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      glaive Showcases His Less Hyper Pop, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Raveena, the Weather Station, Immanuel Wilkins 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.glaive, ‘Icarus’The ostensibly summery, mid-tempo “Icarus” shows off the relatively less hyper side of the hyperpop star glaive, though its lines still hit like angst-ridden daggers: “We’re flying too close to the sun,” he sings to his romantic partner in crime. A highlight from the deluxe edition of his 2021 EP “All Dogs Go to Heaven” (cheekily retitled “Old Dog, New Tricks”),“Icarus” has an instantly catchy hook that shows why many hail glaive as the potential breakout star of his underground subgenre. But the song still retains an appealingly edgy sense of emotional mayhem: “I’m setting fire to my room, ’cause I don’t know what else to do!” LINDSAY ZOLADZThe Smile, ‘The Smoke’The Smile — Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead with Tom Skinner, a drummer from Sons of Kemet — has quickly demonstrated its range. The trio snarled through its first single, “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” only to play things cool on its second, “The Smoke.” A minute-long instrumental intro sticks to syncopated bass and dub-echoed drums, in a 10-bar pattern that threatens to trip up unwary dancers as it seems to switch between 4/4 and waltz. Yorke’s high vocals and a hazy horn arrangement join the rhythmic crosscurrent as he sings about what might be the heat of desire or destruction, crooning, “Smoke wakes me from my sleep.” JON PARELESImmanuel Wilkins, ‘Fugitive Ritual, Selah’Peaceful and incantatory, “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” offers a moment to re-center amid the dicey, kinetic tour de force that is “The 7th Hand,” the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s second album with his quartet. Wilkins is more often in a high-octane mode, but here he nearly caresses each note. He wrote “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” — which weaves through a melody built around harmonic shifts until finally landing on a repetitious, soothing coda — as a tribute to spaces like the Black church, where a distance from the white gaze allows for freer expression. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOPierre Kwenders, ‘Papa Wemba’The Congolese musician Pierre Kwenders was born in Kinshasa and has lived in Montreal since 2001. “Papa Wemba,” from an album due in April, is a tribute to the singer, bandleader and snappy dresser Papa Wemba, who brought Congolese rumba, or soukous, to an international audience from the 1970s until his death in 2016. “Papa Wemba” adds electronic clout to the soukous beat — it sounds like it’s being punched out on a Teletype — and stirs up a rhythmic vortex with echoing guitars, gruffly sung and chanted vocals and a twin-saxophone riff that approximates the horns saying “Papa Wemba.” PARELESRaveena featuring Vince Staples, ‘Secret’Serpentine and luxurious, Raveena’s “Secret” is a pulsing after-hours affair. With her barely there voice, the R&B singer whispers silken come-ons, a steady thrum ricocheting off a muted tabla drum. It’s retrograde but futuristic, like the forthcoming concept album it appears on, which tells the story of a space princess from ancient Punjab. “Wait a sec, I’ll hit you right back,” Raveena coos in the chorus. You can almost feel her hot breath on your neck. ISABELIA HERRERASaba featuring G Herbo, ‘Survivor’s Guilt’“Survivor’s Guilt” is filled with wounds, yet Saba’s flow is breathless, like he’s outrunning the aftermath of trauma in real time. “I’m trying to move better/What’s really eating when you from a food desert,” he raps, echoing the hyper-speed flows of chopper forebears like Twista. A guest verse from G Herbo cements the song as an unforgettably Chicago linkup. HERRERAEx-Void, ‘Churchyard’Reuniting two members of the too-short-lived noise-pop band Joanna Gruesome, Ex-Vöid is a relatively new, jangly British power-pop group set to release its debut album later this year. The lush, taut “Churchyard” retains their previous band’s keen sense of melody, but this time favoring the sort of clean, bright guitar tones that broadcast their penchant for pop songcraft loud and clear. ZOLADZTess Parks, ‘Happy Birthday Forever’Tess Parks’s voice has an alluring, husky grain on “Happy Birthday Forever,” the first single from her upcoming album, “And Those Who Were Seen Dancing.” The Toronto-born artist hasn’t released an LP since her 2013 debut “Blood Hot,” and has since been collaborating with Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but “Happy Birthday Forever” proves she’s a confident, enchanting presence on her own. The song is propelled by a jaunty beat and a bright piano riff, but there’s a dark undercurrent to the way Parks delivers her lines, like she’s exhaling cigarette smoke from the corner of her mouth: “Get me outta here.” ZOLADZDora Jar, ‘Lagoon’A lurching drumbeat, a barely tuned piano: The songwriter Dora Jar — who has lived in New York, California, Poland and England — doesn’t need much more to profess her longing in “Lagoon,” in terms both mundane and surreal: “My heart is a crustacean/Could you come and crack it open?” There’s an Elton John backbeat in her piano chords, but also a 21st-century sense of possibility, as vocal overdubs surround her and, for some reason, what sounds like a banjo surfaces near the end of the tune. PARELESThe Weather Station, ‘Endless Time’“It’s only the end of an endless time,” Tamara Lindeman sings in the opening moments of this shattering new ballad, the first song released from the Weather Station’s upcoming album, “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars.” Lindeman has said the March 4 LP is a kind of companion piece to last year’s excellent “Ignorance,” and “Endless Time” certainly mirrors its predecessor’s chilling evocation of loss as well as its elegant weaving together of the personal and ecological. But while “Ignorance” experimented with fractured, jazzy rhythms, “Endless Time” echoes through a sparse negative space — just a haunting piano accompaniment and Lindeman’s elegiac vocals. Any “companion record” to a strong artistic statement risks being dismissed as a collection of B-sides, but this arresting first single is Lindeman bringing her “A” game. ZOLADZDonna Missal, ‘Insecure’​​Sooner or later, every sound ricochets around Donna Missal’s “Insecure”: ticks and taps of percussion, calm keyboard note clusters, grainy simulated strings and whispery vocals that split into harmonies, get pitched up and down and waft up out of nowhere. “Never want to see you again,” she announces as the song begins, and she goes on to denounce her “baby” as an unapologetic liar. But the confrontation is hushed, private and solitary, as if it’s taking place in a sonic hall of mirrors. PARELESKatie Dey, ‘Real Love’The Australian songwriter Katie Dey is both deadpan and devastating as she sings about an abusive relationship and her own self-destructive impulses in “Real Love.” The verses have an offhand sound — a thumpy drumbeat, dinky keyboard chords — as she recalls how “I made myself small/you made yourself big,” but her vocals take on hyperpop glitches and an Auto-Tuned edge on the way to a chorus that crashes in with distorted guitars, as she declares, “I want love that hurts.” PARELESTyler Mitchell featuring Marshall Allen, ‘A Call for All Demons’The bassist Tyler Mitchell played briefly in Sun Ra’s Arkestra during the 1980s, then put in decades of work as a straight-ahead jazz musician before rejoining