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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Trumpet

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      Listen to Louis Armstrong’s sweetness, Miles Davis’s wild squall, Handel’s Baroque majesty and other favorites.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies and Stravinsky.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the trumpet. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporterThe musical term “intrada” suggests a fanfare, music to mark an entrance. This one, written in 1947 by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, captures the many personalities of the trumpet: noble and bombastic, mischievous and meditative. Hakan Hardenberger seamlessly glides between these moods, driving the energy through the rollicking finale.Honegger’s Intrada in CRoland Pontinen, piano (Bis)◆ ◆ ◆Terence Blanchard, trumpeter and composerHere is my impassioned clarion call to understand the trumpet! See that exclamation point? That’s what a trumpet does. It punctuates emotions. My trumpet teacher Bill Fielder would always ask, “What is the trumpet?” I would ponder for a moment and offer an encyclopedic answer like “A metal instrument with … blah, blah, blah.” To that Mr. Fielder would say, “It is a mirror of your mind.”Ordinarily, I would invite you to listen to Miles Davis’s “Porgy and Bess,” a classic collaboration between Miles and Gil Evans. This album set the stage for people thinking differently about the orchestra and jazz. But as I write this, yesterday was the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. My song “Funeral Dirge,” from the album “A Tale of God’s Will,” originally composed for the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s first Katrina documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” still haunts me today. Actually, I don’t feel like I composed it. I feel like it was being screamed at me: my personal clarion call to hear and weep with my hometown, New Orleans.Dead bodies floating. Dead bodies on top of cars. Dead bodies in the grass. Dead bodies in places I knew. Dead bodies in neighborhoods I grew up in. I saw these bodies in the raw footage of Spike’s documentary. One dead body I didn’t see in the video was that of an old neighborhood friend who died trying to help people stay on their roofs while floodwaters raged beneath. I never cried so much, shedding tears for the many bodies I saw, and the many, many more I didn’t see. This dirge is my tribute to those brave, valiant, fallen heroes. God bless those souls from Katrina — and, today, those souls from Ida.Terence Blanchard’s “Funeral Dirge”(Blue Note)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerConventional wisdom holds that Louis Armstrong’s peak came with his pathbreaking recordings of the late 1920s and early ’30s. Don’t believe it! He remained a potent creative force well into the middle of the century, and his 1947 Town Hall performance of “Dear Old Southland” shows how he continued to deepen his understanding of a tune.This duo rendition, with the pianist Dick Cary, starts out as a stiff-upper-lip confession; the opening trumpet lines suggest a speaker confiding some sadness in a suavely guarded manner. But eventually the attempt to keep up appearances dissolves, as Armstrong sends torrents of welled-up feeling bawling forth. The beaming assurance of his technique — bending notes, reaching for new climaxes — gives this unraveling unmistakable dignity. And the ending’s brief hint of a striding, sunnier future provides one more look at the malleability of a soul.Turner Layton’s “Dear Old Southland”(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Joan Tower, composerThe best way to get to know an instrument is to write for it. It’s like getting to know somebody well; you learn their strengths, their weaknesses. The trumpet has a very limited range: Writing this four-trumpet piece was like being in prison, because the range is so small; it’s like four people in a little room. But inside those two and a half octaves it can really climb. If you go from an A to a C, it’s like you’re going from the basement to the sky.Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 5”American Brass Quintet (Summit)◆ ◆ ◆Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter and composerWho would have imagined that light touching light is connected to comprehension, that inspiration and creativity are bound together in the heart and soul of a true artist? Hearing Miles Davis’s “Calypso Frelimo” was for me an inspired moment of music as art.The piece begins at a shockingly intense level. First the trumpet solo, beautifully inspired music with long-and short-changing sonics, bellowing glissando multiphonics interspersed with nuanced micro-sonics: pure melodic development with a creative range matched by emotion, and just the right amount of space and silence perfectly arched across a vast, still environment mysteriously, without effort.Miles Davis’s “Calypso Frelimo”(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Marie Speziale, Cincinnati Symphony trumpeter, 1964-96The first time I heard a recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, I was mesmerized by the metamorphosis of the sound of the trumpet to the eloquent, distant timbre of the post horn, emerging from offstage in the third movement. This was Leonard Bernstein’s version with the New York Philharmonic, with John Ware playing the solo, and as a very young trumpeter who had grown up steeped in commercial and Afro-Cuban music, I had never heard such a simple yet poignant melody. It was one of the listening experiences that had the most impact on my early career as a symphony orchestra musician.Mahler’s Third Symphony(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Mark Stryker, critic and author of “Jazz From Detroit”Kenny Dorham (1924-72) did not command attention with Gabriel-like power and bravura technique. A favorite of jazz connoisseurs, he seduced listeners with the soulful warmth, colorful wit and understated wisdom of the hippest bon vivant on the scene. Everything about his approach to the trumpet and improvisation was expressive, relaxed and personal. The dappled smears of his crepuscular tone and the flirty bounce he brings to the standard “I Had the Craziest Dream” in 1959 make a beeline for your heart. His improvised phrases, delivered with nonchalant charm, enchant you with clever melodic and rhythmic rhymes and piquant note choices. He’s telling a story, inviting you into his dream — where you not only fall in love with the trumpet, but also the man with the horn.Harry Warren’s “I Had the Craziest Dream”(New Jazz)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerEvery year “Messiah” comes around, and every year, almost at the end, comes the moment to hold your breath. Many performances of Handel’s classic oratorio now take place on period instruments, and the Baroque trumpet is an unwieldy beast: long, straight and lacking the valves that allow players on modern trumpets to hit notes reliably. So while it hopefully doesn’t sound like it, the soaring, angelic, regal solo part that crowns this bass aria is a merciless test of skill, as the player announces the Day of Judgment — and endures his or her own.Handel’s “The trumpet shall sound”Chris Dicken, trumpet; Matthew Brook, bass; Dunedin Consort; John Butt, conductor (Linn)◆ ◆ ◆Leonard Slatkin, conductorIn 1958 my father, the conductor Felix Slatkin, commissioned the composer Leo Arnaud to create pieces that would demonstrate the then-new audio format of stereo. Utilizing various military fanfares as well as original tunes, “Bugler’s Dream” included what would become known as “The Olympic Fanfare.” The track was featured on a Capitol Records album called “Charge!” and has been reissued several times.With trumpets of all sizes and the musicians separated into two different studios, there was simply no better way to show off not only the new technology but also the incredible skill of the 26 players. If you do not love the trumpet after listening to this, I suggest the track that contains the 12 bagpipers.Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream”The Military Band (Beulah)◆ ◆ ◆Nate Wooley, trumpeter and composerThe trumpet is an length of impossible plumbing — physically demanding and fickle — and playing it involves an act of illusory control. Trumpet players, at their best, give up some part of this deception, and their imperfection lets the listener in on a secret: the musician’s humanity. They strive toward something essential and the failure to reach it shows their true virtuosity. What Ron Miles achieves on “Witness” demands that he go beyond his prodigious technique, and the heart-rending sound that comes from his breaking of the illusion is the trumpet at its most essential: vulnerable, virtuosic and real.Ron Miles’s “Witness”(Capri)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorNo fewer than 14 trumpets (and 11 other brasses) blaze mightily through the fanfare finale of Janacek’s Sinfonietta. Written in 1926 for the opening of a mass gymnastics festival that was part fitness bonanza, part explosion of Czech national pride, the work was inspired by a military band its composer heard — and whose raw, brilliant sound and determined spirit he sought to capture. An armed forces paean sounds awful, but Janacek created something both local — a portrait of Brno, his hometown — and universal. The music reflects not reactionary jingoism, but wild liberation.Janacek’s SinfoniettaBavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Rafael Kubelik, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Steph Richards, trumpeter and composerJohnny Coles paints a spectrum of the trumpet’s timbre possibilities at their finest: soft blues, golden butter tones and brazen oranges that reveal a tender underside of the horn. He makes it easy to forget that the trumpet was born as an instrument of fanfare and war. But ultimately it’s the breadth of expression I love most here, the spaces left in order to bring these colors to light. And while Coles’s harmonic contours glide mostly inside the lines, the fleeting moments where the trumpet skates outside — smearing, curving, soaring — bring forward a purple-hued beauty, sounding the blues inside a feminine form.Gil Evans’s “Sunken Treasure”Gil Evans Orchestra (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆C.J. Camerieri, trumpeterIn this recording, I’m drawn to how the trumpet speaks the message of the song as clearly as the lyrics. In my career I’ve seen firsthand how the compositions of Gabriella Smith, the poetry of Paul Simon and the power of Justin Vernon’s voice can express a wide range of feelings so directly. If you think about music as the communication of complex human emotions from an artist to a listener through sound — and if you think about classical music more broadly in the American tradition — no one does it better than Louis Armstrong. What initially drew me to the trumpet, and keeps on drawing me, is how similar the sound is to the human voice, both in its expressive capabilities and its means of production: breath, vibration, projection.Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue”Live in New York, July 22, 1929◆ ◆ ◆Vanessa Rivera, Ohio State University Marching Band trumpeterAlessandro Ignazio Marcello’s Concerto in C minor was originally an oboe concerto, but has since been adapted to be played by other instruments, and one of its more popular recordings features Tine Thing Helseth on piccolo trumpet. The first time I heard this piece, I was in the sixth grade. I didn’t know what a piccolo trumpet was at the time, but I knew that eventually I wanted to get to a point in my career when I would be able to play a piece as rich and interesting as this one.Alessandro Marcello’s Concerto in C minorNorwegian Radio Orchestra; Andrew Manze, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticLeroy Anderson, the master of the light orchestral miniature, recalled that his 1949 piece “A Trumpeter’s Holiday” had its origins backstage during a Boston Pops concert. The great trumpeter Roger Voisin, then principal with the Pops, was complaining that trumpet works tended to be loud, martial, triumphant. Voisin suggested that Anderson try writing something different.The result was this mellow lullaby. Of course, it was still a trumpet piece, so Anderson couldn’t help letting jazzy bits slip in: The beguiling melody has a slightly jumpy repeated-note figure, even as the orchestra maintains a lulling mood in the background, and a middle section turns restless and syncopated in a moment of mischief.Leroy Anderson’s “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby”Susan Slaughter, trumpet; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorAs a violin-playing child, I was slow to appreciate the trumpet, which seemed, like other brass instruments, temperamental and resistant to expressiveness — especially compared with strings. How wrong I was. Take the Thursday installment of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-day opera cycle “Licht.” The drama of Act II, “Michaels Reise um die Erde” (“Michael’s Journey Around the Earth”), unfolds with the characters represented with instruments, not singing voices. In this excerpt, Michael (portrayed by a trumpet) and Eve (a basset horn) engage in a duet that’s flirtatious, funny and — contrary to what I once naïvely believed — full of humanity.Stockhausen’s “Michaels Reise um die Erde”Markus Stockhausen, trumpet; Suzanne Stephens, basset horn (ECM)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      John Coltrane’s Unearthed Live ‘A Love Supreme,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by SZA, Fantastic Negrito, Mary Lattimore 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.John Coltrane, ‘A Love Supreme, Pt. IV — Psalm (Live in Seattle)’When John Coltrane recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” in late 1964, he was demanding an escape from the confines of modern jazz. He was improvising on the level of sound, as much as notes, and he’d already started bringing in new, more freewheeling collaborators to join his quartet. Partly because of that shift, and partly because of how intimate the piece felt to him, he barely played “A Love Supreme” live. But this week, Impulse! Records revealed the existence a 56-year-old tape of him performing the suite in Seattle, in fall 1965, with an expanded version of the quartet. It’s the only known recording of Coltrane playing it for a club audience, and it will be out as a full album on Oct. 8. “Psalm,” the suite’s serene finale and the only publicly released track so far, is the most personal part: Coltrane had set “Psalm’s” melody to the cadence of a praise poem he wrote, and in Seattle he played it without either of the two other saxophonists in that evening’s band. More than an hour in, with the energy of the set suffusing the stage, he turns pieces of the melody into little incantations, coaxing a deep-bellied cry from his horn. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSZA, ‘Nightbird’SZA released a trio of intimate songs on SoundCloud this week, perhaps as a place holder before her next album. On “Nightbird,” the mood is toxic and the singing is limber. SZA has a way of frankly and unflashily relating profoundly complex emotional experiences, building on the melodic structures of 1990s R&B, but also adding some of the sonic distance that’s been built into the genre over the last decade. “Nightbird,” both offhand and devastating, is among her best. JON CARAMANICAFantastic Negrito featuring Miko Marks, ‘Rolling Through California’“Rolling Through California” has a twangy, country-soul groove that harks back to the late-1960s San Francisco of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, all affable and gleaming. But Fantastic Negrito, with Miko Marks harmonizing above his bluesy cackle, sings about how the old California dream has given way to wildfires and pandemic; the foot-stomping chorus goes, “Can you hear the sound/It’s burning to the ground.” JON PARELESThe Felice Brothers, ‘To-Do List’This “To-Do List” starts with everyday chores — “Go to the bank and deposit checks” — but escalates quickly, casually and magnificently to greater goals: “Defy all natural laws,” “Proclaim a lasting peace,” “Discover a miracle drug.” True to the band’s upstate New York location, the Felice Brothers hark back to the Band, with hand-played instruments and a chugging beat; it’s romping honky-tonk existentialism. PARELESRandy Travis, ‘Ain’t No Use’Listen to the mechanical beat of the drums and the ultraprecise mesh of the twin guitars in “Ain’t No Use,” an unrequited love song complaining, “It ain’t no use to talk to you about love.” It’s a track that was shelved from Randy Travis’s 1986 album “Storms of Life,” and even with Travis’s conversational vocal, it’s also a harbinger of the computerized country to come. PARELESDeerhoof, ‘Plant Thief’“Someone’s cooking with my spices!” Satomi Matsuzaki complains in “Plant Thief”: just one reason for the song’s pummeling drums and bass and guitar that wrangle in stereo with staggered, constantly shifting jabs. The song starts out frenetic and builds from there, assembling and discarding dissonant patterns, switching meters and coming to a fiercely open-ended conclusion: “They never weren’t!” she sings. PARELESTerence Blanchard, ‘Diana’No influence looms larger over the Grammy-winning pen of Terence Blanchard — an esteemed jazz trumpeter known for his Spike Lee film scores — than the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, with his terse yet seemingly horizon-less compositions. On “Absence,” a new album paying homage to Shorter, the trumpeter visits with a few rarely covered Shorter gems. Blanchard’s version of the cloud-dwelling ballad “Diana” opens with the strings of the Turtle Island Quartet (featured throughout “Absence”), entering one by one; eventually his quintet, the E-Collective, takes over. Swaddled in synthesizers and trumpet effects, avoiding a firm tempo, Blanchard savors each unorthodox harmonic payoff, feeling no need to take a solo. RUSSONELLOSelena Gomez and Camilo, ‘999’In “999,” Selena Gomez vies with Camilo for who can whisper-sing more quietly. Their voices, harmonizing and dialoguing, share a duet about infatuation, distance and anticipation: “I don’t have photos with you, but I have a space on the wall.” It’s set to a skulking bass line and percussion that wouldn’t wake the neighbors, enjoying the tease, the buildup and a nearly vanished 21st-century experience: privacy. PARELESIcewear Vezzo featuring Lil Baby, ‘Know The Difference’For Lil Baby, it’s new day, new flow on this collaboration with the Detroit favorite Icewear Vezzo. Rapping first, Lil Baby leans in on terse bars, tightening his flow until it’s taut: “I wasn’t ’posed to make it out/I stay by the governor house/I done found another route.” When Icewear Vezzo arrives, the fog lifts ever so slightly — his subject matter is the same, but his flow dances and shimmies. CARAMANICA​​Umu Obiligbo, ‘Zambololo’A duo of brothers from Nigeria, Umu Obiligbo shares close harmonies over their band’s dizzying six-beat, two-chord electroacoustic groove — Nigerian highlife — with constantly evolving tandem guitars and choral harmonies teasing and extending each other. Most of the lyrics are in the Nigerian language Igbo, but the glimpses of English are sharp: “What a man can do, a woman can do it better.” PARELESEsperanza Spalding: ‘Formwela 10’The bassist, singer and songwriter Esperanza Spalding convened not just musicians but also experts — in neuroscience and psychology, among other fields — as she wrote the therapeutic-minded songs for her album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” due Sept. 24. That that didn’t impair the virtuosic playfulness of her music. “Formwela 10” is an apology for mistreating a lover: “I put you through a living hell/This is a way to make the damages clear so I won’t do another that way”; it’s also a leaping, twisting, syncopated melody, a chromatic ramble, and a meter-shifting arrangement that dissolves and realigns around her as she makes peace with her regrets. PARELESMary Lattimore, ‘We Wave From Our Boats’Mary Lattimore’s music holds potent simplicity. The delicate plucks of a harp and the hum of a synth are all she employs on “We Wave from Our Boats,” a four-minute meditation with an arrangement that reflects the aquatic quality of its title: ripples of plucked strings stream over each other, like waves lapping on the shore. But there is also a kind of congenial intimacy to the song. Underneath its marine textures is the glow of closeness: maybe an after-dinner drink shared among friends, a tender embrace, a laugh that fills the belly with warmth. ISABELIA HERRERANite Jewel, ‘Anymore’There are breakup songs that express the profound heartache of a relationship’s end. And then there are songs that probe at the trickier feelings of its denouement, like Nite Jewel’s “Anymore,” from her new album, “No Sun.” Its bright synths and divine harmonies belie the song’s true content: “I can’t describe anything that I want,” sings the producer and vocalist Ramona Gonzalez. “I can’t rely on my desire anymore.” This is a song about the uncertainty and estrangement of a separation: the feeling of no longer recognizing yourself, of no longer trusting your own desires to find a way forward. HERRERA More

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      How Do You Write Down a Scratching, Crunching Violin ‘Chop’?

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      The chop turns string players into beatboxers. After it developed organically over decades, musicians are making new efforts to notate it.Change is hard. All the more so for an old, set-in-its-ways instrument like the violin.But it happens. And in the hands of the five-string fiddler Casey Driessen and the jazz violinist Oriol Saña, change sounds like an unexpected crunch. A scratch. A drag of the bow on the string that ramps up to build an intricate undercurrent of rhythm.How to describe it? “Like a DJ who scratches records,” Driessen offered in an interview. “A little chunky,” Saña said.This small revolution is known as “the chop,” a percussive technique that opens up a new world of rhythm and groove for the bowed string player. The chop turns a violinist into a beatboxer. To play it is to break basic conventions of what most listeners expect from a typically sweet, melodic instrument.For over half a century, musicians around the world have brought the chop to different genres, including bluegrass and jazz, Celtic and funk, far-flung regional traditions and beyond. Composers like Kenji Bunch, Jessica Meyer, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Mimi Rabson have featured it in new works. With all this activity, it has evolved into its own percussive language. This naturally raises the question: how does it get written down?It’s been a long path to trying to notate and codify the chop. “It’s not that often that somebody creates a whole new instrumental technique for the violin and that it actually becomes widespread,” said Laura Risk, a fiddler and assistant professor of music and culture at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who has documented the chop’s diffusion across North Atlantic string communities. “With the chop, it’s so recent and it’s so unusual that we can trace it.”In 1966, the bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene invented the basic chop and put it to work as a showpiece while soloing. It passed to the violinist Darol Anger, who developed it as a tool for backup in the Turtle Island Quartet, a genre-bending