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    12 Grammy Nominees You Need to Hear

    Some of the best competitions are the under-the-radar ones. Listen to nominated songs by Bettye LaVette, Molly Tuttle, Tainy and more.The soul survivor Bettye LaVette, who’s up for best contemporary blues album.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesDear listeners,I’m Jon Pareles, sitting in for Lindsay this week because while she’s on vacation, we couldn’t let the Grammy Awards nominations go by without a playlist.Like a lot of critics, in and out of music, I’m pretty skeptical about awards shows. That’s not just because they rarely agree with my own taste. Awards shows have conflicted agendas and contradictory incentives. They trumpet artistic integrity but crave star power. They claim accountant-verified objectivity but often appear cliquish and stuck in industry bubbles.The one thing that makes me indulge the Grammys is an aspect that infuriates some other Grammy observers: the chronic sprawl of awards categories. There are 94 this year. That’s a lot, but fine: Let a hundred flowers bloom. The Recording Academy is forever trying to trim and adjust those categories, consolidating or renaming or expanding the list. But music keeps eluding them, changing styles and constituencies, while little Grammy voter pools — hopefully specialists, realistically partisans — battle to boost their candidates.It’s complicated, fluid, arbitrary, far from perfect. What, exactly, is “alternative jazz,” one of this year’s new categories? But down in the trenches of concert bookings, “Grammy-winning” can make a bigger difference for someone on a club or college tour than for an act with radio hits and arena gigs. The Grammys can be good for something.I regularly watch the pre-Grammy, non-network, un-prime-time “Grammy Premiere” livestream — just go to live.grammy.com or YouTube — where the unsung majority of Grammy Awards are given out before the prime-time show. They’re dorky and unpolished; some winners read their thank-yous from their cellphones, and they don’t always have designer outfits. But the pre-Grammys also book niche-category performers who tear the roof off, because that’s what happens beyond the controlled sphere of pop. Music can upend everything we expect.Here are a dozen down-category Grammy nominees, who are unlikely to show up in prime time. They’re not necessarily popular — though some were huge hits — or fashionable. They just made recordings worth noticing.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Kylie Minogue: “Padam Padam” (pop dance recording)Kylie Minogue conquered dance floors, yet again, in 2023 with “Padam Padam,” her breezily confident assertion that “I know you wanna take me home.” The title is a heartbeat rhythm, the production uses reverb to play with space, and Minogue sounds quite amenable to a tryst. (Listen on YouTube)2. Killer Mike featuring André 3000, Future and Eryn Allen Kane: “Scientists & Engineers” (rap performance)Multifaceted ideas about creativity — as a calling, a compulsion and a career — unite Killer Mike and his guests in this ambitious, changeable track. Enfolded in restlessly blipping synthesizers and Eryn Allen Kane’s ethereal vocal harmonies, André 3000 and Future muse over past and present before Killer Mike arrives with a closing barrage. (Listen on YouTube)3. Allison Russell: “Eve Was Black” (American roots performance)Racism and misogyny are Allison Russell’s direct targets in “Eve Was Black,” which transforms itself from Appalachian toe-tapper to eerie rocker to jazz excursion to gospel incantation and asks the unflinching question, “Do you hate or do you lust?” (Listen on YouTube)4. Jason Isbell: “Cast Iron Skillet” (American roots song)A tangle of bleak, likely interconnected narratives — murder, death in prison, a family shattered by interracial romance — mingles with homey advice in “Cast Iron Skillet,” a modest-sounding but far-reaching ballad. (Listen on YouTube)5. Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway: “El Dorado” (bluegrass album)The songwriter and flatpicking guitar virtuoso Molly Tuttle spins a brisk, minor-key chronicle of the Gold Rush. She sings about desperate characters and wonders, “Was it worth the blood and dirt to dig our lives away?” (Listen on YouTube)6. Bettye LaVette: “Hard to Be a Human” (contemporary blues album)The gritty-voiced, 77-year-old soul survivor Bettye LaVette embraces 1970s-style Nigerian Afrobeat, with its chattering saxophone and curlicued guitars, in “Hard to Be a Human,” as she wonders about humanity’s irredeemable flaws. (Listen on YouTube)7. Blind Boys of Alabama: “Work Until My Days Are Done” (roots gospel album)The Blind Boys of Alabama, a gospel institution since the 1940s, bring their vintage-style harmonies to a traditional song that’s more about diligence than worship. The arrangement is a two-parter, an easygoing shuffle that revs up midway through to something like sanctified honky-tonk. (Listen on YouTube)8. Tainy featuring Bad Bunny and Julieta Venegas: “Lo Siento BB:/” (música urbana)Tainy, the Puerto Rican producer who’s an architect of reggaeton, racked up a billion streams across various platforms with “Lo Siento BB:/” (“Sorry Baby”). Julieta Venegas and Bad Bunny sing about her infatuation and his refusal to commit, juxtaposing cushy electronics and a blunt beat. (Listen on YouTube)9. Natalia Lafourcade: “De Todas las Flores” (Latin rock or alternative album)The Mexican songwriter Natalia Lafourcade’s album “De Todas las Flores’ isn’t remotely rock. It’s richly retro pop that harks back decades, with acoustic instruments and some orchestral arrangements. The title track is a rueful, elegantly nostalgic lament for lost love. (Listen on YouTube)10. Davido featuring Musa Keys: “Unavailable” (African music performance)Davido is from Nigeria, but he has international aims. In “Unavailable,” he infuses Nigerian Afrobeats with a South African style, amapiano, and he’s joined by the South African singer Musa Keys. They’re both playing hard to get. (Listen on YouTube)11. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society: ‘Dymaxion’ (large jazz ensemble album)The composer Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society is an 18-piece big band that stokes suspense with dissonance, pinpoint timing and an arrangement that gets denser and denser throughout most of “Dymaxion.” Even when it eases back, the piece stays ominous. (Listen on YouTube)12. Ólafur Arnalds: “Woven Song (Hania Rani Piano Rework)” (new age, ambient or chant album)“Woven Song” originally appeared on Ólafur Arnalds’s 2020 album, “Some Kind of Peace,” with an eerie, sliding, untempered vocal. The Polish pianist and singer Hania Rani makes it cozier and more consonant in her “rework,” but the ghost-waltz spirit of the original persists. (Listen on YouTube)And I’d like to thank the Academy …JonThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“12 Grammy Nominees You Need to Hear” track listTrack 1: Kylie Minogue, “Padam Padam”Track 2: Killer Mike featuring André 3000, Future and Eryn Allen Kane, “Scientists & Engineers”Track 3: Allison Russell, “Eve Was Black”Track 4: Jason Isbell, “Cast Iron Skillet”Track 5: Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, “El Dorado”Track 6: Bettye LaVette, “Hard to Be a Human”Track 7: Blind Boys of Alabama, “Work Until My Days Are Done”Track 8: Tainy featuring Bad Bunny and Julieta Venegas, “Lo Siento BB:/”Track 9: Natalia Lafourcade, “De Todas la Flores”Track 10: Davido featuring Musa Keys, “Unavailable”Track 11: Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, “Dymaxion”Track 12: Ólafur Arnalds, “Woven Song (Hania Rani Piano Rework)”Bonus TracksCaryn the editor here flagging the rest of our Grammy coverage that’s gone live so far today:Ben Sisario’s big look at the field, with a spotlight on the top competitions.Our always-entertaining snubs and surprises, examining which genres were conspicuously absent from the biggest categories, and a delightful showdown between Olivia Rodrigo and the Rolling Stones.The full list of nominees: yes, all 94 categories. Yes, I formatted this myself.An interview with Victoria Monét, who has seven nominations (the second-most), and one for her toddler.And an interview with the indie-rock trio boygenius, who picked up six nods. More

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    2024 Grammy Nominations: Full List

    Artists, albums and songs competing for trophies at the 66th annual ceremony are being announced on Friday. The show will take place on Feb. 4 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.SZA is the top nominee for the 66th annual Grammy Awards with nine nods, all for her album “SOS,” which topped the Billboard 200 for 10 weeks.She leads a group of contenders that also includes Victoria Monét (with seven), as well as Jon Batiste, boygenius, Brandy Clark, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift (all with six apiece). Songs from the movie “Barbie” received 11 nods in seven categories. The producer Jack Antonoff and the engineer Serban Ghenea are also top nominees.The ceremony, which will take place on Feb. 4, 2024 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, will recognize recordings released from Oct. 1, 2022, to Sept. 15, 2023.Here is a complete list of the nominations, which were announced on Friday by the Recording Academy.Record of the Year“Worship,” Jon Batiste“Not Strong Enough,” boygenius“Flowers,” Miley Cyrus“What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie,” Billie Eilish“On My Mama,” Victoria Monét“Vampire,” Olivia Rodrigo“Anti-Hero,” Taylor Swift“Kill Bill,” SZAAlbum of the Year“World Music Radio,” Jon Batiste“The Record,” boygenius“Endless Summer Vacation,” Miley Cyrus“Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” Lana Del Rey“The Age of Pleasure,” Janelle Monáe“Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo“Midnights,” Taylor Swift“SOS,” SZASong of the Year“A&W,” Jack Antonoff, Lana Del Rey and Sam Dew, songwriters (Lana Del Rey)“Anti-Hero,” Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift, songwriters (Taylor Swift)“Butterfly,” Jon Batiste and Dan Wilson, songwriters (Jon Batiste)“Dance the Night” (From “Barbie: The Album”) Caroline Ailin, Dua Lipa, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, songwriters (Dua Lipa)“Flowers,” Miley Cyrus, Gregory Aldae Hein and Michael Pollack, songwriters (Miley Cyrus)“Kill Bill,” Rob Bisel, Carter Lang and Solána Rowe, songwriters (SZA)“Vampire,” Daniel Nigro and Olivia Rodrigo, songwriters (Olivia Rodrigo)“What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie,” Billie Eilish O’Connell and Finneas O’Connell, songwriters (Billie Eilish)Best New ArtistGracie AbramsFred again..Ice SpiceJelly RollCoco JonesNoah KahanVictoria MonétThe War and TreatyProducer of the Year, Non-ClassicalJack AntonoffDernst “D’Mile” Emile IIHit-BoyMetro BoominDaniel NigroSongwriter of the Year, Non-ClassicalEdgar BarreraJessie Jo DillonShane McAnallyTheron ThomasJustin TranterBest Pop Solo Performance“Flowers,” Miley Cyrus“Paint the Town Red,” Doja Cat“What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie,” Billie Eilish“Vampire,” Olivia Rodrigo“Anti-Hero,” Taylor SwiftBest Pop Duo/Group Performance“Thousand Miles,” Miley Cyrus featuring Brandi Carlile“Candy Necklace,” Lana Del Rey featuring Jon Batiste“Never Felt So Alone,” Labrinth featuring Billie Eilish“Karma,” Taylor Swift featuring Ice Spice“Ghost in the Machine,” SZA featuring Phoebe BridgersBest Pop Vocal Album“Chemistry,” Kelly Clarkson“Endless Summer Vacation,” Miley Cyrus“Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo“-” (Subtract), Ed Sheeran“Midnights,” Taylor SwiftBest Dance/Electronic Recording“Blackbox Life Recorder 21F,” Aphex Twin“Loading,” James Blake“Higher Than Ever Before,” Disclosure“Strong,” Romy & Fred again..