the group about 10 years ago, after its patriarch had died. By now, he’s a deeply embedded member of the band. Leading his own sextet on a new album, “Dancing Shadows” — with the Arkestra luminary and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, 97, as a featured guest — Mitchell covers a range of Sun Ra material alongside his own tunes; throughout, he guides things from below with the same bobbing, pulpy vigor that makes him sound at home in the Arkestra. “A Call for All Demons” is a tune that Sun Ra first recorded in the 1950s, and on Mitchell’s album it serves as the opening invocation. RUSSONELLONyokabi Kariūki, ‘Equator Song’Nyokabi Kariūki’s “Equator Song” radiates the dissonance of bilingual (or even trilingual) existence. Kariūki, who grew up in Kenya and now lives in Maryland, recorded the song on a trip to Kenya’s Laikipia county, collaging the chatter of weaverbirds — wordless, sky-high vocalizations floating into the ether. “You’ll find my soul on someone’s tongue,” she sings in English, harnessing the experience of living in a language that will never be your own. But instead of lingering in the discomfort or seeking some empty form of reconnection, Kariūki moves fluidly between English, Maa and Kiswahili. It is an acceptance of the diaspora’s constant condition of loss, and the beauty that exists within it. HERRERA More

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      Beegie Adair, a Jazz Master in Country Music’s Capital, Dies at 84

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      In a city defined by honky-tonks and string ties, she had a 60-year career as a jazz pianist and a mainstay of the local scene.Beegie Adair, whose status as a renowned jazz pianist was all the more noteworthy for the place where she built her career — Nashville, the home of country music — died on Jan. 23 at her residence in Franklin, Tenn. She was 84.Monica Ramey, her manager and frequent vocal partner, confirmed the death. She did not provide a cause but said Ms. Adair had been in failing health.If you happened to live in Nashville and found yourself more a fan of Cole Porter than Porter Waggoner, chances are you came across Ms. Adair at some point in her six-decade career. Starting in the early 1960s, she could be found at least once a week playing at the Carousel, a downtown nightclub, or later at F. Scott’s, a restaurant in the Green Hills neighborhood.Being a jazz musician in Nashville is something like being a surfer in Las Vegas, and those who make it need flexibility and hustle — qualities Ms. Adair possessed in surplus.She played hotel lobbies and retirement homes. She and her husband, Billy Adair, wrote jingles for television commercials. And she was in constant demand as a session musician, appearing on more than 100 albums by a wide range of artists, including Dolly Parton, Henry Mancini, and Mama Cass Elliot.“She was omnipresent,” Roger Spencer, who played bass in the Beegie Adair Trio, said in an interview. “If there was an opportunity to play, she was there.”Ms. Adair mostly played American songbook standards, with a restrained, relaxed technique. She adapted to the venue: If it was a restaurant, she receded to the background; in a club, she could dominate the room.“I’ve played with her in just about every kind of musical setting you can play in Nashville over the years,” George Tidwell, a veteran Nashville jazz trumpeter, said in an interview. “And I never played anything where I didn’t think she was the right person to do it.”She released her first album, “Escape to New York,” in 1991. A few years later she formed her trio, with Mr. Spencer on bass and Chris Brown on drums. They toured frequently, including trips to Tokyo and London. Starting in 2011, they played annual gigs at Birdland, in Midtown Manhattan, and later added regular shows at Feinstein’s/54 Below, also in Midtown. They recorded 35 albums and, according to Ms. Ramey, sold some two million copies over the last four decades.Back home, Ms. Adair was the de facto leader of Nashville’s jazz scene, especially during a rough stretch in the 1970s and ’80s when venues closed and gigs were few. What kept her going was the knowledge, not always obvious to the outside observer, that the scene was larger than it seemed, with musicians playing country for the money and jazz for themselves, even if it meant nothing more than jam sessions in someone’s basement.“There are a lot of wonderful jazz players here that don’t get heard often because they’re doing studio work all of the time,” she told The Nashville Banner in 1997. “Every horn player that does studio work is probably a jazz player underneath their skin.”In addition to working steadily as a jazz pianist, Ms. Adair was in constant demand as a session musician.via Adair Music GroupBobbe Gorin Long was born on Dec. 11, 1937, in Cave City, Ky., a small town about halfway between Nashville and Louisville. She began taking piano lessons at 5 and by her teenage years was playing in clubs in Tennessee and Kentucky.Her parents, Bobbe (Martin) Long and Arthur Long, ran a gas station, where young Bobbe also worked when she wasn’t playing piano. To differentiate her from her mother, her father called her “B.G.,” after her first two initials, and the nickname stuck.Ms. Adair graduated with a degree in music education from Western Kentucky University in 1958. After teaching music for three years in Owensboro, Ky., she moved to Nashville for graduate studies in education at Peabody College, now a part of Vanderbilt University.But she was already building a career as a musician in the city’s downtown clubs, especially along Printers Alley, then and now a center of Nashville nightlife. By 1963 she had dropped out of Peabody to play music full time.Ms. Adair came under the wing of the saxophonist Boots Randolph, a resident musician at the Carousel best known for his 1963 hit “Yakety Sax.” He got her gigs and introduced her to the city’s many producers and studio managers, who, though they mostly recorded country and rock ’n’ roll, were always looking for talented, dependable session musicians.Another local music luminary, the guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, was the first to bring her on as a regular at his recording sessions, and his recommendations brought her a steady stream of work in and out of the studio. She played in the house band for “The Johnny Cash Show” and for the local TV host Ralph Emery (who also died this month).She married Mr. Adair in 1974. He died in 2014. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Adair was a prolific musician in his own right, and he built a career as an instructor, eventually becoming a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. In 1995, the couple joined Mr. Spencer and his wife, Lori Mechem, to start the Nashville Jazz Workshop.The workshop trained a new generation of jazz musicians in Nashville, and in recent decades the scene there has started to make a comeback, with its former students starting to win national recognition. In 2016, Ms. Adair and her trio were invited to play Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. “The best thing of all for us was that there were a lot of our fans from Nashville in attendance,” she told The Nashville Scene in 2016, a few days after the show. “I think our appearance there is another indicator that people all over the country recognize that there are great jazz musicians here, and that there is an audience for the music.” More

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      5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

