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      Hear the Best Albums and Songs of 2024

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      A playlist of 103 songs from our three critics’ lists to experience however you wish.Mk.gee, a new type of guitar hero, made some of our critics’ favorite music of the year.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesDear listeners,Here at The Amplifier, we like to keep our playlists relatively brief, like bite-sized musical snacks you can nosh on when you have some downtime. But each December, when the critics are publishing our best-of lists, we like to offer up a much heartier feast. Well, I hope your ears are hungry (is that how it works?) because today is the day. It’s time for our annual playlist of the year’s best music — more than six hours and slightly over 100 tracks of it.These songs are culled from our critics’ year-end lists, featuring what Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and I have chosen as the year’s best albums and songs. There are obvious areas where we all overlap: All three of us, for example, appreciated the bawdy humor of Sabrina Carpenter’s 2024 hits and the towering ambition of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter.” But what makes this playlist such a fun listening experience is the fact that there are many, many places where our tastes, opinions and preferences diverge.Some cases in point: I just cannot buy Addison Rae as a convincing pop star, while Caramanica put her breathy single “Diet Pepsi” as his No. 4 song of the year. The flip side, though, is that I seem to be the only one on staff who appreciates the former Little Mix star Jade’s frenzied debut solo single “Angel of My Dreams,” or Father John Misty’s epic “Mahashmashana,” both of which made my Top 10. Caramanica’s list reminds me that I need to spend some more time with Mk.gee’s “Two Star & the Dream Police” and Claire Rousay’s “Sentiment,” two albums I enjoyed on first listen but have not returned to much since. Pareles’s list, as always, has some unfamiliar names I’m looking forward to checking out, like the ambient jazz artist Nala Sinephro and British producer Djrum. And both of the Jons’ lists remind me that I have been meaning to check out the debut album from the throwback girl group Flo — whose recently released “Access All Areas” they both recommend.If you’d like to read more about each track, you can follow along with our lists of the year’s best albums and songs, in order. But I personally think the best way to experience this massive playlist is to put it on shuffle and experience the chaotic swirl of all of our different recommendations. May it lead you toward discovering (or rediscovering) some of your own favorite music of this wild, waning year.Listen to the playlist on Spotify.Listen to the playlist on Apple Music.The ceiling fan is so nice,Lindsay More

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      Best Songs of 2024

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      Listen to 68 tracks that made major statements, boosted big beefs, propelled up-and-comers and soundtracked the party this year.Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesA Little Strife, a Lot of RhythmHere’s a dipperful of worthwhile tracks from the ocean of music released this year. The top of my list is big-statement songs, ones that had repercussions beyond how they sound. Below those, it’s not a ranking but a playlist, a more-or-less guided cruise through what 2024 sounded like for one avid listener. I didn’t include any songs from my list of top albums, which are worth hearing from start to finish. But in the multiverse of streaming music, there are plenty of other possibilities.1. Kendrick Lamar, ‘Not Like Us’Belligerent, accusatory and as tribalistic as its title, “Not Like Us” wasn’t an attack ad from the 2024 election. It was the coup de gras of Kendrick Lamar’s beef with Drake, a rapid-fire, sneering assault on multiple fronts. Its spirit dovetailed with a bitterly contentious 2024.2. Beyoncé, ‘Texas Hold ’Em’“Texas Hold ’Em” isn’t just an invocation of Beyoncé’s home state. It’s a toe-tapping taunt at the racial and musical assumptions behind country music as defined by record labels and radio stations. Rhiannon Giddens picks an oh-so-traditional claw-hammer banjo intro and Beyoncé — raised in Texas — promises “a real-life boogie and a real-life hoedown,” singing about drinking and dancing and daring gatekeepers to hold her back.3. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’Sabrina Carpenter delivers a sharp message on the slick “Please Please Please.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesComedy is tricky in a straight-faced song, but Sabrina Carpenter’s eye-roll comes clearly through the shiny pop of “Please Please Please.” The singer tries to placate and possibly tame a boyfriend who sounds more obnoxious in every verse. “I beg you, don’t embarrass me,” she coos; eventually she reaches a breaking point.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 Brazilian Jazz