“Rumble,” Skrillex, Fred again.. and FlowdanBest Pop Dance Recording“Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” David Guetta, Anne-Marie and Coi Leray“Miracle,” Calvin Harris featuring Ellie Goulding“Padam Padam,” Kylie Minogue“One in a Million,” Bebe Rexha & David Guetta“Rush,” Troye SivanBest Dance/Electronic Music Album“Playing Robots Into Heaven,” James Blake“For That Beautiful Feeling,” the Chemical Brothers“Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022),” Fred again..“Kx5,” Kx5“Quest for Fire,” SkrillexBest Rock Performance“Sculptures of Anything Goes,” Arctic Monkeys”More Than a Love Song,” Black Pumas“Not Strong Enough,” boygenius“Rescued,” Foo Fighters“Lux Æterna,” MetallicaBest Metal Performance“Bad Man,” Disturbed“Phantom of the Opera,” Ghost“72 Seasons,” Metallica”Hive Mind,” Slipknot“Jaded,” SpiritboxBest Rock Song“Angry,” Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Andrew Watt, songwriters (the Rolling Stones)“Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” Daniel Nigro and Olivia Rodrigo, songwriters (Olivia Rodrigo)“Emotion Sickness,” Dean Fertita, Joshua Homme, Michael Shuman, Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, songwriters (Queens of the Stone Age)“Not Strong Enough,” Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, songwriters (boygenius)“Rescued,” Dave Grohl, Rami Jaffee, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear, songwriters (Foo Fighters)Best Rock Album“But Here We Are,” Foo Fighters“Starcatcher,” Greta Van Fleet“72 Seasons,” Metallica“This Is Why,” Paramore“In Times New Roman…,” Queens of the Stone AgeBest Alternative Music Performance“Belinda Says,” Alvvays“Body Paint,” Arctic Monkeys“Cool About It,” boygenius“A&W,” Lana Del Rey“This Is Why,” ParamoreBest Alternative Music Album“The Car,” Arctic Monkeys“The Record,” boygenius“Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” Lana Del Rey“Cracker Island,” Gorillaz“I Inside the Old Year Dying,” PJ HarveyBest R&B Performance“Summer Too Hot,” Chris Brown“Back to Love,” Robert Glasper featuring SiR and Alex Isley“ICU,” Coco Jones“How Does It Make You Feel,” Victoria Monét“Kill Bill,” SZABest Traditional R&B Performance“Simple,” Babyface featuring Coco Jones“Lucky,” Kenyon Dixon“Hollywood,” Victoria Monét featuring Earth, Wind & Fire and Hazel Monét“Good Morning,” PJ Morton featuring Susan Carol“Love Language,” SZABest R&B Song“Angel,” Halle Bailey, Theron Feemster and Coleridge Tillman, songwriters (Halle)“Back to Love,” Darryl Andrew Farris, Robert Glasper and Alexandra Isley, songwriters (Robert Glasper Featuring SiR and Alex Isley)“ICU,” Darhyl Camper Jr., Courtney Jones, Raymond Komba and Roy Keisha Rockette, songwriters (Coco Jones)”On My Mama,” Dernst Emile II, Jeff Gitelman, Victoria Monét, Kyla Moscovich, Jamil Pierre and Charles Williams, songwriters (Victoria Monét)“Snooze,” Kenny B. Edmonds, Blair Ferguson, Khris Riddick-Tynes, Solána Rowe and Leon Thomas, songwriters (SZA)Best Progressive R&B Album“Since I Have a Lover,” 6lack“The Love Album: Off the Grid,” Diddy“Nova,” Terrace Martin and James Fauntleroy“The Age of Pleasure,” Janelle Monáe“SOS,” SZABest R&B Album“Girls Night Out,” Babyface“What I Didn’t Tell You (Deluxe),” Coco Jones“Special Occasion,” Emily King”Jaguar II,” Victoria Monét“Clear 2: Soft Life EP,” Summer WalkerBest Rap Performance“The Hillbillies,” Baby Keem featuring Kendrick Lamar“Love Letter,” Black Thought“Rich Flex,” Drake & 21 Savage“Scientists & Engineers,” Killer Mike featuring André 3000, Future and Eryn Allen Kane“Players,” Coi LerayBest Melodic Rap Performance“Sittin’ on Top of the World,” Burna Boy featuring 21 Savage“Attention,” Doja Cat“Spin Bout U,” Drake & 21 Savage“All My Life,” Lil Durk featuring J. Cole“Low,” SZABest Rap Song“Attention,” Rogét Chahayed, Amala Zandile Dlamini and Ari Starace, songwriters (Doja Cat)“Barbie World” from “Barbie: The Album,” Isis Naija Gaston, Ephrem Louis Lopez Jr. and Onika Maraj, songwriters (Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice featuring Aqua)“Just Wanna Rock,” Mohamad Camara, Symere Woods and Javier Mercado, songwriters (Lil Uzi Vert)“Rich Flex,” Brytavious Chambers, Isaac “Zac” De Boni, Aubrey Graham, J. Gwin, Anderson Hernandez, Michael “Finatik” Mule and Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, songwriters (Drake & 21 Savage)“Scientists & Engineers,” Andre Benjamin, Paul Beauregard, James Blake, Michael Render, Tim Moore and Dion Wilson, songwriters (Killer Mike featuring André 3000, Future and Eryn Allen Kane)Best Rap Album“Her Loss,” Drake & 21 Savage“Michael,” Killer Mike“Heroes & Villains,” Metro Boomin“King’s Disease III,” Nas“Utopia,” Travis ScottBest Spoken Word Poetry Album“A-You’re Not Wrong B-They’re Not Either: The Fukc-It Pill Revisited,” Queen Sheba“For Your Consideration’24 – The Album,” Prentice Powell and Shawn William“Grocery Shopping With My Mother,” Kevin Powell“The Light Inside,” J. Ivy“When the Poems Do What They Do,” Aja MonetBest Jazz Performance“Movement 18’ (Heroes),” Jon Batiste“Basquiat,” Lakecia Benjamin“Vulnerable (Live),” Adam Blackstone featuring the Baylor Project and Russell Ferranté“But Not for Me,” Fred Hersch and Esperanza Spalding“Tight,” Samara JoyBest Jazz Vocal Album“For Ella 2,” Patti Austin featuring Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band“Alive at the Village Vanguard,” Fred Hersch and Esperanza Spalding“Lean In,” Gretchen Parlato and Lionel Loueke“Mélusine,” Cécile McLorin Salvant“How Love Begins,” Nicole ZuraitisBest Jazz Instrumental Album“The Source,” Kenny Barron”Phoenix,” Lakecia Benjamin“Legacy: The Instrumental Jawn,” Adam Blackstone“The Winds of Change,” Billy Childs“Dream Box,” Pat MethenyBest Large Jazz Ensemble Album“The Chick Corea Symphony Tribute – Ritmo,” ADDA Simfònica, Josep Vicent, Emilio Solla“Dynamic Maximum Tension,” Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society“Basie Swings the Blues,” The Count Basie Orchestra directed by Scotty Barnhart“Olympians,” Vince Mendoza and Metropole Orkest“The Charles Mingus Centennial Sessions,” Mingus Big BandBest Latin Jazz Album“Quietude,” Eliane Elias“My Heart Speaks,” Ivan Lins with the Tblisi Symphony Orchestra“Vox Humana,” Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band“Cometa,” Luciana Souza and Trio Corrente“El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2,” Miguel Zenón and Luis PerdomoBest Alternative Jazz Album“Love in Exile,” Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily“Quality Over Opinion,” Louis Cole“SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree,” Kurt Elling, Charlie Hunter, SuperBlue“Live at the Piano,” Cory Henry“The Omnichord Real Book,” Meshell NdegeocelloBest Traditional Pop Vocal Album“To Steve With Love: Liz Callaway Celebrates Sondheim,” Liz Callaway“Pieces of Treasure,” Rickie Lee Jones“Bewitched,” Laufey“Holidays Around the World,” Pentatonix“Only the Strong Survive,” Bruce Springsteen“Sondheim Unplugged (The NYC Sessions), Vol. 3,” (Various Artists)Best Contemporary Instrumental Album“As We Speak,” Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Edgar Meyer, featuring Rakesh Chaurasia“On Becoming,” House of Waters“Jazz Hands,” Bob James“The Layers,” Julian Lage“All One,” Ben WendelBest Musical Theater Album“Kimberly Akimbo,” John Clancy, David Stone and Jeanine Tesori, producers; Jeanine Tesori, composer; David Lindsay-Abaire, lyricist (Original Broadway Cast)“Parade,” Micaela Diamond, Alex Joseph Grayson, Jake Pedersen and Ben Platt, principal vocalists; Jason Robert Brown & Jeffrey Lesser, producers; Jason Robert Brown, composer and lyricist (2023 Broadway Cast)“Shucked,” Brandy Clark, Jason Howland, Shane McAnally and Billy Jay Stein, producers; Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, composers/lyricists (Original Broadway Cast)“Some Like It Hot,” Christian Borle, J. Harrison Ghee, Adrianna Hicks and NaTasha Yvette Williams, principal vocalists; Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Bryan Carter, Scott M. Riesett, Charlie Rosen and Marc Shaiman, producers; Scott Wittman, lyricist; Marc Shaiman, composer and lyricist (Original Broadway Cast)“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” Annaleigh Ashford and Josh Groban, principal vocalists; Thomas Kail and Alex Lacamoire, producers (Stephen Sondheim, composer and lyricist) (2023 Broadway Cast)Best Country Solo Performance“In Your Love,” Tyler Childers“Buried,” Brandy Clark“Fast Car,” Luke Combs“The Last Thing on My Mind,” Dolly Parton“White Horse,” Chris StapletonBest Country Duo/Group Performance“High Note,” Dierks Bentley featuring Billy Strings“Nobody’s Nobody,” Brothers Osborne“I Remember Everything,” Zach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves“Kissing Your Picture (Is So Cold),” Vince Gill and Paul Franklin“Save Me,” Jelly Roll with Lainey Wilson“We Don’t Fight Anymore,” Carly Pearce featuring Chris StapletonBest Country Song“Buried,” Brandy Clark and Jessie Jo Dillon, songwriters (Brandy Clark)“I Remember Everything,” Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves, songwriters (Zach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves)“In Your Love,” Tyler Childers and Geno Seale, songwriters (Tyler Childers)“Last Night.” John Byron, Ashley Gorley, Jacob Kasher Hindlin and Ryan Vojtesak, songwriters (Morgan Wallen)“White Horse,” Chris Stapleton and Dan Wilson, songwriters (Chris Stapleton)Best Country Album“Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” Kelsea Ballerini“Brothers Osborne,” Brothers Osborne“Zach Bryan,” Zach Bryan“Rustin’ in the Rain,” Tyler Childers“Bell Bottom Country,” Lainey WilsonBest American Roots Performance“Butterfly,” Jon Batiste“Heaven Help Us All,” Blind Boys of Alabama“Inventing the Wheel,” Madison Cunningham“You Louisiana Man,” Rhiannon Giddens“Eve Was Black,” Allison RussellBest Americana Performance“Friendship,” Blind Boys of Alabama“Help Me Make It Through the Night,” Tyler Childers“Dear Insecurity,” Brandy Clark featuring Brandi Carlile“King of Oklahoma,” Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit“The Returner,” Allison RussellBest American Roots Song“Blank Page,” Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter, songwriters (The War and Treaty)“California Sober,” Aaron Allen, William Apostol and Jon Weisberger, songwriters (Billy Strings featuring Willie Nelson)“Cast Iron Skillet,” Jason Isbell, songwriter (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)“Dear Insecurity,” Brandy Clark and Michael Pollack, songwriters (Brandy Clark featuring Brandi Carlile)“The Returner,” Drew Lindsay, JT Nero and Allison Russell, songwriters (Allison Russell)Best Americana Album“Brandy Clark,” Brandy Clark“The Chicago Sessions,” Rodney Crowell“You’re the One,” Rhiannon Giddens“Weathervanes,” Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit“The Returner,” Allison RussellBest Bluegrass Album“Radio John: Songs of John Hartford,” Sam Bush“Lovin’ of the Game,” Michael Cleveland“Mighty Poplar,” Mighty Poplar“Bluegrass,” Willie