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      Lana Del Rey’s Foreboding Lullaby, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Madison McFerrin, Ana Tijoux, Matmos and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lana Del Rey, ‘Bluebird’“Bluebird” — the latest single from Lana Del Rey’s country-infused 10th album — has a homey, retro sound: a relaxed waltz tempo, acoustic guitar picking, dulcet strings and an innocent warble in her voice. Behind it is worry. She’s warning someone — a child? a friend? — to escape while they can, while she stays behind to shield them from abuse: “We both shouldn’t be dealing with him,” she sings. It’s an alarm that’s delivered as a lullaby: “Find a way to fly,” she urges, oh so sweetly. “Just shoot for the sun, ’til I can finally run.”Madison McFerrin, ‘I Don’t’Madison McFerrin transmutes a failed engagement into a wry but dramatic self-assessment: “Did I make a mistake in choosing who / to say ‘I do’ to?” she sings with crisp syllables. Syncopated piano chords and sympathetic backing vocals hint at the archness of a show tune, but a crescendo of distorted electric guitars suggests some feelings still unresolved.Grumpy featuring Claire Rousay and Pink Must, ‘Harmony’A mid-tempo, boom-chunk beat is the only relatively stable component of “Harmony,” a collaboration by four electronics-loving experimenters from pop’s fringe. (Pink Must is a duo.) “Harmony” is a hyperpop ballad that somehow stays winsome despite its filtered, pitch-shifted, overlapping vocals, warped instrumental sounds and angular bits of melody. “When I pray for harmony, it’s for you,” Grumpy sings, no matter how skewed the harmonies are at the moment.Morgan Wallen featuring Post Malone, ‘I Ain’t Comin’ Back’Released on Good Friday, “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” offers peak posturing and allusions to faith, along with brand placements for booze, tobacco and a vintage car. “There’s a lot of reasons I ain’t Jesus, but the main one is that I ain’t comin’ back,” Morgan Wallen and Post Malone sing with sullen pride. There’s some clever wordplay — “Go throw your pebbles, I’ll be somewhere getting stoned,” Malone taunts — but sour self-righteousness prevails.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Francis Davis, Sharp-Eared Jazz Critic and Husband of Terry Gross, Dies at 78

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      He wrote prolifically about various aspects of the arts and popular culture. But he kept his focus on jazz, celebrating its past while worrying about its future.Francis Davis, a prolific jazz critic with a sharp eye and ear for music’s cultural context, died on Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 78.His wife, Terry Gross, the host of the NPR program “Fresh Air,” said the cause was emphysema and complications of Parkinson’s disease.As a contributing editor at The Atlantic for more than a quarter-century and a columnist at The Village Voice for even longer, Mr. Davis wrote hundreds of articles on music, film, television and popular culture, focusing on jazz — an art form he both celebrated and bemoaned, worried that its future would not live up to its past. (He also wrote for The New York Times and other publications.)His specialty was teasing meaning from the sounds he heard, situating them in America’s history, culture and society. That approach, and the fluency of his writing, made him one of the most influential writers on jazz in the 1980s and beyond, drawing a wide readership and praise from other critics. The cultural figures and artifacts he took on — Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, “Seinfeld,” Billie Holiday, the director William Wyler — amount to a group portrait of America in the postwar years, largely in the pages of The Atlantic.One reviewer wrote of “Jazz and Its Discontents” (2004), one of seven books Mr. Davis published, that his “insights, investigations and opinions” were “funny, fierce and fair.”Da Capo Press“He is a sensitive, knowledgeable, perceptive, imaginative critic, and even when he’s moping he’s a pleasure to read,” The Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote of Mr. Davis’s 1990 collection, “Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nino Tempo, Who Topped the Charts With ‘Deep Purple,’ Dies at 90

