Folk Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Mary McCaslin, Folk Singer Who Lamented the Lost Old West, Dies at 75

      by

      A songwriter in her own right, she was known for renditions of pop and rock songs, “Pinball Wizard” among them, that made them sound like mountain ballads.Mary McCaslin, a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Hemet, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles. She was 75.The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s, said her husband, Greg Arrufat.Ms. McCaslin got her start in the mid-60s at the Troubadour, the fabled West Hollywood music incubator, performing at its Monday Night Hoots, as the club’s open-mic nights were known, often hosted by Michael Nesmith, who later found fame as a TV Monkee.John McEuen, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Penny Nichols, who was then his girlfriend, were frequent stage mates.“We thought for a moment we might be the next big something or other trio,” Mr. McEuen said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of fun for no money. Mary was a unique singer who always sounded like someone on an old country record. Like Iris DeMent before Iris DeMent, or Ginny Hawker. She had a really natural mountain voice for someone who grew up in Southern California — an authentic and very traditional Americana sound.”Ms. McCaslin was strait-laced and focused on her music, Mr. McEuen added. “She was unusual, even at that time in the ’60s, and all she cared about was getting the music as right as possible,” he said.She would become a hard-working folk festival and coffee house favorite, if not a household name. On her first album, “Way Out West,” in 1974, she wrote of gamblers, rounders and outlaws and, in the title song, of heartbreak and disillusionment:My family left home when I was a childTo head out West, all open and wildI couldn’t wait to ride the prairie on a ponyBut we passed over the plains and on downInto the great suburban stucco forestThe people there all held my dreams in jestSomehow I grew to spite themWay out WestThe album cover shows a serious-looking young woman, her face framed by a curtain of long hair and bangs in the style of the day. In its review, Rolling Stone noted her “clear, delicately affecting vocals,” and how her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.”Ms. McCaslin, who also played banjo and ukulele, was self-taught, and her open tuning — tuning the strings to sound like a specific chord, as Joni Mitchell did — distinguished her guitar playing.“While Joni’s tunings were more jazz-inflected,” said Mitch Greenhill, president of Folklore Productions/Fli Artists, who managed Ms. McCaslin and her first husband, the folk singer Jim Ringer, starting in the mid-70s, “Mary’s went the opposite way. They were more angular, more Celtic sounding. And she always put the tunings on her albums, which aspiring musicians always appreciated.”She recorded her albums mostly on Philo, a small independent New England label. One newspaper called her an “L.A. cowgirl who records in Vermont.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she was known as “the prairie songstress.”Along with her own songs, Ms. McCaslin sang western standards and pop and rock classics, like the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” transforming that classic power rocker into an Appalachian ballad with her clawhammer-style banjo playing.Her “pure, narrow soprano,” as John Rockwell of The Times described her vocal style, recalled that of Kate Wolf or Nanci Griffith. Her songs have been recorded by Tom Russell, David Bromberg and Ms. Wolf, among others.It was in 1972 that Ms. McCaslin met Mr. Ringer, a gruffly charming, rumpled folk singer 11 years her senior with a honky-tonk style and a colorful biography — from freight hopping to logging to a bit of jail time in his youth — and they began performing and touring together. They were a study in contrasts — her unadorned soprano and demure stage presence and his outlaw persona — and when they recorded an album of duets, they called it “The Bramble and the Rose.” They married in 1978.“The tug between Miss McCaslin’s childhood dream of the Old West and the reality of the New West is what gives her music much of its mythic resonance,” Mr. Holden wrote 1981, when Mr. Ringer and Ms. McCaslin played the Bottom Line in Manhattan. “Her point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.”Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” he said, “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”In her own songs, Ms. McCaslin rued the increasing urbanization of the American West.“I’ve always been attracted by the desert and the beautiful mesas in Arizona and Utah,” she told Mr. Holden. “I get upset that more and more of the land is being developed. Soon there will be no room to graze cattle for food. It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse.”Ms. McCaslin in a 1992 album cover photo. “It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse,” she said.Stuart Brinin, via FLi ArtistsMary Noel McCaslin was born on Dec. 22, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Indianapolis and was adopted by Russell McCaslin, a factory worker, and Lorraine (Taylor) McCaslin, a homemaker. Mary grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., listening to early rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass and country music; her father often took her to concerts.She counted among her influences the ballads of Marty Robbins, the country and western singer popular at midcentury, and the songs of Petula Clark, the English crooner. She bought her first guitar when was 15 with her babysitting money and performed for the first time at 18 at the Paradox, a club in Orange County.In addition to her husband, Ms. McCaslin is survived by her sister, Rose Brass, and a brother, Eric Mauser. She and Mr. Ringer divorced in 1989.On her 1994 album, “Broken Promises,” Ms. McCaslin writes of heartaches and breakups, her wariness and surprise at a new love (that would be Mr. Arrufat, who worked in music production and had been a friend for years) and, on the song “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” her yearning to know her biological parents:’Cause I would almost give it allTo see my family treeIn my life I’ve never seenSomeone who looks like meIn 2013, she did meet her birth mother, Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear, a member of the Kiowa Apache tribe, and her brother, Eric. Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear gave her daughter a Native American necklace, Mr. Arrufat said, and he asked if it might be appropriate to give his wife a Native American name.Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear approved his choice, he said, which was Mary Noel Singing Bear. Mr. Greenhill, her former manager, marveled that Ms. McCaslin, who had made a career singing of Western imagery and themes, turned out to be, as he said, “a true Native American artist.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Alice Gerrard Didn’t Plan a Bluegrass Career and Broke Its Glass Ceiling

      by

      Six decades ago, the singer’s duo with Hazel Dickens revolutionized the genre. As their albums are reissued, she reflected on her unexpected life in folk music and what’s next.For almost 60 years, death has rarely spurned Alice Gerrard. Instead, it has spurred the work of the consummate folk singer and inveterate archivist. During a series of discursive phone calls last month from her home in Durham, N.C., she was eager to remember the people she’s lost.First there was her father, Jerry, a British sailor who settled in Seattle and died from heart disease when Gerrard was 7. Then there was her first husband, Jeremy Foster, an avid old-time musician who was killed in a car crash in 1964, just before Gerrard recorded her debut. Suddenly a single mother of four, she made an album that became a bluegrass landmark. And then there was Hazel Dickens, the sharp tenor to Gerrard’s keening lead for nearly two decades, who died in 2011 from pneumonia after years of ailments. The sole survivor of a duo that revolutionized a genre, Gerrard soon made the album “Follow the Music,” netting her first Grammy nomination at 80.“When somebody dies like that, your father or mother, you’re left with this well of sadness that never really goes away,” Gerrard, 88, said with a soft laugh. “That might be one reason I’m drawn to these death-and-dying songs, these mournful sounds.”When Gerrard and Dickens walked into a church in Washington, D.C., almost six decades ago to record for the traditionalist record label Folkways, they were not thinking about starting careers or breaking a glass ceiling by becoming the first women to lead a popular bluegrass band. They just liked to sing together.Still, they did both: Their four hardscrabble albums helped expand the form’s purview, not only with personnel but also with the politics of unions, feminism and civil rights. The first two of those albums, recorded for Folkways, are set for reissue on Oct. 21, as stand-alone records and, together, as “Pioneering Women of Bluegrass: The Definitive Edition.”Gerrard and Hazel Dickens join Bill Monroe for the Sunday morning gospel sing at the Bean Blossom festival, an annual bluegrass event, in June 1970.Carl FleischhauerAfter the duo’s 1976 split, Dickens remained a genre star and an activist on behalf of the coal miners of her native West Virginia. Gerrard became a fervent documentarian, chronicling the songs and stories of community musicians throughout the rural South before they, too, died. She shared those tales in the magazine she started, The Old-Time Herald. Gerrard is now one of the few living links to American folk musicians alive during the 19th century.“I have always been interested in the lives of other people,” she said, excitedly remembering the time she tracked down the ramshackle homestead of the Virginia fiddler Emmett Lundy, born a year before the Civil War ended. “It’s not just the music. It’s the life that the music grows out of.”But now Gerrard is turning back toward her own life, something she has often resisted. She plans to crowdfund not only her first new album in eight years, but also a sprawling memoir that pairs a lifetime of photos and her conversations with folk legends like Elizabeth Cotten, Bill Monroe and Tommy Jarrell with her experiences making space for women in bluegrass and beyond.“Alice is inspiring as hell, one of those people who made the world a better place so those who came up behind her didn’t have to fight so hard,” said Rhiannon Giddens, who has in turn made bluegrass more inclusive as a Black singer, songwriter and banjo player. “She makes me want to keep telling the stories I tell and live the way I want to live, with or without the music industry.”GERRARD’S UNEXPECTED CAREER began as a hard-luck tale, the kind of tragic saga she might have rendered in song. After she met Foster at Antioch College in the mid-1950s, they fell hard for the rawest, wildest strains of old American folk, encapsulated by Harry Smith’s epochal compendium. They quit school when she was pregnant and headed for Washington, D.C., a borderland between North and South teeming in that period with old-time music and country. They roamed festivals outside the city and played house parties overflowing with folk music. That’s most likely where Gerrard met Dickens and, in late 1963, Peter Siegel, a young New York producer gobsmacked by Gerrard and Dickens’s sisterly harmonies.“For us kids who grew up in ‘rarefied’ or ‘intellectual’ households, there was an authenticity we wanted nurtured. We knew this was the real stuff,” Siegel, a New York native, said by phone from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “They were so emotionally authentic, an incredible voice. It rang so true to me.”Before Siegel could return by bus to D.C. with borrowed recording gear, Foster was dead. Gerrard, suddenly a widow without his paycheck from a naval laboratory, pressed ahead with the sessions. Gospel tunes like the fast-picked “Gabriel’s Call” acquired new brittleness, shadowy standards like “Long Black Veil” an extra gravity. While living with family, Gerrard survived on social security and sued the driver who killed Foster for $35,000, allowing the family of five to buy a space of their own. But it was the network of folk musicians — ad hoc babysitters, grief counselors, life advisers — that helped most.From left: Gerrard, Peter Siegel, Dickens and Mike Seeger during a recording session in New York.John Cohen“I was living in this big city, but there was this large community of musicians we’d been involved with. They supported me,” Gerrard said. “It was music that saw me through. It’s always been the community.”She reinvested herself in that broader network during the eight-year gap between the duo’s Folkways albums. (They quickly cut a follow-up, but the infamous label head Moses Asch simply forgot they’d made it.) She photographed and recorded the titans of old-time and bluegrass. She and Dickens enlisted in the tours of the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, where an integrated confederation of musicians trekked across the South for little money, reintroducing the musical heritage to the communities that fostered it. Gerrard often drove the cramped little van through the fraught region, the diverse roster making for a mobile political statement.