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      The Year in Improvised Music: ‘Everything’s Changing. So the Music Should.’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Year in Improvised Music: ‘Everything’s Changing. So the Music Should.’The pandemic compressed live music onto screens, and Black Lives Matter protests brought it back to the streets. What will it all look like, and sound like, in 2021?Norman Edwards and Endea Owens playing outdoors. Ms. Owens helped put together bands to perform at protests.Credit…Anthony ArtisDec. 17, 2020When concerts and in-person gatherings shut down this spring, livestreamed shows quickly started to feel like a glorified last resort. I found myself avoiding them. But a Facebook video caught my eye one day in June, of the trombonist Craig Harris performing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Accompanied by the keyboardist Pete Drungle, framed by a flowering grove and a trellis, he played “Breathe,” a suite of concise and soothing music that sounds like the sum of Mr. Harris’s experiences on the New York scene since the 1970s.He had written “Breathe” after Eric Garner’s killing by New York police in 2014; it was his reflection on the notion of breath as a great equalizer, and as the source of Mr. Harris’s own powers as a trombonist. But at the start of this video, he turns to those affected by Covid-19. He offers the suite as “a sonic reflection for those who have passed, and those who are born,” Mr. Harris says. “We have to think about the lives of the people who are born in this period now. That’s a whole thing, the beginning and the end.”The performance was taped in May, before George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and its nightmarish resonance with Garner’s death. By the time Mr. Harris’s video was released in June, protesters were constantly in the streets, and the suite’s original message had become painfully relevant again. But even in this new light, the poise and sensitivity that Mr. Harris had intentionally brought to this performance didn’t feel out of place.For any lover of live performances — but especially jazz and improvised music — 2020 will be remembered, joylessly, as the year of the stream. Musicians have done their best with what they’ve had, usually by leaning into intimacy; we saw a lot of artists’ bedrooms this year. But it was actually in the moments when musicians zoomed out — when they made our perspective bigger, and connected this difficult moment with a greater sense of time — that improvised music did its most necessary work.With concerts impossible, the vocalist and interdisciplinary artist Gelsey Bell assembled “Cairns,” a remarkable audio tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; it’s part philosophy talk and part experimental music composition, built of Ms. Bell’s overdubbed vocal improvisations and the sounds of the cemetery as she walks.Green-Wood is a majestic place, and there is something robust and alive about it, even though generations of history lie in its soil. “As I started making it, I was really thinking about our relation to the land and the history it holds, and then where we find ourselves now,” Ms. Bell said of “Cairns” in an interview. “To be connected to the land you live on is to be connected to both its history and the other people that you’re sharing space with.”On the hourlong recording, Ms. Bell tells of various little-known but significant figures, using their histories to illuminate what she calls “the apocalyptic foundations of this place.” And she gives us the histories of the trees, instructing us to listen to the ways they sing to each other, and will continue to after we’re gone.Hiking up a hill, Ms. Bell and her collaborator Joseph White turn the sounds of her breathing and walking into a kind of mulchy, rhythmic music. “Because of breath, we’ll never forget how stuck in time we are, how mortal we are,” she says, making the word “mortal” sound like a good thing.It wasn’t impossible to make music via stream that really pulled people together — just rare — and on this front, couples had an advantage. The week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended all concerts be put on hold, the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and the pianist Sullivan Fortner propped up a camera beside the piano in their living room and broadcast a set of music via Facebook to thousands of viewers. The comments section turned into a chattery town square, full of nervous and grateful people unsure of what the coming months would bring.The bassist Dezron Douglas and the harpist Brandee Younger started performing duets from home every week, ultimately collecting them in a disarming album, “Force Majeure,” released this month. The saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and the drummer Tom Rainey got in the habit of recording their