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      He was a busy session saxophonist, but he is probably best known for the Grammy-winning pop hit that he sang in 1963 as half of a duo act with his sister, April Stevens.Nino Tempo, an accomplished tenor saxophonist whose harmonious foray into pop singing with his sister, April Stevens, produced a chart-topping, Grammy-winning version of “Deep Purple” in 1963, died on April 10 at his home in West Hollywood, Calif. He was 90.The death was confirmed on Tuesday by his friend Jim Chaffin.Mr. Tempo’s career traced an early arc of pop music, from big-band jazz to the rise of rock and funk, before boomeranging back to jazz in the 1990s. As a child he sang with Benny Goodman’s orchestra; he later played saxophone on records by Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra; and he released a funk album, with a studio band called Nino Tempo & 5th Ave. Sax, during the genre’s ascent in the 1970s.But to many aficionados of 1960s pop music, what rings out in memory is his harmonizing with his sister on “Deep Purple,” a jazz standard originally written for piano by Peter DeRose, with lyrics later added by Mitchell Parish.“Deep Purple” was recorded in 14 minutes and originally considered “unreleasable” by Atlantic Records executives, Mr. Tempo recalled. It was released in September 1963 and reached No. 1 two months later.Atco, via Vinyls/AlamyThe song, given a laid-back arrangement by Mr. Tempo and played by a studio ensemble that included Glen Campbell on guitar, was recorded in just 14 minutes at the end of a session produced by Ahmet Ertegun, a founder of Atlantic Records, who had signed Mr. Tempo and Ms. Stevens to his Atco Records imprint.In one part of “Deep Purple,” Ms. Stevens speaks the refrain and Mr. Tempo sings it back in falsetto:“When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls/And the stars begin to twinkle in the night/In the mist of a memory, you wander back to me/Breathing my name with a sigh.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Songs From Pulp, Bon Iver, Rauw Alejandro and More

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      Listen to tracks by Bon Iver, Valerie June, Rauw Alejandro and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Pulp, ‘Spike Island’“This time I’ll get it right,” Jarvis Cocker vows on “Spike Island” from “More,” the first album since 2001 by Pulp, the 1990s Britpop standard bearers. Due in June, the new album grew out of songwriting spurred by a Pulp reunion tour that started in 2023. The band has reclaimed its old glam-rock swagger, backed by strings, and Cocker is just self-conscious enough: “I exist to do this — shouting and pointing,” he sings. True to Britpop, the song’s chorus (“Spike Island come alive”) is a British rock self-reference, to an annoying D.J.’s exhortations at a 1990 Stone Roses concert. And in an equally self-conscious video, Cocker prompts A.I. to make Pulp’s 1995 album cover photos “come alive,” with hilariously suboptimal results.Stereolab, ‘Aerial Troubles’After 15 years between albums, Stereolab has completed a new one: “Instant Holograms on Metal Film,” due May 23. Its first single, “Aerial Troubles,” has the band sounding like its old self, imperturbably setting out patterns within patterns while the lyrics critique late capitalism. “An unfillable hole / An insatiable state of consumption — systemic,” they sing in call-and-response. “We can’t eat our way out of it.” Synthesizers buzz and drums tick steadily as Stereolab calmly anticipates “the new yet undefined future / That holds the prospect for greater wisdom.”Turnstile, ‘Never Enough’From its beginnings more than a decade ago, Turnstile thoroughly established its hardcore bona fides without ever ruling out melody, allowing its music room to expand. “Never Enough,” which will be the title song of Turnstile’s first album since 2021, sets its succinct lyrics in two very different ways. Its intro and outro use stately, billowing, organ-like chords. But its middle section is a fortress of punk-grunge guitars and barreling drums. It crests into a singalong-friendly refrain — “It’s never enough love” — before the track dissolves back into a rich keyboard haze.Bon Iver featuring Dijon and Flock of Dimes, ‘Day One’A couple struggles against self-doubt and depression and tries to reconcile in “Day One” from “Sable, Fable,” Bon Iver’s cathartic new album. “It got bad enough I thought that I would leave,” Justin Vernon moans. Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes) advises, “You may have to toughen up while unlearning that lie.” Together, they sing, “I don’t know who I am without you.” While the chords and tempo come from gospel, the production is fractured and glitchy, questioning its own comforts.Valerie June, ‘Endless Tree’Constant bad news on TV? Pervasive isolation and hopelessness? In “Endless Tree,” from her new album “Owls, Omens and Oracles,” Valerie June recognizes dire times — she’s not naïve — and preaches hope, community spirit and “getting the courage to do something small” anyway. “If you’re on the couch and you’re feeling alone / May you feel moved after hearing this song,” she urges. An increasingly frantic orchestra and chorus join her, revealing some tension behind the positive thinking.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trumpeters. Friends. Rivals. 60 Years Ago, the Pair Made Jazz History.