“The people whose music we admired so much did not go on about themselves, didn’t brag about what they had done,” Gerrard said. She remembered Dickens’s facetious and lascivious tour rider, written on mauve toilet paper, which demanded daily lobster, sex and onstage martinis. The only thing they really wanted was water.In 1981, after divorcing her second husband, Mike Seeger, a fellow archivist and musician, Gerrard decided to commit fully to that community. She moved to Galax, Va., without the kids, renting a ramshackle cabin for $50 a month near the epicenter of American old-time music. She scoured the town for songs and stories. When she helped make a documentary about Jarrell, the fiddling master, with Les Blank, she befriended and even played alongside him, as she did with most of her subjects. Gerrard never pretended to be an academic anthropologist or folklorist — this was her life, not her career.“The young wanted to learn that high-powered stuff, so they weren’t interested in their parents’ music,” Gerrard said, noting she never felt like an outsider, because her enthusiasm was so unabashed. “It was a two-way street. We gave them the pleasure of being able to tell us their story and to know their music would live on, carried on by younger people.”Yet again, death compelled a fundamental change. She’d documented her elders and lived among them, staying up with the likes of the fiddler Luther Davis, then in his late 90s, to play until midnight. But then they started dying, a depressing reminder that this work wasn’t the only music with an expiration date. She had her own songs to share. “I needed to stop being the mentee,” she admitted.“The people whose music we admired so much did not go on about themselves, didn’t brag about what they had done,” Gerrard said.John CohenGerrard moved to her little house in Durham in 1989, lured by the music community there and the promise of state funds for The Old-Time Herald, then six years old and growing fast. She made solo records, started a string of bands and transformed into a mentor for area musicians.When the songwriter Mike Taylor arrived in North Carolina for school in the summer of 2007, he vowed he would meet Gerrard, whose voice on those Hazel and Alice records had long transfixed him. When they had coffee soon after he arrived from California, she eyed him with a little skepticism, a fellow West Coast interloper.Just as his band Hiss Golden Messenger was beginning to earn attention, Taylor worked as Gerrard’s assistant at Duke University, where she briefly taught a course in documenting traditional music. When he asked her to record an album with his friends, she agreed with customary nonchalance. She gave him the flexibility to add unorthodox chords and dissonant textures, creating a gothic folk that distilled her tragedies and hope into the graceful “Follow the Music.” At 80, she had made an entirely different kind of record.“I could tell she was rubbing against something she hadn’t done before, and she was into that,” Taylor said in an interview. “I get the sense from Alice that nothing is permanent, and that’s a profound belief when you’re working in traditional music, where everything is handled so gently because it might break. But she doesn’t live like that.”IN 2004, AFTER Gerrard had been in North Carolina for 15 years, she recorded “Calling Me Home,” a song she’d written in Virginia as she watched elders like Davis and Jarrell die. An a cappella elegy about letting go, the song stemmed partly from Davis’s lament that all his old friends had already gone. He had no one to talk to about their good-old days, no one to ask about the past. “That song is a direct reflection of a life lived and a healthy way of looking at death,” said Giddens, 45, who began playing it during lockdown livestreams. “That is not a 25-year-old’s song.”In September, Gerrard had a question about her past, some bit of minutiae that eluded her. She thought about who to call for the answer. Seeger, Dickens and Blank were all dead, as was an old friend named Ralph Rinzler, who had also been the Smithsonian’s former folk expert. “I realized there was nobody who would actually know anymore,” Gerrard said, pausing her usual rush of stories for several seconds. “Anybody who would have a clue is gone. I didn’t get to them in time.”Gerrard joked that she spends her days not working so much as watching horror movies and gory crime shows or teaching her dog, Polly, to fetch IPAs from the fridge and drop the empties into the recycling bin outdoors. Still, when she spoke of a half-dozen pending projects, like the album and the memoir, she sounded more energized by finishing them than daunted by the prospect of never having the chance.“Hazel and I really did something. There is still a small piece of me that has a hard time believing that, because we were just doing what we loved,” she said. “I have this hesitancy to award myself, you know? They have these lifetime achievement awards they always give you. My life isn’t over.” More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Jazmine Sullivan’s Meditation on Courage, and 10 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Charlie Puth, Chloe Moriondo, Kali Uchis and others.Every 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.Jazmine Sullivan, ‘Stand Up’“Stand Up,” from the soundtrack to the film “Till,” captures an awakening sense of courage and purpose with a melody that expands upward and rhythms that coalesce from a tentative waltz to an insistent 6/8. Jazmine Sullivan’s voice is grainy, improvisatory and increasingly determined; at the end, it becomes a choir of solidarity, declaring, “Someone’s counting on you.” JON PARELESJamila Woods, ‘Boundaries’With a syncopated acoustic guitar at its core, Jamila Woods’s “Boundaries” could have been an easygoing bossa nova. Instead, it’s laced with nervous undercurrents of percussion and bass, playing up the ambivalence of a song that’s pondering just how close to let a relationship get. “It’s safer on the outside/I’d hate to find a reason I should leave,” Woods argues. But she leaves the song unresolved, as if her decision might not be final. PARELESCharlie Puth, ‘Marks on My Neck’If the songs on “Charlie,” the new album by Charlie Puth, sound familiar, it’s because no pop star shows their drafts quite like Puth does, revealing both his personality and his process. “Marks on My Neck” began as a TikTok in November 2021 — Puth, his hair bouncing, told a lightly intimate story, and showed off the early stages of putting together a song about what had happened to him. The final product is chirpy in a way the sentiment isn’t, but it’s in keeping with Puth’s recent turn to the saccharine, his zest for process sometimes outstripping his appetite for pain. JON CARAMANICAChloe Moriondo, ‘Dress Up’The new Chloe Moriondo album, “Suckerpunch,” is jubilantly chaotic — the production leans much further into hyperpop muscle than her previous work, and her songwriting is rowdier and looser. Take “Dress Up,” a part-sung, part-rapped Disney evil-princess theme song that nods to Doja Cat, Kim Petras, maybe Kitty Pryde. It’s astute pop, and also an astute read on the state of contemporary pop. CARAMANICASpecial Interest, ‘Foul’Warehouse labor barks its discontents in “Foul” by the New Orleans post-punk band Special Interest. Over a crescendo of gnashing guitar noise and thumping, clattering drum-machine beats, Maria Elena (guitar) and Alli Logout (vocals) shout terse lines back and forth — “Short staffed/Overworked/Sleep deprived/It’s an art” — until they work themselves up to righteous, well-earned screams. PARELESKali Uchis, ‘La Unica’“Unica — you know I’m the only one,” Kali Uchis sings, in one of the few English lyrics to this skeletal, bilingual, rapped and sung track. It’s a computer construction of programmed beats, sampled flute lines and disembodied voices behind Uchis’s supremely blasé lead vocal. The song feels grounded in Afro-Colombian tradition, even as it flaunts every bit (and byte) of its processing. PARELESLil Yachty, ‘Poland’“Poland” is a wobbly sound experiment from Lil Yachty, one of hip-hop’s most flexible performers. Here he leans into a digitized warble, delivering a dreamlike incantation with an undercurrent of silliness. Is it a song? An idea? A demo? A joke? It no longer matters — those are yesterday’s distinctions. CARAMANICAArima Ederra, ‘Steel Wing’“My refugee blood/You can’t take my freedom,” Arima Ederra sings in “Steel Wing,” a song about leaving home to prove herself. Ederra is the daughter of Ethiopian refugees, born in Atlanta and now based in Los Angeles, where she has found fellow pop experimenters. “Steel Wing,” from her new album “An Orange-Colored Day,” opens with a loose-limbed beat and a low-fi, not-quite-in-tune guitar lick. The song blooms into full-fledged reggae, but doesn’t settle there; it dissolves into a hand-clapping beat and echoey piano chords, with a few words from Ederra’s mother at the end. Ederra may be away from home, but the family connection holds. PARELESCourtney Marie Andrews, ‘Thinkin’ on You’Pure fondness peals from “Thinkin’ on You,” a song with an unambiguous sentiment about a temporary separation. “While you’re away, I’ll be thinkin’ on you,” Courtney Marie Andrews sings in a grandly retro production that stacks folk-rock guitars, pedal steel curlicues and a string-section arrangement over a girl-group beat. She sings “Ooh, ooh,” with a cowgirl yip, fully confident of an impending reunion. PARELESJohanna Warren, ‘Tooth for a Tooth’“Tooth for a Tooth” is the outlier on Johanna Warren’s new album, “Lessons for Mutants,” which is mostly volatile, guitar-centered indie-rock. Instead, “Tooth for a Tooth” is a slow-swaying piano ballad — with upright bass and brushed drums — that tries to find solace after a breakup: “I’d rather be lonely and empowered/Than on a cross or devoured,” she croons. The piano closely follows her vocal line, kindly offering unspoken support. PARELESMidwife, ‘Sickworld’Stasis is an illusion in “Sickworld,” a wistful, lush meditation by Madeline Johnston, who records as Midwife. “Don’t tell me about the future/Don’t ask me about the past,” she whisper-sings, “I don’t want to stay here/But I can’t go back. The structure is elementary — two chords, arpeggiated for four bars each — but Johnston enfolds them in layers that waft by like fog banks: guitar, piano, voices, strings, all of them substantial and then ephemeral. PARELES More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      At 91, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott Still Wants to Tell You a Story

      by

      TOMALES, Calif. — At a friend’s rustic home in a tiny village about an hour north of San Francisco, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. But he couldn’t resist telling a story.“Some of the best oatmeal I ever had was in the L.A. County Jail,” the singer said from beneath an old felt cowboy hat, a blue bandanna tied around his neck. In 1955, while living in Topanga Canyon, he was pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway because the taillight on his Ford Model A was broken. “They told me I could pay a $25 fine or spend six days in the clink.”He was interested in religion at the time, and thought he’d finally have the chance to read the Bible, but his cellmates were too noisy. “I was extremely bored, and the police needed the space for more bona fide criminals, so they kicked me out on the second day,” he said. “They even gave me bus fare to get home.”In his decades as a wayfaring folk singer, Elliott, who turned 91 in August, has amassed volumes of such tales, stories that blur the line between reality and fantasy, and translate as a particular, increasingly endangered strain of American folklore. He’s released nearly two dozen albums since 1956, alone and with the banjo player Derroll Adams (who died in 2000), but wasn’t recognized with a Grammy until 1995.He’s known as an interpreter rather than a writer, singing beloved versions of “If I Were a Carpenter” by Tim Hardin, “San Francisco Bay Blues” by Jesse Fuller and the traditional “South Coast.” Though he hasn’t put out an album since “A Stranger Here” in 2009, he continues to perform live. His gigs this fall included a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on Sept. 24; a short run of concerts in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina start this week, followed by a tribute to John Prine and stops in California.It’s a welcome return to the road. Elliott played 44 concerts in 2019 before the pandemic forced a 15-month pause, the longest he’s ever gone without stepping onstage. In August, he rescheduled two shows after contracting the coronavirus, though he described his case as “mild” after taking the antiviral drug Paxlovid.Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz to middle class, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he became so enamored with our nation’s iconography — the rodeo, merchant vessels, boxcar-hopping folkies, Peterbilt trucks — that he transformed himself into a peripatetic cowboy, a maritime enthusiast and a troubadour chasing the wind.Today, he’s one of the last of the ’50s era folk music revivalists and beatniks who eschewed their parents’ conventions. He studied with Woody Guthrie, inspired Bob Dylan and hung out with Jack Kerouac. He was recorded by Alan Lomax, and has performed with Phil Ochs, Nico and Prine. He has covered, befriended and worked alongside American folk icons for so long that he’s become one.“He wears the cloak and scepter of the American minstrel; he’s that guy,” said Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead and Elliott’s longtime friend. The pair met in the ’60s when Elliott was opening for Lightnin’ Hopkins at a club in Berkley, and Weir, who was 16 at the time, crashed into the dressing room through a skylight to avoid being carded. “He dropped me into a conversation that we’ve been having for incarnations; he pretty much had me nailed to the wall,” he said. “I became acutely aware of who he was and why they call him Ramblin’ Jack.”After decades of touring, the nonagenarian is resilient. He moves with swagger in his carefully chosen outfits.