wide-ranging living room improvisations and publishing them on Bandcamp, in a series that continues under the name “Stir Crazy.”A listener taking in Gelsey Bell’s “Cairns,” an audio tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.Credit…Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesMs. Bell said she thought “about our relation to the land and the history it holds, and then where we find ourselves now.”Credit…Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesWorking alone, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg also started posting daily solo recordings in March on a Bandcamp page labeled “Plague Diary”; it now has nearly 200 entries. Listen for long enough and the tracks of overdubbed instrumentals and low, repetitive rhythms start to run together, like the hazy interminable feeling of existing at home amid lockdown.The saxophonist Steve Lehman swung in another direction, releasing a less-than-10-minute album, “Xenakis and the Valedictorian,” featuring snippets of exercises and experiments that he had recorded on his iPhone, practicing in his car each night so that his wife and daughter could have peace in the house.Continuing to perform during the pandemic — near impossible as it often was — was both a creative and a financial imperative for improvisers, many of whom saw all of their upcoming performances canceled in March. But newly liberated from obligation, inspired by the movement sweeping the country, many also began to organize.Much good critical attention was paid this year in the music press to the ways that our listening habits have had to adjust to lockdown, and to how performances have changed. But what about the institutions that also fell quiet — especially the schools and major arts nonprofits, which have perpetuated massive racial and economic disparities in access to the music? Will they all look the same when things come back online?The trombonist Craig Harris performed “Breathe” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in May.Credit…Brooklyn Botanic GardenMusicians across the world came together via Zoom to organize the We Insist! collective to address these questions, eventually coming up with a list of demands to promote racial equity in major educational institutions and philanthropic groups in the jazz world. A group of artists of historically underrepresented gender identities came together in the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians collective, striking a creative blow against patriarchy in jazz. And as protests overtook streets nationwide, jazz musicians were often there.The bassist Endea Owens showed up on the second day of protests in New York back in May, she said in an interview. She almost immediately felt a need to contribute music, and she helped put together bands that played daily at demonstrations over the next three weeks. “We were out there for two to three weeks, walking from Washington Square Park to the Barclays Center, just playing,” she said. “That created a ripple effect of something creative, something positive. You felt like you had to fight for your lives.”In Harlem, where she lives, Ms. Owens started a monthly series of masked, socially distanced cookout concerts. Using donations as well as money from her own pocket, she has handed out 100 free meals at each one, while paying underemployed jazz musicians to perform. As a member of Jon Batiste’s Stay Human, the house band for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Ms. Owens has been the rare jazz musician this year who could count on a steady paycheck.But without nightly gigs, she has still had an excess of downtime. Now that she has made connections with other organizers and mutual aid groups in the area, she is thinking about how to continue that effort into the future, even if the usual work opportunities for musicians come back.“There’s a big opportunity to make jazz feel more familiar and make it feel more accessible, where anyone can go to these shows,” Ms. Owens said. “I don’t even think it’s possible to go back to the way we did things. Everything’s changing. So the music should. The way we perform, the way we approach it, the places where we have this music.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Othella Dallas, Keeper of Katherine Dunham’s Flame, Dies at 95