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      “There was a bar right there,” a Crown Heights, Brooklyn, resident named James said in early March, pointing to the deli at 835 Nostrand Avenue, at the intersection with President Street. “Long time ago, though.”Sixty years ago, the Black social club that once occupied that corner hosted a jazz concert that is so storied, it has a title: the Night of the Cookers. Of the dozens of performances that the trumpet star Freddie Hubbard led in the mid-1960s, his two nights at La Marchal on April 9 and 10 featuring his friend and chief rival, Lee Morgan, are heralded as arguably the most celebrated jazz gig in the borough’s history.“That was one of the records that made me say, ‘You gotta go find your own thing,’” the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard said in a phone interview, referring to the recordings from the gig that were first released on LP in 1966. “They both had great sounds on their instruments, but they were very different.”The Night of the Cookers was a night of tension. Hubbard and Morgan, both born in 1938, were the hottest trumpet players in the business as they turned 27, though each was at his own crossroads. Hubbard, always ambitious, was securing his future as a bandleader; Morgan was struggling with addiction while watching the improbable rise of his hit record, “The Sidewinder,” on the pop charts.An engineer named Orville O’Brien was rolling tape as the bandstand filled with heavyweights including James Spaulding on alto saxophone and flute, the pianist Harold Mabern Jr., the bassist Larry Ridley, the drummer Pete LaRoca and another special guest, Big Black, on congas. Well-dressed Brooklynites, including musicians like the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, filled the spot to capacity. A crowd of standees hovered near the bar.“When anybody mentions Night of the Cookers, I can see it as if I was there again,” said the trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who sat in the front row both nights. “I was at their feet, looking up at Freddie and Lee, and I was screaming and yelling. When I hear that record, I can hear my voice.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Billie Holiday

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      Billie Holiday is one of the foremost vocalists in jazz, whose emotional depth and unique phrasing inspired generations of singers to experiment with form and pitch fluctuation. Nicknamed “Lady Day” by the saxophonist Lester Young, her star brightened in the 1930s behind a string of hit songs and notable live performances in Harlem. In what was the hottest jazz scene in the country, Holiday stood out, and in 1937 she joined the famed Count Basie Orchestra; a year later, the clarinetist Artie Shaw asked her to join his orchestra, making Holiday the first Black woman to work with a white big band.Billie Holiday in the spotlight.Charles Hewitt/Getty ImagesHoliday’s legend grew in the late ’30s during her residency at the Café Society in Manhattan. She was introduced to “Strange Fruit,” a song by Abel Meeropol about lynching in the American South based on a poem he had written. Barney Josephson, the proprietor of Café Society, heard the song and brought it to Holiday, who first performed it there in 1939. It was a watershed moment for the singer: It’s not only the most famous song in her repertoire, it’s considered one of the most important in history, the track’s vivid imagery a strong indictment of racism in the country. Holiday was officially a star after the recording of “Strange Fruit,” and followed it with an impressive run of tracks in the early ’40s that cemented her fame.While there’s been a notion to only associate Holiday with pain and struggle, these accounts have dimmed her light as a firebrand artist whose creative bravery encouraged others to take similar risks. We asked 10 musicians and writers to share their favorite Holiday songs: Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlists and be sure to leave your own selections in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆‘Autumn in New York’José James, vocalistWithin the first two seconds of this song it’s impossible not to be drawn into the spell of Billie Holiday’s voice. Sailing confidently over lush chords by the pianist Oscar Peterson, Holiday pulls back the curtain on the beating heart of everyone who has loved, lost, loved again and (finally) lost themselves in that great city. A superb storyteller, Holiday explores every nuance of Vernon Duke’s paean to autumnal introspection in the city that never sleeps. Through her knowing delivery, every detail becomes vivid, cinematic: couples holding hands in Central Park, clouds reflecting off endless steel buildings, sundown in Greenwich Village, the wry smile of the maître d’hôtel at the Ritz, a lipstick-stained empty cocktail glass left behind at the bar. Billie was queen of it all, one of the highest-paid Black entertainers of her time, who left no stone unturned on her journey toward the self. This is beyond jazz singing; this is mastery in its highest form. With this song, Billie takes her place among the greatest of all balladeer improvisers in the jazz canon, creating the definitive version of an American classic.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Branford Marsalis and Steve Lehman Rethink the Jazz Cover Album