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesAs the legend goes, Elliott’s nickname originated with the folk singer Odetta’s mother. “I knocked, and the door opened a crack, and I heard her say, ‘Odetta, Ramblin’ Jack is here,’” Elliott said. “I adopted it right away.”Since then, Elliott has spent much of his life traveling between the East and West Coasts, with a little Texas in between. He finally settled in a modest rental in rural West Marin, an arresting stretch along coastal Highway 1. In these parts, Elliott’s become a sort of mythological figure, recognized because of his career but also, more generally, for his vibe, a kind soul in Western wear who cares just as much about the local postman as he does about his days on the Rolling Thunder Review.“He doesn’t distinguish between the Joan Baezes and the Bob Dylans, and the person who’s driving the bus or the truck,” his daughter Aiyana Elliott said in an interview in nearby Marshall, Calif. “He loves working people, but also all people who he comes in contact with.”In 2000, Aiyana made a documentary about her father, “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack,” that explored the real-life costs of building a mythic artistic persona and finds Aiyana grappling with Elliott’s unrelenting restlessness. In a moment of frustration, she begs for alone time with him, which he never grants. That plotline, she revealed, was more loaded than it seemed. “If there was anything keeping me from my father,” she explained, “it was that he had abominably bad taste in women for decades.”At the behest of his daughter, Elliott has been recording his tales for posterity at the home of his friend Peter Coyote, the actor, author and ’60s era counter cultural activist. “They trusted I could keep him on track,” Coyote said in an interview at his home. “He comes over here with a really good sound man, and people like Bobby Weir, Peter Rowan and all these other musicians he’s known drop in.”He lives quite modestly, a lot of people don’t realize just how modestly,” Elliott’s daughter Aiyana said. “But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone so rich in friends.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesWeir emphasized the importance of capturing Elliott’s history: “I’m a big proponent of making some space for him in the Smithsonian,” he said, “because an enormous part of America’s musical heritage lives in that body.”Known for his storytelling and larger-than-life stage presence, Elliott’s greatest superpower may be his way with the guitar. “The way he attacks it, I only hear that in him,” Weir said. Elliott’s mighty flatpicking is also what made Frank Hamilton take notice amid the American folk music revival, when the two musicians were drawn to Washington Square Park. The former Weavers member and a founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, called Elliott a “folk guitarist par excellence” and a “very good raconteur.” “He and I, and a lot of other young men at the time, were imbued with a romanticism of the open road,” he said in a phone interview.Though Elliott has written few songs, a road trip with Hamilton spurred his most famous original, “912 Greens,” inspired by the house of a folk singer they crashed with in New Orleans. “That’s a talkin’ song,” Elliott said, meaning that he’s telling a story over acoustic guitar. “Guy Clark told me he stole the guitar part I’m playing for one of his songs, and I was honored.” Another conversational composition, “Cup of Coffee” was covered by Johnny Cash on his 1966 album of novelty songs “Everybody Loves a Nut.”Recalling his earliest encounter with Dylan, Elliott described him as “a nifty little kid with peach fuzz, he couldn’t shave yet.” (The future Nobel Prize winner was then a teenager visiting Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey.) Elliott wrote “Bleeker Street Blues” for Dylan in 1997, after the singer-songwriter was hospitalized with severe chest pains from histoplasmosis, a fungal infection. “Later on, we’ll join Woody and Jerry and Townes/But right now we all need you, so stick around,” Elliott speak-sings over acoustic guitar.From left: Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Elliott and Dylan onstage in 1975. Elliott performed as part of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue that year.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesThe pair grew close when they were neighbors in the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village, where they bonded over a shared love of Guthrie, and other music of the burgeoning folk revival. Since then, fans have accused Dylan of aping Elliott’s style in his early days, particularly his nasally delivery, but that doesn’t bother the elder. “I helped him get into the musician’s union,” he said. Today, the pair aren’t in regular contact, but when they do cross paths, it’s with a great deal of warmth. “Love you Jack,” Elliot recalled Dylan saying after a gig in Oakland in 2014. “I thought, ‘Wow, you’ve never told me that before,’” Elliott said.Unlike Dylan, and many of his other peers, Elliott hasn’t seen much commercial success — partly because he deals in niche genres, but also because “he’s not been great at managing his career, per se,” according to Aiyana. Because he hasn’t written many songs, he receives far fewer royalties on album sales and streams. The bulk of his income comes from touring, which has its own risks. More than anything, Elliott has sought freedom, and human connection. “He lives quite modestly, a lot of people don’t realize just how modestly,” Aiyana said. “But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone so rich in friends.”After decades of touring, the nonagenarian is resilient. He’s recovered from triple bypass surgery and two “little strokes” that left him unable to play the guitar for about a week. His hearing is assisted by small aids, but his mobility and stamina befit a much younger man. He moves with swagger in his carefully chosen outfits.After a breakfast of oatmeal with berries and chopped pecans, and a plethora of stories about schooner ships, James Dean, big rigs, Leon Russell and other subjects between, Elliott loaded into his Volvo station wagon to wind through the cypress-lined roads overlooking the inlet Tomales Bay. He passed through his friend Nancy’s lavender field, and by the dunes at Dillon Beach where he and his friend Venta hike. In a vulnerable moment, he recalled his wife, Jan, the last of five, who died from alcoholism in 2001. “I was very devastated when she left us,” he said.In 1995, the pair were living in a motor home in Point Reyes while she worked for Ridgetop Music, owned by Jesse Colin Young of the Youngbloods. One day, they decided to head north to sight see. “I was driving and admiring the bay on the left, and she was in the passenger seat and saw a sign on the right,” he said. “We pulled in and rented the house on the spot.” He’s lived in it ever since.“An enormous part of America’s musical heritage lives in that body,” Bob Weir said of Elliott.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDuring the hourlong drive, Elliott’s profile set against the bucolic pastures rolling by and magnificent views of the ocean, he recalled other friends and acquaintances he’s known over the years, some who’ve moved away or died. Pointing to a run-down farmhouse, he wondered what happened to its owner: “I haven’t seen him in years, and I hope he’s OK.” Though Elliott lives in one of the most beautiful places in America, it’s clear that, for him, the landscapes are an added benefit. It’s the people here that truly nourish him.Later, at Nick’s Cove, a local restaurant with a pier that stretches over the bay, Elliott chatted with a woman who had bellied up to the bar to watch a baseball game. “She runs a big dairy,” he explained as he headed toward a table facing the night’s performer. “Hey, I know that guy!” He lit up at the sight of Danny Montana, a fellow cowboy folk singer dressed in a hat and boots. On this September night, he covered many of Elliott’s friends, like John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker and Guy Clark, and Elliott hummed along in between bites of a hamburger. When he finished his set, Elliott invited Montana to sit at our table, and then complimented his “rig” as he packed up his gear to leave.In just a few weeks, Elliott’s own show would be hitting the road once again. He was particularly excited about his travel companion, a former Navy pilot who also loves horses. “He just got a brand-new, red, Ford F-350 diesel pickup truck, and he’s going to be my driver,” he said with a grin. “He’s a good driver and a great guy.” More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Jim Post, Known for a Memorably ‘Groovy’ Hit Song, Dies at 82

      by

      He and his wife, Cathy Conn, had a Top 10 single with “Reach Out of the Darkness” as Friend & Lover in 1968. It’s still played today, but it was their only hit.Jim Post, best known as half of the duo Friend & Lover, whose only hit was a memorable one — “Reach Out of the Darkness,” which proclaimed with flower-power earnestness, “I think it’s so groovy now that people are finally gettin’ together” — died on Sept. 14 in Dubuque, Iowa. He was 82.His former wife Janet Smith Post, with whom he wrote two children’s books, said his death, in hospice care, was caused by congestive heart failure.“Reach Out of the Darkness,” which rose to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1968, featured Mr. Post and his wife at the time, Cathy Conn, singing lyrics that say, in part:Don’t be afraid of loveDon’t be afraid, don’t be afraidDon’t be afraid to loveListen to meEverybody needs a little love.Although the lyrics say “Reach out in the darkness,” an executive of Verve Forecast Records, the label that released the record, gave it the title “Reach Out of the Darkness.” That title suggested something different to Mr. Post, who wrote the song.“Reach out in the places where you’re not enlightened,” he explained to The South Bend Tribune in 2009. He then recited the chorus: “Reach out in the darkness, reach out in the darkness, reach out in the darkness and you may find a friend.”The song fared better than the duo’s album of the same name, and after a few more singles that were not successful, Friend & Lover disbanded and Mr. Post and Ms. Conn divorced. Ms. Conn died in 2018.Mr. Post injected extra elements into “Reach Out” for a 2009 recording, giving it a radically new arrangement and merging it with “Get Together,” the late-1960s Youngbloods hit that urged listeners, “Everybody get together / Try to love one another right now.” He called the medley “Reach Out Together.” He said at the time that “Reach Out,” mashed up with a song from the same era with a similar sensibility, was as relevant as it had been in 1968.“What is the theme of our country now?” he asked. He answered his own question: “Coming together.”“Reach Out of the Darkness” received new life in 2013 when it was heard over the closing credits of a sixth-season episode of “Mad Men” while Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was being reported on television. Writing on the arts and culture website Across the Margin, L.P. Hanners said that the upbeat 45-year-old song “was perfectly paired with the duality featured in the final scene of ‘Man With a Plan.’”The song was also heard on the soundtrack of the 2015-16 TV series “Aquarius,” which starred David Duchovny as a homicide detective on the trail of Charles Manson in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.Jimmie David Post was born on Oct. 28, 1939, in Houston and grew up on a farm about 20 miles outside the city. His father was a longshoreman, his mother a homemaker.A singer from an early age, Jim won a school talent contest in first grade, which led to a performance on a local radio show. Later, he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1972, he was a “successful evangelistic singer” who had performed in more than 500 churches around the United States by the time he was 22.In the early 1960s, Mr. Post became part of a three-man folk group, the Rum Runners, which in 1963 released a version of the traditional song “You Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dog Around” as a single on Mercury Records. When they played at a club in Kansas City, Mo., a year later, Dick Brown of The Kansas City Star wrote, “To a major extent, the vocals depend on the remarkable tenor voice of Jim Post.”While on tour in Canada with the Rum Runners, Mr. Post met Ms. Conn, a dancer, and left the group to be with her. They soon began performing as Friend & Lover and made their name at the Earl of Old Town, a folk club in Chicago where singers like Steve Goodman and John Prine also performed.Although Friend & Lover was a folk act, their records used studio musicians and achieved more of a pop sound — and, at least at first, pop success.After the breakup of both Friend & Lover and his marriage to Ms. Conn, Mr. Post became a solo act and returned to folk music.“Jim was a wonderful character with a wide vocal range,” the folk singer Bonnie Koloc, who watched Mr. Post perform both with Ms. Conn and alone at the Earl of Old Town, said in an interview. “He was such an enthusiastic performer. We all loved him.”Mr. Post, who was married and divorced five times, is survived by a daughter and a grandson.He later changed directions, conceiving and touring with one-man musical shows. The first, in 1986, was “Galena Rose: How Whiskey Won the West,” about a 19th-century lead-mining rush in Galena, Ill., where he lived for many years.Then, in the mid-1990s, when he began to look like Mark Twain, Mr. Post created “Mark Twain and the Laughing River,” a show that married his songs to Twain’s words. The CD of the show earned him an American Library Association award for notable recordings.He followed that about a decade later with “Mark Twain’s Adventures Out West.”“Reach Out of the Darkness” remained a notable part of Mr. Post’s life 54 years after its release, through continued airplay and the royalties he received.“Two months ago, he got a check for $6,000,” his friend Bob Postel said in an interview.He added: “He was always proud that he wrote it and it surprised the hell out of him that it was a hit. That song paid for a lot of gas.” More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Eleri Ward Captures the Longing at the Heart of Sondheim’s Work