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOthella Dallas, Keeper of Katherine Dunham’s Flame, Dies at 95Ms. Dallas taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham dance technique in Europe well into her 90s. She also had a career as a blues, jazz and R&B singer. An early member of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, she later had success as a singer.Credit…via Peter WydlerDec. 11, 2020Othella Dallas, who was one of the last surviving early members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the nation’s first self-supporting Black modern dance troupe, and taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham technique in Europe well into her 90s, died on Nov. 28 at a nursing home in Binningen, Switzerland. She was 95.Her son, Peter Wydler, said the cause was lung cancer.The sound of conga drums reverberated at Ms. Dallas’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, for years as she gyrated to their rhythm. Her students watched reverently, eager to learn from a woman who had learned from Dunham, the matriarch of Black dance, who died in 2006.“I had three mothers in my life,” Ms. Dallas said in a 2016 documentary film about her, “What Is Luck?” “My mother, my grandmother and my godmother. And then I had Katherine Dunham. My professor.”Ms. Dallas’s dance school, which she opened in 1975, is considered the only school in Europe that teaches pure Dunham technique, a polyrhythmic style rooted in early Black dance that Dunham developed through her ethnographic research in the Caribbean in the 1930s. Alvin Ailey studied with Dunham in the 1940s, and the technique’s legacy lives on institutionally at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York.Ms. Dallas teaching a class at her dance school in Basel, Switzerland, last year. She continued to teach well into her 90s.Credit…Renata SagoBut as the style’s prominence diminished, Ms. Dallas’s devotion to teaching it rendered her a powerful living link to dance history.Glory Van Scott, a former principal Dunham dancer who is a master teacher of the technique, said Ms. Dallas was among the last of her era.“Very few are left from her generation,” Dr. Van Scott said. “But as long as there’s someone out there doing Dunham, we’re still here.”“You feel it like a religion,” she added. “It’s in our bloodline. You live with it when you teach it. You respect it. And then you give it to someone else, so they may have the honor of teaching it and seeing the genius of Dunham.”Ms. Dallas left the Katherine Dunham Dance Company in 1949, and although she was associated with her illustrious mentor her whole life, she hardly lived in her shadow.She seized her own spotlight in the 1950s as a blues and R&B singer, sharing stages with Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. She appeared at the Apollo Theater in Harlem with Sammy Davis Jr. And she had the distinction of singing in a stage musical orchestrated by a young Quincy Jones, “Free and Easy,” which flopped so badly that it left him and his band broke and stranded in Europe.Ms. Dallas settled in Switzerland in the 1960s, but she also kept performing, gradually becoming an esteemed elder stateswoman of the blues. In 2005, she played at the founding concert of the Festival da Jazz in St. Moritz, and she went on to perform there annually. Last year she received a Swiss Jazz Award.Ms. Dallas at the Festival da Jazz in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 2010. She performed at the festival annually starting in 2005.Credit…Giancarlo Cattaneo/fotoSwiss.comAfter decades running her school in Basel, she became known as an eccentric local personality. She wore elaborate jewelry and colorful headwraps, and she rode the bus to class, her diminutive figure lugging a roller bag filled with leotards and dance equipment.Ms. Dallas was born just before the Great Depression in Memphis and grew up waiting in breadlines with her mother. She lived in a creaky old house on the outskirts of town. And she was filled with verve from the start.“I was dancing since I came out of my mother’s womb,” she said in the documentary. “I said, ‘Where are the people? Where’s the microphone? Where’s the musicians? I’m ready to dance.’”In the 1930s, while Ms. Dallas was studying ballet in St. Louis, Dunham visited the school one day, and Ms. Dallas caught her attention.“They said, ‘Go dance for Ms. Dunham,’” Ms. Dallas recalled. “And Ms. Dunham, she had her eye on me. I’ll never forget that.”When she was 19, Ms. Dallas headed to New York at Dunham’s invitation to study at her school near Times Square. She was initiated into Dunham’s militaristic training regimen, required to scrub floors, wash clothes and do her teacher’s hair.“My attitude,” Ms. Dallas told The New York Times last year, was “to bleed her, to get everything that I ever wanted to learn in my life about dance.”Ms. Dallas, right, with Katherine Dunham in 1949. “I had three mothers in my life,” Ms. Dallas once said. “My mother, my grandmother and my godmother. And then I had Katherine Dunham. My professor.”Credit…via Peter WydlerMs. Dallas performed on Broadway in 1946 in “Bal Nègre,” a revue staged and choreographed by Dunham, and toured with the company throughout Europe. In Paris, she met a Swiss engineer named Peter Wydler. When Dunham discovered that Ms. Dallas intended to get married, she was initially furious, but she served as Ms. Dallas’s witness and popped the Champagne at the wedding in 1949. Eartha Kitt sang “C’est Si Bon.”Ms. Dallas left the company later that year to stay with her husband in Switzerland. She taught the Dunham technique in Zurich in the 1950s, but soon left to pursue a music career back in America. In 1975, finally settled in Europe, she opened her dance school in Basel.