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      Natasha Rothwell and Samara Joy on Finding Their Voices

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      The “How to Die Alone” creator and actress and the Grammy-winning jazz singer talk about genre, improvisation and romantic comedies.Admiration Society shows two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation.The television actress and writer Natasha Rothwell grew up as an itinerant Air Force kid and started her career in improvisational comedy at places like New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade; she credits both experiences with nurturing her resilience and curiosity. After writing for “Saturday Night Live” in 2014 and then appearing in the 2016 Netflix series “The Characters,” she was hired to write on “Insecure” (2016-21), Issa Rae’s breakthrough Black rom-com HBO series. Rothwell, 43, became better known, however, for portraying Kelli, the show’s frank, sexually free sidekick. She then went on to play Belinda, a disillusioned masseuse at a Hawaiian resort, on the first season of Mike White’s “The White Lotus” in 2021. She’ll reappear on that show’s third season, which airs on Max early next year. And she just finished her showrunning debut as the creator and star of “How to Die Alone,” a New York-set comedy-drama series that premiered on Hulu earlier this month. She plays Mel, a single airport employee whose near-death experience shocks her into living a deeper life.Rothwell is also a jazz obsessive who’s put in many hours of karaoke. One of her favorite artists is Samara Joy, who at the age of 24 has already won three Grammys: Best New Artist and Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2023, followed by Best Jazz Performance this year. Descended from two generations of gospel singer royalty (her grandparents co-founded the Savettes; her vocalist-bassist father toured with Andraé Crouch), Joy excels at rebooting jazz standards with tight new arrangements and dreamy, conversational lyrics. In 2020, while still a student at the State University of New York’s Purchase College, she performed Duke Ellington’s “Take Love Easy,” inspired by Ella Fitzgerald’s 1974 version, in a video posted to Facebook that became a pandemic-era viral hit. She has since released two albums, both influenced by her love of contemporary romance narratives.Joy has been touring almost nonstop for the past three years but, by early summer, when she spoke with Rothwell for the first time one evening, she had completed her third album, “Portrait,” which comes out in October. Their conversation took place over video — Joy at her parents’ home in the Bronx and Rothwell calling in from Thailand, where she’d just filmed White’s show. “Both of us are closing some chapters,” said Rothwell — and each was eager to cheer the other on. By the end of a 90-minute conversation, they’d already made plans to meet soon in person.Natasha Rothwell: When I was watching the Grammys [earlier this year], you would’ve thought I’d caught the spirit in my hotel. I was screaming for you, girl. You so deserved [it]. Where are you in New York?Samara Joy: I’m in the Bronx right now, where I grew up. But I’m moving to Harlem.N.R.: I used to live in New York. I’m in L.A. now, but I set everything I write and produce in New York because I’m trying to get a studio to pay me to come back.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Herb Alpert’s 50th Album Is Here. What’s Kept Him Going Places?

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      For years, Herb Alpert talked by phone with Burt Bacharach once or twice a week. One day, two years before Bacharach’s death in 2023, he called Alpert with concerning news. “He told me he had to go to the hospital to have some fluid drained from his lungs,” Alpert said. “At the time, he was working with a musician who arranged a string part for him that he really liked. So he had the guy send him the part to bring with him to the hospital, so between shots and draining, he could study it.”“Man, he was 92 then and still studying!” Alpert exclaimed. “That’s a quality I really admire.”It’s also one he seems to share. This week, Alpert, 89, will release his 50th album, under the title “50” even though, he pointed out, he hadn’t realized he’d reached that milestone until he finished recording. His oversight shouldn’t be surprising given his schedule. Besides the new release, Alpert has been working on two other albums, in between playing dates on a tour that lasts through the end of the year. He’s also been enjoying his second career as a sculptor, having just completed a 14-foot-tall piece for the New Orleans Jazz Museum that depicts a man playing Alpert’s instrument, the trumpet.“People will look at it and say, ‘Is that you playing? Is it Miles Davis?’” Alpert said. “It’s nobody. I was just trying to capture the feeling of playing.”Communicating that feeling remains his primary concern whenever he performs or writes. “There are lots of artists who try to impress other musicians with their playing,” he said. “They’ll play these dizzying things, and you say, ‘Wow that’s fabulous!’ But is it touching anyone?”Alpert, also a sculptor, has completed a 14-foot-tall piece that depicts a man playing the trumpet.Jake Michaels for The New York TimesOver the years, Alpert’s music has touched multitudes. Since his debut album with the Tijuana Brass, “The Lonely Bull” in 1962, his sets have topped the Billboard album chart five times, generating No. 1 singles in three consecutive decades. To this day, he’s the only artist to crown the charts fronting both an instrumental track (“Rise” in 1979) and a vocal piece (“This Guy’s in Love With You,” penned by Bacharach and Hal David in 1968). In the same time frame, he and Jerry Moss co-founded and ran one of the mightiest and most respected indie labels in music history, A&M Records, which they sold in 1989 for a reported $500 million.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Isaiah Collier Funnels a ‘Very Radical Time’ Into a Vivid New Album

