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    Is She Jazz? Is She Pop? She’s Laufey, and She’s a Phenomenon.

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    For Laufey, 2024 was a whirlwind year. 2025 may be even wilder.Last year, the indie singer-songwriter, who cannot be described without a flurry of hyphenated hybrids — Icelandic-Chinese, jazz-pop-classical, TikTok-trad — became a breakout star with a quirky pop style that draws equally from Taylor Swift and the romantic whimsy of midcentury musicals. She won a Grammy Award and attended the Met Gala in a rosé-colored princess gown and, in perhaps the ultimate orchestra-nerd Easter egg, a veil embroidered with a Bach fugue.In an interview this spring, as she prepared to release her third studio album, “A Matter of Time,” Laufey, 26, was still practically glowing over those accomplishments. But seated at a control console at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where she recorded three of the album’s 14 songs, she also cataloged the jitters and anxieties she felt being thrust into the machinery of fame.“I wanted 2025 to be this year where I was less anxious,” she said, “and instead of walking meekly onto the red carpets or meekly into relationships, I wanted to walk with confidence.”“And I wanted to write a country song,” Laufey continued. She paused a beat. “Country-ish,” she amended herself, and then pushed a button to play “Clean Air” — a twangy starting-over ballad that she said was partly inspired by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris’s “Trio” albums from the 1980s and ’90s.In just a few years, Laufey — her name is properly pronounced with a vowel unfamiliar to most English speakers, but she answers to LAY-vay — has become a phenomenon almost without comparison in contemporary pop. Even in an age of scrambled genres, she stands out as a master code-switcher who cites inspiration from Prokofiev and Chet Baker yet has racked up more than five billion streams with concise, witty earworms that paint a glamorous wonderland shaded with the second guessings of a Gen Z diarist. Despite ruffling some feathers among the conservative gatekeepers of jazz, she has cultivated a vast fan base online and this fall will embark on her first arena tour, including two nights at Madison Square Garden.And she has big fans.Despite ruffling some feathers among the conservative gatekeepers of jazz, Laufey has cultivated a vast fan base. Olivia Rodrigo and Barbra Streisand are among her A-list admirers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justin Bieber’s Surprise Album ‘Swag,’ and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Tyla, Kassa Overall, Syd, Jay Som and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Justin Bieber, ‘Daisies’Justin Bieber has surprise-released a 21-song album, “Swag,” full of lo-fi experiments and unexpected collaborators. The singer has always been a savvy talent scout, and he concocted “Daisies” with the quick-fingered guitarist Mk.gee and the producer Dijon. “Daisies” is a bare-bones track: a lone electric guitar, drums and Bieber’s vocals, mostly using a vintage doo-wop chord progression (I-VI-IV-V) and juxtaposing vulnerability and strength. Bieber sounds needy but sure of his legitimacy: “Whatever it is,” he sings, “You know I can take it.”Syd, ‘Die for This’Syd (formerly Syd tha Kid from the band the Internet) ardently embraces the pleasures of the moment in “Die for This.” A drum machine and plush vocal harmonies buoy her through sentiments like “We can have forever tonight” and “It feels like heaven with you tonight.” She’s absolutely all in; has she convinced her partner?Tyla, ‘Is It’“Am I coming on a little strong?” Tyla teases in “Is It,” a dance-floor flirtation that’s both a come-on and an assertion of power. “Is it the idea that I like, or do I really wanna make you mine?” Tyla asks herself, then advances further. The beat is spartan — often just percussion and a few distorted bass notes — but a chorus of male voices joins her as she takes charge.Flo and Kaytranada, ‘The Mood’The British R&B trio Flo juggles a tricky situation in “The Mood”: saying no for one night, promising future sensual kicks and soothing a partner’s perhaps fragile ego. With a purring bass line and a subdued four-on-the-floor beat provided by Kaytranada’s production, they apologize, “It’s just that I ain’t in the mood tonight.” But they hasten to add, “I swear you’re the only one who does it right.” They also slyly pay homage to their R&B role models by slipping some old song titles into the lyrics.Danny L Harle featuring PinkPantheress, ‘Starlight’The hyperpop producer Danny L Harle has kept busy as a collaborator, but “Starlight” is his first song since 2021 to claim top billing, and it’s just swarming with ideas. With her piping voice run through all sorts of gizmos, PinkPantheress sings about misplaced longings: “I’ve met someone like you / They don’t love me back.” Around her, Harle’s production accelerates from wistful electronic lament to manic, pounding electro-pop, strewing countermelodies all over the place.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Art Blakey