“Yes, I’ve had luck,” she said in the documentary, reflecting on her improbable life. “I’ve been lucky to have so much. That means, what is luck?”Othella Dallas was born Othella Talmadge Strozier on Sept. 26, 1925, in Memphis. Her father, Frank, was a pharmacist. Her mother, Thelma Lee, was a seamstress who also sang in vaudeville. A grandmother ran a music school. Othella attended high school in St. Louis and aspired to become a doctor.As a girl, she suffered from rickets; doctors suggested resetting her legs. Instead, as she told it, her grandmother took her to a voodoo priest, who prescribed that her legs get massaged in greasy dishwater while he recited an incantation.After enough dips in the kitchen sink, he said she was cured.“Let her dance,” he proclaimed.“Let her dance where?” her mother asked. “Those old dirty nightclubs?”“I don’t care where she dances,” he said. “But let her dance.”Before long, Dunham discovered Ms. Dallas and invited her to New York. As Ms. Dallas studied with her, Dunham’s ambitions for her dance company grew. She pursued Broadway and eyed an international tour.“She said, ‘I’m going to put my people on Broadway,’” Ms. Dallas recalled. “And as the first Black company on Broadway, we had to work like a dog.”Of those days, Dunham once wrote: “We weren’t pushing ‘Black Is Beautiful.’ We just showed it.”Ms. Dallas pursued her singing career in the 1950s, changing her surname from Strozier because her manager thought “Dallas” looked slicker on a marquee.In 1960, after making annual visits to her family in Europe for several years, she joined her husband and son in Switzerland, and they settled in Binningen, a town just outside Basel. She kept a scrapbook in her bedroom filled with photographs and press clips from her day in the spotlight.When Dunham died in 2006, Ms. Dallas recommitted to teaching her mentor’s technique. She traveled across Europe hosting workshops at dance schools and events.“She was aware she was pretty much the only one from her time still being able to teach,” her son said. “It was important for her to keep it pure.”Ms. Dallas in Zurich in 2019. Credit…Beda SchmidIn addition to her son, Ms. Dallas is survived by two grandchildren and a half brother, Frank Strozier, a jazz saxophonist. Her husband died in 1982.Ms. Dallas learned she had lung cancer in 2018. Her final performance was a two-hour set at the Atlantis club in Basel this February. She continued to teach at her school three days a week until the lockdown began in March. She was moved to a nursing home over the summer.During her last weeks at the school, she stuck to a favorite routine. When the studio emptied out after class, she liked to put on a Ray Charles CD. As the music played, she danced in front of the mirror by herself.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Gwen Stefani’s Ska-Pop Flashback, and 10 More New Songs

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistGwen Stefani’s Ska-Pop Flashback, and 10 More New SongsHear tracks by Sturgill Simpson, John Carpenter, Elle King and others.Gwen Stefani returns to the familiar sounds of her band, No Doubt, on a new single, “Let Me Reintroduce Myself.”Credit…Kevin Winter/Getty Images For IheartmediaJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Giovanni Russonello and Dec. 11, 2020Every 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.Gwen Stefani, ‘Let Me Reintroduce Myself’[embedded content]When the brash, sneering No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani emerged in the mid-90s to break up the boys-club monopoly of alternative rock, it would have been hard to predict where she’d be now, at 51. She is arguably even more of a household name than in the “Tragic Kingdom” days, but occupies a space at the deadest center of centrist pop — a fixture on a broadcast TV singing competition that is (somehow) in its 20th season, and an occasional (if sonically ill-suited) duet partner with her country-star fiancé. Her new single, the not-so-subtly-titled “Let Me Reintroduce Myself,” gestures back to Stefani’s middle period of, roughly, “Rock Steady” through “Hollaback Girl,” assuring the skeptical listener that she’s still “the original, original old” Gwen. A few clunky verse lyrics protest a bit too much (“It’s not a comeback, I’m recycling me”), but when her brassy voice rises to match the ska instrumentation of the chorus, there’s a fleeting rush of that old No Doubt magic. LINDSAY ZOLADZTroye Sivan, Kacey Musgraves and Mark Ronson, ‘Easy’The neon-kissed “Easy” was already a highlight off the Australian pop sweetheart