Nelson“Me/And/Dad,” Billy Strings“City of Gold,” Molly Tuttle & Golden HighwayBest Traditional Blues Album“Ridin’,” Eric Bibb“The Soul Side of Sipp,” Mr. Sipp“Life Don’t Miss Nobody,” Tracy Nelson“Teardrops for Magic Slim Live at Rosa’s Lounge,” John Primer“All My Love for You,” Bobby RushBest Contemporary Blues Album“Death Wish Blues,” Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton“Healing Time,” Ruthie Foster“Live in London,” Christone “Kingfish” Ingram“Blood Harmony,” Larkin Poe“LaVette!,” Bettye LaVetteBest Folk Album“Traveling Wildfire,” Dom Flemons”I Only See the Moon,” the Milk Carton Kids“Joni Mitchell at Newport (Live),” Joni Mitchell”Celebrants,” Nickel Creek“Jubilee,” Old Crow Medicine Show“Seven Psalms,” Paul Simon“Folkocracy,” Rufus WainwrightBest Regional Roots Music Album“New Beginnings,” Buckwheat Zydeco Jr. and the Legendary Ils Sont Partis Band“Live at the 2023 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival,” Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers“Live: Orpheum Theater Nola,” Lost Bayou Ramblers and Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra“Made in New Orleans,” New Breed Brass Band“Too Much to Hold,” New Orleans Nightcrawlers“Live at the Maple Leaf,” the Rumble featuring Chief Joseph Boudreaux Jr.Best Gospel Performance/Song“God Is Good,” Stanley Brown featuring Hezekiah Walker, Kierra Sheard and Karen Clark Sheard; Stanley Brown, Karen V Clark Sheard, Kaylah Jiavanni Harvey, Rodney Jerkins, Elyse Victoria Johnson, J Drew Sheard II, Kierra Valencia Sheard and Hezekiah Walker, songwriters“Feel Alright (Blessed),” Erica Campbell; Erica Campbell, Warryn Campbell, William Weatherspoon, Juan Winans and Marvin L. Winans, songwriters“Lord Do It for Me (Live),” Zacardi Cortez; Marcus Calyen, Zacardi Cortez and Kerry Douglas, songwriters“God Is,” Melvin Crispell III“All Things,” Kirk Franklin; Kirk Franklin, songwriterBest Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song“Believe,” Blessing Offor; Hank Bentley and Blessing Offor, songwriters“Firm Foundation (He Won’t) (Live),” Cody Carnes“Thank God I Do,” Lauren Daigle; Lauren Daigle and Jason Ingram, songwriters“Love Me Like I Am,” For King & Country featuring Jordin Sparks“Your Power,” Lecrae and Tasha Cobbs Leonard“God Problems,” Maverick City Music, Chandler Moore and Naomi Raine; Daniel Bashta, Chris Davenport, Ryan Ellis and Naomi Raine, songwritersBest Gospel Album“I Love You,” Erica Campbell“Hymns (Live),” Tasha Cobbs Leonard“The Maverick Way,” Maverick City Music“My Truth,” Jonathan McReynolds“All Things New: Live in Orlando,” Tye TribbettBest Contemporary Christian Music Album“My Tribe,” Blessing Offor“Emanuel,” Da’ T.R.U.T.H.“Lauren Daigle,” Lauren Daigle“Church Clothes 4,” Lecrae“I Believe,” Phil WickhamBest Roots Gospel Album“Tribute to the King,” the Blackwood Brothers Quartet“Echoes of the South,” Blind Boys of Alabama“Songs That Pulled Me Through the Tough Times,” Becky Isaacs Bowman“Meet Me at the Cross,” Brian Free & Assurance“Shine: The Darker the Night the Brighter the Light,” Gaither Vocal BandBest Latin Pop Album“La Cuarta Hoja,” Pablo Alborán“Beautiful Humans, Vol. 1,” AleMor“A Ciegas,” Paula Arenas“La Neta,” Pedro Capó“Don Juan,” Maluma“X Mí (Vol. 1),” Gaby MorenoBest Música Urbana Album“Saturno,” Rauw Alejandro”Mañana Será Bonito,” Karol G“Data,” TainyBest Latin Rock or Alternative Album“Martínez,” Cabra“Leche De Tigre,” Diamante Eléctrico“Vida Cotidiana,” Juanes“De Todas Las Flores,” Natalia Lafourcade“EADDA9223,” Fito PaezBest Música Mexicana Album (Including Tejano)“Bordado a Mano,” Ana Bárbara“La Sánchez,” Lila Downs“Motherflower,” Flor de Toloache“Amor Como en Las Películas De Antes,” Lupita Infante“Génesis,” Peso PlumaBest Tropical Latin Album“Siembra: 45° Aniversario (En Vivo en el Coliseo de Puerto Rico, 14 de Mayo 2022),” Rubén Blades con Roberto Delgado and Orquesta“Voy a Ti,” Luis Figueroa“Niche Sinfónico,” Grupo Niche y Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia“Vida,” Omara Portuondo“Mimy & Tony,” Tony Succar, Mimy Succar“Escalona Nunca se Había Grabado Así,” Carlos VivesBest Global Music Performance“Shadow Forces,” Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily“Alone,” Burna Boy“Feel,” Davido“Milagro y Disastre,” Silvana Estrada“Abundance in Millets,” Falu and Gaurav Shah (featuring PM Narendra Modi)“Pashto,” Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain featuring Rakesh Chaurasia“Todo Colores,” Ibrahim Maalouf featuring Cimafunk and Tank and the BangasBest African Music Performance“Amapiano,” Asake and Olamide“City Boys,” Burna Boy“Unavailable,” Davido featuring Musa Keys“Rush,” Ayra Starr“Water,” TylaBest Global Music Album“Epifanías,” Susana Baca“History,” Bokanté“I Told Them…,” Burna Boy“Timeless,” Davido“This Moment,” ShaktiBest Reggae Album“Born for Greatness,” Buju Banton“Simma,” Beenie Man“Cali Roots Riddim 2023,” Collie Buddz“No Destroyer,” Burning Spear“Colors of Royal,” Julian Marley & AntaeusBest New Age, Ambient or Chant Album“Aquamarine,” Kirsten Agresta-Copely“Moments of Beauty,” Omar Akram“Some Kind of Peace (Piano Reworks),” Ólafur Arnalds“Ocean Dreaming Ocean,” David Darling and Hans Christian“So She Howls,” Carla Patullo featuring Tonality and the Scorchio QuartetBest Children’s Music Album“Ahhhhh!,” Andrew & Polly“Ancestars,” Pierce Freelon and Nnenna Freelon“Hip Hope for Kids!,” DJ Willy Wow!“Taste the Sky,” Uncle Jumbo“We Grow Together Preschool Songs,” 123 AndrésBest Comedy Album“I Wish You Would,” Trevor Noah“I’m an Entertainer,” Wanda Sykes“Selective Outrage,” Chris Rock”Someone You Love,” Sarah Silverman“What’s in a Name?,” Dave ChappelleBest Audiobook, Narration and Storytelling Recording“Big Tree,” Meryl Streep“Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,” William Shatner“The Creative Act: A Way of Being,” Rick Rubin“It’s Ok to Be Angry About Capitalism,” Senator Bernie Sanders“The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times,” Michelle ObamaBest Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media“Aurora,” (Daisy Jones & the Six)“Barbie: The Album” (Various Artists)“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – Music From and Inspired By” (Various Artists)“Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3: Awesome Mix, Vol. 3” (Various Artists)“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” Weird Al YankovicBest Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (Includes Film and Television)“Barbie,” Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, composers“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Ludwig Göransson, composer“The Fabelmans,” John Williams, composer“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” John Williams, composer“Oppenheimer,” Ludwig Göransson, composerBest Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II,” Sarah Schachner, composer“God of War Ragnarök,” Bear McCreary, composer“Hogwarts Legacy,” Peter Murray, J Scott Rakozy and Chuck E. Myers “Sea,” composers“Star Wars Jedi: Survivor,” Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab, composers“Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical,” Jess Serro, Tripod and Austin Wintory, composersBest Song Written for Visual Media“Barbie World” from “Barbie: The Album,” Naija Gaston, Ephrem Louis Lopez Jr. and Onika Maraj, songwriters (Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice featuring Aqua)“Dance the Night” from “Barbie: The Album,” Caroline Ailin, Dua Lipa, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, songwriters (Dua Lipa)“I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie: The Album,” Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, songwriters (Ryan Gosling)“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — Music From and Inspired By,” Ryan Coogler, Ludwig Göransson, Robyn Fenty and Temilade Openiyi, songwriters (Rihanna)“What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie: The Album,” Billie Eilish O’Connell and Finneas O’Connell, songwriters (Billie Eilish)Best Music Video“I’m Only Sleeping” (The Beatles), Em Cooper, video director; Jonathan Clyde, Sophie Hilton, Sue Loughlin and Laura Thomas, video producers“In Your Love” (Tyler Childers), Bryan Schlam, video director; Kacie Barton, Silas House, Nicholas Robespierre, Ian Thornton and Whitney Wolanin, video producers“What Was I Made For?” (Billie Eilish), Billie Eilish, video director; Michelle An, Chelsea Dodson and David Moore, video producers“Count Me Out” (Kendrick Lamar), Dave Free and Kendrick Lamar, video directors; Jason Baum and Jamie Rabineau, video producers“Rush” (Troye Sivan), Gordon Von Steiner, video director; Kelly McGee, video producerBest Music Film“Moonage Daydream” (David Bowie), Brett Morgen, video director; Brett Morgen, video producer“How I’m Feeling Now” (Lewis Capaldi), Joe Pearlman, video director; Sam Bridger, Isabel Davis and Alice Rhodes, video producers“Live From Paris, the Big Steppers Tour” (Kendrick Lamar), Mike Carson, Dave Free and Mark Ritchie, video directors; Cornell Brown, Debra Davis, Jared Heinke and Jamie Rabineau, video producers“I Am Everything” (Little Richard), Lisa Cortés, video director; Caryn Capotosto, Lisa Cortés, Robert Friedman and Liz Yale Marsh, video producers“Dear Mama” (Tupac Shakur), Allen Hughes, video director; Joshua Garcia, Loren Gomez, James Jenkins and Stef Smith, video producersBest Recording Package“The Art of Forgetting,” Caroline Rose, art director (Caroline Rose)“Cadenza 21’,” Hsing-Hui Cheng, art director (Ensemble Cadenza 21’)“Electrophonic Chronic,” Perry Shall, art director (The Arcs)“Gravity Falls,” Iam8bit, art director (Brad Breeck)“Migration,” Yu Wei, art director (Leaf Yeh)“Stumpwork,” Luke Brooks and James Theseus Buck, art directors (Dry Cleaning)Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package“The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel,” Jeff Mangum, Daniel Murphy and Mark Ohe, art directors (Neutral Milk Hotel)“For the Birds: The Birdsong Project,” Jeri Heiden and John Heiden, art directors (Various Artists)”Gieo,” Duy Dao, art director (Ngot)“Inside: Deluxe Box Set,” Bo Burnham and Daniel Calderwood, art directors (Bo Burnham)“Words & Music, May 1965 – Deluxe Edition,” Masaki Koike, art director (Lou Reed)Best Album Notes“Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy (Live),” Ashley Kahn, album notes writer (John Coltrane & Eric Dolphy)“I Can Almost See Houston: The Complete Howdy Glenn,” Scott B. Bomar, album notes writer (Howdy Glenn)“Mogadishu’s Finest: The Al Uruba Sessions,” Vik Sohonie, album notes writer (Iftin Band)“Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings From the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958–1971,” Jeff Place and John Troutman, album notes writers (Various Artists)“Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos,” Robert Gordon and Deanie Parker, album notes writers (Various Artists)Best Historical Album“Fragments – Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17,” Steve Berkowitz and Jeff Rosen, compilation producers; Steve Addabbo, Greg Calbi, Steve Fallone, Chris Shaw and Mark Wilder, mastering engineers (Bob Dylan)“The Moaninest Moan of Them All: The Jazz Saxophone of Loren McMurray, 1920-1922,” Colin Hancock, Meagan Hennessey and Richard Martin, compilation producers; Richard Martin, mastering engineer; Richard Martin, restoration engineer (Various Artists)“Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings From the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958–1971,” Jeff Place and John Troutman, compilation producers; Randy LeRoy and Charlie Pilzer, mastering engineers; Mike Petillo and Charlie Pilzer, restoration engineers (Various Artists)“Words & Music, May 1965 – Deluxe Edition,” Laurie Anderson, Don Fleming, Jason Stern, Matt Sulllivan and Hal Willner, compilation producers; John Baldwin, mastering engineer; John Baldwin, restoration engineer (Lou Reed)“Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos,” Robert Gordon, Deanie Parker, Cheryl Pawelski, Michele Smith and Mason Williams, compilation producers; Michael Graves, mastering engineer; Michael Graves, restoration engineer (Various Artists)Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical“Desire, I Want to Turn Into You,” Macks Faulkron, Daniel Harle, Caroline Polachek and Geoff Swan, engineers; Mike Bozzi and Chris Gehringer, mastering engineers (Caroline Polachek)“History,” Nic Hard, engineer; Dave McNair, mastering engineer (Bokanté)“Jaguar II,” John Kercy, Kyle Mann, Victoria Monét, Patrizio “Teezio” Pigliapoco, Neal H Pogue and Todd Robinson, engineers; Colin Leonard, mastering engineer (Victoria Monét)“Multitudes,” Michael Harris, Robbie Lackritz, Joseph Lorge and Blake Mills, engineers (Feist)“The Record,” Owen Lantz, Will Maclellan, Catherine Marks, Mike Mogis, Bobby Mota, Kaushlesh “Garry” Purohit and Sarah Tudzin, engineers; Pat Sullivan, mastering engineer (boygenius)Best Engineered Album, Classical“The Blue Hour,” Patrick Dillett, Mitchell Graham, Jesse Lewis, Kyle Pyke, Andrew Scheps and John Weston, engineers; Helge Sten, mastering engineer (Shara Nova and A Far Cry)”Contemporary American Composers,” David Frost & Charlie Post, engineers; Silas Brown, mastering engineer (Riccardo Muti and Chicago Symphony Orchestra)“Fandango,” Alexander Lipay and Dmitriy Lipay, engineers; Alexander Lipay and Dmitriy Lipay, mastering engineers (Gustavo Dudamel, Anne Akiko Meyers, Gustavo Castillo and Los Angeles Philharmonic)”Sanlikol: A Gentleman of Istanbul – Symphony for Strings, Percussion, Piano, Oud, Ney & Tenor,” Christopher Moretti & John Weston, engineers; Shauna Barravecchio & Jesse Lewis, mastering engineers (Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, George Lernis & A Far Cry)“Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 & Schulhoff: Five Pieces,” Mark Donahue, engineer; Mark Donahue, mastering engineer (Manfred Honeck and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra)Producer of the Year, ClassicalDavid FrostMorten LindbergDmitriy LipayElaine MartoneBrian PidgeonBest Remixed Recording“Alien Love Call,” Badbadnotgood, remixers (Turnstile and Badbadnotgood featuring Blood Orange)“New Gold (Dom Dolla Remix),” Dom Dolla, remixer (Gorillaz featuring Tame Impala and Bootie Brown)“Reviver (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs Remix),” Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, remixer (Lane 8)“Wagging Tongue (Wet Leg Remix),” Wet Leg, remixers (Depeche Mode)“Workin’ Hard (Terry Hunter Remix),” Terry Hunter, remixer (Mariah Carey)Best Immersive Audio Album“Act 3 (Immersive Edition),” Ryan Ulyate, immersive mix engineer; Michael Romanowski, immersive mastering engineer; Ryan Ulyate, immersive producer (Ryan Ulyate)“Blue Clear Sky,” Chuck Ainlay, immersive mix engineer; Michael Romanowski, immersive mastering engineer; Chuck Ainlay, immersive producer (George Strait)“The Diary of Alicia Keys,” George Massenburg and Eric Schilling, immersive mix engineers; Michael Romanowski, immersive mastering engineer; Alicia Keys and Ann Mincieli, immersive producers (Alicia Keys)“God of War Ragnarök (Original Soundtrack),” Eric Schilling, immersive mix engineer; Michael Romanowski, immersive mastering engineer; Kellogg Boynton, Peter Scaturro and Herbert Waltl, immersive producers (Bear McCreary)“Silence Between Songs,” Aaron Short, immersive mastering engineer (Madison Beer)Best Instrumental Composition“Amerikkan Skin,” Lakecia Benjamin, composer (Lakecia Benjamin featuring Angela Davis)“Can You Hear the Music,” Ludwig Göransson, composer (Ludwig Göransson)“Cutey and the Dragon,” Gordon Goodwin and Raymond Scott, composers (Quartet San Francisco featuring Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band)“Helena’s Theme,” John Williams, composer (John Williams)“Motion,” Edgar Meyer, composer (Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain featuring Rakesh Chaurasia)Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella“Angels We Have Heard on High,” Nkosilathi Emmanuel Sibanda, arranger (Just 6)“Can You Hear the Music,” Ludwig Göransson, arranger (Ludwig Göransson)“Folsom Prison Blues,” John Carter Cash, Tommy Emmanuel, Markus Illko, Janet Robin and Roberto Luis Rodriguez, arrangers (The String Revolution featuring Tommy Emmanuel)“I Remember,” Mingus Hilario Duran, arranger (Hilario Duran and His Latin Jazz Big Band featuring Paquito D’Rivera)“Paint It Black,” Esin Aydingoz, Chris Bacon and Alana Da Fonseca, arrangers (Wednesday Addams)Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals“April in Paris,” Gordon Goodwin, arranger (Patti Austin featuring Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band)“Com Que Voz (Live),” John Beasley and Maria Mendes, arrangers (Maria Mendes featuring John Beasley and Metropole Orkest)“Fenestra,” Godwin Louis, arranger (Cécile McLorin Salvant)“In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” Erin Bentlage, Jacob Collier, Sara Gazarek, Johnaye, Kendrick and Amanda Taylor, arrangers (säje Featuring Jacob Collier)“Lush Life,” Kendric McCallister, arranger (Samara Joy)Best Orchestral Performance“Adès: Dante,” Gustavo Dudamel, conductor (Los Angeles Philharmonic)“Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Four Pieces,” Karina Canellakis, conductor (Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra)“Price: Symphony No. 4; Dawson: Negro Folk Symphony,” Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor (The Philadelphia Orchestra)“Scriabin: Symphony No. 2; The Poem of Ecstasy,” JoAnn Falletta, conductor (Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra)“Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring,” Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (San Francisco Symphony)Best Opera Recording“Blanchard: Champion,” Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor; Ryan Speedo Green, Latonia Moore and Eric Owens; David Frost, producer (The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; The Metropolitan Opera Chorus)“Corigliano: The Lord of Cries,” Gil Rose, conductor; Anthony Roth Costanzo, Kathryn Henry, Jarrett Ott and David Portillo; Gil Rose, producer (Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera Chorus)“Little: Black Lodge,” Timur; Andrew McKenna Lee and David T. Little, producers (the Dime Museum; Isaura String Quartet)Best Choral Performance“Carols After a Plague,” Donald Nally, conductor (The Crossing)“The House of Belonging,” Craig Hella Johnson, conductor (Miró Quartet; Conspirare)“Ligeti: Lux Aeterna,” Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (San Francisco Symphony Chorus)“Rachmaninoff: All-Night Vigil,” Steven Fox, conductor (The Clarion Choir)“Saariaho: Reconnaissance,” Nils Schweckendiek, conductor (Uusinta Ensemble; Helsinki Chamber Choir)Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance“American Stories,” Anthony McGill and Pacifica Quartet“Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 6, ‘Pastorale’ And Op. 1, No. 3,” Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos“Between Breaths,” Third Coast Percussion“Rough Magic,” Roomful of Teeth“Uncovered, Vol. 3: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, William Grant Still & George Walker,” Catalyst QuartetBest Classical Instrumental Solo“Adams, John Luther: Darkness and Scattered Light,” Robert Black“Akiho: Cylinders,” Andy Akiho“The American Project,” Yuja Wang; Teddy Abrams, conductor (Louisville Orchestra)“Difficult Grace,” Seth Parker Woods“Of Love,” Curtis StewartBest Classical Solo Vocal Album“Because,” Reginald Mobley, soloist; Baptiste Trotignon, pianist“Broken Branches,” Karim Sulayman, soloist; Sean Shibe, accompanist“40@40,” Laura Strickling, soloist; Daniel Schlosberg, pianist“Rising,” Lawrence Brownlee, soloist; Kevin J. Miller, pianist“Walking in the Dark,” Julia Bullock, soloist; Christian Reif, conductor (Philharmonia Orchestra)Best Classical Compendium“Fandango,” Anne Akiko Meyers; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Dmitriy Lipay, producer“Julius Eastman, Vol. 3: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?,” Christopher Rountree, conductor; Lewis Pesacov, producer“Mazzoli: Dark With Excessive Bright,” Peter Herresthal; Tim Weiss, conductor; Hans Kipfer, producer“Passion for Bach and Coltrane,” Alex Brown, Harlem Quartet, Imani Winds, Edward Perez, Neal Smith and A.B. Spellman; Silas Brown and Mark Dover, producers“Sardinia,” Chick Corea; Chick Corea and Bernie Kirsh, producers“Sculptures,” Andy Akiho; Andy Akiho and Sean Dixon, producers“Zodiac Suite,” Aaron Diehl Trio & the Knights; Eric Jacobsen, conductor; Aaron Diehl and Eric Jacobsen, producersBest Contemporary Classical Composition“Adès: Dante,” Thomas Adès, composer (Gustavo Dudamel and Los Angeles Philharmonic)“Akiho: In That Space, at That Time,” Andy Akiho, composer (Andy Akiho, Ankush Kumar Bahl and Omaha Symphony)“Brittelle: Psychedelics,” William Brittelle, composer (Roomful of Teeth)“Mazzoli: Dark With Excessive Bright,” Missy Mazzoli, composer (Peter Herresthal, James Gaffigan and Bergen Philharmonic)“Montgomery: Rounds,” Jessie Montgomery, composer (Awadagin Pratt, A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth) More

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    Grammy Surprises: boygenius Thrives, Country and Rap Wither

