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      Earl Sweatshirt Exhibits His Evolution, and 14 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by FKA twigs, Makaya McCraven, Hazel English and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Earl Sweatshirt, ‘2010’In 2010, Earl Sweatshirt released his debut mixtape, “Earl,” and his new song titled for that moment in time shows how much he’s evolved while still retaining his sagely iconoclastic spirit. Earl’s more recent releases — “Some Rap Songs” from 2018; “Feet of Clay” from 2019 — have represented his music at its most avant-garde, moving through murky, collagelike atmospheres in a constant state of transformation. “2010,” though, is more straightforward and sustained, with an understated beat from the producer Black Noise that allows Earl to lock into a hypnotic flow. The succinctly poetic imagery (“crescent moon wink, when I blinked it was gone”) and strangely satisfying plain-spoken admissions (“walked outside, it was still gorgeous”) pour out of him as steadily as water from a tap. LINDSAY ZOLADZFKA twigs featuring Central Cee, ‘Measure of a Man’This song’s distinctive descending chord progression, dramatic swells and even its lyrics — “the measure of a hero is the measure of a man” — could make it a James Bond theme. That’s a sign of FKA twigs’s overarching ambitions, her willingness to engage carnality and idealism, and how carefully she gauges the gradations of her voice in every phrase. JON PARELESHazel English, ‘Nine Stories’Call it a meet twee: “You lent me ‘Nine Stories,’ while you starred in mine,” the Australian-born, California-based musician Hazel English sings at the beginning of her ode to every artsy teen’s favorite J.D. Salinger book. The track is a three-minute dream-pop reverie, obscuring lyrics wryly bookish enough for a Belle & Sebastian song beneath a swirl of jangly guitars and shyly murmured vocals. It’s also something of an act of nostalgia, finding the 30-year-old conjuring the sounds and memories of her high school days: “Now that I’m falling, I can’t ignore it,” she sings sweetly, sounding as blissfully crush-struck as a teenager. ZOLADZHorsegirl, ‘Billy’The young Chicago trio Horsegirl is proof that the shaggy-dog spirit of Gen X indie rock is alive and well within a certain subset of Gen Z. Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein’s overlapping vocals are buried beneath a dissonant avalanche of “Daydream Nation”-esque guitars, but enough lyrical imagery comes to the surface to create a strangely poetic impression of their titular character on this stand-alone single, their first release since signing to Matador Records. “He washes off his robes in preparation to be crucified,” Cheng intones, while Lowenstein’s more melodic vocal line adds additional texture to the song’s enveloping, shoegaze-y atmosphere. ZOLADZBen LaMar Gay featuring Ayanna Woods, ‘Touch. Don’t Scroll’On “Touch. Don’t Scroll,” Ben LaMar Gay and Ayanna Woods, two musical polymaths from Chicago, sing about trying to stay connected to each other in an overcorrected world. “Now, baby, I will never leave you ’lone/Oh, can you hear me or are you on your phone?” they drone in unison, an octave apart, over a syncopated beat and lightly twinkling electronics. The track is nestled deep within “Open Arms to Open Us,” Gay’s latest album and probably his most broadly appealing, pulling together influences from country blues, Afro-Brazilian percussion, puckish Chicago free jazz and 2000s indie-rock. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOCardi B, ‘Bet It’“Bet It,” from the soundtrack to Halle Berry’s directorial debut “Bruised,” is only the second solo single Cardi B has released this year. And while it’s nowhere near as fun or inspired than that previous hit, “Up,” “Bet It” is more like a braggadocios status update on Cardi’s recent past, taking in her Grammy wins and her memorable Met Gala appearance in a dress with a “tail so long it drag 30 minutes after.” ZOLADZMorray featuring Benny the Butcher, ‘Never Fail’An impressively feverish turn from Morray, whose 2020 breakout single “Quicksand” leaned toward the spiritual. Here, though, he’s ferocious, rapping with a scratchy yelp and a sense of defiance. He’s accompanied by Benny the Butcher, who is among the calmest-sounding boasters in hip-hop. An unexpected and unexpectedly effective pairing. JON CARAMANICAFrank Dukes, ‘Likkle Prince’The producer Frank Dukes — who’s made understated, hauntingly melodic work with Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, Rihanna and many others — is releasing “The Way of Ging,” his first project under his own name. It’s an album of beats — a beat tape, as they used to say — that’s available for a limited time online, and will eventually be removed from the internet and available only as a set of NFTs. “Likkle Prince” channels early ’80s electro along with some squelched disco majesty. It’s spooky and propulsive. CARAMANICAunderscores, ‘Everybody’s Dead!’A rousing and trippy burst of hyperpop mayhem, “Everybody’s Dead!” is a new single from underscores, who earlier this year released “Fishmonger,” an excellent, scrappy, and puckish debut album. CARAMANICAMicrohm, ‘Spooky Actions’The Mexico City sound artist Microhm, born Leslie Garcia, produced “Spooky Actions” and its accompanying EP using only modular synths. The result feels like hurtling through a Black Hole, where sound and time warp into quantum dislocation. Ambient textures swirl over the lurch of steady drum kicks, as the moments drip into oblivion. ISABELIA HERRERALeon Bridges featuring Jazmine Sullivan, ‘Summer Rain’Leon Bridges looks back to Sam Cooke’s soul; Jazmine Sullivan can go back to the scat-singing of bebop. They trade verses over a slow-motion beat and rhythm guitar in “Summer Rain” to evoke endless conjugal bliss, urging each other “don’t stop now,” for less under minutes of suspended time meant to play on repeat. PARELESIbeyi featuring Pa Salieu, ‘Made of Gold’Ibeyi’s music has always harnessed a sense of ancestral knowledge: The Afro-Cuban French twins grew up listening to Yoruba folk songs that channel the spirit of enslaved people brought to the Caribbean over the middle passage. But their new single, “Made of Gold,” featuring the Ghanian British rapper Pa Salieu, trades the simple but potent piano and cajón for a celestial, spectral otherworldliness. Culling references to the Yoruba deities Shango and Yemaya, as well as Frida Kahlo and the ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” the duo summons power from intergenerational sources to shield them. “Oh you with a spine, who would work your mouth against this Magic of mine,” they intone. “It has been handed down in an unbroken line.” HERRERASting, ‘Loving You’Sting’s new album, “The Bridge,” often harks back to the jazz-folk-Celtic-pop hybrids he forged on his first solo albums in the 1980s; one song, “Harmony Road,” even features a saxophone solo from Branford Marsalis, who was central to “The Dream of the Blue Turtles” in 1985. Many of the new songs lean toward parable and metaphor, but not “Loving You,” a husband’s confrontation with the cheating wife he still loves: “We made vows inside the church to forgive each others’ sins,” he sings. “But there are things I have to endure like the smell of another man’s skin.” Written with the British electronic musician Maya Jane Coles, the track confines itself to two chords and a brittle beat, punctuated by faraway arpeggios and tones that emerge like unwanted memories; it’s memorably bleak. PARELESSingle Girl, Married Girl, ‘Scared to Move’With patient arpeggios and soothing bass notes, the harpist and composer Mary Lattimore builds a grandly meditative edifice behind Chelsey Coy, the songwriter and singer at the core of Single Girl, Married Girl, in “Scared to Move.” It’s from the new album “Three Generations of Leaving.” Cale’s multitracked harmonies promise, “In a strange new half-light, I will be your guide” as Lattimore’s harp patterns construct a glimmering path forward. PARELESMakaya McCraven, ‘Tranquillity’“Deciphering the Message,” Makaya McCraven’s first LP for Blue Note Records, could easily get you thinking of “Shades of Blue,” Madlib’s classic 2003 album remixing old tracks from that label’s jazz archive. On “Deciphering,” McCraven — a drummer, producer and beat dissector — digs through 13 tracks from the label’s catalog and attacks them through his personal method of remixing and pastiche. “Deciphering” crackles with McCraven’s sonic signatures: viscid ambience, restlessly energetic drumming, the recognizable sounds of his longtime collaborators (Marquis Hill on trumpet, Matt Gold on guitar, Joel Ross on vibraphone, et al). “Tranquillity” stems from a track by the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, from his 1966 album “Components,” and McCraven’s intervention is two-pronged: He doubles down on the original’s curved-glass effect, adding whispery trumpet and fluttering flute atop the original track, but his own drums — kinetic, unrelenting — keep the energy at a rolling boil. RUSSONELLO More

