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      Tate McRae Dances in and Out of Love, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ledisi, Perfume Genius featuring Aldous Harding, Smerz 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.Tate McRae, ‘Revolving Door’A lack of instantly recognizable, stylistically defining hits — aside from the slinky, irresistible 2023 smash “Greedy” — has somehow not stopped the 21-year-old singer and dancer Tate McCrae’s star from rising over the past few years. She dips into a more promising and vulnerable sound on the moody, pulsating “Revolving Door,” the latest single from her just-released third album, “So Close to What.” “I keep coming back like a revolving door,” she sings on a chorus that thumps like an anxious heartbeat, “saying I couldn’t want you less, but I just want you more.” A McCrae single is still only as good as the choreography in its accompanying music video, and by that measure, it’s one of her strongest yet. LINDSAY ZOLADZPerfume Genius featuring Aldous Harding, ‘No Front Teeth’Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) and Aldous Harding share “No Front Teeth,” a surreal excursion that seesaws between pretty folk-Baroque pop and noisy, neo-psychedelic rock. Perfume Genius sings about being shattered; Harding answers him with a high, angelic call for “better days.” The video just adds more layers to the conundrum. JON PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Pyramid Scheme’On this heartfelt one-off single, Alynda Segarra returns to the gentle folk-rock sound they honed on “The Past Is Still Alive,” the excellent album they released last year as Hurray for the Riff Raff. “This is not a scene, it’s a pyramid scheme,” they sing, pointing to a larger feeling of social collapse that, as the song progresses, dovetails with personal struggle. “I don’t know who you want me to be,” Segarra sings. “And I don’t know, and that terrifies me.” ZOLADZSleigh Bells, ‘Bunky Pop’The latest blast from the Sleigh Bells album due in April, “Bunky Becky Birthday Boy,” memorializes Alexis Krauss’s dog, who died in 2023. “Nights are long here without you,” she sings. But the song is manic and upbeat, swerving from electro to power-chorded pop, with eruptions of thrash drumming and tangents of dissonance — mourning by celebrating. PARELESMamalarky, ‘#1 Best of All Time’Mamalarky makes musicianly antics sound nonchalant on its new album, “Hex Key.” The singer and guitarist Livvy Bennett breezes through the self-satisfaction of “#1 Best of All Time,” declaring, “I always win even when I fall.” Her voice stays casual (and doesn’t worry about being a little flat) while the beat hurtles ahead and the chords take unlikely chromatic turns. The biggest boast is making it sound so easy. PARELESWe 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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      At 30, the Jazz Gallery Remains a Force. Rio Sakairi Is Its Heart.

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      The nonprofit venue’s artistic director has long booked and guided artists from her gut.Rio Sakairi patted around inside her purse and retrieved a key that unlocks the elevator at 1158 Broadway. Exiting on the fifth floor, she glanced toward the black door leading to the performance space in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, where the Jazz Gallery has made its home since 2012. The saxophonist Ben Wendel’s four-vibraphone band was about to perform on this January night: “This one you want to hear from the beginning,” she said.The Jazz Gallery has long had a reputation as a live music venue where artists take risks and stretch their sound. This year, the nonprofit is celebrating its 30th anniversary; Sakairi has served as its artistic director since 2000. (She received the formal title in 2009.)“It’s really just the music that’s driving my decisions,” she said, settling her coat on a sofa in the Gallery’s board room. Sakairi, 53, has been programming the venue for about as long as she’s been working there. “When people ask me what I play, I jokingly say, ‘I play musicians.’”Sakairi is credited with nurturing an environment that has given major artists an early boost, including Gretchen Parlato, Linda May Han Oh, Gerald Clayton, Lizz Wright, Vijay Iyer, Ambrose Akinmusire, Joel Ross, Miguel Zenón, Kris Davis and Robert Glasper. “Absolutely my first real show as a leader” was at the Gallery, Glasper said via email, adding that the venue “was always open to me exploring what was in my mind and working it out live in front of an audience.”Sakairi behind the scenes as the Jerome Sabbagh Quartet performed at the venue in February.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesFor as long as these artists can remember, Sakairi has been a fierce, albeit frank advocate of artistic expression and development.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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      Monica Getz, Advocate for Divorce Court Reform, Dies at 90