      by

      On her new album, the singer fuses Stephen Sondheim’s emo register with a familiar coffeehouse folk sound.The so-called “I want” song is a convention — if not a rule — of musical theater scores. From “I’ll Know” in “Guys and Dolls” to “My Shot” in “Hamilton,” these thesis statements by leading characters typically come early in a show, hitching the plot’s momentum to their ambitions or dreams.Stephen Sondheim, arguably the greatest of musical theater songwriters, didn’t write many conventional “I want” songs — one great exception being the long “I wish” prologue to “Into the Woods” — but it was not for want of wanting. The characters he wrote for had huge, often doomed desires, whether it was the impossible no-strings intimacy Bobby seeks in “Company” or the apocalyptic retribution demanded by the demonic barber Sweeney Todd, and they expressed them in accordingly expansive musical terms.Among the qualities that Eleri Ward, a preternaturally gifted young singer whose guitar-based interpretations of Sondheim lit up last year’s brilliant album “A Perfect Little Death,” and whose follow-up collection, “Keep a Tender Distance,” is being released by Ghostlight Records on Friday, captures in her performances is the vast, unquenchable longing at the heart of the master’s work. This is not the nervy, brassy Sondheim of “Getting Married Today” or “Putting It Together,” but the wounded soul who wrote “Not a Day Goes By” and “Unworthy of Your Love,” two songs that appear on the new album.Ward plumbs this deep well in a way that feels so intuitively right, it’s remarkable no one has done it before: She has fused this emo Sondheim register with a familiar coffeehouse folk sound, adding delicate fingerpicking guitar accompaniment to support her limber, expressive soprano. In her hands, it’s not hard to imagine these songs as the creation of an especially gifted — if occasionally bloody-minded — indie singer-songwriter.Ward’s new album, “Keep a Tender Distance,” will be released on Friday.-A conservatory-trained singer and musician who grew up on musical theater, as well as pop, in Chicago, Ward, 28, stumbled on this folk-Sondheim sound when she picked up a friend’s guitar and, inspired in part by Sufjan Stevens in his mellower mode, recorded a version of “Every Day a Little Death” on Instagram in 2019. Kurt Deutsch, Ghostlight’s founder and president, later discovered her version of “Johanna (Reprise)” on TikTok, and said of that moment, “There was just a balm that came over me.” He reached out to her to see if she had more like it, and soon she did.“A Perfect Little Death” was mostly “made in her closet during the pandemic,” Deutsch said. It led to a series of live shows, first at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan, then at Joe’s Pub, where she sang a duet of “Loving You” with Donna Murphy, who first sang it as Fosca in Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1994 musical, “Passion.” In an interview, Murphy raved about Ward’s “unicorn of a voice,” adding that she especially admired that “there is nothing about Eleri that is struggling for a quality; it just all feels so fluid.”Josh Groban, who was in the audience at that first Rockwood gig and who later invited Ward to open for him on a recent concert tour, noted the “wonderful line” of her voice, which he said goes against the grain not only of the spikiness of a lot of pop music vocals, but also of what he called the “staccato in Sondheim.” (Groban will find out more about that when he stars in a “Sweeney Todd” revival on Broadway next spring.) Sondheim’s music “connects the brain to the heart,” he said, but what Ward does is “find ways to smooth the songs out and bring even more heart into the performance.”Though she reads music, Ward said she arrives at her guitar and vocal arrangements by ear, spinning the cast albums to learn the songs, then “never listening to them again.” Likewise, on “Keep a Tender Distance,” the string parts by Ellis Ludwig-Leone (“The king of moody strings,” as Ward put it) were derived from her demos rather than from the original orchestrations.The resulting interpretations are somehow both spare and lush, honoring the complexity of Sondheim’s compositions without, as the album’s producer, Allen Tate, put it, “trying to outthink” the original material. Tate, who with Ludwig-Leone is a member of the Brooklyn band San Fermin, added that “what Eleri does well is take what is really speaking to her about these songs, and then try to lay that bare, as opposed to dressing them up beyond what they already are.”“Every song explores some sort of distance from what you want or what you don’t have, and it all rolls forward,” Ward said of the 14 songs on her new album.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe 14 songs on “Keep a Tender Distance” don’t constitute a cast or concept album, exactly, but there is a kind of emotional logic to their order, from the questioning opener, “Merrily We Roll Along,” to the resolute closer, “Move On.”“The whole record is moving through space in all these different ways,” Ward told me. “Every song explores some sort of distance from what you want or what you don’t have, and it all rolls forward.”Among the album’s high points is a subtly reimagined “Another Hundred People” that suggests the original’s vertiginous pace, but is more heartbroken than breakneck, and a stark, haunting take on “Marry Me a Little,” the song from “Company” that gives the album its title and may be Sondheim’s quintessential push-me-pull-you expression of unfulfilled desire.While many singers tend to lean into the song’s delusional hope that an easy-to-handle relationship might be just around the corner (“I’m ready now!”), Ward’s voice, alternating between what Murphy called the “whistle tones” of falsetto and a Fosca-like lower register, conveys crushing need more than sunny optimism.Ward, who is currently understudying two tracks in the new musical “Only Gold” at MCC Theater, and who has recorded her own original pop music, may be feeling a bit like Bobby in “Company”: pulled in many directions by contradictory impulses. The new record, she said, is infused with the sense of, “I’m far away from the thing that I want.” Of course, that might be why it sounds so very Sondheim. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Art Rosenbaum, Painter and Preserver of Folk Music, Dies at 83

      by

      As an artist and exponent of American traditional songs, he sought to blur the lines between outsider and insider art, and became a guiding force in the Athens, Ga., scene.ATLANTA — Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, Ga., his adopted hometown. He was 83.His son, Neil Rosenbaum, said the cause was complications of cancer.Art Rosenbaum’s passion for documenting a broad range of American musical traditions as they were passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms expanded upon the famous field recording work of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. An important inspiration was Pete Seeger, another high-profile 20th-century champion of folk music. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that Mr. Seeger had once told him, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.”Mr. Rosenbaum called it “good advice, and the kick in the rear that got me going.”“Outside Carnesville,” oil on linen, 1983-84. Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings often depicted the musicians he recorded, as he did here, with Mabel Cawthorn on the banjo.Art RosenbaumIn 2007, the Atlanta-based label Dust-to-Digital released the first of two box sets of compilations from Mr. Rosenbaum’s trove, “Art of Field Recording Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum,” which won a Grammy Award for best historical album.The pop music website Pitchfork called the release “revelatory” and “an indispensable counterpoint to Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music,’” a reference to the 1952 song compilation that remains a canonical touchstone for folk musicians.Like Mr. Smith, the bohemian polymath who compiled the “Anthology,” Mr. Rosenbaum was an accomplished visual artist. As an art teacher, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of Georgia, in Athens, where his energetic paintings, often depicting the musicians he recorded, and his ideas about the democratization of culture had an influence that resonated far beyond the classroom.Michael Stipe, the visual artist and singer with the Athens rock band R.E.M., who was a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s in the early 1980s, said Mr. Rosenbaum’s goal “was to blur the lines between what is outsider and insider, and to bring together this untrained music and art with trained music and art, and acknowledge that each have immense power, and that they’re not that far apart.”A portrait of Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. singer, a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s, as well as a subject of his paintings.Art Rosenbaum, Collection of the Peasant CorporationArthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on Dec. 6, 1938, in Ogdensburg, N.Y., in St. Lawrence County. His mother, Della Spark Rosenbaum, was a medical illustrator who encouraged her children’s artistic inclinations. His father, David Rosenbaum, was an Army pathologist who sometimes sang what his son described as “Northern street songs.” Arthur later recorded one of these songs, his father’s a cappella version of the ribald 18th-century Child ballad “Our Goodman,” and included it in the 2007 box set.The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, where Mr. Rosenbaum, entranced by traditional music, absorbed the Harry Smith anthology and the contemporary folk stars of the day. In high school he won an art contest at the Indiana State Fair and spent the $25 prize money on a five-string banjo. He went on to become a pre-eminent expert on traditional banjo playing and tunings and to record several albums.In the mid-1950s Mr. Rosenbaum moved to New York City, then the epicenter of the burgeoning folk revival, earning an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University. In the summers he worked at a resort hotel on Lake Michigan, where he began making recordings of nearby field workers from Mexico and the American South.In 1958, Mr. Rosenbaum tracked down and recorded in Indianapolis a musician named Scrapper Blackwell, whom he described as “one of the best and most influential blues guitarists of the 1920s and ’30s.” Back in New York, as Mr. Rosenbaum was fond of recalling, a fellow roots music obsessive named Bob Dylan would pester him for any details he could muster about Mr. Blackwell’s life and playing style.“Shady Grove,” 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum sought out traditional Black and white musicians, revealing a shared cultural history.Art RosenbaumIt was in New York that Mr. Rosenbaum met the artist Margo Newmark, who became his wife and lifelong collaborator. She survives him.In addition to her and his son, Neil, a filmmaker and musician, he is survived by a sister, Jenny Rosenbaum, a writer; and a brother, Victor Rosenbaum, a concert pianist.After eight years of teaching studio art at the University of Iowa, Mr. Rosenbaum in 1976 took a similar job at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. With Athens as a home base, he and Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum continued making field recordings, many of them in and around Georgia, and giving the musicians they met opportunities to play before new audiences.“As these traditional musicians were identified and then brought out,” said Judith McWillie, an emerita art professor at the university, “and as there were more festivals and opportunities for them to play, people began to envision an identity for Georgia that was somewhat different from the one that it had. This was the 1970s, and coming off some extremely difficult times in the South.”Folk music, she said, revealed a shared cultural history: “The musicians Art brought out were Black and white.”In 1984, Mr. Rosenbaum recorded an album of stories and songs by Howard Finster, the self-taught artist, preacher and self-proclaimed “man of visions” whose work has become indelibly associated with 20th-century Georgia after its use on album covers by R.E.M. and the band Talking Heads.Untitled Diptych, 2014. Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings are allegorical works in which the old and the new cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space with modern-day hipsters.Art RosenbaumHe also recorded the McIntosh County Shouters, an African American group from coastal Georgia who performed the “ring shout,” which Mr. Rosenbaum described as “an impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion and expressive and formalized dancelike movements.” The ring shout, he asserted, was “the oldest African American performance tradition on the North American continent.”Brenton Jordan, a member of the group, said of the Rosenbaums, “It’s their legwork that actually kind of introduced the McIntosh County Shouters to the world.” He noted that the ring shout, once on the verge of extinction, has in recent years been performed by his group in Washington at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.The Rosenbaums published a book on the ring shout in 1998. With drawings of the performers by Mr. Rosenbaum and photos of them by Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum, it depicts a place and a culture that seems beguilingly out of phase with modern life.Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s other paintings and drawings are loose allegorical works in which the old and the new clash and cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space on the canvas with modern-day hipsters, skateboarders and documentarians (often Mr. Rosenbaum himself).As a painter, he was inspired by Cezanne and Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist. At times his work recalls the painting of Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist. Some of Mr. Rosenbaum’s works are large murals on historical themes.Pete Seeger once told Mr. Rosenbaum, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.” That advice set him on a decades-long project of seeking out unrecorded musicians.via Rosenbaum familyBeginning in the late 1970s, Athens saw an explosion of forward-thinking rock musicians, many of whom, like Mr. Stipe, had ties to the Georgia art school. Mr. Rosenbaum’s passions always ran to traditional music, but he remained an inspiration for contemporary musicians.Lance Ledbetter, the founder and co-director of the Dust-to-Digital label, recalled Vic Chesnutt, the brilliant, idiosyncratic Athens-based songwriter who died in 2009, speaking of Mr. Rosenbaum, quoting him as saying:“When you move to Athens, and you hear about this guy who plays banjo and knows all of these songs, you just follow him around like a puppy dog. And I’m not the only one who did that.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      75 Pop and Jazz Albums, Shows and Festivals Coming This Fall