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      Dave Frishberg, Writer of Songs Sardonic and Nostalgic, Dies at 88

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      A gifted jazz pianist and a singer with a limited range but a distinctive voice, he wrote mostly for grown-ups but reached his largest audience on “Schoolhouse Rock!”Dave Frishberg, the jazz songwriter whose sardonic wit as a lyricist and melodic cleverness as a composer placed him in the top echelon of his craft, died on Wednesday in Portland, Ore. He was 88.His wife, April Magnusson, confirmed the death.Mr. Frishberg, who also played piano and sang, was an anomaly, if not an anachronism, in American popular music: an accomplished, unregenerate jazz pianist who managed to outrun the eras of rock, soul, disco, punk and hip-hop by writing hyper-literate songs that harked back to Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, by way of Stephen Sondheim.His songwriting wit was for grown-ups, yet he reached his widest audience with sharpshooting ditties for kids as a regular musical contributor to ABC-TV’s long-running Saturday morning animated show “Schoolhouse Rock!”Merely being aware of Dave Frishberg and his songs conveyed an in-the-know sophistication. He poked fun at this self-congratulatory hipness in his lyrics for “I’m Hip,” a classic of clueless with-it-ness that he wrote to a melody by his fellow jazz songwriter Bob Dorough:See, I’m hip. I’m no square.I’m alert, I’m awake, I’m aware.I am always on the scene.Making the rounds, digging the sounds.I read People magazine.‘Cuz I’m hip.Mr. Frishberg’s original lyric for “I’m Hip,” written in 1966, was “I read Playboy magazine,” but he later changed it.People magazine never did get around to profiling him (though it did briefly review one of his albums in the 1980s). But his niche in the niche-songwriting world of the cabaret smart set (when such a breed still existed) was lofty. Superb saloon singers came to be identified with the Frishberg tunes they sang. One of those singers was Blossom Dearie, whose rendition of his “Peel Me a Grape” was, in Mr. Frishberg’s view, definitive.Still, no one quite sang a Dave Frishberg song like Dave Frishberg, with his thin, reedy voice and compellingly constricted vocal range. Mr. Frishberg’s performance of his acerbic paean to “My Attorney Bernie” was unsurpassed, particularly his laconic crooning of the song’s refrain:Bernie tells me what to doBernie lays it on the lineBernie says we sue, we sueBernie says we sign, we sign.Mr. Frishberg’s songwriting gift extended well beyond the satirical jab. He composed some beautiful ballads, and he was an elegant nostalgist who wrote longingly (though also knowingly) about the mists of time and loss. There was the bittersweet Frishberg of “Do You Miss New York?,” the aching Frishberg of “Sweet Kentucky Ham” and the ingeniously eloquent Frishberg of “Van Lingle Mungo,” a touching wisp of a ballad constructed solely from the strung-together names of long-ago major league baseball players.Mr. Frishberg at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in 2002. His niche in the cabaret songwriting world was lofty. Richard Termine for The New York TimesDavid Lee Frishberg was born on March 23, 1933, in St. Paul, Minn., the youngest of three sons of Harry and Sarah (Cohen) Frishberg. His father, who owned a clothing store, was an émigré from Poland; his mother was a native-born Minnesotan.He began sketching athletes from news photos when he was 7 and hoped to become a sports illustrator, but he also listened closely to music growing up and could sing the entire score of “The Mikado” and other Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His brother Mort, a self-taught blues piano player, soon steered him toward jazz and blues records, and to the keyboard, where the teenage Mr. Frishberg replicated by ear the boogie-woogie styles of Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis before discovering the modernist pianism of bebop.“Jazz musicians were hip,” Mr. Frishberg wrote in his memoir, “My Dear Departed Past” (2017); “they were funny, they were sensitive, they were clannish, and they seemed to have the best girlfriends.”After graduating from St. Paul Central High School, Mr. Frishberg briefly attended Stanford University before returning home to enroll at the University of Minnesota. Though he was already a semiregular on the local jazz scene, his sight reading skills were too poor for a formal music degree. Instead he flirted with majoring in psychology before gravitating to journalism and securing his degree in 1955.He served two years in the Air Force as a recruiter, to fulfill his R.O.T.C. obligations, and then, in 1957, was hired by the New York radio station WNEW to write advertising scripts and other material for its disc jockeys and announcers. He quickly forsook WNEW to write catalog copy for RCA Victor Records, then finally stepped out as a working solo pianist with a late-night slot at the Duplex cabaret in Greenwich Village.Mr. Frishberg became an in-demand sideman at jazz spots like Birdland and the Village Vanguard for jazz luminaries including the saxophonists Ben Webster, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and the drummer Gene Krupa. He also accompanied an array of great singers, including Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day and, for one dizzying night while backing Ms. O’Day at the Half Note, a timid Judy Garland, who tremulously sat in and sang “Over the Rainbow,” then asked Mr. Frishberg to become her musical director. He demurred.“I’m Just a Bill,” which Mr. Frishberg wrote for the animated children’s show “Schoolhouse Rock!,” brought him unexpected acclaim and long-lasting residuals for what he later ruefully acknowledged to be his “most well-known song.”Kari Rene Hall/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesIn the early 1960s, Mr. Frishberg began writing songs — “all kinds of songs,” as he recalled in “My Dear Departed Past.” When the singer Fran Jeffries asked if he could write her a bit of special material, something she could “slink around while singing,” he responded with “Peel Me a Grape”:Peel me a grapeCrush me some iceSkin me a peach, save the fuzz for my pillowStart me a smokeTalk to me niceYou gotta wine meAnd dine me.Written in 1962, “Peel Me a Grape” became Mr. Frishberg’s first published tune — though the publishing company that acquired it, Frank Music, owned by the illustrious Frank Loesser, did little with it. “As far as I knew, the song was a pretty confidential item,” Mr. Frishberg later wrote, “until Blossom Dearie’s version.” Still, it launched Mr. Frishberg as a songwriter.