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      Recordings of Brahms, Haydn, Grieg, Nikolai Kapustin and George Walker are among recent highlights.‘Blueprint’: Piano Music by Nikolai Kapustin for Jazz TrioFrank Dupree, piano; Jakob Krupp, bass; Obi Jenne, drums (Capriccio)When I reported last year on the pianist Frank Dupree’s first album of works by Nikolai Kapustin, Dupree previewed things to come. For his follow-up engagement with Kapustin, a swing-influenced Russian composer, Dupree said he would release a series of solo piano works played by a traditional jazz trio.Now that the results are out, the wisdom of the idea is evident. Dupree could have recorded an enjoyable solo set, as his feel for Kapustin is as fluid as ever. But we currently have no lack of one-player recitals of this music — including from Marc-André Hamelin, Steven Osborne and Kapustin himself.The improvised element on “Blueprint” is subtle. Dupree plays the piano solos as they were notated, and the bassist Jakob Krupp follows his left hand. The album’s distinguishing element of improvisation is left to the percussionist Obi Jenne. And it’s his interventions that truly elevate this set. In a piece like the Op. 41 Variations, Kapustin moves briskly between different syncopated styles; Jenne’s mutable beat-juggling highlights each change. Perhaps not every item here needed the jazz combo treatment. But when the arrangements work — as on selections from the Eight Concert Études — this trio adds to the material a new jolt. SETH COLTER WALLSBrahms: Late Piano WorksPaul Lewis, piano (Harmonia Mundi)To listen to the pianist Paul Lewis’s new album of late Brahms, you would think these pieces had been written just after the last sonatas of Schubert, which Lewis has recorded with wrenching restraint. Splicing the gap between 1828 and the early 1890s, Lewis’s is a vision of Brahms as fully Classicist; these final four sets of solos are rendered with judicious tempos and a clean, calm touch — intelligent, sensitive readings.The pearly moderation that makes Lewis’s Schubert so movingly humble sometimes keeps his Brahms shy of grandeur and especially mystery. These are tender, affecting interpretations more than pensive, let alone unsettling, ones; Lewis sometimes stints the softest dynamics, giving a slight sense of straightforwardness when you want intimations (at least) of the epic. The Intermezzo in E flat (Op. 117, No. 1) doesn’t seem to lose itself in the middle section — as it does in Radu Lupu’s benchmark 1987 recording — so the return to the theme is less than overwhelming.But a cleareyed Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2) is deeply satisfying; the Intermezzo in E Minor (Op. 119, No. 2) leavens lucidity with dreaminess. And Lewis’s sparkle in the middle of the Romanze in F (Op. 118, No. 5) gives the shift back to sober feeling at the end quietly immense power. ZACHARY WOOLFEGrieg: SongsLise Davidsen, soprano; Leif Ove Andsnes, piano (Decca)The recording industry has finally found a way to capture Lise Davidsen. A luminous soprano of remarkable range, equally capable of floodlight power and the piercing smallness of a laser pointer, she wasn’t well represented on her first two albums for Decca, which were documents of sensitive and intelligent interpretation more than versatility or resounding might.Now, after programs of Wagner, Strauss, Beethoven and Verdi, comes a much more intimate album of Grieg songs performed with the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes — a pairing of two excellent Norwegian musicians in works by their country’s most treasured composer. The scale of this program is better suited than Davidsen’s earlier albums at conveying the dexterity of her voice, and her gift for endearing levity; there are playful turns of phrase here that you just don’t get in “Tannhäuser.”Throughout the album — which begins with the eight-song cycle “The Mountain Maid” and continues with excerpts from other collections — Andsnes is an evocative tone painter, with dreamy glissandos in “Singing,” galloping festivity in “Midsummer Eve” and flowing momentum in “A Boat on the Waves Is Rocking.” And Davidsen is a nimble raconteur, lovingly warm in the opening cycle’s “Meeting,” then shattering in its Schubertian finale, “At the Gjaetle Brook,” and later bringing both folk lightness and Wagnerian heft to the six songs of Op. 48. To the credit of Grieg and these artists, you’ll never be so moved by a song called “Snail, Snail!” JOSHUA BARONEHaydn: SymphoniesAcademy of St. Martin in the Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor (Eloquence)It’s easy now to be a little sniffy about Neville Marriner’s achievements with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a partnership renowned as the most recorded in history. With the success of the period-instrument movement, their hundreds of recordings on modern instruments have gained the reputation of being a bit staid — practical and reliable, to be sure, but nevertheless dusty relics of an era best forgotten.But this thoroughly enjoyable 15-disc set — which for the first time brings together 33 Haydn symphonies set down between 1970 and 1990 — is ample reminder that there were perfectly good artistic reasons Marriner and his chamber-orchestra forces were such a roaring commercial success.Conceiving their work initially as a crisp, stylish rejoinder to an older, stouter approach to the Baroque and Classical repertoire, they played this music with insatiable collective commitment — the slow movements singing gracefully, the outer movements sparkling in their drive and invention. If there is a little more zest in their accounts of Haydn’s earlier symphonies than his later ones, they are all brilliantly well judged, and full of life. DAVID ALLENGeorge Walker: Piano SonatasSteven Beck, piano (Bridge)In 2018, when the composer and pianist George Walker died at 96, there were plenty of accomplishments to memorialize, including his Pulitzer Prize — the first awarded to a Black composer. But there was also a dispiriting acknowledgment of a missed opportunity, given that so few elite classical institutions had seriously engaged with Walker’s work while he was alive.The inattention extended to recordings; there remains a notable dearth of sets devoted exclusively to Walker. Very partial redress comes in the form of this new album, in which Steven Beck takes on all five of Walker’s piano sonatas, written between 1953 and 2003.The first sonata, revised in 1991, offers some of the galloping energy seemingly required when suggesting Americana, but it also includes a rambunctious harmonic edge that bristles with maverick spirit. By the time of the Third Sonata, written in 1975 and revised in 1996, atonality had taken center stage. But Walker’s signature feel for contrast — including alternations between motifs that ring out and peremptory chordal bursts — is still evident. With playing that’s slashing and sensitive by turns, Beck’s recital accentuates the through lines in a protean artistic life. SETH COLTER WALLS More

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      Badal Roy, Who Fused Indian Rhythms With Jazz, Is Dead at 82