    A look at the Grammys’ most unexpected and interesting story lines, including Olivia Rodrigo’s intergenerational rock battle with the Rolling Stones.Young women from across genres — along with the Recording Academy’s favorite polymath spoiler Jon Batiste — reigned atop the nominations on Friday for the 66th annual Grammy Awards, to be held Feb. 4 in Los Angeles.But beyond familiar names like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, this year’s class of nominees reveals a strong surge for R&B (SZA, Victoria Monét, Coco Jones, Janelle Monáe); a tough showing for country, rap and Latin music, especially in the top categories; and the enduring love for soundtracks historically felt in Grammyland.But who got left out, who represents a welcome surprise and what, as ever, are the Grammys thinking? The New York Times’s pop music team — editor Caryn Ganz, reporter Joe Coscarelli, chief pop music critic Jon Pareles and pop music critic Jon Caramanica — pored over the complete list, including some deeper, oft-ignored categories, to break down the most interesting story lines, snubs and surprises.Boygenius makes the big leagues.The indie-rock supergroup made up of the singers and songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus was once a side project, an inside joke, a fun way to promote a tour of solo acts. Not anymore. Having released its debut album, “The Record,” earlier this year on the major label Interscope — and having sold 67,000 albums in its first week, landing in the Billboard Top 5 — boygenius may very well be the biggest new rock band working, with all the arena shows, promotional savvy and celebrity worship that entails. Recognized in best rock performance, best rock song, best alternative performance, best alternative album, best engineered album and — most notably — album of the year, boygenius is among the most nominated acts with six overall, the same number as Taylor Swift. Not bad company in 2023. JOE COSCARELLIWhere’s country music?By any measure, it has been a banner 12 months for country music on the pop charts — Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” has spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200, and in August, for the first time in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, the top three positions were occupied by country songs. And yet none of the artists behind those songs — Wallen, Luke Combs and Jason Aldean — were nominated in any of the Grammys’ big three all-genre categories. Neither was Zach Bryan, the genre’s leading dissident, nor Oliver Anthony, who had the year’s most unlikely No. 1 hit.The shutout of the men of country may be indicative of the political shift, explicit and implicit, shaping the genre’s most prominent figures. Wallen, who remains under the long shadow of the 2021 revelation that he was captured on tape using a racial epithet, is still the most popular performer in the genre; he received no nominations this year (though his song “Last Night” is up for best country song, a prize for songwriters). With Aldean, the politics are more literal. His vigilante-justice hit, “Try That in a Small Town,” made overt a partisan perspective that often resides just beneath the surface in Nashville. As for Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a workingman lament that baffled both the left and the right, its direct engagement with class politics perhaps made it too hot to the touch for Grammy voters (if, indeed, Anthony even submitted it for consideration).If there were one song with the best chance of bridging contemporary country to the Grammys, it would be Combs’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” which went to No. 2 on the Hot 100 and earlier this week won song of the year at the CMA Awards, making Chapman the first Black winner in that category. But in part because of Grammy rules — it isn’t eligible for song of the year because Chapman was nominated for her original in 1989 — Combs’s version has been relegated to just a single nomination, in best country solo performance, a snub that feels unexpectedly pointed. JON CARAMANICA‘Barbie’ at the Grammys? Yes, she Ken.If it felt this year that pop music was more slippery than ever, subject to the whims of streaming algorithms and TikTok trends, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Grammys chose to reward songs that came via a particularly old-fashioned delivery mechanism: the film soundtrack.Songs from the Greta Gerwig film “Barbie” — a canny collection of contemporary pop hitmakers finding creative ways to wrestle with the film’s themes — are everywhere in this year’s nominations. Billie Eilish’s familiarly melancholy “What Was I Made For?” is up for record and song of the year, and Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” is also nominated for song of the year. “Barbie World” by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice will compete for best rap song. Tracks from the soundtrack also hog up four of the five available slots in best song written for visual media. CARAMANICAEmerging Latin stars get left behind.After a year in which Latin music continued to explode on streaming services and forge all sorts of cross-cultural hybrids, this year’s Grammy nominations are, well, puzzling. Edgar Barrera, the Mexican American songwriter who has collaborated on hit after hit for singers across the Americas, is rightfully a nominee for songwriter of the year. But there’s no best new artist nomination for Peso Pluma, the cutting-voiced Mexican songwriter whose career skyrocketed in 2022 and 2023 — he’s touring arenas this year — and who bridges regional Mexican corridos and Latin trap. Peso Pluma’s 2023 album, “Génesis,” is just tucked among the nominees for música mexicana. Other emerging Mexican-rooted acts that had a blockbuster year — among them Eslabon Armado, Grupo Frontera, Grupo Firme, Christian Nodal and Natanael Cano — go unmentioned.Then there’s the oddity of the música urbana category. Its three — only three — nominees are deserving: the reggaeton producer Tainy, the electronics-loving pop experimenter Rauw Alejandro and the Colombian songwriter Karol G, whose 2023 album, “Mañana Será Bonito,” was the first Spanish-language album by a woman to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200. But música urbana — encompassing reggaeton, Latin hip-hop, dembow, Latin trap and more — is a crowded, competitive, hugely popular format. The Grammys couldn’t find five nominees? All they had to do was turn on the radio. JON PARELESOlivia Rodrigo takes on … the Rolling Stones.The Grammys’ rock categories are reliable head-scratchers, but best rock song provides an unexpected delight this time: Olivia Rodrigo’s “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” goes up against the Rolling Stones’ “Angry,” pitting some of this year’s oldest nominees (average Stones age: 78) against one of the youngest (at 20, Rodrigo is still not old enough to order a celebratory champagne). Rodrigo is the only nominee in the category who isn’t part of a band, but her track has the fewest number of writers: just two, herself and the producer Daniel Nigro. (The other competitors include boygenius, Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age.)“Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” with its gleeful pop-punk thrash, is an ode to social awkwardness that draws on ’90s rockers like Veruca Salt; “Angry” is built on a classic Stones riff with plenty of room to breathe — unlike the troubled relationship Mick Jagger describes in its lyrics. Both describe uncomfortable situations; both sound like a load of fun. And it’s nice to see Rodrigo’s latest album, “Guts,” recognized in the rock field, where it belongs. CARYN GANZA powerful Paul Simon LP goes unrewarded.If anyone should have been able to count on respect from the Grammys, it’s Paul Simon. His 2023 album, “Seven Psalms,” plays as a thoughtful, complex, tuneful farewell, anticipating his death. It’s a major statement couched in intimate acoustic arrangements, with the craftsmanship and artistic ambition that awards shows claim to recognize. Simon has won 16 Grammys, dating back to his days with Simon and Garfunkel. But “Seven Psalms” was shut out of high-profile categories like album of the year, and got just one obscure nomination, for best folk album, where Simon competes with the touching comeback (and beloved, familiar songs) of “Joni Mitchell at Newport.” The Grammys used to reward late-career albums by musicians like Steely Dan (“Two Against Nature”), Bob Dylan (“Time Out of Mind”) and Tony Bennett (“MTV Unplugged”). Now, Simon’s knotty confrontation with mortality seems to have gotten stranded between Grammy generations. PARELESRap’s Grammy struggle continues.For the 20th time in a row, a rap release will not win album of the year at the Grammys. That was a safe bet before — only two hip-hop albums have ever won in the biggest category: Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1999 and Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2004 — but it’s assured now because none were even nominated. No rap appears among the nominees in record or song of the year, either. (Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” remains the only rap song to ever win in those categories.) But while past Grammys have brought recriminations about how hip-hop is recognized, this shutout up top comes amid a year of intra-genre soul-searching about a lack of chart impact and a dearth of new stars, especially those invested in the album format.The genre-specific nominations include a mix of familiar names (Drake — despite his history of boycotting submissions — with 21 Savage, plus Nicki Minaj and Nas) and a few artists with something to prove (Killer Mike, Doja Cat, Coi Leray). Yet this may be the first year in some time where a lack of major recognition is met with a resigned sigh. Outside of SZA’s rap-flavored singing, Ice Spice’s nomination for best new artist is the lone bright spot in the biggest categories, driving home another common talking point in rap industry circles of late: Women are the present, and likely the future. COSCARELLIGreetings from traditional pop.Oh, the categories! Who knew that Bruce Springsteen, a lifelong rocker, would someday find himself among the “traditional pop vocal” nominees? I think of it as the slot that was created for singers, like Tony Bennett, who kept reaching back to what was known as the Great American Songbook: pop standards written for vintage Broadway and Hollywood musicals, the sophisticated idiom that was overturned by the simplicity of rock ’n’ roll. But Springsteen’s nominated album, “Only the Strong Survive,” isn’t a standards album. It’s a collection of vintage 1960s soul songs, which somehow do not qualify in the Grammy category of “traditional R&B.” Are the Grammys expanding the Great American Songbook, or just consigning Springsteen to the past? PARELES More

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    Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre

    TRAY WELLINGTON KNOWS that many will take the title of his 2022 album, “Black Banjo,” as an oxymoron. The banjo, and with it an entire body of folk-based music, is now so thoroughly associated with whiteness as to obscure its origins in Black musical tradition. “One of the first things I heard when I started playing banjo was, ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this,’” says Wellington, 24, whose father is Black and mother is white. But for him, playing the banjo has become an act of reclamation.Contemporary audiences still tend to associate the banjo with white Southern traditions of bluegrass, old-time and what record labels used to market as hillbilly music, but its roots are in Africa, in stringed instruments like the akonting, the buchundu and the ngoni. During the 19th century, the banjo became inextricably linked to minstrelsy: variety shows in which white performers (and, increasingly after the Civil War, Black performers) “blacked up,” grotesquely caricaturing Black facial features. The minstrel show, which persisted onstage and onscreen well into the 20th century, accounts for the banjo’s conflicted legacy — both part of the visual vocabulary of white supremacy and a point of creative contact between Black and white musicians.Wellington’s interest in the banjo was stoked by his maternal grandfather’s love of classic country, which he’d play for Wellington on fishing trips or while working in the backyard garden of the family home in Ashe County, N.C. After some cajoling, Wellington’s mother (a hip-hop fan) took her 13-year-old son to a pawnshop, where they purchased one on layaway. Playing banjo eventually led Wellington to East Tennessee State University’s renowned Bluegrass, Old‑Time and Roots Music program, where he learned the history and practice of folk music and joined a community of mostly white teachers and students. Many of his classmates welcomed him (he plays with fellow E.T.S.U. grads in his current band); a few subjected him to scorn. “People would often ask me, ‘How does it feel to be Black in this music?’ I would put if off because I didn’t want to talk about it,” Wellington says. Recording “Black Banjo” during the pandemic lockdown and amid protests for racial justice, however, occasioned an awakening. Being a Black banjo player is “kind of a rare thing,” he says. “It’s who I am.”The folk musicians Dom Flemons, Kara Jackson, Amythyst Kiah and Tray Wellington discuss the complications of being a Black performer working in a genre now commonly associated with whiteness.Justin FrenchToday Black folk performers have reached a critical mass and level of exposure not seen since the early decades of the 20th century, when Black bands like Cannon’s Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band were among the most commercially popular in the country, touring in medicine shows and playing vaudeville stages. In a 2013 essay about Gus Cannon, the banjo-playing frontman of the Jug Stompers, the multi-instrumentalist and cultural historian Dom Flemons writes that it was only out of an “absurd racial insensitivity” that a “legitimate Black art form developed.” Flemons, 41, who goes by the name the American Songster in tribute to the players of the past, believes we’ve now entered “a postmodern contemporary folk period” in which new and more expansive definitions of traditional music are taking root. He’s among a new generation of Black folk musicians that includes Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell and many others who are returning to songs that are decades (even centuries) old. They play fiddles and jugs, bones and guitar — and most of all the banjo.Some of these performers veer into activism. For Hannah Mayree, 34, a Northern California-based musician, “playing banjo as a Black person is not enough.” That’s why she founded the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, which supplies instruments to Black musicians and holds workshops where participants learn to make banjos for themselves. “The knowledge of how to build a banjo lives inside my body,” she says. Other musicians are folklorists, introducing listeners to source recordings that testify to an unbroken tradition of Black folk music in America. Still others see reclaiming the past as a means of creating a future. “As opposed to someone who is the caretaker of an archive, I think of my role as a living musician as a member of a future archive,” says Jake Blount, 28, a banjo and fiddle player from Washington, D.C. His most recent album, “The New Faith” (2022), presents an Afrofuturist refiguring of traditional songs. Black Americans, Blount says, have “had to be a forward-facing people because the past has been denied to us.” Part of that history is recoverable through sheet music and source recordings, but much is lost to memory.IN THE BROADEST sense, folk music is a multiracial, working-class tradition, stretching across time and continents. In the United States alone, it comprises a repertoire of ballads and work songs, blues and breakdowns, songs of love and songs of protest. Folk is a body of simple tunes played by beginners — “Tom Dooley,” “Oh! Susanna,” “Down in the Valley” — and a platform for the greatest virtuosity. For some the term conjures a cinematic shorthand: the dueling banjos of “Deliverance” (1972) and George Clooney mugging his way through “O Brother, Where Art Thou” (2000). Folk’s history over the past century or more is best told through revivals, periods of intensified interest and participation in the music. In moments when the notion of a shared cultural heritage is most desirable — during the Great Depression, or the Red Scare paranoia of the ’40s and ’50s — people have often returned to what the 20th-century folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan once described as “the big song bag which the folk have held in common for centuries.” During a 1956 live performance of the spiritual “This Train (Bound for Glory)” — a song that’s now been recorded by scores of artists, including Louis Armstrong, Alice Coltrane, Bob Marley and Sister Rosetta Tharpe — the guitar legend Big Bill Broonzy teased an audience of earnest college students swept up in the latest revival. “Some people call these ‘folk songs,’” he said while noodling on his guitar, with the singer-songwriter Pete Seeger playing banjo onstage beside him. “Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!”Rhiannon Giddens at Cecil Sharp House, an arts center in London named for the English folklorist.Justin FrenchFolk is indeed the people’s music, yet early efforts to market it ended up, to borrow the historian Karl Hagstrom Miller’s phrase, segregating sound. In the 1920s, with the advent of the modern recording industry and broadcast radio, music executives, most notably Ralph Peer of Okeh Records, leveraged emergent technology to define marketable genre categories along racial lines. Out of this came so-called race records (which first appeared at the beginning of the 1920s, aimed at Black Americans) and hillbilly records (which arrived a few years later, geared toward Southern whites). Even as folk crossed racial boundaries — as in the Lomaxes’ recordings of Lead Belly for the Library of Congress — white song hunters often constrained Black performers inside narrow presumptions: attributing virtuosity to natural gifts rather than to musical skill; soliciting songs of protest and lament rather than those of love and happiness; and conjuring a mythic authenticity instead of making space for the real thing (as happened when the Lomaxes, after helping to secure Lead Belly’s release from Angola prison in 1934 in Louisiana, made him perform thereafter in a prison jumpsuit).Over the decades, race records gave way to more coded genre designations, like R&B and soul. Hillbilly morphed into country and western and finally simply into country. By midcentury, folk was widely considered a genre, too, a narrow term to define acoustic, string-based music, mostly by white musicians and often with a political bent. Folk songs inspired generations of singer-songwriters like Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, whose global fame the term “folk” was too small to contain. Folk, at least for some, became a backward glance to a distant past, nostalgic and reverential. It became Southern and working class and, in the minds of many, it became white.Amythyst Kiah in front of her father’s home in Johnson City, Tenn.Justin FrenchTHE RENAISSANCE OF Black folk music can be traced back to a single event nearly 20 years ago. In April 2005 in Boone, N.C., some 30 Black string-band musicians and dozens of other attendees came together for fellowship. Black Banjo Then and Now, as the gathering was called, began as an online community of over 200 members (only a small percentage of whom were Black), formed the year before by Tony Thomas, a Black banjo player from Miami. Among the group’s most junior members were Flemons, an Arizona native, then 23, and the then-27-year-old Rhiannon Giddens, a classically trained soprano from Greensboro, N.C. After graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in music performance, Giddens found her way back home, working two jobs — one as a singing hostess at Romano’s Macaroni Grill — until she earned enough money to buy her instruments, and calling contra dances, a form of line-based group folk dancing with roots in the British Isles.Giddens sought a way to embrace her love of folk music and her Blackness, too. It’s a central paradox of folk today: How can a music so thoroughly identified with whiteness that, for the better part of 50 years, found definition in contradistinction to Black music and even Black people be so Black? She found her answer at the in-person gathering of Black Banjo Then and Now. At the time, she told the Greensboro News & Record that old-time was “something that really spoke to me, and it was OK that the people who were playing it were white. But when I discovered my people had so much to do with the music, and the string bands at the turn of the century were Black, well, this is a part of history.” The four-day event, held on the campus of Appalachian State University, drew musicians from afar, including the New York-based old-time string band the Ebony Hillbillies, and living legends from close to home, like the then-86-year-old North Carolina old-time fiddle virtuoso Joe Thompson. The experience was unforgettable, with epic jam sessions and intergenerational camaraderie. “It changed my life,” Giddens says. Out of this gathering, she, along with Flemons and, eventually, a third member, Justin Robinson, formed a modern Black string band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops.The Chocolate Drops were both interested in history and utterly contemporary. All members sang and played multiple instruments, with the banjo at the center of their sound. Their style of performance owes a debt to Thompson (who died in 2012). “We had a pure mission to expose this music to as many people as possible and to tell Joe’s story,” Giddens says. On their 2010 album, “Genuine Negro Jig,” which won a Grammy Award for best traditional folk album, they covered the 2001 R&B song “Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)” by Blu Cantrell, taking a time-bound pop hit and making it feel nearly as timeless as “This Train.” The group disbanded in 2014, at which point, as Giddens says, the project had done “exactly what it was meant to do: inspire a whole generation of young people of color to say, ‘Hey, I see myself.’”Tray Wellington with his banjo at the Pour House, a music venue and record store in Raleigh, N.C.Justin FrenchTHE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE Drops and many others have now ensured that future generations can see themselves onstage but, once up there, such Black performers rarely see themselves in the crowd. Do Black artists need a Black audience? It’s a longstanding debate that sometimes pits the artistic against the sociopolitical functions of song. The writer Amiri Baraka once defined Black music as “American music expanded past the experience of the average American.” “It gets down,” he wrote. “It is about the life of the downed, yet its dignity is in the fantastic sophistication even at the moment of would-be, should-be humiliation and actual despair.” Giddens, who once described her music as “Black non-Black music” and now prefers to call it simply “American music,” understands this implicitly. “All the good things that come from American music [come from] mixture,” she says. “Hiding in plain sight in all the different types of American music is cross-cultural working-class collaboration. It’s people making music because that’s what they’ve got.”The most powerful folk music has always addressed points of tension: between Black and white, rich and poor, sophistication and humiliation. Cannon’s 1927 song “Can You Blame the Colored Man?” tells the story of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, dining with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901, the year Washington’s best-selling autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” was published. “Could you blame the colored man for makin’ them goo-goo eyes?” Cannon sings, after describing in detail the lavish dinner at the president’s table. Likewise, today’s best folk music still confronts issues of race and class. In 2019 Amythyst