      by

      Major live events (Adele, Rosalía), buzzy debuts (Muni Long, Skullcrusher), energized returns (the Comet Is Coming, Kid Cudi) and a Taylor Swift LP are on the way.Live music made a roaring return this year, as artists who paused touring plans for the pandemic flooded back to the road. Arenas, jazz clubs, rock spots, cozy cabaret rooms: they’re booked solid this fall, giving musicians and fans a chance to reconnect. The release calendar is jam-packed, too, though many of pop’s biggest names haven’t announced autumn albums — yet. (One big exception? Taylor Swift.) But the schedule is stocked with LPs from emerging artists, established acts and a few pioneers who still have plenty to say. Dates are subject to change; check vaccine and mask requirements for individual performers and venues.ROSALÍA A few months ago, Lorde slipped a cover of Rosalía’s saucy “Hentai” into her set at Radio City Music Hall; this month, New Yorkers have a chance to hear it straight from the source, on the same stage. Currently on the road supporting her genre-busting album “Motomami,” the Spanish superstar hits Boston on Sept. 15, then cities including New York, Toronto and Chicago before heading to California. From a doggedly inventive artist who’s as meticulous about her visuals as her music, this stage show features sharp choreography, a seamless backdrop and even the singer giving herself an onstage haircut. (In North America through Oct. 22) — Olivia HornROXANA AMED For this Argentine-born, Miami-based vocalist, jazz is a loose and syncretic system, suitable for mingling traditions from across the Americas. The luxurious darkness of her alto might recall contemporaries like Cassandra Wilson or Claudia Acuña, but Amed is distinguished by her scholarly tack. “Unánime” (the title translates to “Anonymous”) is both a response and a kind of resistance to one question she’s often asked, about her relationship to the so-called Latin jazz tradition. The album includes covers of artists as varied as Egberto Gismonti and Miles Davis, as well as new originals, anchored by the piano playing of a now-80-year-old Chucho Valdés. (Sept. 16; Sony Latin) — Giovanni RussonelloBLACKPINK Perhaps the biggest girl group in K-pop, Blackpink is also the genre’s most playfully eclectic. “Pink Venom,” the first single from its second album, “Born Pink,” has traditional Korean instruments, old-school rap, boomy EDM beats and boasts about their stuff going “straight to your dome like whoa, whoa, whoa.” A world tour this fall includes a handful of American dates. (Sept. 16; YG Entertainment/Interscope) — Ben SisarioMICHELLE BRANCH With Y2K nostalgia thriving, Michelle Branch — whose pop-rock anthems “Everywhere” and “All You Wanted” made her a teen star in 2001 — released an updated version of her debut, “The Spirit Room,” last year. But, hardly content to be a throwback act, Branch has new music in the pipeline, too. Written and recorded with the Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, “The Trouble With Fever” balances alt-rock edge with decadent orchestral pop flourishes. (Sept. 16; Audio Eagle/Nonesuch/Warner Records) — HornNOAH CYRUS When she began her music career at age 16, Noah Cyrus — already caught in spillover from her sister Miley’s spotlight — hunted for her sound in full public view. Her early efforts, aligned with hip-hop and R&B, didn’t stick, and she has since retreated to her Nashville roots. On “The Hardest Part,” her debut album, she draws pedal steel, banjo, fiddle and harmonica from a robust country tool kit on songs that foreground her struggles with addiction and noxious romance. (Sept. 16; Records/Columbia) — HornDEATH CAB FOR CUTIE Twenty-five years into its career, the band brings its incisive, anguished writing to a particularly 2022 brand of existential angst on its 10th album, “Asphalt Meadows.” The songs spool and spiral, commenting on the slow-motion dread of a warming planet, the ache and anger of pandemic politics and the desperation of lockdown. “These nights, I don’t know how I survive,” Ben Gibbard repeats on the first track, howling over a distorted gnarl of guitar. It’s a tidy thesis statement for an expansive album: He doesn’t know how he makes it through, but he’s delighted that he does. (Sept. 16; Atlantic) — Dani BlumSKYLER GENTRY The performer and writer Ben Zook, host of the cheeky web series “Where the Bears Are,” brings “The Dirty Show With Skyler Gentry” to the West Bank Cafe’s Laurie Beechman Theater on Sept. 22-23. Expect an evening of raunch and revelations from “America’s favorite actor-singer-dancer-psychic,” as Zook is billing his alter ego. The venue’s lineup also features the drag darling and television personality Tammie Brown (Sept. 16-17), the elegant soprano stylings of Shana Farr (Oct. 7, 12 and 20, Nov. 12), the queenly revisionism of Distorted Diznee (Sept. 23, Oct. 21, Nov. 18, Dec. 9), the supple harmonies of Those Girls (Oct. 2, 15 and 29, Nov. 3), the caressing interpretations of Linda Viggiano (Oct. 13, Nov. 11) and the diva impressionist nonpareil Christine Pedi (Dec. 16-17). — Elysa GardnerLITTLE BIG TOWN The country group Little Big Town recruited over 30 songwriters for its latest album, “Mr. Sun,” a sweeping record that oscillates between whistling, warbling songs and despondent breakup anthems. These are glossy, pop-inspired tracks — “Why are songs never long enough to hold you?” the band coos over disco beats on “Heaven Had a Dance Floor” — but they also confront the turmoil brewing beneath the burbling bass lines. “I go to bed to sleep you off, and I wake up feeling better/Ain’t too proud to push it down, but I’m a terrible forgetter,” they howl on “Three Whiskeys and the Truth.” (Sept. 16; Capitol Records Nashville) — BlumMARCUS MUMFORD The Mumford & Sons frontman trades his galloping guitar and ragged harmonies for introspective anthems on his debut solo album, “(Self-Titled).” Childhood trauma, prolonged breakups, losing faith — Mumford doesn’t shy away from the heaviest topics here. (“Each word is a cut that I see coming/I clench my fists as I’m inflicting them,” he murmurs on “Prior Warning.”) He recruits Phoebe Bridgers, Clairo and Brandi Carlile to help bring some air into his intense self-examination, but even on these duets, Mumford and his gravelly voice remain the focus. (Sept. 16; Capitol) — BlumMarcus Mumford’s debut solo album doesn’t shy away from painful topics.Emma Mcintyre/Getty Images For KroqMURA MASA The English producer Mura Masa can contort any sound into a rave-ready thumper. On “Demon Time,” his pandemic dread-inspired album, he cobbles club hits out of dial-up tones, revving engines, screeching cars and sludgy synths. A cadre of hyper-online collaborators sing and rap over his bleeping, blurry beats, including Lil Uzi Vert, Shygirl and PinkPantheress. “Life in a box, start watching TV/Brain like mush always staring at screens,” the British rapper Slowthai snarls on “Up All Week,” over frenetic flashes of fizz. (Sept. 16; Anchor Point Records/Interscope) — BlumLeANN RIMES Twenty-five years after LeAnn Rimes released her first song — the yearning ’90s country classic “Blue,” which she delivered as a 13-year-old with the ache of someone three times her age — the singer-songwriter is ready to take some risks. On “God’s Work,” a nod to the Christian music she’s put out in the past and the album’s devotional undercurrent, she slides through swelling piano ballads and guitar-heavy reggae, crescendoing choruses and gentle, lilting hums. “If we ain’t seeing God in everyone,” she muses on the title track, “then we ain’t seeing God at all.” (Sept. 16; EverLe Records via Thirty Tigers/ The Orchard) — BlumREMEMBERING TOMASZ STANKO Until his death four years ago, the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko was among the most respected improvisers and bandleaders in Europe, unmistakable for his terse economy and saturnine tone. He grew up in Soviet-era Rzeszów, where he first heard jazz via Voice of America broadcasts in the postwar years. In his mid-60s he realized a lifelong dream and moved to New York. Now, in what would have been his 80th year, Stanko will be celebrated in a special tribute concert in Brooklyn, featuring admirers and collaborators from Europe and the United States: the trumpeters Ambrose Akinmusire and Wadada Leo Smith; the guitarist Jakob Bro; the saxophonists Ravi Coltrane, Joe Lovano and Chris Potter; and others. (Sept. 18; Roulette) — RussonelloCÉCILE McLORIN SALVANT Since winning the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2010, Cécile McLorin Salvant has earned consistent praise (and three Grammys) for her witty, rangy singing, as well suited to Rodgers and Hart and Kurt Weill as to blues classics and Kate Bush. Her song cycle “Ogresse” blends folk, jazz, country and baroque influences, and she’ll appear Sept. 20-25 at the Blue Note, where other artists this season include the silky-voiced rising jazz star Samara Joy (Sept. 12, Sept. 26), the Harlem Gospel Choir (Sept. 18, Oct. 16, Nov. 13), the prolific trumpeter and vocalist Keyon Harrold (Oct. 16-19) and the soulful, genre-blending group Tank and the Bangas + Friends (Nov. 11-13). — GardnerCécile McLorin Salvant will bring the full range of her vocal talents to the Blue Note this month.Pawel Supernak/EPA, via ShutterstockALEX G For more than a decade, this unlikely star of Philadelphia’s D.I.Y. scene has been cranking out defiantly odd homespun recordings, keeping his head down and choosing close friends and family as collaborators even after accruing mainstream clout (see: his contributions to Frank Ocean’s “Blonde”). “God Save the Animals,” his ninth album, smashes together elements of folk, rock and noise music and subjects them to funhouse-mirror distortion, with results that are alternately eerie and endearing, and, as usual, resistant to interpretation. (Sept. 23; Domino) — HornCHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS PRESENTS REDCAR Since assuming the Christine and the Queens moniker in 2010, this French singer has become known for body-friendly funk-pop with nuanced ideas about gender norms and performance. With a new alias, Redcar, reflecting an evolving identity (“My journey with gender has always been tumultuous,” the artist told The New York Times earlier this year), he is back with his first album in four years, “Redcar les Adorables Étoiles (Prologue).” Sung almost entirely in French, the album feels beamed from the ’80s, with chunky, ultra-synthetic arrangements counterbalancing the singer’s lithe, expressive voice. (Sept. 23; Because Music) — HornKELSEA BALLERINI On “Subject to Change,” Kelsea Ballerini animates her perky country-pop with succinct, specific details — the partner who leaves a light on for her when she comes home after a night drinking with friends, the blasé thrill of a hand on the small of her back. Her new album is filled with strum-along tracks about growing up (her verdict: “It kinda hurts like hell/it’s chaotic, ironic”) and delving deeper into new relationships and long-term friendships (“I’ve known you since Brad and Angelina”). Even while extolling how hard it is to leave adolescence behind, she makes maturity sound easy. (Sept. 23; Black River Entertainment) — BlumKelsea Ballerini’s new album, “Subject to Change,” revels in the details.