“I’m Hip” followed in 1966, leading to a swelling portfolio of songs. The demos that he cut to teach singers his songs began to tickle the insular jazz recording industry’s ear. Finally, Mr. Frishberg went into the studio himself to record an album, consisting of his own compositions. The record was released in 1970 on the recently formed CTI label under the title “Oklahoma Toad.”Mr. Frishberg decamped to Los Angeles in 1971, ostensibly to write material for “The Funny Side,” a new NBC variety show starring Gene Kelly. The show lasted only nine episodes, but work as a studio musician kept Mr. Frishberg afloat. He also began to perform his songs regularly in local clubs.In 1975, Mr. Dorough invited him to contribute to “Schoolhouse Rock!,” for which Mr. Dorough was the musical director and one of the writers. Mr. Frishberg’s first contribution, in the show’s third season, was “I’m Just a Bill,” an explanatory swinger about the legislative process sung by the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Jack Sheldon. It brought him unexpected acclaim and long-lasting residuals for what he later ruefully acknowledged to be his “most well-known song.”“The Dave Frishberg Songbook, Volume No. 1” earned Mr. Frishberg the first of his four Grammy Award nominations. “The Dave Frishberg Songbook, Volume No. 1” garnered a 1982 Grammy Award nomination for best male jazz vocal performance. The next year, “The Dave Frishberg Songbook, Volume No. 2” did the same. In support of that album, Mr. Frishberg appeared on “The Tonight Show.” Two more Frishberg albums were nominated for Grammys, “Live at Vine Street” in 1985 and “Can’t Take You Nowhere” in 1987.Mr. Frishberg’s marriage in 1959 to Stella Giammasi ended in divorce. He later married Cynthia Wagman.In 1986, he, his wife and their year-old son, Harry, moved to Portland, fleeing the freeway traffic and what he once referred to as the “malignant environment” of Los Angeles. He lived on in Portland, more or less contentedly, for the rest of his life, producing a second son, Max; divorcing for a second time; and, in 2000, marrying Ms. Magnusson. In addition to her, he is survived by his sons.In Portland, he collaborated regularly with the vocalist Rebecca Kilgore. As often as not, though, Mr. Frishberg reveled in playing solo piano in crowded hotel bars. When ill health overtook him late in life, he never stopped writing, just as he had mordantly predicted in 1981 in “My Swan Song”:Once I popped them out like wafflesThe good ones and the awfulsA new one every day. But nowI find I’m uninspired, my wig’s no longer wiredI’ve nothing left to say. …But I’ll say it anyway.Alex Traub More

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      Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers’s ‘Red’ Duet, and 14 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Beyoncé, Let’s Eat Grandma, Beach House and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Taylor Swift featuring Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Nothing New’Like “Fearless” before it, Taylor Swift’s rerecorded and reclaimed “Red (Taylor’s Version),” out Friday, features a trove of newly recorded material from the vault. One of the best offerings is “Nothing New,” a melancholic meditation Swift wrote in 2012 and returned to nearly a decade later, enlisting the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers as her very capable duet partner. The song is kind of a shadow version of “The Lucky One,” Swift’s incisive but ultimately peppy track about the price of fame on the original release of “Red.” “Nothing New” is much darker in tone and more sharply critical of a culture that moves from one young ingénue to the next: “How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?” Swift asks, foreshadowing some of the themes she’d explore on her 2020 album “Folklore.” Most striking, though, is the bridge, in which she imagines meeting the Eve Harrington to her Margo Channing, a predecessor with “the kind of radiance you only have at 17.” It’s hard not to picture the longtime Swiftie Olivia Rodrigo (“She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me”), who seems to have fulfilled this prophecy to a T. But in the time that has passed from when Swift wrote this song to when she finally recorded it, the mournful “Nothing New” has transformed into something triumphant: It’s proof that Swift has outlasted her novelty and stuck around longer than her detractors imagined. Plus, she doesn’t seem to mind Rodrigo calling her “mom.” LINDSAY ZOLADZBeach House, ‘Superstar’Beach House’s music contains many gifts, but it’s the group’s ability to magnify life’s small dramas into sky-sized emotions that glitters. “Superstar” is a prodigious torch song that fits comfortably among other beloved anthems in the band’s catalog: the blissed-out “Myth,” the romance of “Lover of Mine.” Here, the duo immerses itself in the cosmos, the trick of light of a falling star guiding the nightmare of a relationship’s end. “When you were mine/We fell across the sky,” sings Victoria Legrand as the band once again harnesses an indescribable feeling and bottles it. ISABELIA HERRERABeyoncé, ‘Be Alive’There’s nothing subtle about the message of Black striving and ambition in “Be Alive,” Beyoncé’s song for “King Richard,” the movie about the father and tennis coach of Venus and Serena Williams. “This is hustle personified/Look how we’ve been fighting to stay alive,” she sings. “So when we win we will have pride.” The beat is blunt, steady and determined, and as Beyoncé pushes her voice toward a rasp, she girds herself in vocal harmonies, a multitracked family. The song insists on the community effort behind the triumph. JON PARELESIrreversible Entanglements, ‘Open the Gates’“Open the gates, we arrive — energy time,” Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) commands in the title track to the new album by Irreversible Entanglements, which backs her spoken words with a shape-shifting jazz quartet. “Open the Gates” is a concise but packed two-and-a-half minutes, with a six-beat bass vamp holding together prismatic, multilayered percussion and horns — a welcome that promises eventful times ahead. PARELESGirl Ultra, ‘Amores de Droga’“Amores de Droga” doesn’t require much to glow: a steady four-on-the-floor rhythm, the weightless melodies of the Mexican R&B chanteuse Girl Ultra, a couple of bleeding-heart lyrics. “A mi nadie me enseñó a querer,” Girl Ultra sings. “Yo no nací pa’ enamorarme.” (“No one taught me how to love/I wasn’t born to fall in love.”) It’s a refutation — a detox from poisonous love and all its dangers. HERRERATeddy Afro, ‘Armash (Stand Up)’Ethiopia is consumed in a civil war as its Tigray ethnic minority, formerly in control, moves against a democratically elected government that has been taking its own brutal measures. On Nov. 2, the government declared a state of emergency. That was the day Teddy Afro released “Armash,” a nine-minute plea for Ethiopian unity sung in Amharic. It has two chords, an expanding horn line and a voice with deep sadness and a tinge of Auto-Tune, as he sings, “Longing for a country, here, in my own motherland.” It has logged more than three million listens on YouTube, but music can’t heal everything. PARELESMelanie Charles, ‘All Africa (The Beat)/The Music Is the Magic’In 2017 Melanie Charles self-released “The Girl With the Green Shoes,” a tantalizing, 30-minute mixtape that sampled Kelela, Nina Simone and Buddy Miles, and shined a light on Charles’s rangy talents as a vocalist, flutist and producer. She returns this week with “Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women,” her debut for the major jazz label Verve, and this one is a mixtape too, of sorts: She samples or reworks a song by a different Black woman ancestor on nearly every track. Abbey Lincoln gets covered twice, in a medley that starts with “All Africa,” a rolling rumination on the ancient power of the drum originally on “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.” Charles layers four-part harmony and swathes of effects onto an incantation of “The beat!” and her band kicks into a scorching, slow-motion groove. It opens onto a blasted-out cover of “The Music Is the Magic,” one of Lincoln’s most enchanted compositions, but after just over a minute, it fades out. The proof of concept is there. Now we’re waiting for more. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOShamir, ‘Cisgender’Most of Shamir’s songs have been wrapped in sweetness. Not this one. “Cisgender” is an uncompromising declaration of gender fluidity: “I don’t wanna be a girl, I don’t wanna be a man,” Shamir declares. “I’m just existing on this God-forsaken land/You can take it or leave it.” The track is industrial, with brute-force drums and distorted guitar, insisting that limits are being pushed; variations of a four-letter word pop up in the lyrics. In the video, the singer has deer horns and cloven hooves. PARELESMitski, ‘The Only Heartbreaker’There’s sleek, poppy sheen to Mitski’s latest single, the second from her newly announced sixth album, “Laurel Hell,” but beneath the distortion-scorched surfaces of her early work, she’s been writing melodies this catchy and anthemic since her great 2014 album “Bury Me at Makeout Creek.” Co-written with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, “The Only Heartbreaker” is propelled by punchy percussion and retro-sounding synthesizers that explode into a dramatic conflagration during the song’s bridge. Like so many of Mitski’s best songs, this one is about embracing emotionality and the inevitability of messiness: “I’ll be the bad guy in the play,” she tells a relatively reserved partner. “I’ll be the water main that’s burst and flooding/You’ll be by the window, only watching.” ZOLADZPinegrove, ‘Alaska’“Last month in Alaska,” Evan Stephens Hall sings at the beginning of the latest song from Pinegrove, stretching out those vowels with a twangy sense of yearning. (In the next verse, impressively, he’ll wring a similar kind of musicality out of the word “Orlando.”) Taken from the New Jersey indie-rockers’ forthcoming album “11:11” (out Jan. 28), “Alaska” is one of those cozy winter songs you want to wrap around yourself like a wool blanket. The lyrics showcase the vivid poeticism of Hall’s writing (“like a ladder to the atmosphere, the rungs each come again and again”) while the song’s driving rhythm and fuzzy guitars create an atmosphere that’s at once emotionally restless and as warm as a hearth. ZOLADZCamp Cope, ‘Blue’Following the righteous punk anger of Camp Cope’s great 2018 album “How to Socialize & Make Friends,” the Australian trio’s first single in three years is something of a departure: “Blue” is a twangy, acoustic-driven reflection, its sonic palette akin to something off Waxahatchee’s “St. Cloud.” But subsequent listens reveal singer Georgia Maq’s emotional perception to be as receptive and unflinching as ever, as the song depicts a relationship in which both partners are struggling with their own forms of depression: “It’s all blue, you know I feel it and I bet you do.” ZOLADZLet’s Eat Grandma, ‘Two Ribbons’“Two Ribbons,” the title song of an album due in April, puts a serene facade on all-consuming grief. It backs Jenny Hollingworth’s voice with, mostly, two chords from a calmly strummed electric guitar, along with underlying tones; Velvet Underground songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” are predecessors. Her voice and her words cope with suffering, death, mourning, survival, and moving on; the song is quietly shattering. PARELES.Mdou Moctar, ‘Live at the Niger River’Mdou Moctar, a Tuareg guitarist and singer born in Niger, and the other three members of his band, set up to perform on a bank of the Niger River during a scenic sunrise to play four songs — “Tala Tannam,” “Bissmilahi Atagh,” “Ya Habibti” and “Chismiten” — from the album they released this year, “Afrique Victime.” With just two guitars, bass and calabash, the music is live, unadorned and pristinely recorded. Drone harmonies make it meditative, even as the rhythms and guitar lines streak ahead. PARELESAdam O’Farrill, ‘Ducks’The trumpeter and composer Adam O’Farrill has a way of showing his ambition by turning the volume down, asking the members of his quartet, Stranger Days, to play their spare but not-simple parts with measured intention, so that all four instruments can be heard at the same volume. On “Ducks,” from “Visions of Your Other,” O’Farrill’s just-released album with Stranger Days, the drummer Zack O’Farrill (his brother) leaves space around every drum stroke. The busiest it gets is at the end of the track, when O’Farrill and the tenor saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo hold long notes together in taut harmony. RUSSONELLO More

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      Post Malone and the Weeknd’s Emo Synth-Pop, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jenny Lewis, TNGHT, Dawn Richard and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Post Malone and the Weeknd, ‘One Right Now’Oh, the fragile male ego. “Don’t call me baby when you did me so wrong” is one of the milder jibes hurled at a straying girlfriend by Post Malone as he trades verses with the Weeknd. She may want to get together, but the guys have already moved on, with “one coming over and one right now.” A very 1980s track — springy synthesizer bass line and hook, programmed beat — carries pure, focused resentment about how much damage she’s done to “my feelings.” JON PARELESCharli XCX featuring Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek, ‘New Shapes’“What you want/I ain’t got it,” Charli XCX snarls over a blast of ’80s pop gloss. The British pop provocateur unleashes her ultrapop persona, brooding over cinematic new wave synths. “New Shapes” leverages the kind of vulnerability and insecurity that defines some of Charli’s best work, thanks to pointed verses from her guests (and previous collaborators), the sad girl supergroup of Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek. The whole thing doesn’t quite measure up to the irresistible drama of the beloved 2019 anthem “Gone,” but hey, the girls will take it. ISABELIA HERRERATerrace Martin featuring Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Ty Dolla Sign and James Fauntleroy, ‘Drones’The polymathic musician and producer Terrace Martin is widely known for helping Kendrick Lamar sculpt his jazz-tinted masterpiece, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” but he’d been an asset in Los Angeles studios since the mid-2000s, when he first fell in with Snoop Dogg. The title track from Martin’s new solo album, “Drones,” is something like a reading of his résumé, with features from four resounding names in L.A. hip-hop. The dapper, G-funk beat is a braid of plunky guitar, pulsing electric piano and 808 percussion; the lyrics — sung partly by Lamar, in a sly shrug — describe a booty-call relationship that’s exactly as shallow as it looks to the outside world, and maybe not much more satisfying. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODawn Richard, ‘Loose Your Mind’Following her eclectic album “The Second Line,” released earlier this year, Dawn Richard’s new track for the Adult Swim Singles series is all bass-heavy, aqueous funk. Her voice shape-shifts throughout “Loose Your Mind,” so at times it almost feels like she’s duetting with different sides of her prismatic personality. “Ain’t really nothing wrong when the feeling is golden,” she spits at the beginning, before a melodic chorus of Dawns responds in agreement: “Solid gold.