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      Her troubled marriage to the jazz star Stan Getz led to a headline-making divorce case. The result of the trial gave her a cause to fight for.Monica Getz, whose tempestuous 24-year marriage to the jazz star Stan Getz was whipsawed by his addictions and who, after losing a protracted legal fight to save the marriage, became an advocate for divorce court reform, died on Jan. 5 in Irvington, N.Y. She was 90.Her son Nicolaus Getz said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was bile duct cancer.The Swedish-born Ms. Getz was a student at George Washington University when Mr. Getz, one of the most revered jazz saxophonists of the 20th century, met her backstage at a campus concert and pursued her even though he was married. When they wed in 1956, the actress Donna Reed was the maid of honor at the nuptials in Las Vegas.The Getzes lived in a 27-room mansion called Shadowbrook, overlooking the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y. They bought it in the mid-1960s when Mr. Getz’s fame was at an apex as a result of his bossa nova recordings: the album “Jazz Samba,” with the guitarist Charlie Byrd, and the hit single “The Girl From Ipanema,” on which his mellifluous tenor sax backed the breathy singing of Astrud Gilberto.Drugs and alcohol, however, created havoc in the Getzes’ marriage. Mr. Getz had begun using heroin at 16 and was arrested two years before the marriage for attempting to rob a pharmacy to get narcotics. At the insistence of his wife, a teetotaler, he would seek medical help and enter rehabilitation programs, but relapses invariably followed.Stan and Monica Getz in 1975.via Getz familyAt the couple’s divorce trial in 1987, Mr. Getz said he often drank to the point of blacking out. “I have a discography of 2,010 records,” he said, but “some of them I can’t even remember making.”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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      Susan Alcorn, Voyager on Pedal Steel Guitar, Dies at 71

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      With a daring avant-garde approach, she pushed the frontiers of an instrument best known for speaking with a down-home accent.Susan Alcorn, an experimental composer and musician who pushed the pedal steel guitar, an instrument more often associated with the country music roadhouse, into the avant-garde, died on Friday in Baltimore. She was 71.Her husband, David Lobato, said the cause of death, in a hospital, had not been determined.A rare female virtuoso on an instrument long dominated by men, Ms. Alcorn erased boundaries for pedal steel guitar — a console-style electric guitar played face up, with pedals and knee levers to alter pitch, often used to create a forlorn, wailing twang. That made it a key instrument in country music.As hinted at by the title of her 2006 album, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar,” Ms. Alcorn steered the instrument into uncharted territory. Over the course of a career in which she mined and refigured countless genres, she released more than 20 albums, either as a solo artist or in collaboration with boundary-pushing musicians like the guitarist and banjo player Eugene Chadbourne, the saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and the guitarist Mary Halvorson.The title of Ms. Alcorn’s 2006 album, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar,” signaled that she was steering her instrument into uncharted territory.Olde English Spelling BeeMs. Alcorn’s 2003 album, “Curandera,” featured her interpretations of compositions by Curtis Mayfield and Messiaen.Uma SoundsHer album “Curandera,” released in 2003, featured cosmic interpretations of the Curtis Mayfield composition “People Get Ready” and Messiaen’s “O Sacrum Convivium.” Her 2023 album, “Canto,” was inspired by her travels in Chile, where she became entranced with nueva canción, a left-leaning folk music that had been repressed by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s.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 Blue Note Records

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      This month, we look at the legacy of Blue Note Records, perhaps the best-known label in jazz, with its instantly recognizable blue-and-white vinyl center labels and decades-long run of landmark albums, some of which have become cornerstones in the genre.Founded in 1939 by the German American record executive Alfred Lion and the writer Max Margulis, Blue Note began as a passion project for Lion, who visited the recently opened Café Society club to talk about recording music with the pianists Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons. Soon after, Lion paid the artists to play in a Manhattan studio, later pressing up the music from the session and releasing it as the first album ever on Blue Note Records.Over the next decade, Blue Note would become the most prolific label in jazz, releasing albums from future legends like Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and Bud Powell. Then the label hit its stride in the ’50s: Records from Lee Morgan, Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins and Lou Donaldson came in rapid succession, helping solidify Blue Note as the go-to label of the moment. Now, 86 years into its run, as a label still releasing straight-ahead jazz but also jazz-meets-hip-hop-and-funk, Blue Note truly needs no introduction.Below, we asked 14 musicians and writers to name a favorite song to introduce someone to the Blue Note catalog. Listen to the playlists below the article, and don’t forget to leave your own picks in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Wayne Shorter, “Speak No Evil”Don Was, president of Blue Note RecordsWayne ShorterAndrew Putler/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn February 1971, temperatures dropped below zero in Ann Arbor, Mich. I was a 19-year-old college dropout — draftable and without a car or job. My life was veering off track but there was one ritual that always provided comfort, direction and hope: turning down the lights and listening to Wayne Shorter’s Blue Note masterpiece, “Speak No Evil.”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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      Jacob Collier, Megan Moroney and Clay Aiken Issue Holiday Albums