Troye Sivan’s recent EP, “In a Dream,” but a new mix by Mark Ronson and guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves kick it into another gear. Ronson’s production expands the song’s spacious atmosphere, accentuating an echoing New Order bass line, starry synth flourishes and cavernous percussion. For all her disco flirtations on “High Horse,” Musgraves has never lent her benevolent croon to a song so straightforwardly poppy before — but she sounds so at home that it’s worth wondering if this hints at a potential post-“Golden Hour” direction. ZOLADZJohn Carpenter, ‘The Dead Walk’The director John Carpenter is a full-fledged musician who has also composed the scores for many of his films. “The Dead Walk” is from an album due in 2021, “Lost Themes III,” of music without movies. It’s a martial, suspenseful, pumping, minor-key synthesizer melody, with a guitar overlay, that has its beat drop out midway through, for blurred piano arpeggios, only to resume with even more ominous intent. JON PARELESGeorge Coleman Quintet, ‘Sandu’In 1971, seven years after his tenure with Miles Davis’s famed quintet, the saxophonist George Coleman was revving up his career as a bandleader in his own right. On this newly discovered live recording, “The George Coleman Quintet in Baltimore,” Coleman — an inveterate weight lifter — drives the band like a personal trainer, while syncing up with the colorful trumpet phrasing of Danny Moore and the brawny Midwestern swing of Larry Ridley’s bass. On “Sandu,” a classic Clifford Brown blues, Moore nods to its author with a few upturned, pretty lines, but he’s working out his own shapes. On Coleman’s solo, his fits of circular breathing seem to call back to the old R&B saxophone hollerers of generations before. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOFunkmaster Flex featuring King Von, ‘Lurkin’The first single from the forthcoming Funkmaster Flex compilation — 1990s back! — is a taut example of the storytelling rap that made the Chicago rapper King Von, who was killed last month, such a compelling talent. JON CARAMANICABenny the Butcher, ‘3:30 in Houston’Benny the Butcher raps “3:30 in Houston” from a wheelchair — the result of getting shot last month in an attempted robbery. At first, he’s laughing a little — after all, he notes, he’s been on the other side of a robbery in his day. But midsong, as he relives the moment of the attack, the mood sours:Rolls-Royce truck basically stood outOnly one mistake, I ain’t have a lookoutQuarter in jewels, shopping at WalmartTake me out the hood but can’t take the hood outSoon, it’s a deadpan revenge tale, including the suggestion that someone’s “pinkie finger’s getting sent to me.” CARAMANICAKing Princess, ‘Pain’“Cheap Queen,” Mikaela Straus’s 2019 full-length debut as King Princess, was a relatively subdued affair, full of mid-tempo tunes that telegraphed laid-back cool. So the in-your-face energy of her latest single “Pain” is certainly a departure, but it works: The kinetic maximalism of the song’s early 90s touchstones — a “Freedom! ’90” keyboard riff; some “Tom’s Diner” do-do-dos — keep the song from wallowing in the muck of its moody subject matter. “I can’t help turning my love into pain,” Straus croons. The playful music video, directed by Quinn Wilson, conjures some cartoonishly masochistic imagery, with that titular word suddenly appearing like the bam and pows in an old “Batman” episode. ZOLADZSturgill Simpson, ‘Oh Sarah’“Oh Sarah” is a desolate Southern soul ballad on Sturgill Simpson’s 2016 album, “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” losing itself in the loneliness and transience of the road: “Too old now to learn how to let you in/so I run away just like I always do.” On “Cuttin’ Grass — Vol. 2 (Cowboy Arms Sessions),” his second album of bluegrass remakes from his catalog, it’s far more reassuring, rooted in string-band picking. It’s a vow of enduring love despite the separations: “Don’t worry baby, I’ll come home.” PARELESElle King, ‘Another You’Bitterness seethes and crests as the string section swells in Elle King’s “Another You,” a knife-twisting response to a message from a despised ex. In the verses she details his failings, almost singing through clenched teeth; in the chorus, she belts with vindictive joy about a new romance, proclaiming, “It wasn’t hard to fill your shoes.” PARELESEl Perro del Mar featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alone in Halls’“I’m going through changes,” El Perro del Mar — the Swedish composer and singer Sarah Assbring — sings and speaks, again and again, in “Alone in Halls,” over two organlike chords that feel like inhales and exhales. She’s joined, now and then, by the voice of Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). Aren’t we all going through changes? PARELESMoontype, ‘Ferry’“I wanna take the ferry to Michigan,” Margaret McCarthy