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTNGHT, ‘Tums’Few songs defined the hypermaximalist sound of the 2010s as succinctly as the electronic duo TNGHT’s “Higher Ground,” that brassy, ever-escalating EDM anthem that was sampled by Kanye West on “Yeezus” and — I will die on this hill — has to be the inspiration behind the “Arby’s: We Have the Meats” jingle, right? After a long hiatus, the producers Hudson Mohawke and Lunice reunited as TNGHT in 2019, and have now released a new track called “Tums,” which Lunice says was created according to the duo’s guiding principles: “Keep it really fun. Dumb. Hard-hitting. Don’t overwork it.” Sampled giggles and slide whistles keep things fizzy on the surface, while the track’s booming low end guides it through a series of roller-coaster drops. “Tums” might not be as innovative as the pair’s earlier work, but maybe that’s because everything else has been sounding like them for years now. ZOLADZSimi, ‘Woman’With “Woman,” the Nigerian singer and songwriter Simi offers a tribute, corrective and update to Fela Anikalupo Kuti, who invented Afrobeat in the 1970s in songs including “Lady,” which scoffed at European feminism. “Woman” mixes current electronic Afrobeats with the funk of Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat, while quoting Kuti songs between her own assertions about women’s strengths: “She won’t pay attention to the intimidation.” The rhetoric is tricky; the beat is unstoppable. PARELESGregory Porter featuring Cherise, ‘Love Runs Deeper’The standard elements of Gregory Porter’s style run through “Love Runs Deeper”: lyrics that linger on the difficulties — and the bounties — of care and connection; twinkling orchestral strings; a gradual build that allows his burly, baritone voice to unfurl itself with just enough tension and release. But this is more of a direct-delivery power ballad than most of Porter’s tunes: The melody wouldn’t feel out of place on an Adele or Halsey record, and it’s liable to get lodged in your head quickly and stay there. With supporting vocals from the young British singer Cherise, “Love Runs Deeper” serves as the soundtrack to Disney’s annual holiday-season advertisement, which this year is a short film (full of self-referential touches, like a Buzz Lightyear cameo) titled “The Stepdad.” The song is also included on a new Porter compilation, “Still Rising,” which features a mix of his greatest hits, B-sides and new songs. RUSSONELLOJenny Lewis, ‘Puppy and a Truck’“My 40s are kicking my ass, and handing them to me in a margarita glass” — how’s that for an opening line? Something about the gentle country strum and laid-back croon of Jenny Lewis’s new stand-alone single recalls her old band Rilo Kiley’s great 2004 album “More Adventurous,” though her perspective has been updated with the unglamorous realities and hard-won wisdom of middle age. After chronicling the wreckage of a few recent relationships, the eternally witty Lewis arrives at a mantra of tough-talking self-reliance: “If you feel like giving up, shut up — get a puppy and a truck.” ZOLADZChastity Belt, ‘Fear’Lydia Lund spends much of the Washington indie-rock band Chastity Belt’s new song “Fear” hollering until she’s hoarse, “It’s just the fear, it’s just the fear.” Apparently she recorded the vocals while she was staying at her parents’ house, and her commitment to the song was so intense that her mother knocked on the door to make sure she was OK because she “thought I was doing some kind of primal scream therapy,” Lund said. “And I guess in a way I am.” Lund’s impassioned delivery and the song’s soaring guitars turn “Fear” into a cathartic response to overwhelming anxiety, and provide a powerful soundtrack for slaying that dreaded mind killer. ZOLADZRadiohead, ‘Follow Me Around’“Kid A Mnesia,” the new, expansive compilation of Radiohead songs from their paradigm-shifting sessions in 1999-2000, has unearthed studio versions of songs that the band performed but never committed to albums, notably “Follow Me Around,” a guitar-strumming crescendo of paranoia. The video, apparently made with a small but persistent camera drone, nicely multiplies the dread. PARELESLorde, ‘Hold No Grudge’Lorde whisper-sings through the first half of “Hold No Grudge,” a bonus track added to her album “Solar Power.” It’s a memory of an early love that ended without a resolution; later messages went unanswered. Midway through, she’s still bouncing syllables off guitar strums, but the sound of the song comes into focus and Lorde realizes, “We both might have done some growing up.” She’s ready to let the passage of time offer solace. PARELESOmar Apollo featuring Kali Uchis, ‘Bad Life’Omar Apollo is known for combining cool funk grooves, slick charisma and sensual falsettos. But on “Bad Life,” his new single featuring Kali Uchis, the young singer-songwriter peels back the layers and puts his armor aside for a bare-bones exercise in vulnerability. “Bad Life” revels in contempt, burning slow and low alongside a soft-focus electric guitar. Apollo opens the track with a heart-piercer: “You give me nothing/But I still change it to something.” Ouch. The singer’s voice curls into anguished melismas, and when the orchestral strings soar in halfway through, the resentment cuts crystal clear. HERRERAAlt-J, ‘Get Better’Alt-J created a serene and almost unbearably mournful song with “Get Better,” a fingerpicked chronicle about the profundity and mundanity of a loved one’s slow death like Paul Simon’s “Darling Lorraine” and Mount Eerie’s “Real Death.” It’s profoundly self-conscious, citing the similarly acoustic arrangement of Elliott Smith; it offers personal moments, stray events, reminiscences, belongings, thoughts of “front line workers,” admissions that “I still pretend you’re only out of sight in another room/smiling at your phone.” The loss is only personal, but shattering. PARELES More

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      Pat Martino, Jazz Guitarist Who Overcame Amnesia, Dies at 77

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      He was one of the genre’s most acclaimed players when brain surgery left him with no memory. But he recovered and made music for another three decades.Pat Martino, whose trailblazing career as a jazz guitarist seemed to end prematurely in 1980 when brain surgery left him with no memory, but who then painstakingly relearned the instrument, and his own past, and went on to three more decades of innovative musicianship, died on Monday at his home in South Philadelphia. He was 77.Joseph Donofrio, his longtime manager, said the cause was chronic respiratory disorder, which had forced Mr. Martino to stop performing after a tour of Italy in November 2018.Mr. Martino’s playing began drawing attention when he was still a teenager. Having been expelled from a Roman Catholic high school in 10th grade (“Something took place between me and one of the priests there,” he wrote years later. “If I remember correctly, it had something to do with bubble gum.”), he became a professional musician, joining the singer Lloyd Price’s big band and then, in 1962, the saxophonist Willis Jackson’s combo.In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”Mr. Martino at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2006, accompanied by Albert Heath on drums.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn the book, he described going through a series of misdiagnoses and ill-advised treatment, including electroshock. He retired from performing and turned to teaching at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, but his problems worsened; at one point, he wrote, a doctor told him he had two hours to live.A condition called arteriovenous malformation, a tangling of arteries and veins, was diagnosed. An aneurysm resulted in emergency surgery to remove a large tumor; when he awoke, he had no memory.“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.“He can play chorus after chorus of bebop lines, zigzagging through the chromatic harmonies of his own tunes,” Mr. Pareles wrote. “But more often than not, he turns bebop conventions sideways. He starts a line on an unexpected beat, breaks his runs up to insist on a single note or riff, inserts odd-length leaps into standard licks and shifts accents around the beat. His playing is articulately wayward, approaching tunes from odd angles and taking rewarding tangents; he makes song forms seem slippery and mysterious.”In 1987, Mr. Martino released a new album. It was called “The Return.”Mr. Martino at a nightclub in Asbury Park, N.J., in 1967, the year he released his first album, “El Hombre.”Pat Martino CollectionPatrick Azzara (he took Martino, which his father had also used, as a stage name) was born on Aug. 25, 1944, in Philadelphia to Carmen and Jean (Orlando) Azzara. His father, known as Mickey, was a tailor who also worked as a guitarist and singer. He would hide his guitar from young Pat, though in the autobiography Mr. Martino suggests that this “was a bit of reverse psychology on his part” — once the boy took up the instrument, his father encouraged his career and introduced him to various musicians.Mr. Martino was in bands as a boy, including one with the future pop star Bobby Rydell, who lived nearby. One of the guitar greats Mr. Martino’s father took him to meet, backstage after a concert in Atlantic City, was Les Paul, who asked young Pat to play a little something.