Kiah, now 36, a guitarist and banjo player from Tennessee, joined Giddens, along with Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, in a string-band collective called Our Native Daughters. They decided to excavate American history, going back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to find inspiration for new songs. One of the songs that came of that process was the startling and soulful “Black Myself.”I don’t pass the test of the paper bag’Cause I’m Black myselfI pick the banjo up and they sneer at me’Cause I’m Black myselfYou better lock your doors when I walk by’Cause I’m Black myselfYou look me in my eyes but you don’t see me’Cause I’m Black myselfThe brown paper bag test, as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, was born out of colorism within the Black community, in nightclubs and house parties in New Orleans where anyone darker than the bag taped to the door would be denied entrance. In a song that confronts the experience of being shut out of traditionally white spaces — such as contemporary folk and country music — Kiah’s lyrics build toward resistance and joy: “I’ll stand my ground and smile in your face / ’Cause I’m Black myself.”Addressing her race so explicitly in her music was a departure for Kiah. “I’ve always written songs in a way where anybody can put themselves in that position,” she says. Throughout her years of playing, she’s subscribed to the theory that the more specific and personal a song’s perspective, the more a listener — any listener — will relate to it. Just as Kiah, no poor white Southern girl from rural Kentucky, could relate to Loretta Lynn’s 1970 single “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” she says, so she hopes that listeners, whomever they may be, will relate to “Black Myself.”Bluegrass and country, the music first marketed a century ago as hillbilly, might seem inhospitable to Black listeners and musicians. But there’s a longstanding tradition that binds Black people, both personally and aesthetically, to these sounds. “The way I talk is with an accent, so the way I sing is with an accent. And that has always needed to be explained because I’m in the skin I’m in,” says Valerie June, 41, whose voice carries the cadences of her native Jackson, Tenn. “There are [Black] people from where I’m from that talk like me. And if they started singing, they would probably sound like me.”Flemons at FitzGerald’s.Justin FrenchThis rootedness in place, particularly a rural Southern place where many Black Americans no longer live but that they never left behind, is central to Black folk music’s endurance. When Kara Jackson was a child, during the first decades of the 2000s, in Oak Park, Ill., just outside of Chicago, characters from her father’s hometown of Dawson, Ga., populated her imagination. “I grew up knowing these nicknames, hearing these stories from this small Southern town of 4,000 people,” she says. “It almost felt like hearing superhero tales.” She reveled in the stories she heard in songs as well, be they Wu-Tang Clan tracks that her older brother played or ballads from Dolly Parton LPs in the family collection. It wasn’t long before she began to write songs herself, composing by voice, then on guitar, then using the banjo that her father gave her when she was in high school. She wrote poetry, too, so well that she was named the national youth poet laureate in 2019-20.Earlier this year, Jackson, 24, released her debut album, “Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?,” with songs that partake of folk and jazz, blues and rap. Her lyrics layer sound and simile: “I wanna be as dangerous as a dancing dragon / Or a steam engine, a loaded gun,” she sings on “No Fun/Party.” Her music is sometimes playful, sometimes searing; above all, it’s story driven, like the nearly eight-minute ballad “Rat,” in which Jackson assumes the role of troubadour from the opening couplet: “Take the story of Rat who’s headed west / His buddy once told him he likes the girls there best.” Memorializing the lives of people both real and real enough for Jackson to imagine is what her music does best. “I love songs that tell stories,” she says. “That’s what folk music is for me.”After composing many of her songs in the isolation of her bedroom during the pandemic, she’s now growing accustomed to playing them for an audience. She recalls a recent performance where the energy was great, but the crowd was mostly white, which left her conflicted. “I am so grateful for anyone who listens to my music,” Jackson says. “But I secretly and very selfishly do want my music to reach my own people. And to prove that this is our music also. It’s not even like I’m doing something subversive. I’m just making the music that we came up with in the first place.” More

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    What Fuels the ‘Manic Creativity’ of Joan Baez

    The 82-year-old singer and subject of a new documentary sleeps in a tree, has come to terms with not being a reader and is more interested in upside down than right side up.About seven years ago, Joan Baez — singer, activist, icon — decided she was ready.“I wanted to do what I called an honest legacy,” she said. “Then I realized that to do that, I had to really give up a lot of control over my personal stuff.”That meant opening up the meticulously sorted archive of family movies, recordings, photos and journal entries that her mother maintained. In the documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” which was released in October, Baez lays eyes on the trove at the same moment as viewers.“I just kind of gawked at it in astonishment,” Baez, 82, said. Each time she watches the documentary, “there’s something revelatory,” she added. “It’s been a major learning experience for me.” Baez told us about some of the people, places, activities and music that have fueled the “manic creativity” she’s now experiencing.1DancingI dance in the morning when I get up, on and off through the day, and have a Zoom dance with friends one night a week. We can start at 6 p.m. and quit at 7, instead of starting at 10 and dancing until I drop, which I realize was not that much fun after all, as I am no longer 30 and everything began hurting.2Drawing Upside DownUpside down is far more interesting to me than right side up. Things otherwise not available to my conscious mind become obvious when I turn the drawing right side up and see what it’s telling me. It can take the place of doodling, though not necessarily. Doodling has its place.3A Certain TreeI sleep in my big oak tree most nights in the summer. I have a platform 20 feet up, held in place by ropes and bamboo. There’s a ladderlike stair which is way too steep. Having fallen from it once, I now use a climbing harness to get up and down — so my friends won’t live in a constant state of panic and have to try and hide the panic from me. So I won’t worry that they are worried, and we don’t have to talk about it, and I can just get on with my life. The tree is named Frank. He named himself.4Writing PoetrySince I quit touring four years ago, I have been in a state of manic creativity: portrait painting, drawing, making prayer sticks, making a documentary and last but not least, finishing up a book of poetry which will be released in the spring. It’s called “When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.” The title poem is a fantasy story of my mother falling in love with a Swedish opera singer, Jussi Bjorling, and him falling for her.5Music I Have Listened to ForeverJussi Bjorling, the sopranos Joan Sutherland and Kathleen Ferrier, the pianists Glenn Gould and Maurizio Pollini, and the violinist Jascha Heifetz are among the classical favorites I listen to. For nonclassical music I depend on the Gipsy Kings; selected country and western music like Lauren Duski and Sturgill Simpson for the voice; Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash for the soul. I like to put Leonard Cohen on Spotify and see which of my friends and colleagues show up in Spotify’s interpretations. And I’ll listen to anything at all by Andrea Bocelli.6Collecting Eggs From My Beloved ChickensA fresh egg is a gift from God. Did you know that when it comes out it’s wet? Like a newborn elephant, or sparrow. Or you, or me.7AudiobooksI am a nonreader and now can depend on audiobooks to both entertain and educate me. My favorite book of the last 10 years is “A Gentleman in Moscow,” with “Bel Canto” running a close second. People give me books to read and I just smile blankly and say thank you, and wish I were a reader. I know I’m missing a world of treasures.8Making Good TroubleI know about the pendulum theory — politics swing left to right, imperfect democracy to fascism — but no one could have predicted the current wrecking ball. What to do about it? Keep your head up, or down if you are passing the Proud Boys on the street, and make good trouble wherever and whenever you can.9BirdsongOf all the animals and birds which are now disappearing by the billions, I feel closest to the songbirds. They are, after all, my family. My advice is to listen to one bird sing its glorious song — listen hard and treasure it, and no longer expect a chorus.And then go help someone clean up a river.10My SonHe is uniquely funny and can make me laugh as few people can. I’ve given him permission to leave the room when I’m on my deathbed and say, “[Expletive], I wish she’d just get on with it, because she’s driving everybody nuts!” Gabe doesn’t read much either, so he probably won’t see this. More

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    Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned

    An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts.The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned after CBC News reported that it had found a birth certificate indicating that she was born to white parents in Massachusetts, and not on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada.Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation, which was published on Friday, pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria.Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her “growing-up Mom” had told her that she was adopted and was Native. In both a 2018 biography and the statements, Sainte-Marie also says she was told she may have been born “on the wrong side of the blanket,” referring to an affair.“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” Sainte-Marie, 81, said in the written statement. “Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”Sainte-Marie, whose songs include “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” won an Oscar in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” a song from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” “I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she told The New York Times last year.News of the investigation was particularly surprising to Canadians because Sainte-Marie is such a well-known figure, said Kimberly Tallbear-Dauphine, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta who was quoted in the CBC article.“She’s a celebrity but she’s also somebody a lot of Indigenous people know and have met with, and that makes it more personal,” Tallbear-Dauphine said in an interview with The Times. Emails and text messages she has received show that people are “feeling very emotional about this.”The freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler said in the CBC investigation that she began looking for Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate after watching an “American Masters” episode about the singer last year. Keeler wrote a column for The San Francisco Chronicle last year that challenged the Indigenous heritage of the actor Sacheen Littlefeather.In their article, CBC reporters described how they obtained Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate from Feb. 20, 1941, which says she was born to Winifred and Albert Santamaria at 3:15 a.m. The CBC said the Santamarias were of Italian and English ancestry; in her statements, Sainte-Marie said Winifred was part Mi’kmaq, a tribe from eastern Canada.The investigation also cites a 1945 life insurance policy document that says Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham and a 1982 marriage certificate in which Sainte-Marie certified that she was born in Massachusetts. Also included was a 1964 newspaper article in which an uncle of Sainte-Marie’s disputed her claims that she was Indigenous, saying, “This is all part of the professional build-up.”A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. “Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,” the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC.After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said that “Buffy is our family.”“We chose her and she chose us,” they said. “We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” More