sings, buoyed by oceanic guitar distortion on the chorus of “Ferry,” the first single from the Chicago indie-rock trio Moontype’s upcoming debut album. “Ferry” marries the woozy swoon of Beach House with the rising sweep of a Galaxie 500 song, though McCarthy’s voice cuts through the haze with direct emotional lucidity. ZOLADZAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Piano Bars and Jazz Clubs Reopen, Calling Live Music ‘Incidental’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPiano Bars and Jazz Clubs Reopen, Calling Live Music ‘Incidental’As the coronavirus continues to spread, Marie’s Crisis Cafe became the latest Manhattan music venue to reopen, claiming that it is not a performance venue.Despite the worsening pandemic, Marie’s Crisis Cafe, a West Village piano bar, reopened with a singalong this week. Like other venues, it says its music is “incidental,” and therefore allowed.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSarah Bahr and Dec. 11, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETAlthough most indoor live performances have been banned in New York since the coronavirus began its deadly spread in March, about a dozen people turned up Wednesday night at Birdland, the jazz club near Times Square, for a 7 p.m. performance that was billed as dinner with live jazz. They had reservations.Among them was Tricia Tait, 63, of Manhattan, who came for the band, led by the tuba player David Ostwald, which plays the music of Louis Armstrong. Until the pandemic hit, it had performed on most Wednesdays at Birdland. She admitted to health worries “in the back of my mind,” but said, “Sometimes you just have to take a chance and enjoy things.”While the number of daily new coronavirus cases in New York City has been climbing to levels not seen since April, in-person learning has been suspended at public middle schools and high schools, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned this week that indoor dining in the city could soon be banned, Birdland and a number of other noted jazz clubs and piano bars across the city have been quietly offering live performances again, arguing that the music they are presenting is “incidental,” and therefore permitted by the pandemic-era guidelines set by the State Liquor Authority.Those guidelines state that “only incidental music is permissible at this time” and that “advertised and/or ticketed shows are not permissible.” They continue: “Music should be incidental to the dining experience and not the draw itself.”That has not prevented a number of New York venues that are better known for their performances than their cuisine — including Birdland, the Blue Note and Marie’s Crisis Cafe, a West Village piano bar that reopened Monday with a show tune singalong after declaring itself a dining establishment — from offering live music again.“We think it’s incidental,” Ryan Paternite, the director of programming and media at Birdland, said of its calendar of performances that include a brass band and a jazz quartet. “It’s background music. That’s the rule.”The rules have been challenged in court. After Michael Hund, a Buffalo guitarist, filed a lawsuit in August challenging them, a judge in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of New York issued a preliminary injunction last month preventing the state from enforcing its ban on advertised and ticketed shows. “The incidental-music rule prohibits one kind of live music and permits another,” the judge, John L. Sinatra Jr., wrote in his Nov. 13 decision. “This distinction is arbitrary.”The state is appealing the ruling.“The science is clear that mass gatherings can easily turn into superspreader events, and it is unconscionable that businesses would attempt to undermine proven public health rules like this as infections, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise,” William Crowley, a spokesman for the liquor authority, said Thursday. He noted that a federal judge in New York City had ruled in another case that the restrictions were constitutional. He said that the state would “continue to vigorously defend our ability to fight this pandemic whenever it is challenged.”But it is unclear what, exactly, “incidental” music means. Does that mean a guitar player in the corner? A six-person jazz band like the one that played at Birdland on Wednesday night? The Harlem Gospel Choir, which is set to perform at the Blue Note on Christmas Day? Mr. Crowley did not respond to questions seeking further clarity on Thursday, or about what enforcement actions the state has taken.Customers at Marie’s Crisis Cafe.