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      For a time in the late 1940s, Art Blakey went to live in West Africa. When he returned to the United States, he told reporters that his time there had given him a fresh appreciation for the music called jazz. This, he declared, was a Black American music — quite distinct from the folk forms he’d heard in Africa.Yet at the same time, Blakey’s experiences in the motherland — where he’d converted to Islam and taken the name Abdullah ibn Buhaina — filled him with a knowledge of jazz’s roots, allowing him to hone a style that was deeply polyrhythmic, powerful and directly related to the drum’s original role: communication. With that knowledge, he would change jazz history.“When he plays, his drums go beyond a beat,” Herb Nolan once wrote in a DownBeat profile. “They provide a whole tapestry of dynamics and color.”Blakey had started out playing piano on the Pittsburgh scene during the Great Depression, but after switching to the drums he stood out, joining the famous big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. Following his sojourn in Africa, he and other young Muslim musicians in New York formed their own large ensemble, the Seventeen Messengers. After that band broke up, he and the pianist Horace Silver started a smaller group, the Jazz Messengers; before long, Blakey was its sole leader, and with his drumming as the linchpin, the Messengers came to define the straight-ahead, “hard bop” sound of jazz in the 1950s and ’60s.Art Blakey at Cafe Bohemia in New York in the mid-1950s.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesBlakey kept the band together for decades, frequently replenishing its lineup with young talent, so that the Messengers became known as jazz’s premier finishing school. “Once he saw that you’d learned the lesson, it was time for you to go,” the saxophonist Bobby Watson recalled of his time as a Messenger in the 1970s and ’80s. He added, “He was one of the most positive people I ever met, and he loved young people. He used to say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being young — you just need some experience.’ And that’s what he provided.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lalo Schifrin, 93, Dies; Composer of ‘Mission: Impossible’ and Much More

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      Lalo Schifrin, the Grammy-winning Argentine-born composer who evoked the ticking, ominous suspense of espionage with his indelible theme to the television series “Mission: Impossible” as well as scored movies like “Cool Hand Luke,” “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 93.His wife, Donna, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of pneumonia.Mr. Schifrin had a startlingly diverse career as a composer, arranger and conductor in a wide range of genres — from classical to jazz to Latin to folk to rock to hip-hop to electronic to the ancient music of the Aztecs.He conducted symphony orchestras in London and Vienna, and philharmonic orchestras in Tel Aviv, Paris and Los Angeles. He arranged music for the Three Tenors. He provided what The Washington Post called the music of “rebellious cool” for Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.When Mr. Schifrin won an honorary Academy Award in 2018, it was given to him by Clint Eastwood, a frequent collaborator.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBut the prolific Mr. Schifrin, who wrote more than 100 film and television scores, was best known for “Mission: Impossible.” Interpretations of his propulsive theme have also been featured in the eight movies in the “Mission: Impossible” series, starring Tom Cruise, which began in 1996.Like John Williams, whose many compositions for film include the theme from “Jaws,” Mr. Schifrin was a master of creating jittery unease and peril. Both composers worked with a recognizable style and a distinct purpose.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jack Kleinsinger, Impresario Behind a Marathon Jazz Series, Dies at 88