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressTHE COMET IS COMING Of the saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’s many projects, the Comet Is Coming is the most closely linked to London’s electronic music mainstream. Mixing jazz methodology with loops, spiraling effects and Hutchings’s retrofits of Caribbean rhythm, this trio seems intent on humanizing the EDM beat while actually upping its power, not diluting it. Hutchings, the keyboardist Dan Leavers and the drummer Max Hallett (in the band they go by King Shabaka, Danalogue and Betamax) recorded their fourth album, “Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam,” in a series of jam sessions. The LP finds each player showing newfound restraint, leaving more room for the listener than on any of the trio’s earlier releases. (Sept. 23; Impulse!) — RussonelloDR. JOHN The New Orleans piano man who embodied the musical mélange of his hometown had the kind of drawly, lived-in voice that only improved with age. So “Things Happen That Way” — Dr. John’s final album, recorded the year he died, 2019 — captures him in peak form. The album honors the singer’s country influences via covers of classics by Hank Williams (a swaggering “Ramblin’ Man”) and Willie Nelson (a wry “Funny How Time Slips Away”), who also duets with the good doctor on a funky “Gimme That Old Time Religion.” A few originals — a reprise of “I Walk on Guilded Splinters,” from Dr. John’s voodoo-inspired 1968 debut, and new tracks including “Holy Water,” inspired by his early ’60s drug arrest — frame him as a key link in the American lineage he so revered. (Sept. 23; Rounder) — Hank ShteamerMUNI LONG “Public Displays of Affection: The Album,” a new collection from the R&B singer-songwriter Muni Long, isn’t exactly a debut. But it might register as one, since the artist’s prior two full-lengths came out under the name Priscilla Renea, before she assumed her current alias (a playful rendering of “money long”) and scored a Top 20 hit with the sultry “Hrs and Hrs.” Joining material from two earlier EPs are new tracks that betray her years of experience in the pop songwriting trenches. “Butterfly Effect” unleashes her formidable vocal range on a fantasy of undoing a painful romance; “Conversation” returns to the luxurious feel of “Hrs and Hrs,” paying tribute to the simple joys of talking it out. (Sept. 23; Supergiant/Def Jam) — ShteamerMAKAYA McCRAVEN The drummer Makaya McCraven has been blurring the line between bandleader and beatsmith for the better part of a decade now. And over time, his blend of live performance and hip-hop production technique has become both more organic and more grandiose: The making of his newest album, “In These Times,” was shaped by a string of shows he played with large ensembles, transposing his production approach to a live band that featured harp, vibraphone and a frontline of horns. Though the arrangements skew polyrhythmic and layered, and McCraven did his fair share of cutting and editing, the communal flow of the full group reigns. (Sept. 23; International Anthem/Nonesuch/XL) — RussonelloFor Makaya McCraven’s “In These Times,” he adapted his cut-and-edit approach to a large live band.Marcin Obara/EPA, via ShutterstockANGELICA SÁNCHEZ This pianist and composer has yet to receive her full due, but at 50 she continues to churn out fabulous acoustic free jazz recordings at an unfettered clip. On her latest acoustic-trio album, “Sparkle Beings,” recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s former studios in New Jersey, she partners with an expert rhythm section: the bassist Michael Formanek and the immortal drummer Billy Hart, a longtime inspiration and new collaborator for Sánchez. The trio lays into some ear-grabbing originals, plus works by Cecil Taylor, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington (the album closes with a somersaulting take on “The Sleeping Lady and the Giant That Watches Over Her,” from his “Latin American Suite”) and the Mexican composer Mario Ruíz Armengol. (Sept. 23; Sunnyside) — RussonelloVIEUX FARKA TOURÉ and KHRUANGBIN The whole world now celebrates desert blues — the hypnotic Saharan style currently performed by Tinariwen and Mdou Moctar — thanks largely to one musician: the Malian guitarist-singer Ali Farka Touré. His son and musical successor honors him on “Ali,” an inspired team-up with Khruangbin, a Houston trio that has garnered its own passionate following thanks to its exquisitely chill, globally seasoned grooves. On “Diarabi,” from Ali’s 1994 album with Ry Cooder, Vieux’s plaintive vocals and guitar hover over the band’s plush yet unshakable pulse. On “Mahine Me,” played acoustically on Ali’s 1992 LP “The Source,” the zydeco accordionist Ruben Moreno sits in for a buoyant interpretation of a Songhai proverb. These covers point back to their source while casting their own spell. (Sept. 23; Dead Oceans) — ShteamerGLOBAL CITIZEN FESTIVAL During the past decade, Global Citizen has raised more than $40 billion to combat extreme poverty, with an annual all-star event on Central Park’s Great Lawn as its flagship event. Fans can enter a ticket drawing by signing petitions, calling leaders or sharing informational videos, and this year, their incentives include a 10th-anniversary lineup featuring the pop empress Mariah Carey, the thrash titans Metallica, the Spanish pop revolutionary Rosalía, the country trailblazer Mickey Guyton, the glammed-up Italian rockers Maneskin and the resurgent hitmakers the Jonas Brothers. A companion fest, held simultaneously in Accra, Ghana, plays up the event’s international reach, pairing American stars like SZA, Usher and H.E.R. with Afrobeats luminaries including Tems and Sarkodie. (Sept. 24; Central Park) — ShteamerTAYLOR HAWKINS TRIBUTE CONCERT Taylor Hawkins wasn’t just the Foo Fighters’ drummer; he was also a full-time poster boy for the band’s arena-conquering rock ’n’ roll quest. So it’s fitting that the Foos will give Hawkins — who died in March at age 50 — a hero’s send-off at this Los Angeles blowout, which follows a similar event in London. The guest list traces the full arc of his career, touching on his early idols (Queen’s Roger Taylor, the Police’s Stewart Copeland), his first high-profile boss (Alanis Morissette), his drummer peers (Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, Rage Against the Machine’s Brad Wilk) and various pop-star pals (Pink, Miley Cyrus). Expect a heartfelt memorial that doubles as a loud, sweaty scream-along. (Sept. 27; Kia Forum) — ShteamerZACHARY CLAUSE For those not ready to leave summer behind, the cunning charmer Zachary Clause returns to Pangea on Sept. 29-30 with “On a Beach,” drawing inspiration from Hollywood and Fire Island, Rodgers and Hart and post-punk pop. The East Village nightspot will also offer new shows by the seasoned provocateur Penny Arcade and her longtime creative partner Steve Zehentner (Sept. 17) and house favorite Tammy Faye Starlite (Nov. 3 and 10), who’ll apply her beneficent irreverence to the Rolling Stones catalog. The coolly eclectic vocalist Zora Rasmussen is in residency the third Thursday of each month through December, and the long-treasured actor, director and theater guru Austin Pendleton will continue his collaboration with the singer, actor and musician Barbara Bleier in a tribute to Richard Rodgers, set for Oct. 4, 11 and 25. — GardnerTITUS ANDRONICUS “The Will to Live,” the seventh LP by the classicist New Jersey punk act Titus Andronicus, doesn’t aim quite as high as its Civil War-inspired “The Monitor” or its rock opera “The Most Lamentable Tragedy.” But it still finds the bandleader Patrick Stickles howling out big questions following the 2021 death of Matt (Money) Miller, his cousin and the band’s founding keyboardist. On “I Can Not Be Satisfied,” he belts that he isn’t afraid to die, “I’m much more frightened to survive,” on a chorus that sounds like the E Street Band tearing through a dive-bar encore. Fittingly, the actual Springsteen sideman Jake Clemons adds ambling piano to the down-and-out closer “69 Stones.” (Sept. 30; Merge) — ShteamerBJÖRK “Fossora,” the Icelandic musician’s first album in five years, is a pandemic-era project as only Björk could conceive it: a paean to the Earth and her late mother, filled with fantastical imagery of fungi and what she described as lots of “heavy bottom-end.” (Sept. 30; One Little Independent) — SisarioKID CUDI The man who famously branded himself “the lonely stoner” released a third installment of his “Man on the Moon” series in 2020, in which he continued to interrogate his angst and trace the sources of his trauma. Cudi returns for a new project in September, “Entergalactic” (arriving with an animated Netflix show that expands on its themes), which explores another very personal topic: love. (Sept 30; Republic) — BlumASHLEY McBRYDE This country singer-songwriter wields her intricate, intimate storytelling like a conductor on “Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville,” offering a guided tour of a fictional town where the strip club hosts a gospel night and even the funeral home comes with a catchy jingle. She passes the mic to country contemporaries like Aaron Raitiere, Pillbox Patti and the Brothers Osborne for songs that sketch out the landscape of Lindeville and its many characters — the woman in a turtleneck racing around in a red Corvette, the widow chalking the local ball field. It’s a fluorescent carnival of pedal steel and thumping guitar that proves McBryde can be a skilled curator, as well as a performer. (Sept. 30; Warner Music Nashville) — BlumAshley McBryde’s new album explores a fictional town in all of its hyperlocal glory.Katie Kauss/Getty ImagesWILCO In honor of the 20th anniversary of the lush, sprawling album often considered the best in Wilco’s catalog, the band is releasing seven new editions of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” with a remastered version included in each set. The Super Deluxe iteration includes live concert recordings, radio performances, drafts and demos that trace the band tinkering with shards of the tracks, and 82 previously unreleased songs. The set also includes parts of a 2001 full-band interview with the Chicago radio station WXRT, one week after Sept. 11. (Sept. 30; Nonesuch) — BlumALYSHA UMPHRESS The powerhouse whose bluesy but ebullient belting was showcased in the 2015 Broadway revival of “On the Town” will present her first solo show in New York City since 2008 — titled “Alysha Umphress and Things … Like This” — at Joe’s Pub on Oct. 1-3. The Joe’s Pub Vanguard Residency will feature artists who studied with or were influenced by the beloved voice teacher Barbara Maier Gustern, who died in March, among them the downtown luminaries Penny Arcade (Nov. 29-Dec. 1) and Murray Hill (Dec. 13-17). Earlier, Machine Dazzle will celebrate the album release of “Treasure,” a “future psyche-sex-adelic synth rock experience” inspired by Dazzle’s mother and their relationship, on Oct. 21. — GardnerALVVAYS After a half-decade and a lineup shuffle, the dream-pop band fronted by Molly Rankin is back with “Blue Rev,” its third album. Across 14 songs, Rankin’s sharp character sketches are set against colorful scribbles of guitar and synths, padded with layers of fuzz. Working with Shawn Everett, an engineer and producer known for unorthodox techniques, Alvvays recorded much of the album in one sprint, managing to preserve the zingy immediacy of a live performance. (Oct. 7; Polyvinyl) — HornBROKEN BELLS Brian Burton, the A-list producer known as Danger Mouse, and the Shins leader James Mercer are a well-matched pair: pop auteurs who have carved out space in the mainstream while keeping their eccentricities intact. Their 2010 self-titled debut bathed Mercer’s trademark twisty hooks in Burton’s stylish psych-pop textures; “After the Disco” from 2014 added a dose of playful retro funk. “Into the Blue” is their moodiest trip yet, with the duo sending classic soul balladry (“Love on the Run”) and sumptuously spooky art pop (“We’re Not in Orbit Yet”) through a surreal prism. The album has its kitschier moments (the glam-rock-tinged “Saturdays”) but the overall mood suggests an alternate-dimension “AM Gold” compilation: soothing and unsettling by turns. (Oct. 7; AWAL) — ShteamerCHLOE MORIONDO Paramore, All Time Low and Girlpool were among the acts that Chloe Moriondo name-checked on “Favorite Band,” a 2021 song situating her own punkish brand of indie-pop within a broader lineage. “Suckerpunch,” her new album, smacks away indie signifiers: Out with the guitars and the earnestness, in with bravado, beat drops and Auto-Tune. The opener, “Popstar,” an apparent sequel to “Favorite Band,” outlines her ambitions, citing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera as inspiration. Kesha in her dollar-sign era is another evident touchstone. (Oct. 7; Public Consumption/Fueled by Ramen) — HornCHARLIE PUTH What if … Charlie Puth finally finished the album? Over the past year, the pop star has been relentlessly teasing new music on TikTok, taking viewers through his song-making process from conception — like when he captured Foley-style audio of a studio light switch in the video that soft-launched the single “Light Switch” — to completion. On “Charlie,” Puth’s third album, a year’s worth of dribbles are assembled into a coherent whole: a tangy, lightly gimmicky record that sees Puth through the many phases of heartbreak. (Oct. 7; Atlantic) — HornWILL SHEFF The longtime leader of the elegant indie-folk band Okkervil River has described his solo debut as a clean break with the past. Inspired in part by the 2020 death of the band’s former drummer, Travis Nelsen, “Nothing Special” finds Will Sheff letting go of previously held ideas of romanticized self-destruction. The results reveal a new serenity but don’t fall back on easy truths. “Holy Man” plays like soft-rock Leonard Cohen, weighing temptation and redemption with equal skepticism, and “Estrangement Zone” finds a narrator “ready to withdraw” but worried about slipping into oblivion. The context may be new, but Sheff still showcases his gift for writing songs that harness both the glow of poetry and the gravity of hymns. (Oct. 7; ATO) — ShteamerSUN RA ARKESTRA The world is just beginning to catch up with Sun Ra, whose radical practice as a composer, pianist, bandleader, poet and philosopher presaged much of the work being done by artists and humanities scholars today, particularly (but not only) in the realm of Afrofuturism. Ra’s band, the Arkestra, remains active and thriving almost 30 years after his death, converting this renewed attention into fresh sound. “Living Sky” is an all-instrumental album recorded during the pandemic, featuring takes on a few classic Ra compositions as well as three originals by Marshall Allen, the 98-year-old alto saxophone iconoclast who now leads the band. (Oct. 7; Omni Sound) — RussonelloMarshall Allen leads the Sun Ra Arkestra through a new instrumental album recorded during the pandemic.