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    Mr Eazi’s Anthem of Gratitude, and 12 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Silvana Estrada, Old Dominion, Nadine Shah and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.​​Mr Eazi featuring Soweto Gospel Choir, ‘Exit’Mr Eazi — born in Nigeria and long based in Ghana — has been releasing singles and mixtapes for a decade, becoming one of Africa’s major hitmakers. But he considers his new album, “The Evil Genius,” his official studio debut, tracing a narrative that reaches its finale with “Exit.” The track, produced by the Nigerian studio mastermind Kel-P, merges Nigerian Afrobeats and South African gospel, as Mr Eazi sings about how the paranoia of success — “I’ve seen things go bad/When my family turns to demons around me” — gets overcome by gratitude and faith. The Soweto Gospel Choir harmonizes with worshipful, call-and-response thank yous. JON PARELESNadine Shah, ‘Topless Mother’Loud guitars over a pounding Bo Diddley beat propel Nadine Shah’s vocals through “Topless Mother,” a burst of determined, free-associative, syllabically perfect semi-sequiturs. “I told you all/That I have heard,” she sing-chants. “And do you promise not to breathe a word.” She also blurts out three-syllable rhymes: “Sinatra, Viagra, iguana.” Both words and music are all about brusque momentum and a determination to connect. PARELESFlyte featuring Laura Marling, ‘Tough Love’“This could be real — tough love,” the not-exactly folky duo Flyte sings, in a track from its self-titled new album that starts out with typical folk-rock strumming and harmonies and grows into an avalanche. Will Taylor and Nick Hill sing about self-contradictory behavior — “How do we start healing if we can’t keep out the dark” — while the track swells in a giant crescendo. An intimate conflict becomes an existential struggle. PARELESSilvana Estrada, ‘Qué Problema’The problem in “Qué Problema” (“What a Problem”) is a rapturous infatuation, verging on the mystical, that may never be fulfilled. “Your skin has the color of time,” sings the Mexican songwriter Silvana Estrada. “When you smile, the wind stumbles.” A swaying, flickering rhythm, with a six-beat undercurrent that’s sometimes only implied, carries a vocal that radiates affection, no matter how things turn out. PARELESLulu. featuring the Joy, ‘Yesterdays’Lulu. — a Nigerian-British songwriter, Lulu Ayodele, who’s unlikely to be confused with the 1960s Scottish hitmaker Lulu — works her way from self-doubt to cautious optimism in “Yesterdays.” She sings, “I know I’m changing/I know there is beauty where pain is.” Subdued Afrobeats percussion and diffident guitar picking captures her uncertainty, but the Joy — a South African vocal group, singing in English and Zulu — coaxes her to move ahead, insisting, “Now I found a better place.” PARELESSheherazaad, ‘Mashoor’Sheherazaad, an Indian-American songwriter from San Francisco, draws on microtonal South Asian vocal inflections, Minimalism and hints of flamenco in “Mashoor” (“Fame”), which was produced by another South Asian hybridizer, Arooj Aftab. Singing in Hindi, accompanied only by a meditative classical guitar and hand percussion, Sheherazaad interrogates unearned fame, pondering, “Have you climbed too high?/Where is my reflection in the mirror?” PARELESOld Dominion, ‘Beautiful Sky’Smokey Robinson — who co-wrote “The Way You Do the Things You Do” — might appreciate “Beautiful Sky,” which hijacks standard honky-tonk images into self-pitying analogies for a failed romance: “The way you go to my head, you’d make a really good tequila/The way you’re always on, you’d make a damn good neon light.” Fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitars gather behind Old Dominion’s close-harmony vocals, and of course that “Beautiful Sky” feels blue. PARELESThe Third Mind featuring Jesse Sykes, ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’Dave Alvin from the Blasters, Victor Krummenacher and David Immerglück from Camper Van Beethoven and Michael Jerome from Better Than Ezra get together as the Third Mind to enjoy psychedelic jams. They found an ideal vehicle with “Sally Go Round the Roses,” the mysterious one-hit wonder by the Jaynetts, who sang, “The saddest thing in the whole wide world/is to see your baby with another girl.” The song has also been picked up by Grace Slick, Tim Buckley and the English folk-jazz group Pentangle. It’s a modal, Celtic-flavored tune, mostly a drone, and the Third Mind’s guitar colloquies connect it to Appalachia, the Byrds and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jesse Sykes’s vocals sound frayed and knowing; the guitars tease, probe, tangle and palpitate. PARELESHauschka, ‘Altruism’Volker Bertelmann, the composer who performs as Hauschka — and who won an Academy Award for the score of “All Quiet on the Western Front” — plays piano both on the keyboard and inside on the strings directly. He also uses a prepared piano, with damping and resonating objects on the strings, along with other acoustic and electronic sounds. In “Altruism,” from his new album “Philanthropy,” Hauschka layers terse little riffs and plinking, clanking, rattling tones into something like funk, with a marchlike melody emerging briefly before the track calmly disassembles itself. PARELESRoy Nathanson featuring Nick Hakim, ‘All the Bones Had Names’During the pandemic, the saxophonist, poet, educator and activist Roy Nathanson, 72, convened jam sessions in front of his Brooklyn home for 82 straight days with whichever musicians assembled on the sidewalk that evening. He has funneled the experience into “82 Days,” a scruffy and enchanting new record. “All the Bones Had Names” began with a poem, written when he was getting a somber drumbeat of news about death: of family members, close friends and essential workers living in the neighborhood. Over a droning electric bass and splatters from an un-fancy keyboard, Nathanson reads the poem while the vocalist Nick Hakim, his frequent musical partner, adds a smokescreen of ad-libs. “All the bones had names/no one claimed,” the poem begins. But by the end, Nathanson is refusing to see death as an endpoint. “The bones were stars,” he says, “that had yet/to be discovered.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJ.D. Allen, ‘The Knight of Swords’Since 2011, the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen has released an album a year, typically with a trio. But don’t confuse habit with stillness. His most recent LP, “This,” is Allen’s first full-on encounter with electronics, and it is the sound of a burly toned, bop-steeped saxophonist pushing beyond the familiar. On “The Knight of Swords,” two independent histories seem to circle each other, seeking common ground, as Allen’s spiraling, bittersweet blues meets the ghostly swell of Alex Bonney’s electronics. RUSSONELLOKevin Sun, ‘After Depths’The saxophonist Kevin Sun has been making his mark on the New York scene of late by way of studiousness and subtlety. Sun is not shy about his appreciation for Mark Turner, a shadow-dwelling tenor great one generation his senior, and one way to hear his double LP “The Depths of Memory” is as a callback to the sort of bendable postmodernism that Turner was playing with his Fly Trio back in the early 2000s (and that he’s continued making for ECM Records, in other formats). But Sun has something original going on, too: his own feeling of loose coil and terse freedom, and a personal approach to disrupting time. Leading a quintet here, Sun concludes the album with “After Depths,” a slow-motion action painting with a melody that could almost pass for spontaneous — if it weren’t being doubled with such precise imperfection by the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. RUSSONELLO More

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    My Haul From the WFMU Record Fair

    Rounding out a record collection with finds from the Beach Boys, Kraftwerk and Roberta Flack.Scenes from a great day album shopping in Queens.Lindsay ZoladzDear listeners,Over the weekend, I spent some time at the WFMU Record and CD Fair — a New York institution returning in person for the first time since 2019. A fund-raiser for the great, listener-supported radio station, this year’s Record Fair featured over 100 dealers hawking vinyl and other musical sundries at the Knockdown Center in Queens. I browsed for hours, and by the time I was done my back was sore from hunching over crates and my arms ached from all the records I was toting around. Who says record collecting isn’t a sport?That lingering pang in my shoulder, though, meant I left with a pretty decent record haul — which I used to create today’s playlist.Some people go to record fairs ready to drop big bucks on rare finds and coveted collectibles. That wasn’t my aim, though: I was in it for the cheap thrills and spontaneous discoveries. I found, for example, a fantastic, good-as-new-condition Ike & Tina Turner live album I’d never heard, at a stand where most records were marked down to 50 percent off in the event’s final hours. (Given that deal, I threw in a copy of Dinosaur Jr.’s scuzzy classic “You’re Living All Over Me” at the last minute, too.) For $5 or less, I acquired records by Bob Dylan and Roberta Flack.But I also learned about the perils of the discount bin. When I added a $3 copy of Waylon Jennings’s “Greatest Hits” to my pile, I thought I’d checked the condition of the LP. But apparently I hadn’t looked at the label. For when I pulled it out of its sleeve yesterday and went to play it, I found that I was actually in possession of … Neil Diamond’s “12 Greatest Hits, Volume II.” Talk about a rude awakening.Overall, though, the fair was a blast, and an opportunity to connect with record sellers in a setting way more personable than ordering something off Discogs. Each stall had its own style and personality quirks — like the one graciously offering a questionably large bowl of free “I More