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      He collaborated across cultures, playing tabla with Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin and others in the jazz world and beyond, including Yoko Ono.Badal Roy, an Indian tabla player whose drumming propelled East-West fusions for some of the most prominent musicians in and out of jazz, died on Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.His son, Amitav Roy Chowdhury, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Roy was largely self-taught. He was not trained in the Indian classical apprentice tradition of gurus and disciples. Where classical tabla players use a pair of differently tuned drums, Mr. Roy sometimes used three or four. His improvisational flexibility and his skill at sharing a groove made him a prized collaborator for jazz, funk, rock and global musicians.He first became widely known for his work in the early 1970s with the English guitarist John McLaughlin and Miles Davis, appearing on Davis’s pivotal jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors. He went on to many other collaborations,— recording with Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Yoko Ono, Bill Laswell and Richie Havens — and spent more than a decade as a member of Ornette Coleman’s electric band, Prime Time.Amarendra Roy Chowdhury was born on Oct. 16, 1939, in the Comilla District of what was then British India. (The area was later part of East Pakistan and is now in Bangladesh.) His father, Satyenda Nath Roy Chowdhury, was a government official in Pakistan; his mother, Sova Rani Roy Chowdhury, was a homemaker. “Badal,” which means “rain” in Bengali, was a childhood nickname.An uncle introduced him to the tabla and taught him its rudiments: the vocal syllables that denote specific drum sounds. Later, in New York, he took some lessons from Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s longtime tabla player. While growing up, he was also a fan of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. His introduction to jazz was hearing Duke Ellington perform in Pakistan in 1963.Mr. Roy wasn’t planning a career in music when he came to New York in 1968. He intended to earn a Ph.D. in statistics.To support himself, he worked as a waiter at the Pak India Curry House and found a weekend gig playing tabla with a sitarist at A Taste of India, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Mr. McLaughlin was a regular there, and he sometimes sat in with the duo. After a few months of jamming, he asked Mr. Roy to join a recording session. The resulting album, “My Goals Beyond,” released in 1971, was an early landmark in Indian-influenced jazz.Mr. McLaughlin was also working with Miles Davis at the time, and he brought Mr. Roy to Davis’s attention; when Davis was appearing at the Village Gate in 1971, Mr. Roy’s duo auditioned for him during a break between sets at A Taste of India, carrying their instruments a few blocks down Bleecker Street. Davis called on Mr. Roy for a 1972 session that also included Mr. McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Jack DeJohnette on drums.In an interview with an Indian newspaper, The Telegraph, Mr. Roy recalled: “All of a sudden, Miles tells me: ‘You start’ — no music, no nothing, just like that. Realizing I have to set the groove, I just start playing a ta-ka-na-ta-n-ka-tin rhythm. Herbie nods his head to the beat and, with a ‘Yeah!,’ starts playing. For a while, it’s just the two of us, and then John and Jack join in. Then all the others start and, to me at least, it’s pure chaos. I’m completely drowned out by the sound. I continue playing, but for the next half-hour, I can’t hear a single beat I play.”Those sessions yielded Davis’s “On the Corner.” Mr. Roy joined Davis for other 1972 sessions that contributed material for Davis’s “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It,” both released in 1974, and performed with him at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center for what became Davis’s 1973 album “In Concert.”Mr. Roy received a copy of “On the Corner” when it was released in 1972. But after his frustration at the sessions, he didn’t listen to it until the 1990s, when his son, then a graduate student, told him, “All the hip-hop guys are sampling it.”In 1974, Mr. Roy married Geeta Vashi. She survives him, along with their son and Mr. Roy’s sisters, Kalpana Chakraborty and Shibani Ray Chaudhury, and his brother, Samarendra Roy Chowdhury. He lived in Wilmington.Mr. Roy backed the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders on the albums “Wisdom Through Music” (1972), “Village of the Pharoahs” (1973) and “Love in Us All” (1974), and in later years performed with Mr. Sanders onstage. With the saxophonist Dave Liebman, who had been in Davis’s group, Mr. Roy appeared on “Lookout Farm” (1974), “Drum Ode” (1975) and “Sweet Hands” (1975). (“Sweet hands” is the translation of a Bengali term praising a virtuoso tabla player.)He released two albums as a leader in the mid-1970s, both featuring Mr. Liebman: “Ashirbad” (1975) and “Passing Dreams” (1976), which also included the Indian classical musician Sultan Khan on sarangi, a bowed string instrument.Mr. Roy performed and recorded widely, often as part of cross-cultural fusions. He had a longtime duo with the bansuri (wooden flute) player Steve Gorn, which appeared regularly at the Manhattan restaurant Raga. He shared the 1978 album “Kundalini” with the American jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson and the Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the flutist Herbie Mann’s group and appeared on the 1981 Mann album “All Blues/Forest Rain.” He also recorded with the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell; with the trombonist and conch-shell player Steve Turre; with Yoko Ono on her 1982 album, “It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)”; and with the Brazilian guitar duo Duofel, the Japanese bassist Stomu Takeishi, the bassist and producer Bill Laswell and the Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider.In 1988, he joined Ornette Coleman’s band Prime Time, and though the group rarely released studio albums, he appeared on its final one, “Tone Dialing,” in 1995. In the early 2000s he was a member of Impure Thoughts, a group led by the keyboardist Michael Wolff. Mr. Roy also recorded often as a leader, collaborating across idioms and styles.In an interview for All About Jazz, Mr. Roy emphasized that his solos were about “telling a story.” “I go with the groove,” he said, “and then go free.” More

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      Taylor Mac Explores the Philosophy of the Hang

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      What kind of a party do you throw when you’re about to die? It’s an especially morbid question these days. But in “The Hang,” a new opera from the performer Taylor Mac, the answer involves equal parts philosophy and décor.The show, written with the composer Matt Ray, is about the death of Socrates, who after being convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by hemlock, spent his final hours talking about virtue with his friends. And a few songs into a recent run-through of the production at the HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, Mac — in a purple tulle robe and appropriately Socratic pandemic beard — started dragging out giant beanbag chairs while a bar took shape in the corner of the stage.“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” Mac sang, as the eight-piece band leaned into a groove, “I’m in it for the hang.”Mac with cast members of “The Hang,” which takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThat’s something of a credo for Mac, whose work, including the epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” celebrates community and connection through a radical queer lens. And “The Hang,” created with some of Mac’s longtime collaborators, puts those themes onstage again, in a phantasmagorical, hard-to-summarize mix.The show, which runs 105 minutes without an intermission, takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies,” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. There’s plenty of wailing, but also queer romps, ancient Greek in-jokes, a comic monologue in the style of Noël Coward and a meditative number sung in a lavatory.And yes, there’s talk of virtue — not in the sense of starchy purity (to say the least), but the Socratic sense of knowledge and ceaseless questioning, which for Mac is not just a matter of logical argument, or even words.From left, Trebien Pollard, El Beh and Queen Esther. Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle designed the costumes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“One angle I wanted to go with in this show was to say there’s more,” Mac said in a video interview. “The Socratic questions can also be expressed physically, aesthetically and sonically.”“The Hang,” which began previews Thursday and runs through Feb. 20, may seem like a riposte to the pandemic, which shut down not just theater but also, for a time, most nonvirtual hanging out. (The opera, which is being produced by HERE, was originally set to have its premiere earlier this month as part of the Prototype Festival, which was canceled because of the Omicron surge.)The show was inspired by Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates. It was so relevant, Mac said, to the way conversations about virtue today “are being manipulated to end curiosity.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut Mac said the idea began germinating several years ago, as a “palate cleanser” after “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a sprawling meditation on American history through 246 songs, which Mac performed as a 24-hour marathon in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.The initial impulse was to make a solo theater piece based on Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates, which Mac had recently read for the first time. “I wanted to do something simple,” Mac said. “And it was also so relevant to what’s been going on — the conversation about justice and virtue, and how those things were being manipulated to end curiosity.”The jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson was persuaded to join the production. It’s her first stage role.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut nothing with Mac, a self-described maximalist, stays simple, or small. In late 2019, “The Hang” had turned into an ensemble piece, and he sent a preliminary script to Ray, who had arranged the songs in “A 24-Decade History.”Ray, who has played jazz since he was a child, said his sonic entry point was a wailing saxophone, which became the sound of the poison, played in the show by a trio that sometimes roams the stage, as if spreading it. “I just started hearing this sound in my head,” he said. As Mac kept emailing him lyrics (in no particular order), Ray composed what became the show’s 26 songs, drawing on New Orleans jazz, swing, soul jazz, touches of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and other influences, though he hesitated to affix any firm labels. “I don’t like to write things that are an impression,” Ray said. “I just wrote the things I like to play.”Trebien Pollard applying makeup before a dress rehearsal.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator. He’s the one who suggested that the action was actually set inside Socrates’ body, complete with a fabric-draped proscenium as the rib cage.The vibe is wild and messy excess, though Dazzle said the pandemic had subtly affected his approach to costuming, and not just because the price of tulle had doubled.“People are different from the way they were two years ago,” he said. “You can tell they’ve been thinking. They’re in their head more.”Early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the core creative team started having virtual hangs twice a month, to talk about the show (and what they missed about seeing each other in person). The first workshop was held in October 2020, in a tent in a plaza in downtown Brooklyn.The show’s choreographer Chanon Judson.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe director Niegel Smith.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Machine Dazzle, the scenic and costume designer.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Matt Ray, the composer and music director.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Niegel Smith, the director, said the casting was about “curating friendship,” as well as artistry. The company of nine performers and eight musicians (who are choreographed into the show) are a mix of veterans of previous Mac projects and new collaborators, including the jazz vocalists Kat Edmonson and Queen Esther and the Broadway veteran Kenneth Ard (“Cats,” “Starlight Express,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”).Ard had already left theater when the pandemic hit, and was working as a corporate chef. He moved to San Francisco during the lockdown, but came back to New York to audition at the recommendation of Dazzle, a friend.“I was tired of the commercial theater thing, but I hadn’t experienced really artistic theater, as I feel this is,” he said in a video interview. “Matt Ray’s score just blew me away. I just thought, I have to sing these songs.”Wesley Garlington during rehearsals.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesEdmonson was recruited by Ray, with whom she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. It’s her first stage role and, in the song “Virtue,” a chance for some serious scatting, something she has only recently added to her own live shows. “It’s kind of a new thing for me,” she said. “It’s so much fun.”The physical demands of “The Hang” aren’t quite as extreme as those of Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which put the actors — and the audience — in a giant ball pit. (The play, directed by Smith, was still in previews at the Flea when the pandemic hit.)Still, at the recent rehearsal for “The Hang,” the performer El Beh’s big skirt festooned with Medusa heads kept knocking over the urn where the cast members burn their mock-Socratic beards during “OK Boomer,” a riff on cultural ephemerality. And there was strategizing over the best way to flop onto a giant pouf during an extremely up-tempo philosophical dialogue called “The Ephemeral.”“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it,” Mac said of approaching the work.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Chanon Judson, the choreographer, described the movement, like so much of the show, as a collage. “I really like to scan the room and sponge in everyone’s idiosyncratic ways of being in the space,” she said.In Plato’s “Apology,” the downfall of Socrates is blamed on Aristophanes, who in his play “The Clouds” had ridiculed Socrates as a charlatan, helping to turn public opinion against him. “The Hang” certainly gets its digs at Aristophanes. But in Mac’s retelling, if Socrates has a foil, it’s Plato himself, who lurks around the action, taking it all down on an ancient Greek stenograph.Plato was famously critical of theatricality, condemning drama as a form of lying that manipulates the public, with sometimes dangerous consequences. It’s an idea “The Hang” turns inside out.“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it, and find a way to express a truth rather than a lie?” Mac said. “You can’t hide when you sing. You can try to, but you always end up telling some kind of truth about who you are.” More