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      When the term “Brazilian jazz” arises, one might think of bossa nova, or Sergio Mendes (its most popular purveyor), and stop there. But there’s a world beyond those sunny instrumentals and bright vocals, where artists like Hermeto Pascoal, João Donato and Leny Andrade show that Brazilian jazz can be funky, soulful and esoteric. This type of jazz had deeper resonance beyond the oceanfront views it conjured.The origins of Brazilian jazz are often traced to the late 1950s, to the advent of bossa nova by the composers Donato and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Blending samba (a style of music born out of the Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia) with American jazz, bossa nova — which means “new wave” — reached its apex in 1964 when “The Girl From Ipanema,” sung by the Brazilian vocalist Astrud Gilberto, hit the U.S. singles chart, and won the Grammy for record of the year in 1965. Yet before the song’s success, American composers like Quincy Jones, Herbie Mann and Dave Brubeck recorded bossa nova albums, which stoked the curiosity of U.S. listeners.Thanks to the contributors below, a mix of musicians, writers and scholars, we get to hear Brazilian jazz beyond the gravitational pull of bossa nova and samba, from its height in the ’60s to the present day. And while you’ll see familiar names pop up more than once, they’re often in conversation with others from the broad space of the genre. Traces of bossa nova and samba emerge, but these selections also take fusion, ambient and psychedelia into account. You can find a playlist at the end of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jeff Caltabiano, writer and historianSão Paulo Underground, “Jagoda’s Dream”Brazil, a country rich with Indigenous musical traditions, has had an ongoing dialogue with the (North) American jazz tradition since the 1950s. That dialogue has broadened well beyond the breezy straightjacket of bossa nova. The visionary American composer and cornetist Rob Mazurek spent eight years living in Brazil, and has been in musical conversation with the São Paulo-born musicians M. Takara and Guilherme Granado for two decades, with the group São Paulo Underground. Takara and Granado go back even further, having met as teenagers in the city’s punk scene. Granado’s hazy keyboards open up “Jagoda’s Dream,” from the band’s third album, “Três Cabeças Loucuras” (“Three crazy heads”), from 2011. The song was written for their friend’s daughter, with a melody and harmony by Mazurek and an infectious cavaquinho rhythm pattern by Takara. The cavaquinho, a miniature guitar with a bright sound, is prominent throughout. During the recording, Takara played cavaquinho with his hands while playing the drums with his feet. Richard Ribeiro played second drums. The song is a firecracker that represents São Paulo’s creative music scene and its hybrid of sounds. A chorus of voices takes us out, wordlessly repeating the rhythm pattern, about to wake from Jagoda’s magnificent dream.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Joyce Moreno, singer and composerTenório Jr., “Embalo”In the early 1960s, bossa nova was at its peak in Brazil and was also growing worldwide. Some Brazilian musicians who were fluent with both bossa nova and jazz began to organize themselves into instrumental groups, mostly trios, but adding horns on occasion. They created music — samba-jazz they called it — with inventive improvisation, sultry rhythms and creative harmonies. One of the most brilliant pianists to emerge from the samba-jazz movement was Tenório Jr. In 1964, at 23, he recorded his one and only album as a leader, “Embalo,” which is now widely acknowledged a classic of the genre. On the title track, a composition by Tenório arranged by the alto saxophonist Paulo Moura, Tenório’s solo is a gorgeous example of the heights that made-in-Brazil jazz could achieve. Unfortunately, that recording is the only taste of Tenório’s genius we still have. In Buenos Aires in 1976, while on tour as a sideman for the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, Tenório mysteriously “disappeared” in Argentina on the eve of that country’s military coup (a story told in the excellent animated film “They Shot the Piano Player” by the Spanish filmmakers Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal). Tenório’s music, however, lives on forever.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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      Best Jazz Albums of 2024

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      Musicians both established and up-and-coming stretched themselves in fresh ways over the last year, creating poignant moments of collaboration and challenge.In 2024, jazz continued to spiral out, looking both forward and backward and expanding to mingle with adjacent styles. The year’s most memorable releases in the genre are diverse, but they all share one key trait: a delight in intimate, real-time musical conversation.1. Tarbaby, ‘You Think This America’Orrin Evans’s original “Red Door” appears on the trio Tarbaby’s latest album, a record made with no additional featured musicians.Yana Paskova for The New York TimesThe pianist Orrin Evans, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Nasheet Waits have each been indispensable to 21st-century jazz, both as bandleaders and sidemen. But despite a near-20-year history, their collective trio, Tarbaby, has flown under the radar. With “You Think This America,” the first Tarbaby album without any additional musicians, they stake their claim as an elite group capable of conveying the most guileless tenderness (on a version of the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow”), the deepest blues feeling (on the 1920s standard “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) and the hippest sort of post-bop looseness (on the Evans original “Red Door”). They did it all while cultivating a refreshingly non-hierarchical approach, where moment to moment each member has an equal sonic stake.2. David Murray Quartet, ‘Francesca’Even when David Murray first arrived in New York around 50 years ago as an upstart saxophonist and bandleader, he seemed like an old soul, communing with the roots of jazz while thriving on its cutting edge. So he’s a natural fit for the elder-statesman role he plays on “Francesca,” alongside three outstanding younger musicians — the pianist Marta Sánchez, the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Russell Carter — who seem intuitively connected to his love of vigorous swing and grittily exuberant improv. The results feel like quintessential Murray, whether on the swaggering, extroverted “Am Gone Get Some” or the title track, a waltz that starts off restrained but soon bursts with emotion.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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      Jon Batiste Can’t Stop Thinking About Beethoven