jazz group. The chop offered a way to mimic a full rhythm section using only string players.In 1973, Bill Keith, Clarence White, Richard Greene and David Grisman in the bluegrass band Muleskinner.via Richard GreeneIt’s in this form that the technique took off — “dangerously,” Anger has said. “I feel like Oppenheimer sometimes. I’ve released some kind of monster.”He recalls a watershed moment at a music camp in the 1990s, when he offered “Darol’s Chop Shop” to a group of virtuosic young fiddlers eager to discover new sounds. Among them were Driessen and Saña, who have since made chopping central to their musical lives. Driessen has extended the chop’s vocabulary through new moves, even introducing the “triple chop,” which makes a tsk-tsk-tsk triplet, as if calling to a stubborn cat; Saña has brought it to string communities in Europe; and both have passed it on through performance, workshops and online instructional videos.The chop’s spread has been raucous, organic, primarily learned player-to-player; at first glance, inventing a written form for it might seem strange or sacrilegious. Notation is a deliberate act of definition. It’s a bet on standardization in exchange for dissemination. Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Casey DriessenAnger and the Turtle Island Quartet used a simple “x” or a slash in place of the standard notehead to mark different flavors of chop. When the group started publishing their own arrangements, those symbolic choices became quasi-codified, establishing a baseline notation. Two years ago, Saña and Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language. The project is a multimedia mixture of musical glossary, historical record and pedagogical tool.Of course, there is a tension in writing something down. Is a notation a description of a particular musical personality? A set of instructions for someone to follow? “With a score, there is usually leeway for interpretation,” Risk said. “That’s where your own sense of musicality, the style and genre, that’s where all of that comes in.”For Anger, writing at an earlier point in the chop’s development, the simplicity of the symbols was crucial. In its arrangements, the Turtle Island Quartet opted to use the minimal amount of information possible to make space for the somatic experience of the music: listening and feeling. They worried too much detail would muddle the groove, leaving players “dreading their way through a thicket of squiggles,” said Anger.Two years ago, Oriol Saña and Casey Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language.Laura RuizDriessen and Saña debated how to express for players both the location and movement of the bow with precision, while still having the symbols be legible. For composers, software loomed large, with the two men choosing to favor readily available symbols in popular typesetting programs like Sibelius. Elements of taste also shaped how to visually represent a sound, often leaving them comparing which symbols felt “stronger,” “more intuitive” or “crunchier.”Given that the chop was already in widespread use, Driessen and Saña involved the musical community, too, including Greene, Anger and string faculty members at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. One important line of edits came from cellists like Natalie Haas and Mike Block, who pointed out aspects of the notation that they thought were too violin-centric. Driessen and Saña felt things had truly clicked when a colleague told them “it looks like it sounds, which is exactly the way notation should be.”The duo’s notation features a language of compound symbols. Different noteheads mark the quality of the percussive sound, including slashes of varying size for hard and soft chops, and an “x” for the subtle melodic hint of ghost notes. Signifiers for where to chop on the instrument (relative to the player’s body, at the midpoint or beyond the instrument’s bridge) combine with directions for how to move the bow vertically.Other modern chopping moves received their own written forms, taking cues from their corresponding sound and motion. For example, parallel scrapes (which often make a pitchless drag noise) use a headless stroke with a modified arrow indicating their duration and direction of attack. Circular bow scrapes (which sound like a chunky record scratch) resemble an altered “c” to show whether the rotation should be clockwise or counterclockwise.Will writing further spread the chop? The Chop Notation Project has already ended up in the textbook Berklee Contemporary Music Notation, and has been shared with students at gatherings like the Barcelona Fiddle Congress and online. Other chop notation systems continue to circulate, too, which make different choices about the exact information captured in writing and left up to the player.The chop is primarily a “living and evolving aural language,” said Driessen, but both he and Saña believe a standard notation will help find new exponents for its still-transgressive joys.“I teach chops with students who are four years old,” Saña said. “The first time when you teach it, they say, ‘I can do that with my fiddle?’” More

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      Charlie Watts, the Unlikely Soul of the Rolling Stones

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      In a band that defined debauched rock ’n’ roll, he was a quiet, dapper jazz fan. But their unusual chemistry defined the rhythm of the Stones, and of rock.On some superficial level, Charlie Watts had always seemed the oddest Rolling Stone, the one who never quite fit as a member of rock’s most Dionysian force.While his bandmates cultivated an attitude of debauched insouciance, Watts, the band’s drummer since 1963, kept a quiet, even glum, public persona. He avoided the limelight, wore bespoke suits from Savile Row tailors and remained married to the same woman for more than 50 years.Watts even seemed barely interested in rock ’n’ roll itself. He claimed that it had little influence on him, preferring — and long championing — the jazz heritage of Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich and Max Roach. “I never liked Elvis until I met Keith Richards,” Watts told Mojo, a British music magazine, in 1994. “The only rock ’n’ roll player I ever liked when I was young was Fats Domino.”Even the Stones’ celebrated longevity represented less of a life’s mission to Watts than a tedious job punctuated by brief moments of excitement. In the 1989 documentary “25×5: The Continuing Adventures of the Rolling Stones,” he summed up what was then a quarter-century on the clock with one of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll bands: “Work five years, and 20 years hanging around.”And yet Watts, who died on Tuesday at 80 as the Stones’ longest-serving member outside of Richards and Mick Jagger, was a vital part of the band’s sound, with a rhythmic approach that was as much a part of the Stones’ musical fingerprint as Richards’s sharp-edged guitar or Jagger’s sneering vocals.“To me, Charlie Watts was the secret essence of the whole thing,” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir, “Life.”Watts’s backbeat gave early hits like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” a steady testosterone drive, and later tracks like “Tumbling Dice” and “Beast of Burden” a languid strut.His distinctive drumming style — playing with a minimum of motion, often slightly behind the beat — gave the group’s sound a barely perceptible but inimitable rhythmic drag. Bill Wyman, the Stones’ longtime bassist, described that as a byproduct of the group’s unusual chemistry. While in most rock bands the guitarist follows the lead of the drummer, the Stones flipped that relationship — Richards, the guitarist, led the attack, with Watts (and all others) following along.