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesRobert Bookman, a lawyer who represents a number of New York’s live music venues, said venues interpreted the ruling as allowing them to advertise and sell tickets for incidental music performances during dinner.So venues have chosen their words carefully. They are taking dinner reservations, and are announcing calendars of lineups for what Mr. Paternite, of Birdland, characterizes as “background music during dinner.” Unlike Mac’s Public House, the Staten Island bar that declared itself an autonomous zone and was recently lampooned on “Saturday Night Live,” they have no interest in openly flouting regulations.Mr. Paternite said that Birdland, after laying off nearly all of its 60 employees in March, is now back to what he calls a “skeleton staff” of about 10 people.“It’s a huge risk for us to be open,” he said. “And it only brings in a pittance. But it helps us out in our agreement with our landlord, because to pay our rent over time and stay current on our utilities and taxes, we need to stay open. But we’re losing massive amounts every day.”If venues don’t reopen now, he fears, they may never do so. The Jazz Standard, a beloved 130-seat club on East 27th Street in Manhattan, announced last week that it would close permanently because of the pandemic. Arlene’s Grocery, a Lower East Side club that hosted the Strokes before they became well known, said it was “on life support” and, without aid, would have to close on Feb. 1.Randy Taylor, the bartender and manager at Marie’s Crisis Cafe, said the last time the piano bar had served food was probably back in the 1970s — or perhaps earlier. “There’s a very old kitchen that’s totally disconnected upstairs,” he said. Its dining options are extremely limited: It currently offers $4 bowls of chips and salsa. “We are required to sell them,” he said. “We can’t just give them away.”Steven Bensusan, the president of Blue Note Entertainment Group, said that he hopes the state does not move to shut down indoor dining.“I know cases are spiking,” he said. “But we’re doing our best to keep people safe, and I hope we can continue to stay open. We’re not going to be profitable, but we have the ability to give some people work who’ve been with us for a long time.”The clubs said that they were taking precautions. At the Blue Note, which reopened Nov. 27, the formerly shared tables are now six feet apart and separated by plexiglass barriers, and its two nightly dinner seatings are each capped at 25 percent capacity, or about 50 people. At Marie’s Crisis Cafe, where the masked pianist Alexander Barylski was ensconced behind clear shielding on Wednesday night as he led a jubilant group chorus of “Frosty the Snowman,” Mr. Taylor said that tables were separated by plastic barriers, and that the venue conducted temperature checks and collected contact tracing information at the door.Daniel Wiseman, left, and Rindi Klarberg are greeted by Moni Penda, right, at Birdland, a noted jazz club that now calls its live music “incidental.” Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMarie’s Crisis Cafe had been livestreaming shows on Instagram and its Facebook group page, but Mr. Taylor said it wasn’t the same. On Wednesday night, 10 customers belted out holiday tunes through masks, some sipping their first drinks at a venue since March.“There have been some tears,” Mr. Taylor said. “People really, really missed us. We can’t see their smiles through their masks, but their eyes say it all.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Take Five’ Is Impeccable. ‘Time Outtakes’ Shows How Dave Brubeck Made It.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Take Five’ Is Impeccable. ‘Time Outtakes’ Shows How Dave Brubeck Made It.An album of previously unheard recordings from the “Time Out” sessions in 1959 reveals the making of a masterpiece.From left: Paul Desmond, Joe Morello, Eugene Wright and Dave Brubeck, the quartet that recorded “Time Out” in 1959.Credit…Brubeck FamilyBy More

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      A Bittersweet Juice WRLD Team-Up, and 13 More New Songs

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistA Bittersweet Juice WRLD Team-Up, and 13 More New SongsHear tracks by 24kGoldn, Beach Bunny, Kali Uchis and others.A Juice WRLD collaboration with Benny Blanco was released this week, on what would have been the sing-rapper’s 22nd birthday.Credit…Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for IheartmediaBy More

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      Best Jazz Albums of 2020

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBest Jazz Albums of 2020The Covid-19 pandemic halted live performance, the lifeblood of the genre, but a run of powerful albums — and standout debuts — provided respite, and hope.Clockwise from top left: Asher Gamedze, Charles Lloyd and Eric Harland, Logan Richardson and Jyoti (Georgia Anne Muldrow).Credit…Clockwise from center: Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times; Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns, via Getty Images; Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Elijah NdoumbeBy More