“What came out of that guitar was unbelievable,” Mr. Paul wrote in the liner notes to Mr. Martino’s 1970 album, “Desperado.” “His dexterity and his picking style were absolutely unique. He held his pick as one would hold a demitasse … pinkie extended, very polite. The politeness disappeared when pick met string.”As Mr. Martino grew more experienced, his view of jazz evolved, largely shaped by Eastern philosophies; he did not, he told The Examiner in 1975, consider himself a jazz musician.“Jazz is a way of life,” he said. “It’s not an idiom of music. Jazz is spontaneous improvisation. If you ever leave your house with nowhere to go, and just walk for pleasure, observing and looking around, you’ll find that you improvise.”And he did not consider himself a “guitar player,” he said, though he once did.“I no longer view myself that way because I don’t want to be depersonalized by my instrument,” he said. “I’m an observer of my environment, including the guitar; I see the guitar in everything.”In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”Mr. Martino is survived by his wife of 26 years, Ayako Asahi.Mr. Martino had other health issues over the years, but Mr. Donofrio, his longtime manager, said his resilience was remarkable.“Every time I thought he was going to be down and out,” he said, “he came back stronger than before.”Jeff Roth contributed research. More

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      La Grenouille NYC: Classic Cuisine and the Owner’s Lusty Crooning

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      Around 9:15 on a recent Wednesday evening, the mood in the full but otherwise serene dining room of La Grenouille suddenly shifted.The lights brightened. A small band began to play loudly. Out of the kitchen emerged a man in sunglasses, sporting a Cheshire cat grin and hips that swayed like a palm tree in a storm. He burst into a rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon,” in a voice that combined the boom of a sportscaster with the swagger of an Elvis impersonator. For almost half an hour, he strutted around this French restaurant known for its towering floral displays and airy soufflés, perching on diners’ tables and even growling like a cat.Who was this brassy balladeer? None other than the restaurant’s majority owner, Philippe Masson.Some guests cheered. Others took photos. As Mr. Masson, 60, told how he once romanced Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a woman could be heard saying, “This is the last dying gasp of the patriarchy.”Mr. Masson and his house band perform the Gershwin tune “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLa Grenouille, just off Fifth Avenue on East 52nd Street, is among the last old-school French restaurants left in New York City, a contemporary of lost gustatory temples like Lutèce, La Caravelle and La Côte Basque. Much of its reputation has rested on how little it changed during nearly 60 years in business.So the restaurant’s transformation into a raucous late-night jazz lounge has been jarring to some diners, thrilling to many others and surprising to almost everybody. (The performances, which take place on all four nights the restaurant is open each week, aren’t mentioned when you make a reservation online, though they are noted on the La Grenouille website.)“It was definitely like a caricature of Frank Sinatra,” said Caroline Askew, 37, a creative director of a Manhattan design studio, who ate at La Grenouille in July. “But it was fun. I don’t know, I think we needed that sense of humor.”It was one of the first times she’d dined indoors since the pandemic began. “It felt like, OK, this is why I live here,” she said. “I love the old New York-y characters.”To Mr. Masson, who has no formal musical training and who broke into song four times during a half-hour interview for this article, the musical gig feels like a fulfillment of a lifelong destiny. “I seem to move people — I can’t explain it,” he said.Some have been moved in less desirable ways.“It ruined the entire ambience and tenor of the evening,” said Carrie Cort, 77, who lives in Washington, D.C., and has been going to La Grenouille for 28 years. She and her husband recently celebrated his 80th birthday there, and felt the performance was more a disturbance than a delight. “If he wants to open up a nightclub, good, but that’s not what La Grenouille is.”Many guests are excited about the live music, the first in the restaurant’s nearly 60-year history. Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLa Grenouille has been a Midtown oasis of tradition and tranquillity since Gisèle Masson and her husband, Charles Masson Sr., opened it in 1962. But the restaurant has also kicked up some public drama. In 2014, their son Charles Masson Jr. stepped down from his longtime role as general manager amid a bitter, longstanding dispute with Philippe, his younger brother, who then took over. (Asked for comment about the new musical act, Charles Masson Jr. said, “As much as I may have an opinion, I’d rather keep it to myself.”)Philippe Masson started performing casually for outdoor diners at La Grenouille in July 2020, as a tribute to the restaurant’s captain Bertrand Marteville, who had died of Covid-19. When indoor dining resumed two months later, Mr. Masson removed some tables and replaced them with a stage. He hired four jazz musicians and named them the Buster Frog Quartet, a nod to the restaurant’s name, which means “the frog.”Mr. Masson learned songs like “La Vie En Rose” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” The goal, he said, was to “bring back life to the city.”He soon realized that he had unlocked a passion. “People are saying, ‘Never mind the food or flowers — we are coming here to hear you sing, Philippe.’”Between sets of about 30 minutes, Mr. Masson still runs the kitchen, oversees the dining room and creates the restaurant’s signature flower arrangements. “Music is energizing,” he said. “It picks me up.”Mr. Masson started performing to honor an employee who died from Covid-19, and found a new passion in the process.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesHe knows that not everyone appreciates his act. “One out of 100 say, ‘Oh, Philippe, this is not La Grenouille,’” he said. “I say, it is fitting for me and it is fitting for most.”It’s good for business, too, he said. “In the past we didn’t have a third seating. I could give food away and it wouldn’t happen. Now we have something to create more income for that elusive late-night seating.” (A French singer, Naïma Pöhler, also performs three nights a week, and the singers Lucy Wijnands and Ashley Pezzotti take the stage on Saturdays.)The music has attracted a younger clientele. Liana Khatri, 30, worried that the restaurant would be too stuffy when she visited in August — until Mr. Masson came onstage. “You didn’t care if the guy’s voice was good,” she said. “That was not the point. It was more the experience.”“There are so many trendy restaurants in New York City,” she added. “There is something to be said for a place that is not trying to be cool.”Eventually, Mr. Masson wants to turn the private dining room upstairs into a jazz lounge, where he will keep performing.And what of the employees who hear his crooning night after night? One busboy simply shrugged and said, “You get used to it.”Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      Alicia Keys’s Hypnotic Love Jam, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Anaïs Mitchell, Hurray for the Riff Raff, ASAP Rocky and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Alicia Keys, ‘Best of Me’The steady, diligent beat is from Sade’s “Cherish the Day” by way of Raphael Saadiq; the promises of loyalty, honesty and absolute devotion are from Alicia Keys as she channels Sade’s utterly self-sacrificing love. “We could build a castle from tears,” Keys vows. The track is hypnotic and open-ended, fading rather than resolving, as if it could go on and on. It’s from a double album coming Dec. 10 featuring two versions of the songs: “Originals,” produced by Keys, and “Unlocked,” produced by Keys and Mike Will Made-It. JON PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Rhododendron’The first single from Hurray for the Riff Raff’s forthcoming album “Life on Earth” is frisky and poetic, contrasting the wisdom of the natural world with the chaos of humanity. The New Orleans singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra (who uses they/she pronouns) is so enthralled with the wonders of plant life that they are able to extract lyricism from simply listing off some famous flora (“night blooming jasmine, deadly nightshade”) in a wonderfully Dylan-esque growl. The chorus, though, comes as a warning in the face of ecological destruction: “Don’t turn your back on the mainland.” LINDSAY ZOLADZKylie Minogue and Jessie Ware, ‘Kiss of Life’Following her excellent 2020 disco-revival record “What’s Your Pleasure?” (and this year’s Platinum Pleasure Edition, which contained enough top-tier bonus material to make an equally excellent EP) Jessie Ware gets the ultimate co-sign from the dancing queen herself, Kylie Minogue, on this playful duet. Their breathy vocals echo throughout the lush arrangement, as they trade whispered innuendo (“Cherry syrup on my tongue/how about a little fun?”) and eventually join together in sumptuous harmony. ZOLADZBaba Harare featuring Kae Chaps and Joseph Tivafire, ‘Vaccine’Baba Harare, from Zimbabwe, is a master of the genre called jiti: a speedy four-against-six beat that carries stuttering, syncopated guitars and deep gospel-tinged harmony vocals. In “Vaccine,” he’s joined by fellow Zimbabweans Kae Chaps and Joseph Tivafire, and between the hurtling beat and the call-and-response vocals, the song is pure joy. PARELESBitchin Bajas, ‘Outer Spaceways Incorporated’The latest project from the freewheeling ambient drone group Bitchin Bajas is boldly conceptual: a homage to one of the Chicago trio’s formative heroes, Sun Ra. As daunting as it may sound to reinterpret some of the cosmic jazz god’s most innovative compositions, Bitchin Bajas approach the challenge with a playful ingenuity. Take their cover of “Outer Spaceways Incorporated,” which in its original form is a loose, interstellar groove. Bitchin Bajas refract it instead through the lens of one of their other major influences, Wendy Carlos (hence the title “Switched on Ra”) and turn it into a kind of retro-futuristic waltz. The guest vocalist Jayve Montgomery uses an Electronic Wind Instrument to great effect, enlivening the song with an energy that’s both eerie and moving. ZOLADZASAP Rocky, ‘Sandman’ASAP Rocky has been featured on plenty of other artists’ tracks over the past few years, but “Sandman” — released to commemorate his breakthrough 2011 mixtape “Live.Love.ASAP” finally coming to streaming services — is his first new solo song since 2018. Produced by Kelvin Krash and ASAP fave Clams Casino, “Sandman” toggles between hazy atmospherics and sudden gearshifts into the more exacting side of Rocky’s flow. Plus, it gives him an opportunity to practice his French: “Merci beaucoup, just like Moulin Rouge/And I know I can, can.” Quelle surprise! ZOLADZCollectif Mali Kura, ‘L’Appel du Mali Kura’The project Collectif Mali Kura gathered 20 singers and rappers to share a call for hard work, civic responsibility (including paying taxes) and national unity in Mali. Sung in many languages, with bits of melody and instrumental flourishes that hint at multiple traditions, the song starts as a plaint and turns into an affirmation of possibility. PARELESJorge Drexler and C. Tangana, ‘Tocarte’“Tocarte” (“To Touch You”) is the second deceptively skeletal collaboration released by Jorge Drexler, from Uruguay, and C. Tangana, from Spain; the first, a tale of a showbiz has-been titled “Nominao,” has been nominated for a Latin Grammy as best alternative song. “Tocarte” is a pandemic-era track about longing for physical contact: It constructs a taut, ingenious phantom gallop of a beat out of plucked acoustic guitar notes, hand percussion and sampled voices, and neither Drexler nor Tangana raises his voice as they envision long-awaited embraces. PARELESHayes Carll, ‘Nice Things’In the twangy, foot-stomping, gravel-voiced, fiddle-topped country-rocker “Nice Things,” which opens his new album, “You Get It All,” the Texan songwriter Hayes Carll imagines a visit from God. She (yes, she) runs into pollution, over-policing and close-minded religion. “This is why I blessed you with compassion/This is why I said to love your neighbor,” she notes, before realizing, “This is why y’all can’t have nice things.” PARELESAnaïs Mitchell, ‘Bright Star’Before she wrote the beloved Tony-winning musical “Hadestown,” Anaïs Mitchell was best known as a gifted if perpetually underrated folk singer-songwriter with a knack for traditional storytelling. The stage success of “Hadestown” (which itself began life as a 2010 Mitchell album) forced her to put her career as a solo artist on hold, but early next year she’ll return with a self-titled album, her first solo release in a decade. Its leadoff single “Bright Star” is a worthy reintroduction to the openhearted luminosity of Mitchell’s voice and lyricism: “I have sailed in all directions, have followed your reflection to the farthest foreign shore,” she sings atop gently strummed acoustic chords, with all the contented warmth of someone who, after a long time away, has at last returned home. ZOLADZAoife O’Donovan featuring Allison Russell, ‘Prodigal Daughter’Aoife O’Donovan sings delicately about a reunion that could hardly be more fraught; after seven years, a daughter returns to her mother with a new baby, needing a home and knowing full well that “forgiveness won’t come easy.” O’Donovan reverses what would be a singer’s typical reflexes; as drama and tension rise, her voice grows quieter and clearer, while Allison Russell joins her with ghostly harmonies. As a tiptoeing string band backs O’Donovan’s pleas, Tim O’Brien plays echoes of Irish folk tunes on mandola, a musical hint at multigenerational bonds. PARELESMarissa Nadler, ‘Bessie, Did You Make It?’How about a chillingly beautiful modern murder ballad to cap off spooky season? The folk singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler’s new album “The Path of the Clouds,” (out Friday on, appropriately enough, Sacred Bones) was partially inspired by her quarantine binge-watch of choice: “Unsolved Mysteries.” The opening track “Bessie, Did You Make It?” creates a misty atmosphere of reverb-heavy piano and arpeggiated guitar, as Nadler tells a tale of a nearly century-old boat accident that was never quite explained. “Did you make it?” she asks her elusive subject, who seems to have perished that day along with her husband. Or: “Did you fake it, leave someone else’s bones?” ZOLADZArtifacts, ‘Song for Joseph Jarman’Artifacts features three of the leading creative improvisers on the Chicago scene: the flutist Nicole Mitchell, the cellist Tomeka Reid and the drummer Mike Reed. All are deeply entwined in the lineage of their home city, and on “Song for Joseph Jarman” — from Artifacts’ sophomore release, “ … and Then There’s This” — the trio pays homage to an influential ancestor with this slow, hushed, deeply attentive group improvisation. It’s not unlike something Jarman himself might have played. Reid and Mitchell hold long tones more than they move around, sounding as if they’re listening for a response from within each note. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      A BRIC in Flux Turns Out an Intimate, Focused JazzFest