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      Marsalis leads a take on Keith Jarrett’s 1974 LP “Belonging,” and Lehman interprets “The Music of Anthony Braxton,” revealing fresh lessons.Great jazz composers are legion. But the list of great jazz composers whose work gets played by other artists with any regularity? That’s a far more exclusive club.So when a jazz musician devotes an entire record to the work of a less-celebrated figure, it reads like a deliberate, even courageous, act of advocacy. The soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy did this for Thelonious Monk in 1959, releasing “Reflections,” the first-ever tribute album to the pianist, which paved the way for a wider engagement with Monk’s sui generis songbook; likewise, in the ’80s and ’90s, the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the trombonist Roswell Rudd and the collective known as the Herbie Nichols Project each made strong cases on record for the work of the once obscure Nichols.Two new jazz releases find a pair of saxophonists taking similar stands. On “Belonging,” Branford Marsalis leads his working quartet through a full-album take on Keith Jarrett’s 1974 LP of the same name. And on “The Music of Anthony Braxton,” Steve Lehman and his longtime trio mates, with the guest tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, play a live set heavy on material by Braxton, the unorthodox, genre-transcending visionary who was also Lehman’s personal mentor and former collaborator. Both records showcase the potency of the material at hand while achieving a certain kind of expressive liftoff that makes them more than just rote covers.Jarrett’s “Belonging” places unusual demands on the would-be interpreter. It’s an album of emotional extremes that encompasses ecstatic exuberance and prayerful yearning. It also seems almost inextricable from the idiosyncrasies of its maker, revered as an improviser but still undervalued for his prolific writing, which peaked in the ’70s with bespoke works for both a stateside quartet and the European one heard on “Belonging.”Marsalis has tackled imposing jazz masterworks before, covering the entirety of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” in the studio and onstage in the early 2000s, but at its best, his “Belonging” goes deeper. On the original album, the title track is a brief, reflective interlude, played as a solo-free duet between Jarrett on piano and Jan Garbarek on tenor. Marsalis takes his time with the piece, stating the theme on soprano saxophone and leaving space for the rhythm section — the pianist Joey Calderazzo, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Justin Faulkner — to set up a lovely rubato ballad texture. Re-entering, Marsalis starts out playing gentle, aqueous phrases, then steadily crescendoes to a piercing intensity for the final theme statement, the band swelling to match him as his tone grows ever more urgent. It’s a performance that both honors and amplifies the somber beauty of the source material.“The Windup” represents the other pole of “Belonging.” A rollicking, acrobatically twisty theme, it suggests boogie-woogie gone prog, conjuring a mood of infectious delight. Marsalis’s quartet has embraced it as a favorite in recent years, and an earlier version appeared on the band’s 2019 live album, “The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul.” Like in that performance, Faulkner is the driving force on the new studio take. Here he pushes even harder, complementing the opening piano-and-bass vamp with a busily festive beat marked by a barrage of syncopations on snare and cowbell.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yasuaki Shimizu, a Japanese Sax Master, Takes North America

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      The composer and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu is at home in free jazz, classical and art pop. Finally touring North America, he’s going big by staying small.Halfway through “Bye Bye Kipling,” Nam June Paik’s mash-up of music and video graphics from 1986, the camera pans to a tenor sax player as he leaps through “Tribute to N.J.P.” with its composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, behind him on piano, conjuring a blend of Shostakovich and Keith Jarrett.The two musicians had joined Paik’s project, which was simultaneously broadcast from New York and Tokyo, to help rebut Rudyard Kipling’s line, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”The twain meets again this week, when that saxophonist, Yasuaki Shimizu, embarks on his first North American tour, starting at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Thursday and Friday, before going on to Chicago, Toronto, California and Seattle. And on Saturday, at the Metrograph theater on the Lower East Side, Shimizu will introduce four films that he scored, including “Bye Bye Kipling.”For a musician whose inventive arrangements of Bach and whose TV and movie scores have made him a minor celebrity in Japan, the tour is long overdue. (He last performed in the United States in the 1970s.)Shimizu at work in Kanagawa. Kentaro Takahashi for The New York TimesA career retrospective, it should give audiences a taste of Shimizu’s wide-ranging music. He has recorded some 40 albums in as many years — starting in the late 1970s with slick fusion boogie and progressive rock — and has been a prized sideman in the electronic and improvised scenes. With most of his recordings still out of print in the States, he has remained something of a cult figure here.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More