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      Our critics on Christmas records from Jacob Collier, Megan Moroney, two “American Idol” alums and more.A holiday album offers musicians a chance to adopt — or reinvent — a classic format and show fans a different side of themselves. Here’s a sampling of this year’s releases, from singers exploring the standards and artists rethinking the meaning of the holidays.Clay Aiken, ‘Christmas Bells Are Ringing’This is Clay Aiken’s second holiday album; the first arrived two decades ago, the year after he gawkily crooned his way to second place on the second season of “American Idol.” In the intervening time, he’s been on Broadway, he’s run (unsuccessfully) for political office and he’s been on “The Masked Singer.” But he never lost his voice — all these years later, Aiken still sings with a lovely flutter, and with real punch, too. His first holiday collection, “Merry Christmas With Love,” was overflowing with earned pomp — a singer who excelled at targeted bombast given free melodramatic reign. His new one, a covers collection, is a touch more polished, though he does convey true mischief on “Magic Moments” and, on “Do You Hear What I Hear,” accesses the kind of pyrotechnic fifth gear that’s the stuff of “Idol” finales, musical theater blockbusters and Christmas morning celebrations. JON CARAMANICACarpenters, ‘Christmas Once More’The Carpenters’ 1978 holiday release “Christmas Portrait” is not only one of the most enduringly enjoyable Yuletide pop albums of its era, it’s also one of the most ambitious works that Richard Carpenter ever arranged: a grandly orchestrated, elegantly realized suite that weaves together an extended medley of Christmas favorites as though they were a single song. That fluidity is preserved on the new collection, “Christmas Once More,” even though it’s a compilation that features remixed and remastered material culled from both “Christmas Portrait” and its slightly inferior though still lovely 1984 sequel, “An Old-Fashioned Christmas.” These 16 tracks represent most of the highlights from each release, including a festive take on “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” and a rerecording of the Carpenters’ own 1970 holiday hit “Merry Christmas, Darling,” featuring accompaniment from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Streamlining the best material from the two previous LPs eliminates some of the compositional pomp that occasionally distracted from the warm, down-to-earth intimacy of Karen Carpenter’s voice, and the finely executed new mix gives it an added gleam. LINDSAY ZOLADZJacob Collier, ‘Three Christmas Songs (An Abbey Road Live-to-Vinyl Cut)’Earlier this year the multitalented polymath Jacob Collier recorded a continuous, 14-minute set of three Christmas classics live at London’s Abbey Road Studios. He uses his piano, guitar and voice all in a similarly searching manner, leaping along scales and octaves with a daredevil’s flair. That approach works best here on piano, particularly during a spellbinding deconstruction of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” enlivened by its twinkling cascade of high notes. Collier’s voice is more of an acquired taste than his piano playing, and despite his impressive range, his showy runs can overly complicate the emotions meant to be translated through these songs. Regardless, though, this recording captures a skillfully executed performance and ends with one of its most enchanting moments, as Collier conducts a choir — its members just happened to be sitting in the audience — in a beautifully understated “Silent Night.” ZOLADZDean & Britta & Sonic Boom, ‘A Peace of Us’“A Peace of Us” brings indie-rock introspection to seasonal sentiments. Dean Wareham, from Galaxie 500 and Luna, and his longtime duo partner and wife, Britta Phillips, collaborated with Sonic Boom, from Spacemen 3, on mostly lesser-known Christmas songs, from John Barry and Hal David, David Berman, Randy Newman, Merle Haggard, Boudleaux Bryant and Willie Nelson, whose “Pretty Paper” is remade as whispery, pulsing electro-pop. The songs play up the mundane aspects of the holiday, and the tone is hushed and hazily retro, with subdued vocals and reverbed guitars alongside the sleigh bells. Even the Lennon-Ono standard, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” drifts away instead of building up. JON PARELESBen Folds, ‘Sleigher’Christmas would seem to present a prime topic for Ben Folds, whose piano virtuosity, keen eye and skeptical but ultimately kindly spirit can turn domestic moments into show tunes waiting for a show. “Sleigher” has one standout: “Christmas Time Rhyme,” a song about the annual family reunion where “We arrive half alive from the last weird trip around the sun.” It’s a jazzy waltz that juggles childhood memories and grown-up insights. The rest of the album — including songs from the Mills Brothers and Mel Tormé — struggles to match it. PARELESWe 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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      Martial Solal, French Jazz Piano Virtuoso, Is Dead at 97

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      Mr. Solal, who also wrote music for films and symphony orchestras, was revered in Europe and hailed in the United States on his rare visits there.Martial Solal, Europe’s pre-eminent jazz pianist, who recorded dozens of startlingly original albums in a career of almost three quarters of a century and who wrote scores for numerous films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece “Breathless,” died on Thursday in Versailles, France. He was 97.His death, in a hospital, was announced by Rachida Dati, France’s minister of culture.Mr. Solal, who was born in Algeria, was 34 when he performed his first concert at the landmark Salle Gaveau concert hall in Paris, his adopted home, in 1962. He was 91 when he took the same stage in 2019 for his farewell concert.The two performances were bookends to an extraordinary career in which he recorded countless albums and wrote music for solo piano, big bands and symphonies, including four concertos for piano and orchestra, as well as the film scores.Although he was little known in the United States, the critic Francis Davis, writing in The New York Times in 2001, said that Mr. Solal “might be the greatest living European jazz pianist — and is at least the equal of any in the United States.”In 2010, John Fordham, the chief jazz critic of The Guardian, called him “France’s most famous living jazz artist.”Mr. Solal was admired as much for his technical virtuosity as for his exploratory improvisations. Critics compared him to the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, and his playing at times echoed (without imitating) the likes of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. But he blazed his own path, combining spare melodic lines with lush chordal passages in a style the French newspaper Le Monde described as “cutting through his music with the precision of a goldsmith.”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