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      Before Isaiah Collier went into the studio to record his new album, the saxophonist and composer sent his fellow musicians a playlist of sorts. Instead of songs, it contained news clips chronicling racially motivated violence targeting Black men and women — including the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the 2023 shooting of the Kansas City, Mo., teenager Ralph Yarl — as well as the protests that followed. Collier wanted the LP to be an “observation log” of the past four years, and he was reminding the members of his band, the Chosen Few, exactly where the music had sprung from.“It’s one thing to hear people who write their inspirations,” Collier, 26, explained on a recent video call from his hometown, Chicago. “It’s another thing for you to be in real time, and knowing that this is really coming from an actual tangible and concrete place.”To make that context clear for listeners, Collier wove broadcast news excerpts into the finished album, “The World Is on Fire,” out Oct. 18. The aesthetic choice plays out powerfully on tracks like one named after Arbery, which opens with a CBS report blended with a somber chord progression from the pianist Julian Davis Reid. Later in the piece, police sirens wail in the background as Collier’s alto solo reaches a torrential climax, backed by the drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode’s seismic rolls and cymbal crashes.Along with his musical upbringing, Isaiah Collier learned about the perils of racism early on.Lyndon French for The New York Times“This is why this song carries this type of weight,” Collier said. “The air that you feel around it — it’s real.”Much of the record, which finds Collier most often playing tenor, surges ahead with an irrepressible momentum that harks back to John Coltrane’s classic 1960s quartet. Like another album Collier released this year with the Chosen Few, “The Almighty” — which juxtaposes turbulent workouts and meditative interludes in the mode of Pharoah Sanders’s late 1960s and early ’70s masterpieces — “The World Is on Fire” boasts the grit and conviction that have helped Collier stand out in an increasingly crowded field of younger artists engaging with the tradition of so-called spiritual jazz.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dan Morgenstern, Chronicler and Friend of Jazz, Dies at 94

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      He wrote prolifically about the music and played an important role in documenting its history, especially in his many years with the Institute of Jazz Studies.Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars to have known the giants of jazz he wrote about as both a friend and a chronicler, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.His son Josh said his death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure.Mr. Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.He was known for his low-key manner and humility, but his accomplishments as a jazz scholar were larger than life.He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers and journals, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor in chief and Jazz magazine (later Jazz & Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as publishing 148 record reviews while an editor at DownBeat, including a stint from 1967 to 1973 as the magazine’s chief editor.His incisive liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He was involved — as a writer, adviser, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority — in more than a dozen jazz documentaries. Most decisively, he served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, elevating the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Mr. Morgenstern often maintained. “I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic,” he wrote in “Living With Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      20 Pop and Jazz Albums, Shows and Festivals Coming This Fall