“It’s probably a matter of personality,” Wyman was quoted as saying in Victor Bockris’s book “Keith Richards: The Biography.” “Keith is a very confident and stubborn player. Immediately you’ve got something like a hundredth-of-a-second delay between the guitar and Charlie’s lovely drumming, and that will change the sound completely. That’s why people find it hard to copy us.”Watts’s technique involved idiosyncratic use of the hi-hat, the sandwiched cymbals that rock drummers usually whomp with metronomic regularity. Watts tended to pull his right hand away on the upbeat, giving his left a clear path to the snare drum — lending the beat a strong but slightly off-kilter momentum.Even Watts was not sure where he picked up that quirk. He may have gotten it from his friend Jim Keltner, one of rock’s most well-traveled studio drummers. But the move became a Watts signature, and musicians marveled at his hi-hat choreography. “It’ll give you a heart arrhythmia if you look at it,” Richards wrote.To Watts, it was just an efficient way to land a hard hit on the snare.“I was never conscious I did it,” he said in a 2018 video interview. “I think the reason I did it is to get the hand out of the way to do a bigger backbeat.”Watts’s technique involved idiosyncratic use of the hi-hat. He tended to pull his right hand away on the upbeat, giving his left a clear path to the snare drum.Jeff Hochberg/Getty ImagesWatts’s musical style could be traced to mid-1950s London, the period just before rock took hold among the postwar generation that would dominate pop music a decade later. As a young man he was infatuated with jazz, often jamming with a bass-playing neighbor, Dave Green. In 1962, after stints in local jazz bands, he joined the guitarist Alexis Korner’s group Blues Incorporated, which was influenced by electric Chicago blues and R&B.“I went into rhythm and blues,” Watts recalled in a 2012 interview in The New Yorker. “When they asked me to play, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it meant Charlie Parker, played slow.”While Watts was in Blues Incorporated, Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones — the other founding guitar player of the Rolling Stones — all passed through, playing with the group. Watts joined the Stones at the start of 1963, and that June the band released its first single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On.”The Stones quickly took their place as leaders in rock’s British Invasion, the rowdy complement to the Beatles. But Watts never quite matched that profile. On the band’s early tours of the United States, he behaved like a middle-aged tourist, making pilgrimages to jazz clubs.As the lifestyle of the Rolling Stones became more extravagant, Watts grew more solitary and eccentric. He became an expert in Georgian silver; he collected vintage cars but never learned to drive. The journalist Stanley Booth, in his book “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,” about the glory and the depravity of the band’s 1969 American tour, described Watts as “the world’s politest man.”From left: Mick Jagger, Watts, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood. While his bandmates cultivated an attitude of debauched insouciance, Watts kept a quiet public persona.Robin Platzer/Getty ImagesAt the same time, Watts often functioned as a kind of ironic mascot for the band. He was a focal point on the covers of “Between the Buttons” (1967) and “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!” (1970), on which a smiling, leaping Watts posed with a donkey.When members of the Stones relocated to France in 1971 to escape onerous British tax rates, Richards’s rented villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer became the band’s hub of creativity and decadence. Watts and Wyman largely abstained, and as a result were absent for some of the ad hoc recording sessions that resulted in the band’s next album, “Exile on Main St.”“They weren’t very debauched for me,” Watts later said of the sessions. “I mean, I lived with Keith, but I used to sit and play and then I’d go to bed.”While around the Rolling Stones, he was invariably laconic, usually lingering in the background during public appearances. But later in life, as Watts indulged his love for jazz in the long stretches between Stones projects — his groups included Charlie Watts Orchestra and two with Green, the Charlie Watts Quintet and the ABC&D of Boogie Woogie — he opened up, giving occasional interviews.His go-to subjects were his love of jazz and how strange it was to be a member of the Rolling Stones.“I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one,” he told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 2000. “I thought they’d last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.” More

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      Shawn Mendes and Tainy’s Summer Breeze, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Circuit des Yeux, Cimafunk and George Clinton, Alice Longyu Gao 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.Shawn Mendes and Tainy, ‘Summer of Love’It’s amazing that more English-speaking pop songwriters haven’t latched on to Tainy, the Puerto Rican producer behind globe-spanning hits by Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, J Balvin and many others. Tainy puts a reggaeton beat, bachata-tinged guitar syncopations and deep sustained bass lines behind Shawn Mendes as he croons short, breathy, calculated phrases about a remembered season of sensual delights. The title has completely freed itself from the 1960s. JON PARELESThe Rolling Stones, ‘Living in the Heart of Love’Sure, it’s a leftover, and it’s obvious why it was shelved. “Living in the Heart of Love” is a vault track to be released on an expanded 40th-anniversary reissue of “Tattoo You,” something to promote when the Stones tour this fall (with Steve Jordan substituting for Charlie Watts on drums). The song is an obvious “Brown Sugar” knockoff, with Mick Jagger striking an uncommonly conciliatory pose as he woos someone: “I’ll play dirty, I’ll play clean/But I’ll be damned if I’ll be mean,” he contends. (Really?) It’s second- or third-tier Stones, and it nearly falls apart halfway through, but the way the band keeps charging ahead is more than enough fun. PARELESParquet Courts, ‘Walking at a Downtown Pace’Parquet Courts are back with a vibrant ode to New York City — and a chronicle of a busy mind traversing its streets. “Treasure the crowds that once made me act so annoyed,” Andrew Savage sings on the first single from the band’s forthcoming album, “Sympathy for Life,” “Sometimes I wonder how long till I’m a face in one.” As ever, his observations are peppered with the robotic banalities of modern existence (“pick out a movie, a sandwich from a screen”), but the song’s snaking groove, persistent beat and shout-along chorus are all teeming with life. LINDSAY ZOLADZLily Konigsberg, ‘That’s The Way I Like It’Lily Konigsberg is a member of the freewheeling art-rock trio Palberta, but over the past few years she’s also been releasing a steady stream of eclectic-yet-infectious solo material on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. (A compilation of that work, titled “The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now,” arrived earlier this year.) “That’s the Way I Like It,” from her forthcoming solo debut “Lily We Need to Talk Now,” is smoother around the edges than Palberta’s spiky grooves, but it’s still got ample personality to spare. “That’s the way I like it, you can’t do anything about it,” Konigsberg intones with a sugary defiance, addressing someone who’s been disrespecting her boundaries. As far as assertions of selfhood go, this one’s particularly catchy. ZOLADZCircuit des Yeux, ‘Dogma’Haley Fohr’s voice has an entrancing power. As Circuit des Yeux, she composes haunting atmospheres that augment its force. “Dogma,” the first offering from her sixth album, “-io” pulls the listener along with a steady, hypnotic beat, overtop of which her shape-shifting vocals move from a low drone to a keening croon with remarkable ease. “Tell me how to see the light,” she sings, as if yearning for salvation, but at other moments in the song she sounds like an eerily commanding cult leader. ZOLADZCimafunk and George Clinton, ‘Funk Aspirin’Cimafunk puts a heavy dash of classic Afro-Cuban rhythm into his throbbing dance music, but he’s also been a longtime fan of American funk, and he recently sought out George Clinton, an idol of his since childhood, for a hang and a recording session. The result is “Funk Aspirin,” a bilingual paean to the healing powers of rhythm, taken at a coolly grooving medium tempo and recorded at Clinton’s Tallahassee, Fla., home studio, where the music video was also shot. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLONaujawanan Baidar, ‘Shola-e Jawed’Thinking about Afghanistan this week? Here’s a traditional Afghan melody in modern guise: distorted, multitracked and surrounded in effects, yet still speaking from its home. PARELESPieri, ‘Quien Paga’Born in Mexico and now based in New York City, Pieri chant-rap-sings over a cranked-up, swooping synthesizer bass line with ratcheting drum machines at its peaks in “Quien Paga” (“Who Pays”). It’s a brash, assaultive kiss-off with electronic muscle as she multitracks her voice to announce, rightly, “They tell me that I’m pretty, and I also have a flow that kills.” PARELESAlice Longyu Gao, ‘Kanpai’For the uninitiated: Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Alice Longyu Gao, a glitchy hyperpop paradise full of killer hooks and knowing, oddball humor. A D.J. and producer who was born in China and later moved to New York, then Los Angeles, Gao has recently worked with such similarly brash kindred spirits as Alice Glass and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady (who produced her deliriously fun 2020 single “Rich Bitch Juice”). “Kanpai” — “cheers” in Chinese, Japanese and Korean — is a total sugar rush, blending the pop excess of Rina Sawayama with the electro-freneticism of Sophie. “My name on your lips like liquor lipstick, everybody’s talking about me,” Gao intones, a semi-absurd but self-evident declaration from someone who’s clearly already a global superstar in her own mind. ZOLADZTopdown Dialectic, ‘B1’The taciturn electronic musician who records as Topdown Dialectic previews “Vol. 3,” an album due in October, with “B1,” a rhythm-forward track that surrounds a roboticized samba beat with sporadic cross-rhythms and chords that bubble up from below, then vanish before leading anywhere. It’s simultaneously propulsive and evasive. PARELESMaggie Rose, ‘For Your Consideration’On her third album, “Have a Seat,” the Nashville-based songwriter Maggie Rose seeks reconciliation and balance: between friends, between lovers, between ideologies. She recorded, like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with session musicians rooted in soul. The slow-rolling “For Your Consideration” chides a judgmental companion — “Doesn’t mean it’s all my fault ’cause you say it’s so,” she observes — but also, in a swelling chorus, announces, “I wish that I could borrow your eyes/Maybe that would open my mind.” She’s only calling for fairness, not domination. PARELESOrla Gartland, ‘Things That I’ve Learned’The meter, mostly, is a syncopated and eccentric 5/4, though it shifts at whim; the attitude is terse and businesslike, but sisterly. The Irish-born, England-based songwriter Orla Gartland, 26, an online presence for more than a decade, dispenses advice in “Things That I’ve Learned” on her long-burgeoning debut album, “Woman on the Internet.” She warns against consumerism, comparisons and artificial peer pressure; she gradually stacks up electric guitar riffs and then breaks them down to a little percussion and a lone, undaunted voice. PARELESLee Morgan, ‘Absolutions (July 10, 1970; Set 2)’Starting on the night of his 32nd birthday, not long before his flare-like career would come to an abrupt end, the trumpeter Lee Morgan played a three-day engagement at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, Calif. A live album drawn from these performances became the last LP released during Morgan’s life; its four lengthy tracks are part of the jazz canon. But there was plenty more where those came from, and on Friday Blue Note Records released a mammoth box containing the full recordings: a dozen separate live sets, performed over the course of three nights. It’s dizzying to hear how little the quintet flags, knowing it was playing four sets a night; the unrepentant tension and synced-up control that made “Live at the Lighthouse” a classic is maintained basically throughout the boxed set. A nearly 20-minute version of “Absolutions,” a perilously seesawing, skittering tune written by the group’s bassist, Jymie Merritt, opened the original album. This newly released take, from Set 2 of Night 1, lasts even longer. As Morgan, the tenor saxophonist Bennie Maupin and the pianist Harold Mabern each take lengthy solos, Mickey Roker’s cross-stitched drumming keeps the friction high. RUSSONELLO More

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      Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Team Up Again, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Lizzo featuring Cardi B, Machine Gun Kelly, Brandee Younger 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.Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘Can’t Let Go’Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and the guitarist and producer T Bone Burnett, who released “Raising Sand” in 2007, have joined forces again for an album due in the fall called “Raise the Roof.” They’ve turned Lucinda Williams’s “Can’t Let Go” into a rockabilly rumba, singing close harmony and sharing the spotlight with a twangy lead guitar. The lyrics are about heartbreak and loneliness, but the performance flaunts camaraderie. JON PARELESJade Bird, ‘Candidate’No slow burn here: The English roots-rocker Jade Bird vents against every man who “takes me for a fool,” flailing at her acoustic guitar and quickly summoning a full electric band, counterattacking both her own past naïveté and everyone who’s ever exploited it. PARELESLadyhawke, ‘Think About You’The New Zealand musician Pip Brown has been releasing music as Ladyhawke since 2008, but the light, infectious “Think About You” proves she’s still got some fresh ideas up her sleeve. Buoyed by a disco-pop bass line and a Bowie-esque riff, the song is a dreamy ode to the timeless feeling of being crush-struck: “Try as I may I can’t seem to shake away this crazy feeling inside.” Don’t overthink it, commands the song’s breezy vibe. LINDSAY ZOLADZKaty B, ‘Under My Skin’Ten years ago, the British pop singer Katy B released her effervescent debut album “On a Mission,” which helped usher in an era of sleek dance-floor reveries from kindred spirits like Disclosure and Jessie Ware. She’s been relatively quiet for the past half decade, returning with a sultry mid-tempo affair that retains her voice’s soulful grit. “The beginning of the end, the moment that I let you in,” she sings, the ruefulness of this realization balanced out by her charismatic sass. ZOLADZBrandee Younger, ‘Spirit U Will’In a group setting, the harp can seem a separate element, becoming something like the air around an ensemble sound — proof of a higher atmosphere, or simply a foil. In Brandee Younger’s hands, and in the pieces that she writes and performs, the harp is something different: It’s the scaffolding, the very bones of the larger sound. On “Spirit U Will,” from her just-released Impulse! debut, “Somewhere Different,” Younger and the bassist Dezron Douglas build the foundation of a bobbing, West African-indebted beat, stenciled out by the drummer Allan Mednard’s muffled snare patterns and given lift by the soaring trumpet of Maurice Brown. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLizzo featuring Cardi B, ‘Rumors’Here’s a natural alliance: two boisterous performers who know that all attention — admiring or disapproving, prurient or censorious — pays off. “All the rumors are true,” Lizzo boasts, stifling a giggle, as a cowbell thumps and horns punch a riff; Cardi B revels in her international fame — “They lie in a language I can’t even read” — and vows, “Last time I got freaky the FCC sued me/But I’mma keep doing what I’m gonna do.” Together they share the last laughs. PARELESNas featuring Ms. Lauryn Hill, ‘Nobody’Nas collaborated with Lauryn Hill (before she added the Ms.) 25 years ago on “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).” Their reunion, from the new Nas album “King’s Disease II,” cruises on a mid-tempo beat and easygoing electric-piano chords. It’s an elder-generation complaint. Nas longs for privacy and recalls an era “Before the internet energy and social decline/Destroyed the vibe, foolin’ us with the headlines, keepin’ us blind.” Ms. Lauryn Hill bats away old complaints about her long absences from performing and her lack of careerism: “Now let me give it to you balanced and with clarity/I don’t need to turn myself into a parody.” They’re not defensive; they’re calmly proficient. PARELESKodak Black featuring Rod Wave, ‘Before I Go’Death and paranoia loom in multimillion-streaming hip-hop tracks like “Before I Go.” Two sing-rappers, Kodak Black and Rod Wave, trade verses over descending minor chords, hollow drum-machine beats and a quavery repeating keyboard line. Kodak Black confesses to problems, says he still listens to his mother and wonders, “I don’t know why but they be plotting to kill me.” Rod Wave details his safeguards but expects the worst. Neither one counts on a happy ending, even if Kodak insists, “Everybody gonna die before I go.” PARELESMachine Gun Kelly, ‘Papercuts’Machine Gun Kelly delivers the verses of his gloriously pummeling “Papercuts” in a classic pop-punk drawl, and the towering, crunchy guitars recall the heyday of ’90s alternative rock. (The distorted chords almost sound like a direct homage to Green Day’s “Brain Stew.”) The first single from his upcoming sixth album, “Born With Horns,” continues in the straight-ahead rock lane that suited him well on last year’s “Tickets to My Downfall,” and it arrives with a surreal music video directed by Cole Bennett. The clip features MGK strutting down the streets of Los Angeles in sequined pants and a tattooed bald cap, cutting a silhouette that’s a little bit Ziggy Stardust, a little bit Kurt Cobain. ZOLADZBig Thief, ‘Little Things’There’s a warm, feral energy to “Little Things,” the A-side of a new single from the Brooklyn folk-rockers Big Thief. Adrianne Lenker murmurs a string of nervous, vulnerable confessions — “Maybe I’m a little obsessed, maybe you do use me” — but the rest of her band creates a textured, woolly atmosphere that swaddles her like a blanket. By the middle of their rootsy jam session, she’s feeling both frustrated and free enough to let loose a cathartic primal scream. ZOLADZPRISM Quartet featuring Chris Potter and Ravi Coltrane, ‘Improvisations: Interlude 2’The PRISM Quartet is four saxophonists, anchored in Western classical, whose catholic interests have brought them into contact with European experimental composers, Afro-Latin innovators and jazz improvisers. On the group’s new album, “Heritage/Evolution, Volume 2,” the quartet is joined by Chris Potter, Ravi Coltrane and Joe Lovano, three of the leading saxophonists in jazz, each of whom contributes original material. Potter wrote his “Improvisations” suite by capturing himself extemporizing on saxophone, then turning some of those improvisations into a layered composition. Partway through the suite, on “Interlude 2,” he (on tenor sax) and Coltrane (on soprano) tangle and nip at each other, while the PRISM Quartet tunnels into a syncopated groove, not unlike something the World Saxophone Quartet might’ve played in the 1980s. RUSSONELLO More

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      The Music That Inspires the Watchmakers

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      Lots of artisans rely on music for inspiration, distraction and just a bit of fun.Music and watchmaking have a deep connection. Consider the “tick tock” of traditional timepieces, the minute repeater complication (a function besides the telling of time) that chimes the time on demand and the tunes played by many a pocket watch.Some watchmakers, though, say music also plays an important role in their ateliers — as inspiration, distraction and sometimes just for fun.Below, six industry professionals talk about what’s on their playlists.UrwerkFelix BaumgartnerWatchmaker at Urwerk, in GenevaThe Rolling Stones have played an important role at Urwerk since its founding in 1997, uniting Martin Frei, who designs the wildly futuristic watches, and Mr. Baumgartner, who makes them.For example, Mr. Baumgartner wrote in a email, in 2002, “we had finished the design of our new watch, the UR-103, but had barely enough money to put it into production.“We had to make a decision. Urwerk was clinically dead. It made no sense to continue,” the 46-year-old watchmaker added. “We took a break, turned on the music, the famous ‘Time Is On My Side,’ on maximum volume. We looked at each other and we knew. We found faith. We had to go to the end.”Ulysse CamusDenis FlageolletWatchmaker at De Bethune, in L’Auberson, SwitzerlandMr. Flageollet’s exposure to music began long before 2002, when he co-founded De Bethune, a brand dedicated to combining watchmaking’s heritage with new technologies.He was 7 in 1969, when Woodstock captured the world’s attention. “I couldn’t understand what was going on but I heard so much about it that I knew it was something big,” Mr. Flageollet, now 59, wrote in an email. “My elders introduced me to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who and their music never left me.”Later, he added, “I discovered the Montreux Jazz Festival, which introduced me to many artists with very different styles such as Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Prince, David Bowie.”Kross StudioMarco TedeschiWatch designer at Kross Studio, in Gland, SwitzerlandNot all creative types in the watch world lean toward rock, though. Recently the founder and chief executive of Kross Studio has been listening to the music from the 1996 movie “Space Jam.”The reason: He is creating a tourbillon watch housed in a sculptural wood and aluminum basketball — a homage to LeBron James, star of the new movie “Space Jam: A New Legacy.”It is just one of the projects that Kross has undertaken since Mr. Tedeschi, formerly with Hublot, established the business a year ago and signed partnerships with Warner Bros. (which produced and released both “Space Jam” movies) and Lucasfilms (its visual effects division worked on “A New Legacy”) to create themed collector sets that retail for five to six figures.“I played the soundtrack through again and again,” he said, referring to the original movie.As for his own taste, Mr. Tedeschi, 36, has an iTunes library of more than 30,000 listings: “I like French music from the ’80s, George Clinton, Motown singers — that type of music is the base of my musical culture. My father played Otis Redding a lot as I was growing up.”via ZenithAlexandra MouginWatch analyst at Zenith, in Le Locle, SwitzerlandMs. Mougin, 44, repairs some of Zenith’s most complicated watches.“When I’m setting the hammers of my minute repeater,” she wrote, referring to the watch complication that strikes the hours, quarters and minutes on request, “I have to listen to the ‘music’ played by the gongs of this watch. My mind is silent, and I’m totally concentrated, with only the music played by my watch piercing this silence.”And when she is starting a restoration, she wrote, “My mind has to be clear, not clogged up with worries or questions. That’s when I mentally conjure up ‘The Funeral’ by Ennio Morricone. Admittedly it’s quite sad, but so powerful. It helps me reconnect with essentials.”She also will imagine the New Orleans classic “Iko Iko”; “Elle est d’ailleurs,” sung by Pierre Bachelet; and “Ça va ça va,” performed by Claudio Capéo.via Kari VoutilainenKari VoutilainenWatchmaker at Voutilainen, in St.