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      A lawyer by day, he created Highlights in Jazz, bringing together artists both famous and unknown in more than 300 concerts over 50 years.Jack Kleinsinger, a lawyer by day who in his evening hours indulged his passion for music by creating and running Highlights in Jazz, one of New York’s longest-running concert series, for which he arranged and hosted more than 300 shows over a 50-year run, died on June 11 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.His cousin, Elizabeth Elliot, said the cause was complications of a fall.Mr. Kleinsinger spent 30 years as a government lawyer, first for New York City and then, from 1970 to 1991, as an assistant attorney general for the State of New York.But his real life began after he punched out every afternoon. Seven times a year, he presented Highlights in Jazz, a roaming concert series that featured some of the country’s best musicians playing alongside a host of promising young artists.Beginning in 1973, at a time when interest in jazz was at its ebb and nightclubs were shutting down, Mr. Kleinsinger nonetheless drew packed crowds. His shows often sold out; any tickets he didn’t sell, he donated to performing-arts high schools around the city.Mr. Kleinsinger’s first shows, in 1973, were such a hit that he immediately began planning. He ended up presenting concerts in various venues around Manhattan.Tribeca Performing Arts CenterHe could count on a core audience of about 350, many of whom took pride in attending virtually every one of his shows. He built on that base with a mailing list of 5,000, which he curated by hand.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Unearthed Joni Mitchell Jazz Demo, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Sarah McLachlan, Camilo, Us3 and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Joni Mitchell, ‘Be Cool’The first preview of “Joni’s Jazz,” an archival collection of Joni Mitchell’s collaborations with jazz musicians, is this 1980 demo of “Be Cool,” a song that featured Wayne Shorter on saxophone when it was released in 1982 on “Wild Things Run Fast.” This version — two guitars, drums and a click track — doesn’t have all its lyrics yet. It doesn’t need them. Instead, Mitchell flaunts some bold, sure-footed scat-singing. The groove and the attitude — “50-50 fire and ice” — were already fully formed.Sarah McLachlan, ‘Better Broken’Sarah McLachlan ponders giving a second chance to a fraught, long-ago relationship in “Better Broken,” her first new song since 2016 and the title track of a coming album. It’s in vintage McLachlan style: a stately piano ballad with a melody that climbs gradually and holds some aching notes. She knows the possible rationalizations, envisioning “a jagged edge worn smooth by time”; she also, it seems, knows better.Caroline Polachek, ‘On the Beach’It was probably inevitable that Caroline Polachek — whose pop pushes toward the posthuman without losing physical connection — would fulfill a videogame commission. With the hyperpop producer Danny L Harle, she created “On the Beach” for Hideo Kojima’s game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. She sings about Sanzu — the Japanese analog of the river Styx, dividing life and death — in a slow march with a melody that leaps to superhuman, computer-tuned peaks and valleys. She still sounds awe-struck.Us3, ‘Resist the Rat Race’In the 1990s and early 2000s, the British group Us3, led by Geoff Wilkinson, backed rappers with jazz grooves, mixing samples — primarily vintage Blue Note jazz tracks — with performances. Now Us3 has returned as Wilkinson’s instrumental band, still merging loops, beats and live musicians — now with arrangements for 18 brasses and reeds. A low-slung piano vamp and programmed trap drums run throughout “Resist the Rat Race,” topped by tootling synthesizer melodies and dense horn-section outbursts worthy of Gil Evans and Henry Mancini. It’s a swaggering alliance of human and machine.Camilo, ‘Maldito ChatGPT’Artificial intelligence matchmaking fails completely in Camilo’s “Maldito ChatGPT” (“Damned ChatGPT”). When he tells ChatGPT the attributes of his ideal partner, the system insists he’s chosen the wrong person, sabotaging his confidence. “I make a list of everything I’ve always dreamed of / And it looks nothing like the person next to me,” he sings. The track feels transparent, with a steady, subdued beat and skeletal piano chords. But as with an A.I. interface, there’s a lot going on under the surface: percussion, vocals, pizzicato strings, echoes. True to chatbot conventions, the A.I. ends its response with a question; Camilo can barely sputter an incredulous reply.

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      Rigmor Newman, Behind-the-Scenes Fixture of the Jazz World, Dies at 86

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      She was a concert promoter, a nightclub impresario and the producer of an award-winning 1992 film about the Nicholas Brothers dance duo.Rigmor Newman, who began her career in Sweden as a singer and beauty queen and went on to become a fixture in the U.S. jazz world as a concert and film producer as well as a talent manager, died on April 26 in the Bronx. She was 86.Her daughter, Annie Newman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Her death was not widely reported at the time.Ms. Newman, who sang at the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm in 1957, arrived in New York in the early 1960s after marrying Joe Newman, a standout trumpeter in the Count Basie and Lionel Hampton orchestras.She later managed the Nicholas Brothers, a gravity-defying dance duo that dazzled cinema audiences starting in the late 1930s, and became heroes to many Black Americans. Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers became her second husband.Among her many professional incarnations, Ms. Newman served as the executive director of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit organization promoting jazz throughout the New York metropolitan area, which Joe Newman helped found in the early 1960s.Ms. Newman appeared with the trumpeter Joe Newman, whom she married, on the cover of his 1960 album “Counting Five in Sweden.” Given the racial climate of the day, the image was a symbolic triumph.World Pacific RecordsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brandee Younger Has a New Secret Weapon: Alice Coltrane’s Harp

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      Brandee Younger has noticed her audience changing lately. The harpist, composer and bandleader, whose elegant, groove-anchored sound has made her a standout presence in and around jazz in recent years, had grown accustomed to seeing a certain type of listener at her shows.“It’s, like, a Portland, 40s man,” she said with a smile during an interview last month at her East Harlem apartment, referencing demographic data on her fan base — not atypical for a contemporary jazz artist — furnished by her label.During recent tours, though, she started to notice an influx of “young girls that are, like, so excited.”It’s been an encouraging sight for Younger, 41, who said that growing up as “this little Black girl playing harp” and devoting herself to classical studies while also keeping close tabs on hip-hop and R&B, she struggled to find role models.“I want to grab their hands,” she said of these new converts. “I want to nurture these 20-year-old girls, because I wish I had that — something like that — when I was 20.”Younger’s latest batch of music, out Friday, feels like a nurturing, affirming message too. “Gadabout Season,” her third album for Impulse!, offers the best encapsulation yet of the tasteful, subtly radical sonic hybrid that she has been honing since she picked up the harp at age 11. It’s a persuasive argument for the vast, trans-idiomatic potential of her instrument.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More