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      A Knockout Country-Rap Crossover, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Nilüfer Yanya, Gayle, John Mellencamp 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.Kidd G featuring YNW BSlime, ‘Left Me’There’s been an increasing amount of crossover between country and hip-hop in recent years, though often the relationship between the two influences can feel strained. But here’s a collaboration between two sing-rappers, both teenagers, that sounds utterly unforced: Kidd G, who’s making the kind of naturally syncretic music Nashville should be inching toward, and YNW BSlime, the younger brother of the incarcerated star YNW Melly. Kidd G taps into his Juice WRLD influences, with pitter-patter syllables and scraped-up singing, and YNW BSlime’s guest verse is chilling, and sung with disarming innocence: “Two years my brother’s been gone/And I’ve never/felt so alone.” It sounds like the No. 1 song of 2030. JON CARAMANICACharlie Puth, ‘Light Switch’A peppy song about romantic dyspepsia, “Light Switch” is a lightly manqué version of the sort of electric funk-pop that made Charlie Puth’s 2018 album “Voicenotes” so appealing. The singing is slightly less committed, and the lyric construction not buttoned quite as tight, and there’s a light hyperpop-esque treatment on the vocals that makes Puth sound like hes lamenting from the inside of the synthesizer. But the anxiety of the words is pointed, and the sugar-rush production scans as breathlessness. CARAMANICANilüfer Yanya, ‘Midnight Sun’Escalation suggests obsession in “Midnight Sun” from a new Nilüfer Yanya album, “Painless,” that’s due in March. “Maybe I can’t care too much/I can’t clean this up,” she sings. “Get me off this spinning wheel.” Both the acoustic guitar chords and the drumbeat feel looped, with more than a hint of Radiohead, but other sounds arrive — acoustic and electric guitars — sounding hand-played and offering possibilities of escape. It’s not clear whether she’ll use them. JON PARELESGayle, ‘Ur Just Horny’The quantum guitar-chord crescendo of grunge — quiet-loud-MUCH LOUDER — gets a full, furious workout in Gayle’s “Ur Just Horny,” the teenage songwriter’s follow-up to “Abcdefu.” As the stop-start guitars stack up, she spells things out: “You don’t wanna be my friend/You just wanna see me naked/Again.” PARELESEcco2K and Bladee, ‘Amygdala’Ecco2K and Bladee are members of the Drain Gang, a Swedish pop collective that has a sideline in fashion modeling. Their latest collaboration, produced by the German musician Mechatok, is a slice of pointillist hyperpop that treats voices and synthesizer tones alike as bits of blipping staccato counterpoint and computer-compressed nuggets of cosmic ambition: “Destroy and create, dreaming in the dream,” Bladee croons at the end, before the machines shut off. PARELESSofia Kourtesis featuring Manu Chao, ‘Estación Esperanza’Sofia Kourtesis makes songs that pulsate with the hope of a new day. “Estación Esperanza” is a master class in culling citations, opening with the chants of a Peruvian protest against homophobia before vocal samples of Manu Chao’s “Me Gustas Tu” glitch into focus, interspersed with vibrant bird calls and a steady horn. When Kourtesis’ own humming comes into focus, a single moment opens to infinity. ISABELIA HERRERAINVT, ‘Anaconda’The Miami duo INVT lets genres slip through their fingers on its latest track. A fever pitch dembow riddim lifted from Jamaican dancehall thumps to life. A vaporous echo and fleshy moan whisper under the production. There is the steady clang of a cowbell, the shake of a maraca. Is it reggaeton? Minimal techno? Does it even matter? HERRERAKey Glock, ‘Proud’Young Dolph, who was shot and killed in his Memphis hometown in November, had mentored and collaborated with his cousin, Key Glock. Key Glock’s tribute song, “Proud,” is the first single from the compilation “Paper Route Empire Presents: Long Live Dolph,” and it’s burly in presentation but the lyrics ache: “I can get it back in blood but still I can’t get back the time.” In the video, Key Glock raps his regrets at the site of the killing, a stark choice. CARAMANICAJohn Mellencamp, ‘I Am a Man That Worries’John Mellencamp stays grim and grizzled throughout his new album, “Strictly a One-Eyed Jack.” In “I Am a Man That Worries,” he’s worried about everything and belligerent about it: “You better get out of my way,” he growls. It’s a vintage-style blues stop with slide guitar and fiddle flanking his voice, and though he proclaims his bitter solitude, he has a crowd shouting alongside him by the end. PARELESDaniel Rossen, ‘Shadow in the Frame’Nervous energy courses through “Shadow in the Frame,” the first single from the solo album due in April from Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear. Rossen played every instrument except drums (by Grizzly Bear’s Christopher Bear) in the intricate arrangement, including strings and woodwinds. The song is a meditation on ephemerality and catastrophe — “You will watch us flash and fade and get torn apart,” he sings — carried by a restless, circling phrase that migrates among guitars and vocals, changing contour but never resolving, hinting at hope that keeps moving out of reach. PARELESUwade, ‘Do You See the Light Around Me?’The songwriter Uwade explores infatuation in “Do You See the Light Around Me?” It’s a single on Sylvan Esso’s label, Psychic Hotline, and as it cycles through four chords with voices and instruments arriving and disappearing, it echoes that group’s mixture of sparse electronic beats and human warmth. But Uwade brings her own personality, at once uncertain and embracing. PARELESJana Horn, ‘Jordan’The Austin-based songwriter Jana Horn keeps her voice small and whispery throughout “Optimism,” the debut album she releases this week. “Jordan” is the album’s eeriest, most exploratory, most determined song: a steady-pulsing march with electronics at the fringes, an enigmatic biblical narrative about a quest, an ordeal, a dilemma, a revelation. PARELESGui Duvignau, featuring Bill Frisell, ‘Tristeza e Solidão’The bassist Gui Duvignau begins his take on “Tristeza e Solidão” — a torch song by the Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell and the poet Vinícius de Moraes — unaccompanied, sounding plangent and contemplative as he lets low notes resound. The guitarist Bill Frisell, featured as a special guest, enters with the drummer Jeff Hirschfield, and trades the song’s somber melody back and forth with Duvignau. The track is overcast and melancholy and slow, lacking the quiet, motor-like samba groove of Powell’s and de Moraes’s original version but sounding just as haunted. This performance comes from Duvignau’s latest album, “Baden,” a tribute to the influential guitarist, who died in 2000. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKiko Villamizar, ‘Sembrá El Maíz’Cumbia rhythms, carried on drums stroked by hands and mallets, lift up a reverb-shaken guitar and the sleepy-eyed voice of Kiko Villamizar. “Sembrá El Maíz” (“Plant the Corn”) is an original urging hard work and patience, even in the face of climate catastrophe. By the end he’s full-throated, trading call-and-response vocals with the band. A musician, educator and organizer now based in Austin, Villamizar grew up primarily on a coffee farm in Colombia and later traveled the country collecting songs. When Los Destellos and Los Wemblers de Iquitos started making Peruvian jungle-surf like this in the 1960s, it rang cosmopolitan; today, writing similar songs, a younger musician from the Colombian side is building on what’s become a tradition of its own. RUSSONELLO More

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      Broadway Meets the Avant-Garde in a Juilliard Music Festival