-Sulpice, SwitzerlandA variety of music entertains Mr. Voutilainen, 59, and his 10-member workshop team. They tune into local radio stations in Switzerland’s Val de Travers that might be playing “jazz, classical, popular music,” the independent watchmaker said. “It’s background music, creating a relaxing mood.”And when it’s not so relaxing? “It’s a common decision when it’s time to change the station,” Mr. Voutilainen said.Personally, “I listen to everything, to classical, to jazz, to Louis Armstrong. I’m not difficult,” he said, adding that he also likes “Italian pop music, like Zucchero. I do also like the Canadian singer Garou; you can hear the passion when he’s singing.”Johann SautyEric GiroudWatch designer at Through the Looking Glass, in Confignon, SwitzerlandDifferent music fits different projects, Mr. Giroud, 59, wrote in an email. “In the research of ideas or concept I will listen to soft and introspective music,” like Debussy’s piano concertos or Nils Frahm, he wrote. “When sketching I listen to music more rhythmic and almost disturbing in order to leave my zone of comfort (Nick Drake, Isaac Hayes, etc.)”And creating 2-D or 3-D drawings? “Titles arranged by Claus Ogerman, for example, or Kruder & Dorfmeister,” he said, referring to the German arranger and composer and the modern Austrian remix specialists.Music is so important to his creations that “every year I make a compilation of the music that had accompanied me during the year in the form of a CD that serves as a greeting card,” he wrote.Just this creative watchmaker’s way of spreading the inspiration of music. More

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      The Weeknd’s Disco Fever, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Aventura and Bad Bunny, Guns N’ Roses, Aimee Mann 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.The Weeknd, ‘Take My Breath’What would Barry Gibb do? The disco thump, electric piano chords and call-and-response falsetto vocals in “Take My Breath” hark back to vintage Bee Gees by way of a Max Martin production. But leave it to the Weeknd to sketch a creepy bedroom scenario: “Baby says take my breath away/and make it last forever.” He seems to shy away from strangulation — “You’re way too young to end your life,” he warns — but the chorus keeps coming back. Maybe it’s a Covid-19 metaphor. JON PARELESAventura and Bad Bunny, ‘Volví’“Volví” is the kind of mythical collaboration first theorized in group chats and Twitter threads, written about in all caps. This is the world’s greatest bachata boy band and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, after all. The dream comes to life with a bachata-reggaeton hybrid that bursts with late summer joy. But it also contains the slow-burning envy of bachata: familiar themes of jealousy and possession, the kind of toxic melodrama that makes the genre so addictive in the first place. ISABELIA HERRERAGuns N’ Roses, ‘Absurd’And to think you spent the last week theorizing about Limp Bizkit. Here is the real text to decode: “Absurd” is the first single from Guns N’ Roses in more than a decade. It’s amped-up and nervy, a lightly filtered version of the speedier mayhem that first made them famous. Axl Rose sounds a little bulbous, but all around him, things are moving exceptionally quickly. JON CARAMANICANelly featuring Breland and Blanco Brown, ‘High Horse’As surely as Nelly brought Midwest melody to hip-hop and seeded more than a decade of imitators, he did the same in country music, thanks to his “Cruise” remix with Florida Georgia Line. His Nashville inheritors have been rapper-singers, Black artists who are beginning to find success close to the center of the Nashville mainstream. Here, Nelly teams up with a couple of them, Breland and Blanco Brown, and all together, these three country performers — to varying degrees, but all sincere — somehow arrive at pristine disco-country. CARAMANICAIsabella Lovestory, ‘Vuelta’A pair of light-up platform stilettos and a bubble gun make appearances in Isabella Lovestory’s “Vuelta” video, helping turn a minimalist clip into a hyperpop dream. Lovestory’s lyrics are all singsong playground rhymes: “Baby, I’m lonely/Why don’t you hold me?/All I want to do tonight is dance.” The track is simple but coy, enough to remind you of the joy that Y2K girl groups like Dream and in-store soundtracks from Limited Too brought you back in the day. HERRERALakou Mizik and Joseph Ray, ‘Bade Zile’“Bade Zile” is a traditional Haitian voodoo song that calls to spirits. It gets an electronic update on “Leave the Bones,” an album-length collaboration by Lakou Mizik, a band from Haiti whose long-running project has been to preserve traditional songs by modernizing them, and the producer Joseph Ray, who shared a Grammy as part of the dance-music group Nero. Men and women toss the traditional chant back and forth, then unite and echo; hand-played percussion rides a four-on-the-floor beat, and the energy multiplies. PARELESRed 6xteen, ‘Armageddon’The Dominican drill artist Red 6xteen unleashes “Armageddon” with a cadence that lies low to the ground. But it doesn’t take long for her to stunt: Her voice mutates into squeaky, high-pitched taunts, only to transform into a breakneck dash. An orchestral outro finds her meditating on loyalty and her place in the game. The two-and-a-half minute track functions like an exhibition of Red’s potential, a promise to infuse Dominican hip-hop with the edge it needs. HERRERABrian Jackson, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, ‘Baba Ibeji’In the American musical record, the composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson has been too easily overlooked. As the other half of Gil Scott-Heron’s musical brain throughout the 1970s, Jackson helped create some of the most lasting (and perpetually relevant) music of that era. But since he and Scott-Heron parted ways in the early ’80s, Jackson has rarely put out recordings of his own. When Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge started their Jazz Is Dead project, a series of collaborations with elder musicians, they sought out Jackson first. The fruits of that 2019 session have now been released as “JID008,” a short album of instrumental pieces, all composed collectively, carrying hints of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” and “Get Up With It” sessions, and of more recent work by the guitarist Jeff Parker. On the buoyant “Baba Ibeji,” whose name refers to a pair of holy twins in the Yoruba religion, Jackson’s Rhodes shines with the same quiet magnetism that defined it half a century ago. Nothing’s overstated; close listening is rewarded. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAimee Mann, ‘Suicide Is Murder’The warmth of waltzing piano chords, supportive cellos and “ooh”-ing backup vocals accompanies Aimee Mann in “Suicide Is Murder.” But her lyrics are clinical and legalistic, considering the physical practicalities and weighing “motive, means and opportunity”; instead of proffering sympathy, she coolly reminds a listener that a suicide is a “heartless killing spree.” PARELESAmelia Meath and Blake Mills, ‘Neon Blue’Amelia Meath’s quietly confiding voice usually gets cleverly minimal electronic backup as half of Sylvan Esso. Working instead with the guitarist and producer Blake Mills, she’s backed by brushed drums and syncopated acoustic guitar, along with electronic underpinnings and what might be horns or simulations, in a waltz that conjures the elusive allure of a smoky bar crawl. It’s the cozily experimental first release from Psychic Hotline, a label run by Sylvan Esso with its manager. PARELES More