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      Though it was operating on fewer cylinders because of the pandemic, for the first time in its seven-year history the event sold out all three nights of music in Brooklyn.As jazz festivals go, BRIC JazzFest is on the small but ambitious side, aspiring to a few ideas at once. It operates in Brooklyn with something close to Manhattan-scale resources, but like BRIC’s flagship music series, the Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, it aims to serve a broad audience, not a particularly affluent one.To a greater degree than Celebrate Brooklyn! — a series of mostly free summertime performances in Prospect Park — JazzFest spotlights artists who live and work in the borough, though it brings in some of the best from out of town too. In the process, its organizers cut away at some of the hierarchical thinking that other jazz festivals, at various levels, often reinforce.After three nights of music this past weekend from across the borough’s varied landscape, it was in the closing moments that all these strands came together most effortlessly, in what might have been the festival’s most informal moment.The multi-instrumentalist Louis Cato was leading a jam session, smiling mirthfully from behind an electric bass, guiding a rotating band through deep-pocket covers of jazz standards and D’Angelo B-sides. At one point he followed Yahzarah — a vocalist and longtime veteran of the neo-soul scene, giving a bravura performance — from a coldly grooving cover of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” to a simmering vamp on James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”It felt like a festival-size version of something that you might find happening at a small bar in Brooklyn — and that ought to happen at more of them. Whether it fit perfectly under the banner of a “jazz festival” felt both uncertain and unimportant. Here were pieces of popular culture coming together; what justified its place as the culminating act was the virtuosity of the players, and the way they seemed to have earned the crowd’s constant curiosity.The crowds had been good all weekend, including for strong sets by high-profile headliners like the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who closed Thursday night, and the Sun Ra Arkestra, Friday’s finale. This was the first time in BRIC JazzFest’s seven-year history that it had sold out completely each night, putting some wind into the sails of an organization that has found itself deeply in flux.Much of BRIC’s top leadership has departed in recent months, leaving it in a period of transition as it looks to move beyond the coronavirus pandemic. Shortly before the festival, Lia Camille Crockett, BRIC’s director of performing arts, announced that she was taking a job running NPR’s live-events operation.But in an interview, she said that BRIC had allowed her to experiment during the pandemic in ways that paid off, and she expects the organization to ride out its current straits with a similar resourcefulness. “One of the things I’ve loved about working at BRIC is that it’s always been an environment where you can ask questions, and question why things have been done a certain way,” she said.“It was a year of experimentation,” she added. “Without saying, ‘We have a whole new manifesto,’ it was about taking opportunities where we could to experiment and turn certain things on their head.”Nick Hakim performed with Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist and poet two generations his senior he’d collaborated with earlier this year.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesAt Celebrate Brooklyn! this year, with attendance and sponsorships already expected to be lower than usual, there was extra room for “creative risk-taking,” Crockett said. During the pandemic, she and her team also introduced the idea of having a Brooklyn-based musician help book BRIC JazzFest, along with herself and the producer Brice Rosenbloom. At last year’s digital-only festival, the bassist and singer Meshell Ndegeocello came on board. This year, the artist-curator was the vocalist Madison McFerrin.In an interview, McFerrin said she had put a priority on keeping the curation close to home, mostly by booking musicians she knew personally from around the Brooklyn scene. She saw it as “an opportunity to just put my friends on,” which led her to think about the natural “range and extension of jazz,” as a way of making music.Getting an artist to open their own contacts list seems a solid way of ensuring that a festival has a cozy and coherent feel to it. And it paid off for McFerrin in a personal way. Her headlining set on Saturday, performed solo with a digital control station beside her, went awry at the start when her loops pedal malfunctioned.Midway through the set, she tried to get the audience to clap a fast and not-uncomplicated pattern as she led into “No Time to Lose,” a peppery original tune. Cato, a longtime friend of McFerrin’s, was standing in the crowd, and he saw what the moment needed. He leapt onstage and saddled up behind the drum set, guiding the crowd through the beat.McFerrin first came in contact with BRIC soon after moving to Brooklyn seven years ago, when an old friend approached her to create a short documentary about her life as an artist for BRIC’s online TV channel. In addition to presenting music, BRIC is the borough’s largest creator of public-access TV content; a provider of media literacy training and documentary resources to Brooklyn residents; and an arts education group active in public schools across the borough.The soul vocalist Nick Hakim also first interacted with BRIC through its documentary work, when the filmmaker Terence Nance made a short film about him for a BRIC series, “Brooklyn Is Masquerading as the World.”This year Hakim and Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist and poet two generations his senior, released a short and enchanted album of tunes they’d written together in Nathanson’s South Brooklyn home. I first saw them play some of these songs live in Nathanson’s driveway, during a little public concert he’d thrown for the neighborhood in May, around his 70th birthday, but Friday night marked the first time the songs had been presented in concert with a full band.The playing was as loose and unforced as it is on the album, and both audience and band seemed aware of the music’s value.Sasha Berliner, a rising young vibraphonist also based in Brooklyn, appeared on the gallery stage — located in the building’s amphitheater-style foyer — with a vigorous, groove-oriented new band. Parrying with the keyboardist Julius Rodriguez, who was on Rhodes, Berliner sounded fully in command, showing meaningful growth from the last time she’d played BRIC JazzFest, two years earlier.Stas Thee Boss performed an update on a ’90s indie hip-hop sound.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesThe gallery stage was burdened with tough acoustics and unforgivingly bright lighting (it’s in a glorified lobby, after all), but it boasted a constant, varied flow of acts that offered a sense of what a working musician’s life sounds like in Brooklyn these days, across a variety of scenes.Stas Thee Boss, an M.C. who moved to Brooklyn from the West Coast a few years ago, brought her group’s throbbing update on a ’90s indie hip-hop sound. The guitarist Yasser Tejeda led a quartet that was one-half percussion, blending rhythmic traditions from his home country, the Dominican Republic, that are rarely put together. Adam O’Farrill, a trumpeter who has lived in the borough almost his entire life, opened the festival on Thursday with a set of twisty new music from a forthcoming album with his quartet, Stranger Days.This year, operating on fewer cylinders because of the pandemic, BRIC JazzFest didn’t include a full week of workshops, film screenings and other free community programming, as it typically would. But with a smaller focus and a slightly more intimate feel, it actually widened the lens to show what’s already happening far outside its doors. More