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      Focus, a weeklong event starting Sunday, delves into the broad range of American sounds in the first half of the 20th century.Does “People Will Say We’re in Love,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 musical “Oklahoma,” have anything to, well, say to Lou Harrison’s shimmering Six Sonatas for Cembalo, completed the same year? How does Edgard Varèse’s pensive “Octandre” sound alongside Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”?These aren’t questions most audiences have ever been asked to consider. But the answers might permit a fuller understanding of the broad range of American music in the first half of the 20th century, a period when this country began to export its own brand of sound.Unusual but telling juxtapositions abound in “The Making of an American Music, 1899-1948,” this year’s Focus festival at the Juilliard School, which opens for a week of performances on Sunday. Each year Focus zeros in on a specific topic in modern music; the 2022 iteration brings together — and demonstrates the substantial overlap between — worlds not often united in the history books or on concert programs: ragtime, jazz, Broadway, Americana, global music, dance and the Europe-descended avant-garde.Joel Sachs, the festival’s organizer and the longtime doyen of new music at Juilliard, said that “The Making of an American Music” emerged out of brainstorming for the 2021 festival. With a presidential inauguration then looming, he thought of 1921, the start of Warren G. Harding’s term, and its implications for international affairs.“Music in times of trouble” was to have been the theme, Sachs said by phone recently, with a week focusing on the two decades from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second, including politically charged pieces by the likes of Charles Ives, Stefan Wolpe and Hanns Eisler. But Sachs hadn’t gotten past rough plans before the festival was canceled because of the pandemic.“Then came 2021,” he said, “and things beginning to look better, and a sense we might be getting out of this situation, which turned out to be not quite right. But I started to think that was too gloomy a subject.”He turned his attention specifically to the American repertory, and, using the enormous New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, put down all the composers writing in the first 50 years of the 20th century; there were almost 300 names. He and David Ludwig, the new dean and director of Juilliard’s music division, then independently drew on that for lists of 15 “musts” and 15 “maybes.” (Their top tiers, as it happened, were almost identical.)Mei-Ann Chen rehearses the Juilliard Orchestra in Ives’s Symphony No. 2, which they will play on the festival’s closing night.George Etheredge for The New York Times“It blossomed into a kind of monster,” Sachs said, chuckling. “The program book is 88 pages. But it’s a really interesting period.”These are the six Focus programs, starting on Sunday evening:SundayA set of Joplin’s rags — the phenomenally popular sheet music for “Maple Leaf Rag” helped put American music on the global map — leads directly into two of Ives’s bustling, changeable Ragtime Dances, performed by Sachs’ New Juilliard Ensemble. The rapidly shifting moods of the dances will offer a new context for the similarly jittery “Octandre,” written for a small group of winds and brasses and ending in a bright scream. Varèse, a native Frenchman, spent the last 50 years of his life in America, and his influence here made him a natural for this Focus.Sachs wrote a biography of Henry Cowell, who was part of a circle of experimental composers with Varèse, and whose brooding Sinfonietta follows “Octandre.” Ruth Crawford was also part of the group, and the program includes her angular “Three Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg,” before closing with Ives’s Third Symphony, “The Camp Meeting,” a characteristically Ivesian explosion of European styles and 19th-century Americana.MondayThe military marches of John Philip Sousa, a major American presence in Europe during this period, are rarely heard alongside modernists like Milton Babbitt and Leon Kirchner, and Amy Beach’s String Quartet is rarely heard, period. Beach’s warm, thickly chromatic, intensely elegant single-movement quartet — which incorporates, after the model of Dvorak, the Native American melodies “Summer Song,” “Playing at Ball” and “Ititaujang’s Song” — looks both backward and forward.The quartet and chamber works by Babbitt, Kirchner, Conlon Nancarrow (best known for his wild player-piano studies) and Virgil Thomson lead, however unexpectedly, to Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” represented by Vladimir Horowitz’s virtuosic — and, in this company, truly progressive-sounding — piano arrangement.TuesdayAmong the week’s most intriguing rediscoveries is “Deep Song,” a Martha Graham solo that she first danced in 1937 as a cri de coeur during the Spanish Civil War. The score, by Cowell, was lost, so when the dance was revived in the 1980s, it was with another Cowell piece.Terese Capucilli dancing Martha Graham’s solo “Deep Song” in 1988. As part of this year’s Focus, Capucilli is helping to remount the dance with its original Henry Cowell score.Nan MelvilleThe correct music — created using an innovative technique that let the choreographer rearrange modular phrases as needed — was rediscovered in the early 2000s. So this collaboration with Terese Capucilli, a Graham expert who teaches at Juilliard, will be the modern premiere of a substantial re-creation of the original, set alongside chamber works by John Cage, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.WednesdayA very brief history of the transition from ragtime to jazz — including pieces by Eubie Blake, Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington — is the climax of a program that also includes an aria from Gian Carlo Menotti’s popular opera “The Medium,” William Grant Still’s eloquent “Incantation and Dance” for oboe and piano, and works by Vincent Persichetti, Wolpe and Elliott Carter.ThursdayRefractions of other cultures by Colin McPhee (drawing on Balinese melodies) and Alan Hovhaness (on the kanun, an Armenian zither) join a two-piano arrangement of Carl Ruggles’s “Organum” and the slow movement of Samuel Barber’s Op. 11 String Quartet, which he later arranged as the famous Adagio for Strings.The “Festival Prelude” for organ by Horatio Parker, Ives’s teacher at Yale, is delightfully paired with Ives’s own nutty organ variations on “America”; Harrison’s cembalo sonatas; and a sampling of Broadway songs by Berlin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers — capped by a two-piano version of Gershwin’s variations on “I Got Rhythm.”FridayThe culminating event features, as usual, the Juilliard Orchestra, the school’s main symphonic ensemble; Mei-Ann Chen, the music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, conducts. Joplin is once again on the program, in the form of the lively overture to his 1910 opera “Treemonisha,” which was first staged in 1972 and for which he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.Another long-overlooked composer, Florence Price, is represented by her lyrical Violin Concerto No. 1, with Timothy Chooi as soloist. And Ives, that great masher of genres, closes this genre-mashing festival with his grandly impassioned Second Symphony, which weaves American songs and hymns throughout. More