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesMICHAEL FEINSTEIN Following a seven-year association with 54 Below, the singer, pianist, historian and American songbook advocate is attaching his brand to the Uptown institution where Bobby Short once held court. Feinstein’s first-ever engagement at Café Carlyle, set for Oct. 11-22, will include songs from “Gershwin Country,” his album featuring duets with Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill and Liza Minnelli. Others due at the Carlyle include the Broadway and “Madam Secretary” alum Erich Bergen (Sept. 13-17), the actress and singer Betty Buckley (Sept. 27-Oct. 1), the pianist and vocalist Peter Cincotti (Sept. 20-24), the singer and actress Rita Wilson (Oct. 25-Nov. 5) and the beloved cabaret couple John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey (Nov. 8-19). — GardnerHABIBI FESTIVAL Organized by the music arm of the Public Theater, this five-day event highlights performers who preserve and reinterpret the regional musical traditions of Southwest Asia and North Africa. In its second year, Habibi Festival’s lineup includes Bnat El Houariyat, an all-female percussion and dance group from Morocco; Bedouin Burger, a Syrian and Lebanese duo who explore Arabic melodic modes in their electronic compositions; and Hat, a Moroccan D.J. who travels the world to capture recordings of folk musicians, then remixes them live. The French-Tunisian composer Yacine Boulares, one of the festival’s curators, will also present the U.S. debut of his take on “Night in Tunisia,” imbuing the jazz standard with North African rhythms. (Oct. 11-15; Joe’s Pub) — HornBACKSTREET BOYS It’s a bridge every by-the-book pop act must cross eventually: the Christmas album. And the Backstreet Boys sound like they’re all in on their first holiday-themed effort, “A Very Backstreet Christmas,” whether they’re embracing vintage doo-wop on “White Christmas” and “Winter Wonderland” or going full carol on “Silent Night.” The standout numbers skew more modern: “Together,” one of three originals, a lite-R&B promise of holiday-season romance, and, best of all, a tastefully tempo-boosted reading of the gold standard of all boy-band Christmas efforts, Wham!’s “Last Christmas.” (Oct. 14; BMG) — ShteamerBILL CALLAHAN It’s tempting to view Bill Callahan’s three-decade evolution — from the lo-fi outsider art of his early ’90s recordings as Smog to his current mature-troubadour mode — as a gradual mellowing. But his songs’ ability to stop you in your tracks has only grown. “We warmed our hands in the corpse of a wild horse,” he sings over rolling fingerpicked guitar on “Everyway,” from “YTI⅃AƎЯ,” his upcoming eighth album under his own name. Then he works his way to a classic Callahan punchline: “At least we’re all in this horse together.” Elsewhere, he muses on childhood innocence while name-checking the Harlem Globetrotters great Meadowlark Lemon on the loose roots-rocker “Natural Information” and processes death with disarming tenderness on the ghostly folk song “Lily.” (Oct. 14; Drag City) — ShteamerBRIAN ENO There’s a new Brian Eno album on the way, but which Eno will show up? The master soundscapist who arguably invented ambient music, or the skewed pop auteur the world met on ’70s cult classics like “Here Come the Warm Jets”? On the upcoming “Foreverandevernomore,” it’s a little of both. The album is Eno’s first vocal-centric LP since 2005, but the tracks themselves — like “Garden of Stars,” where he chants about the mysteries of the cosmos against a backdrop of distorted synth buzz, or “We Let It In,” where he and his daughter Darla croon serenely from within a womblike tone bath — are as unapologetically abstract as anything in his catalog. (Oct. 14; Verve/UMC) — ShteamerMIKO MARKS This singer-songwriter’s “Feel Like Going Home” — her second album in two years, following a lengthy recording hiatus — arrives at a time when she and fellow artists of color are forcefully pushing back against racism in Nashville, past and present. The album finds Miko Marks broadening her sound to make room for her full range of influences, from Muscle Shoals-style Southern soul (“One More Night”) to sizzling blues (“River”) and soothing gospel (“Lay Your Burdens Down”). (Oct. 14; Redtone) — ShteamerSUE MATSUKI An author and a performers’ advice columnist as well as a long-admired entertainer, Matsuki was the first winner of the Mabel Mercer Foundation’s Julie Wilson Award in 2004. Now she’ll present “But Beautiful … a Tribute to Julie Wilson” in two parts during separate shows on Oct. 14 at the Green Room 42. Homages are also planned for Barbra Streisand (Jenna Pastuszek’s “Me, Myself & Barbra,” returning Dec. 17) and Britney Spears (Sean Stephens’s “One More Time,” Oct. 12), as the revue “At This Performance …” continues to showcase Broadway and Off Broadway understudies, standbys and alternates (Sept. 12, Nov. 21 and Dec. 12). “5 Questions With James and JAM” will deliver James Jackson Jr. and John-Andrew Morrison from the cast of the Tony-winning musical “A Strange Loop” on Sept. 19; “Leola’s Lady Land Lounge” will team Will Nolan’s Kelly Clarkson-loving drag persona with special guests on Oct. 6 and Dec. 5; and the new musicals “Fountain of You” and “Atlantis” will be performed in concert Sept. 26 and Oct. 2. — GardnerMIGHTMARE The new solo project from Sarah Shook, who fronts the country-punk outfit Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, was an insular-by-necessity product of the pandemic, written, recorded and produced by Shook during its first year. On “Cruel Liars,” Shook dials back the twang and down-home shuffle of Disarmers records while retaining their rough hew and stark, straightforward lyricism. Compact and nervy, the album centers the fallout of a bad breakup, but creeps toward optimism: “Ain’t gonna be no memory gonna haunt me down tonight,” Shook sings on its unexpectedly sweet final track. (Oct. 14; Kill Rock Stars) — HornRED HOT CHILI PEPPERS The return of one member to a legacy rock act shouldn’t mean that much these days. But the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2019 reinstatement of John Frusciante — the soulful and prodigiously skilled guitarist who had done two prior stints in the band since joining in 1988 — has been received like the righting of a cosmic imbalance. “Return of the Dream Canteen,” the band’s second new double LP of the year, helps explain why, distilling the quartet’s signature sound down to its essence: “Tippa My Tongue” checks every Chili Peppers box (Flea’s serpentine slap bass, Frusciante’s jewel-like chords, Anthony Kiedis’s audaciously corny rap couplets) without sounding tired, and tracks from the Eddie Van Halen-inspired “Eddie” to the glimmering, reggae-esque “Handful” summon that sun-baked pathos that’s always elevated the band’s Frusciante-era material. (Oct. 14; Warner Records) — ShteamerAnthony Kiedis, Flea and the rest of Red Hot Chili Peppers are releasing their second double album of 2022 in October.Rob Grabowski/Invision, via Associated PressSKULLCRUSHER The musician Helen Ballentine drummed up some early pandemic buzz with her debut EP, a set of folksy, confessional tunes that suited the hushed interiority of the moment. (Tellingly, she named a song after Nick Drake on a subsequent release.) With her first album, “Quiet the Room,” Ballentine, who performs as Skullcrusher, has grown more adventurous: Her delicate melodies bloom into dense sound collages, built up with layers of drones, field recordings and echoes that smudge out her vocals. The songs are spooky and stirring, like old photos whose context is long forgotten. (Oct. 14; Secretly Canadian) — HornTOVE LO “Dirt Femme,” Tove Lo’s fifth album, and the first for her own label, hones in on the twin forces that have animated her music since her breakout hit “Habits (Stay High)”: her deconstruction of femininity, especially as a queer woman, and her fascination with her own death drive. She rejects constraints of traditional gender roles (“Suburbia”), prods at the limits of body positivity (“Grapefruit”) and laments her draw to a conventional romance narrative. She finds clarity in club music, joining with the dance producers SG Lewis and Channel Tres to craft sticky, coruscating tracks. “It’s tough out in the real world,” she wails on “True Romance”; this LP offers a welcome distraction. (Oct. 14; Pretty Swede Records/Mtheory) — BlumWILD PINK “A Billion Little Lights,” Wild Pink’s acclaimed album from last year, wasn’t the frontier myth-themed double LP that the group’s frontman, John Ross, once planned — but its soft-edged rock did conjure a sense of road-meets-horizon vastness. The New York band’s follow-up, “ILYSM,” builds on that instinct with long songs full of unexpected detours. Though partly inspired by Ross’s battle with cancer while writing it, the record is more imagistic than diaristic, and more contemplative than despairing. Its most prominent theme is companionship, with the tenderness of the title track (shorthand for “I love you so much”) matched only by closer “ICLYM” (“I couldn’t love you more”). (Oct. 14; Royal Mountain) — HornIHEARTRADIO FIESTA LATINA The annual festival returns to Miami’s FTX Arena in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. The one-night event brings established Latin rap and pop stars like Enrique Iglesias, Farruko and Nicky Jam alongside rising hitmakers like the glossy pop singer Becky G and the rapper Myke Towers. Iglesias will also receive this year’s iHeartRadio Corazón Latino Award, for his charitable endeavors as well as his musical legacy. (Oct. 15) — BlumBRIC JAZZFEST A multiday festival that gets more adventurous each year, BRIC JazzFest gives some of New York’s brightest rising talent the rare chance to perform on a major festival stage without leaving home. This year’s three-day marathon, held as usual at BRIC’s Downtown Brooklyn headquarters, will include sets from the vibraphonist Joel Ross and his nine-piece band, Parables; the vocalist Lizz Wright; the pianist Julius Rodriguez; and the trombonist Kalia Vandever, among dozens more. (Oct. 20-22; BRIC House) — RussonelloARCHERS OF LOAF Archers of Loaf perfected a certain strain of roaring, smartass indie rock on their 1993 debut, “Icky Mettle.” They broke up before the decade was done but, like so many of their peers, revved back up in the 2010s. On “Reason in Decline,” their first album in 24 years, the singer-guitarist Eric Bachmann reclaims the band’s lovably ornery spirit, working in the hard truths of middle age. “Tangled in the wasted time,” he sings on “Saturation and Light.” “Every little minute you stay in it/You blame yourself and it cuts you like a knife.” Whether he’s taking aim at the “masters of distraction” dominating the discourse on “Misinformation Age” or a troubled old friend on “Human,” his band provides a reliably stubborn kick. (Oct. 21; Merge) — ShteamerARCTIC MONKEYS This beloved British rock band has shape-shifted over its nearly two-decade career, pivoting from raucous anthems about caroming drunk through city streets to steamier, sleeker songs about anxious desire. For its seventh album, “The Car,” the band zags once more, teaming up again with its long-term producer James Ford for 10 mostly ballad-tempo songs, all written by the band’s lead singer, Alex Turner, that include classic-rock nods like string sections, carefully crooned vocals, funky guitars and plenty of dark observations. (Oct. 21; Domino) — BlumBABYFACE Kenneth (Babyface) Edmonds knows a thing or two about the female voice, having written songs for standouts including Aretha Franklin and Ariana Grande. His new album, “Girls Night Out,” harks back to the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack from 1995, where he assembled an all-star cast that featured the Queen of Soul alongside Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan, TLC and more. This time around, he shows how sharp he still is as a producer, talent spotter and sometime vocalist, teaming up with an impressive selection of R&B up-and-comers, including the “Boo’d Up” singer Ella Mai on “Keeps on Falling,” a dance-floor-ready ode to enduring love; and Ari Lennox on “Liquor,” which equates romantic intoxication with the other kind. (Oct. 21; Capitol) — ShteamerBabyface’s “Girls Night Out” features collaborations with up-and-coming women artists.