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      Long before Jon Batiste was a bandleader, television personality and Grammy- and Academy Award-winning artist, he was a classical piano student.As an adolescent in Metairie, La., he spent Saturday mornings at the home of his teacher, known as Miss Shirley, working on scales and arpeggios, and music by Bach and Debussy.“I was the kind of student that would leave the books in the foyer to sit there until next week’s lesson,” Batiste said. “No practice at home. The beauty of the music didn’t dawn on me until later.”Now Batiste, 38, is returning to his classical roots with an album called “Beethoven Blues.” It features his improvisations on masterpieces like “Für Elise” and the Fifth Symphony, as well as Beethoven-inspired compositions like “Dusklight Movement” and “Life of Ludwig.”Unmute to hear Batiste riff on “Für Elise.”For Batiste, who recorded the album in a day and a half at his home in Brooklyn, the project is personal. It brings him back to the Maple Leaf Bar and other stages in New Orleans, where, as a teenager, he began fusing Chopin nocturnes and Bach inventions with his own music.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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      Roy Haynes, a Giant of Jazz Drumming, Is Dead at 99

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      An irrepressible force who remained relevant over the course of a seven-decade career, he had a hand in every major development in modern jazz.Roy Haynes, among the greatest and most influential drummers in the history of jazz, died on Tuesday in Nassau County, N.Y., on the South Shore of Long Island. He was 99.His death, after a brief illness, was confirmed by his daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore. She declined to specify where in the county he died.Mr. Haynes was an irrepressible force who proudly remained both relevant and stylish over a career spanning seven decades, having had a hand in every major development in modern jazz, beginning in the bebop era. Remarkably, he did so without significant alterations to his style, which was characterized by a bracing clarity — Snap Crackle was the nickname bestowed on him in the 1950s — along with locomotive energy and a slippery but emphatic flow.Few musicians ever worked with so broad an array of jazz legends. Mr. Haynes recorded with the quintessential swing-era tenor saxophonist Lester Young as well as the contemporary guitarist Pat Metheny. He was briefly but prominently associated with the singer Sarah Vaughan, and with some of bebop’s chief pioneers, notably the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk.And he appeared on dozens of albums, including many regarded as classics, among them Eric Dolphy’s “Outward Bound” (1960), Oliver Nelson’s “The Blues and the Abstract Truth” (1961), Stan Getz’s “Focus” (1962) and Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968).As a band leader, Mr. Haynes made a handful of highly regarded albums, like “We Three,” a 1958 trio session with the pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. and the bassist Paul Chambers.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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      The Curious Case of Nora Holt, a Pioneer of Black Classical Music and Jazz

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      “Fabulous is the word for Mrs. Nora Douglas Holt,” read the 1974 obituary in The Amsterdam News.And fabulous she was: A pioneer of the Black classical music scene in Chicago, Holt also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in Paris. Born into the middle-class, she moved back and forth between worlds: concert artist and blues singer, newspaper columnist and club hostess, erudite scholar and scandalous socialite.This fluidity led to friendships with two women who represented distinct versions of fame for Black women in the early 20th century: Josephine Baker, the working-class dancer from St. Louis, who became the toast of Paris; and the composer Florence Price, who transformed Chicago’s classical music scene, rising to national fame with her symphonies.Holt’s life didn’t follow familiar narratives. Hers was not a rags-to-riches story, like Baker’s; nor was it, like Price’s, a cathartic breakthrough for Black musicians in the white world of classical music. Instead, she had a kind of mutability, frequently changing her name and her place in culture, collapsing ideas about respectability and sexual liberation.Music was the through line in Holt’s life. She first made her name in classical music. For young, middle-class Black women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical music could open doors to salon culture, church leadership, jobs teaching music and civic engagement.In 1918, Holt, a pianist, became the first Black person in the United States, female or male, to earn a master’s degree in music, from Chicago Musical College. She also worked in the male-dominated fields of music criticism, scholarship and composition. Her music journalism, public lectures, recitals and community organizing became a blueprint for other Black women seeking to become leaders in Chicago’s classical musical scene.“Of course, men are supposed to have better business minds than women,” she wrote to a male colleague after founding a magazine, Music and Poetry, in 1921. “But I have made this thing go and the opportunities are yet unlimited.”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