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      FKA twigs Seeks Angelic Intervention, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Maren Morris, Stromae, Robert Glasper 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.FKA twigs, ‘Meta Angel’FKA twigs’s new mixtape, “Caprisongs,” is woven through with snippets of conversations with friends, which she has said represents a kind of sonic antidote to the loneliness and self-doubt she was experiencing during the 2020 lockdown. The wrenching, shape-shifting “Meta Angel” is perhaps the purest distillation of this approach: After an introductory pep talk from a friend, twigs confesses her private vulnerabilities (“I’ve got voices in my head, telling me I won’t make it far”), before summoning all her defiance on an artfully Auto-Tuned, Charli XCX-esque chorus. “Throw it in the fire,” she belts, in a conflagration of emotion that sounds like the first step to healing. LINDSAY ZOLADZStromae, ‘L’enfer’“L’enfer” — the “Hell” that Stromae confesses to in this single — is thoughts of suicide. Stromae, whose father is from Rwanda, is a Belgian songwriter, musician, dancer and YouTube creator who has been making a return after releasing his last studio album in 2013. This song suggests the reason for his absence: dark, self-destructive impulses that he has averted. It begins with Bulgarian-style vocal harmonies and moves to four mournful piano chords as Stromae considers how “It’s crazy how many people have thought the same.” A choir, stuttering electronics and a looming beat answer him, but there’s nothing sanctimonious about the song; Stromae sounds like he’s still grappling with his troubles. JON PARELESAldous Harding, ‘Lawn’“Doors are the way you leave/Open it up to me,” sings the ever-enigmatic Aldous Harding in “Lawn,” from an album due in March. The track is a wispy-voiced homage to Stereolab, serenely cycling through two-chord piano patterns over breezy syncopated drums, as Harding airily ponders “losing you” and the obligations of songwriting: “Time flies when you’re writing B-sides,” she observes. The video, co-directed by Harding, features human-lizard hybrids and actual reptiles, but she never sounds entirely coldblooded. PARELESMaren Morris, ‘Circles Around This Town’The first single from Maren Morris’s forthcoming album, “Humble Quest,” vividly conjures her earliest days in Nashville, hustling around town in a “Montero with the A/C busted” shopping “a couple bad demos on a burned CD.” Those details may feel lived-in and time-stamped, but Morris knows she’s operating within a long lineage — she was certainly not the first aspiring songwriter to drive circles around Music City in hopes of catching her big break, nor will she be the last. The song’s direct appeal to this country tradition makes it feel like a throwback to the days before Morris’s pop crossover, but she and the producer Greg Kurstin prove twang is no obstacle to a soaring, universally inviting chorus. “Thought that when I hit it, it’d all look different, but I still got the pedal down,” Morris sings from the other side of success, still hungry but now with a mature confidence in her talent. ZOLADZPavement, ‘Be the Hook’An infamous lore hangs over “Terror Twilight,” Pavement’s fifth and final album, from 1999. The alt-rock super-producer Nigel Godrich was hired in an attempt to make the band’s slacker-rock sound slightly more palatable to the mainstream, but his methods ended up hastening the already-fraying group’s demise — or so the story goes. On April 8, though, Matador Records will finally release a comprehensive deluxe edition of “Terror Twilight,” and perhaps enough time has passed since the LP’s polarizing release that it can finally be appreciated on its own terms. The first taste of the unreleased material, the loose and bluesy jam “Be the Hook,” already complicates the received wisdom that “Terror Twilight” was all streamlined melodies and smoothed-over edges, as Stephen Malkmus meta-vamps charismatically atop a crunchy riff: “Everybody get your hands together and cheer for this rock ’n’ roll band!” ZOLADZKing Princess featuring Fousheé, ‘Little Bother’King Princess, a songwriter from Brooklyn, uses a programmed punk-pop beat, U2-style guitar chords, cascading vocal harmonies and the endorsement of a co-writer, Fousheé, to confront an ex who ended up being indifferent, treating her like a “little bother.” Pointedly, she asks, “Do you feel like you should-could have tried a little harder?” PARELESRobert Glasper featuring Killer Mike, Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid, ‘Black Superhero’Robert Glasper, a jazz pianist who maintains a close connection with hip-hop, works through three thick chords and enlists choir-like backup vocals behind Killer Mike (from Run the Jewels), Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid to call for a “Black Superhero.” The song invokes 1960s activism and current unrest to call for ways to save “every block, every hood, every city, every ghetto.” PARELESDJ Python, ‘Angel’The Brooklyn-based producer Brian Piñeyro (a.k.a. DJ Python) has a reputation for tenderness. Consider the title of his website, a painfully veracious observation on contemporary texting behavior: “sayingsomethingsincerelyandendingitwith.lol.” That kind of soft-focus sentimentality also appears on “Angel,” the latest track from his upcoming full-length “Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2.” Over the course of the 10-minute production, Piñeyro collages oneiric, crystalline synths and drums into a suspended state of astral bliss. The song arrives alongside a custom perfume, whose description — a “gender-spectral” scent that draws on rave culture — only plunges the release further into the universe of daydreams. ISABELIA HERRERAJacques Greene, ‘Taurus’Jacques Greene has always been interested in weaving the textures of all kinds of club music, but on “Taurus,” he takes a more meditative path, perhaps inspired by the film scores he recently composed. Hard-edge drum breaks propel the production, recalling the rush of a distant dance floor, but a softness remains at the center. The vaporous whispers and echoes of the vocalist Leanne Macomber float on and over each other, curling into a small misty cloud, like visible breath on a frigid day. The effect is cold and cavernous, but it offers an unexpected sense of comfort. HERRERAGonora Sounds, ‘Kusaziva Kufa’Gonora Sounds, from Zimbabwe, is led by a blind guitarist, Daniel Gonora, who had been a member of a top Zimbabwean group, Jairos Jiri Band. For years, he made a living performing on the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. A documentary, “You Can’t Hide from the Truth,” revived his reputation, and on Feb. 4 he releases an album, “Hard Times Never Kill,” backed by some of Zimbabwe’s top musicians. His style is called sungura, which meshes Zimbabwe’s own traditions — guitar picking that echoes the plinking patterns of thumb pianos — with styles from across Africa. “Kusaziva Kufa” (“Ignorance”) taunts anyone who doubted that his music would survive; between drums, vocals and guitars, it’s a syncopated marvel that shifts to an even higher gear halfway through. PARELESRokia Koné & Jacknife Lee, ‘Kurunba’The Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Koné smiles her way through the video for “Kurunba,” and the beat she and the Irish producer Jackknife Lee — whose collaborative album is due Feb. 18 — worked up meshes a four-on-the floor thump, electronic swoops, quick-strummed guitars and West African percussion, an unstoppable groove. Yet her lyrics, delivered with a tough rasp, are about the ways a patriarchal culture discards women after they have raised their children, protesting with unquestionable vitality. PARELES More