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesCARLY RAE JEPSEN A dependable source of heart-eyed synth-pop, this Canadian singer rode the wave of poptimism all the way from her “Call Me Maybe” breakout to her current status as cult hero. The breezy first single from her new album, “The Loneliest Time,” showed her mellower side, but effervescence is still Jepsen’s default mode: Look out for the stratospheric chorus of “Surrender My Heart” and the escapist disco fantasia of “Shooting Star.” (Oct. 21; 604/Schoolboy/Interscope) — HornDRY CLEANING “My shoe organizing thing arrived/Thank God,” Florence Shaw deadpans over a swirling art-pop vamp on “Anna Calls From the Arctic,” the opening track of “Stumpwork,” the second LP from the young London quartet Dry Cleaning. The moment sums up the odd sense of composure that’s helped make Shaw one of the most compelling presences in the current British post-punk revival. But the band is a true collective: On the title track, Shaw’s bandmates wrap her words in gauzy textures that betray a hint of menace, heightening the weirdness of lines like, “I thought I saw a young couple clinging to a round baby/But it was a bundle of trash and food.” (Oct. 21; 4AD) — ShteamerTAYLOR SWIFT The pop superstar’s fifth album in just over two years will arrive this fall: “Midnights,” which she described on social media as “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.” She added: “This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face.” “Midnights” will come too late to qualify for the next Grammys, but the album has a strong possibility of becoming one of the year’s biggest commercial successes, rivaling LPs like Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House.” (Oct. 21; Republic) — SisarioAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTEGAN AND SARA The Canadian twins have turned their open-book ethos into a robust brand, unpacking their origins as songwriters and queer women in a 2019 memoir, soon to become a TV series starring the TikTok creators Railey and Seazynn Gilliland. But as heard on the upcoming “Crybaby,” Tegan and Sara’s most revealing platform remains their songs. Twenty-plus years and 10 albums into their career, the sisters are experts at polishing their tracks to a sheen without sanding down the sharp emotional edges. Songs like “I Can’t Grow Up” and “____ Up What Matters” explore toxic relationship dynamics to the tune of peppy, hook-heavy pop. (Oct. 21; Mom + Pop) — ShteamerTHE MABEL MERCER FOUNDATION’S NEW YORK CABARET CONVENTION The organization’s 33rd fête rolls into Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall on Oct. 26 with “Look to the Rainbow: The Songs of Yip Harburg,” hosted by Andrea Marcovicci and Jeff Harnar and featuring cabaret and theater fixtures such as Karen Akers, Christine Andreas, Tovah Feldshuh, Maude Maggart and Those Girls. On Oct. 27, Natalie Douglas hosts Darius de Haas, Eric Yves Garcia, Marilyn Maye, Gabrielle Stravelli, Billy Stritch and others in “Unforgettable: A Tribute to Nat King Cole,” and KT Sullivan wraps things up Oct. 28 with “Through the Years: Celebrating Timeless American Standards,” set to include performances by Celia Berk, Klea Blackhurst, Shana Farr, David LaMarr, Karen Mason, Sidney Myer and Mark Nadler. — GardnerOUMOU SANGARÉ Now that Tuareg desert blues is known around the world, Wassoulou — a style that favors female bandleaders and rides an equally infectious current of rhythm — is due for its own moment in the global sun. Oumou Sangaré, a Grammy-winning vocalist, songwriter and activist, is a household name in Mali and one of Wassoulou’s greatest ambassadors abroad. Singing in Bambara, she renders social critiques and affirmations of women’s power in a gravelly alto; on her latest release, “Timbuktu,” she shows off a wide range — singing over driving, front-loaded rhythms on some tracks, and offering wistful Malian ballads (think Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré) on others. She will make her Apollo debut at this concert, presented as part of the World Music Institute’s Women’s Voices series. (Oct. 29; Apollo Theater) — RussonelloTRIPPIE REDD This 23-year-old descended from the SoundCloud school of hip-hop: brash beats, soupy melodies, sludgy emo-rap. His new release, “A Love Letter to You 5,” continues a series — his last installment topped the charts when it came out in 2019 — and taps current heavyweights like Offset and Moneybagg Yo. The new album finds Trippie Redd crooning about being in love over twinkling guitars and skittering drums, swooping his vowels as he sings to a nameless “youuuu.” (October; 1400 Entertainment/10K Projects) — BlumTrippie Redd’s October release, “A Love Letter to You 5,” features Offset and Moneybagg Yo.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressBOB DYLAN “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), promises lessons on the craft of songwriting — pro tips on “the trap of easy rhymes” and “how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song,” according to his publisher — through 66 essays on a tantalizing track list including Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up,” the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’,” Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and three songs associated with Elvis Presley (“Blue Moon,” “Viva Las Vegas” and “Money Honey”). (Nov. 1; Simon & Schuster) — SisarioDANIEL AVERY The British dance music producer Daniel Avery opts for a darker, denser sound on “Ultra Truth,” distorting swaths of static and tinny, tingling beats into neatly packaged tracks. A song with fellow techno producers Kelly Lee Owens and Haai (Teneil Throssell) is titled “Chaos Energy,” but “Ultra Truth” is all about pristine precision, slick cuts and jittery percussion. The album unveils like an elegy to the internal monologue, the constant noise building inside your brain. (Nov. 4; Mute/Phantasy) — BlumCAVETOWN The bedroom pop singer-songwriter Robin Skinner has gained a fervent online following with delicate tracks about teen life featuring titles like “I Miss My Mum” and “I’ll Make Cereal.” On his new release, “Worm Food,” he blends the curdled angst and peppy hooks of ’90s pop-punk (one track longs for 1994, a year Skinner was not yet alive) with subdued synth pop. He writes about the specific aches of a new relationship: “Laundry day, going to shrink your shirt/makes a perfect fit for me,” he coos over lilting strings on “Laundry Day.” On another, he compares himself to a “ball of wasabi” — “there to keep things interesting, but nobody wants me.” It’s a charming portrait of anxious love. (Nov. 4; Cave Music Limited) — BlumBILLY JOEL Before Billy Joel conquered Madison Square Garden with an ongoing monthly residency and played the last-ever concerts at Shea Stadium, he headlined another of New York’s secular temples, the original Yankee Stadium, for two nights in June 1990. A remixed, re-edited and newly expanded version of “Live at Yankee Stadium,” the concert film documenting those mega-gigs, will soon see release on Blu-ray, with the audio version coming out digitally, and on CD and LP sets. The hit-parade set list (including “My Life,” “Uptown Girl,” “New York State of Mind,” “Piano Man” and the then-recent No. 1 “We Didn’t Start the Fire”) doesn’t differ much from the one you’ll hear Joel play at the Garden today, more than 30 years later — the mark of a true pop institution. (Nov. 4; Columbia/Legacy) — ShteamerPHOENIX The French band whose bubbly 2009 indie-pop crossover hit “Lisztomania” got even a collegiate A.O.C. dancing with abandon is back with “Alpha Zulu,” its first LP in five years. In part a meditation on loss — including that of its producer Philippe Zdar, who died in an accident in 2019 at age 52 — the album, marking Phoenix’s 25th anniversary as a group, includes an appearance by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend. (Nov. 4; Glassnote/Loyaute Music) — SisarioJULIE BENKO & JASON YEAGER If you followed the backstage drama at Broadway’s “Funny Girl,” you know that Julie Benko is the bright-eyed, dulcet-voiced soprano who went from standby to star after Beanie Feldstein’s departure. On Nov. 7, Benko and her husband, the jazz pianist Jason Yeager, will perform selections from their new album, “Hand in Hand,” which mixes show tunes and standards with Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” and Yeager originals at 54 Below. Other artists slated to visit “Broadway’s living room” include the unsinkable nonagenarian Marilyn Maye (Oct. 12-15, Oct. 18-22), the stage and screen veteran Leslie Uggams (Nov. 10-12) and the latest jewel in the club’s “Diamond Series,” Vanessa Williams (Dec. 13-18), followed by the enduring gem Patti LuPone (Dec. 20-30). Fans of a certain Sara Bareilles musical can look forward to “Sugar, Butter, Reunion: Celebrating the Jennas of ‘Waitress’” on Oct. 9, and the new musical “Sean’s Story,” an Ars Nova commission by Khiyon Hursey, will be showcased in concert Oct. 11. — GardnerPATRICIA BRENNAN The jazz world can get stuck in a battle between the head and the heart, but rarely do you find an improviser like Patricia Brennan, the Veracruz, Mexico-born vibraphonist, marimba player and effects maven, who skirts that dichotomy almost completely. Her music seems to exist in a realm outside the body, but stays loaded with feeling. “More Touch” is the follow-up to Brennan’s spellbinding debut, the solo LP “Maquishti,” and it introduces a new quartet of advanced rhythmic thinkers: the drummer Marcus Gilmore, the percussionist Mauricio Herrera and the bassist Kim Cass. They venture between dreamy swing, bobbing bolero, the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Brennan’s hometown, and free time. (Nov. 11; Pyroclastic) — RussonelloADELE Apart from a few TV tapings and private events, Adele hasn’t appeared on a U.S. stage since 2016. And the postponement of her Las Vegas residency the day before its original January kickoff date raises the stakes even more for this rescheduled “Weekends With Adele” run at Caesars Palace’s 4,100-seat Colosseum. Expect megawatt tear-jerkers like “Hello” and “Someone Like You” to share set-list space with new fan favorites from her 2021 chart-topper “30,” including “Easy on Me,” a tender post-mortem of her former marriage; “Oh My God,” where she confronts the vertigo of new love; and the real-talk anthem “I Drink Wine.” (Nov. 18 through March 23; Caesars Palace; Las Vegas) — ShteamerMICHAEL JACKSON In an era when Beatles recording sessions yield a seven-hour documentary and a Bob Dylan boxed set might contain an entire album’s worth of “Like a Rolling Stone” outtakes, a two-disc reissue commemorating the 40th anniversary of “Thriller” — the best-selling album of all time, by a significant margin — seems almost stingy. But the idea that there might still be more to learn about this Quincy Jones-helmed triumph is still an enticing prospect. The Jackson estate is keeping a tight lid on the contents of the “Thriller 40” bonus material, but previously unreleased demos are promised. Given that only a handful of demos and outtakes surfaced on a 2001 “Thriller” reissue, a major excavation could be in store. (Nov. 18; Sony) — ShteamerCHARLES LLOYD The guitar has been an essential foil for Charles Lloyd since his upbringing in the blues and soul hotbed of Memphis. Moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, a big early break came as musical director for Chico Hamilton’s band, where he forged a close bond with the Hungarian guitar virtuoso Gabor Szabo. In recent years, Lloyd, an 84-year-old tenor saxophonist, flutist and National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, has been leading the Marvels, a country-jazz quintet featuring Bill Frisell’s guitar and Greg Leisz’s pedal steel. And by autumn’s end, he will have released three new albums this year, each with a different guitar trio and each casting its own light on his Lester Young-goes-to-Joshua Tree saxophone sound. Of the three, the last one, “Sacred Thread,” featuring the guitarist Julian Lage and the tabla icon Zakir Hussain, packs the wiliest punch. (Nov. 18; Blue Note) — RussonelloWENDY MOTEN The 21st-century virus of celebrity-judged TV talent contests has produced heartening stories, few more so than Wendy Moten’s; the 50-something Memphis native sang backup for Julio Iglesias and assorted country stars before “The Voice” brought her supple, limpid voice to wider attention. In a show returning to the Birdland Theater on Nov. 18-20, Moten highlights the pre-World War II classics of Richard Whiting (“He’s Funny That Way,” “Too Marvelous for Words”), mixing in a little Paul Simon and Janis Ian. Upstairs at Birdland Jazz Club, scheduled acts include the Broadway star-turned-cabaret stalwart Karen Akers (Sept. 12), the piquant stage and screen mainstay Julie Halston (Oct. 17) and the upscale nightlife fixtures Steve Ross (Oct. 24) and Jeff Harnar (Nov. 7), with the variety shows “Jim Caruso’s Cast Party” and “The Lineup With Susie Mosher” continuing at the jazz club on Mondays and the theater on Tuesdays. — GardnerThe singer Wendy Moten returns to Birdland Theater with a show that crosses genres and eras.Terry Wyatt/Getty ImagesWEYES BLOOD The singer-songwriter Natalie Mering, who performs as Weyes Blood, braids together emotional and existential upheaval, capturing the weightiness of contemporary life in sweeping, baroque-pop poetry. The crisis-rich three years since her last release have offered Mering plenty to write about; her upcoming fifth album, “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” layers references to climate change, pandemic and impending civilizational collapse into songs about estrangement and longing. “Living in the wake of overwhelming changes/We’ve all become strangers, even to ourselves,” she sings on the opening track, looking around and within. (November; Sub Pop) — HornJINKX MONSOON & BENDELACREME In 2018, these popular “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alumni joined forces to ring in the most wonderful time of the year. “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” now marks the duo’s fourth seasonal tour, for which variety-show maestro BenDeLaCreme and the cabaret and theater veteran Monsoon — the “sugary” queen and the “spicy” one, according to their official site — have co-written a new assortment of music, comedy and spectacle. The party arrives at Town Hall on Dec. 2-3. — GardnerA JOHN WATERS CHRISTMAS It’s been 18 years since the filmmaker, performer, author, fine artist and pope of trash (as he was christened by William S. Burroughs) curated a holiday album including cult classics such as “Fat Daddy” and “Santa Claus Is a Black Man,” but the spirit hasn’t left John Waters, who returns to City Winery on Dec. 18 with his latest irreverent Yuletide offering. Other seasonal celebrations scheduled at the Winery include Betty’s “December Delight” (Dec. 11) with special guests including Gloria Steinem, and “Suzanne Vega: Home for the Holidays” (Dec. 22-23, Dec. 26-27). — Gardner More