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      Anticipated debuts and long-awaited follow-ups are due this season. Our critics plucked out a list of the most notable.Some of the year’s buzziest artists (Charli XCX, Chappell Roan) are headlining tours and festivals this fall, and a bevy of new albums from established stars (Shawn Mendes, Jelly Roll) and up-and-comers (Flo, Nemahsis) are on the way. Dates and lineups are subject to change.SeptemberNILÜFER YANYA The British musician Nilüfer Yanya makes pensive, intricately layered songs that revel in unexpected textural jolts. On “Like I Say (I Runaway),” the lead single from her third album, “My Method Actor,” the deadpan, Sade-like cool of Yanya’s vocals is interrupted by a sudden eruption of PJ Harvey-esque guitar distortion. A melodically rich meditation on identity, desire and the reverberations of heartache, “My Method Actor” is a confident and hypnotic follow-up to her 2022 release, “Painless.” (Sept. 13; Ninja Tune) LINDSAY ZOLADZNEMAHSIS Nemahsis — the songwriter Nemah Hasan, who has Palestinian roots — sings about seizing her tangled identity as an independent artist, a Muslim, the daughter of immigrants and a self-questioning but determined individualist. On her debut album, “Verbathim,” her producers include Drake’s regular collaborator Noah (40) Shebib, with songs that can be folky or test the electronic edges of hyperpop. (Sept. 13; Verbaithim) JON PARELESSEXYY RED Fresh off several high-profile collaborations with Drake, Sexyy Red, the 26-year-old St. Louis rapper, makes the leap to headlining arenas on her Sexyy Red 4 President tour, on which she’s playing songs from her latest mixtape, “In Sexyy We Trust.”. That’s one way to kick off election season. (Sept. 17; Barclays Center) ZOLADZSexyy Red’s tour started in late August and comes to Brooklyn in September.Torben Christensen/Ritzau Scanpix Denmark, via ReutersCHARLI XCX AND TROYE SIVAN Most live performances by the British pop singer, songwriter and producer Charli XCX tend to feel more like semi-legal warehouse raves than highly choreographed arena shows, but the breakout success of her sixth album, “Brat,” means that, on the Sweat Tour that she is headlining with the Australian pop star Troye Sivan, the 32-year-old industry veteran will be playing some of the largest venues of her career. Bid farewell to Brat Summer in style starting Sept. 14 in Detroit. (Sept. 23; Madison Square Garden) ZOLADZWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Big Band Jazz

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      Big bands were built in the 1920s and ’30s to blast young dancers with layers of rhythm, but creative composers seeking a larger canvas have kept the form alive. Hear 12 big selections.“Big band music” isn’t everybody’s first thought when they’re pondering what to punch into Spotify, we’ll grant you that. But if all big bands make you think of is “jazz hands” and flappers and early black-and-white films, let’s take five minutes to change that.Of course, the best way to experience a jazz orchestra is not on a streaming platform — it’s live. The format was first built in the 1920s and ’30s to satisfy Lindy hoppers and other young dancers across the country. The real point of getting more than a dozen horn players together with a rhythm section is to blast you with layers of rhythm: A big band is a sonic engine, with interlocking gears and heat and pulse.Still, with great writing, jazz orchestras can also be fun to hear up close on recordings. At this point, it’s been over half a century since most big bands made actual dance music, anyway. What has really kept the big band alive is its attractiveness to creative jazz composers seeking a larger canvas. The big band has been embraced over the years by jazz’s left wing (David Murray, Sam Rivers, Carla Bley, Horace Tapscott and of course Sun Ra), by innovators after something closer to a Third Stream fusing classical and jazz (Toshiko Akiyoshi and Maria Schneider), and recently by a veritable movement of under-50 composer-bandleaders like Darcy James Argue, Miho Hazama, Igmar Thomas and Anna Webber.For a primer on the big band canon, look no further than the 12 picks below, courtesy of musicians and writers who know the medium well. You can find a playlist at the end of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Ted Nash, saxophonist and composer“A Tone Parallel to Harlem” by Duke Ellington“Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.” Duke Ellington could say so much with very little. With “A Tone Parallel to Harlem,” a long-form piece that evokes vibrant neighborhoods in New York City, Duke, in just under 14 minutes, expresses everything I love about music: swing, grooves, simple themes, development, complex harmony, tension, release, expressive dynamics, featured soloists and the blues. Though it was originally commissioned by Arturo Toscanini in 1950, as part of a larger New York City-inspired orchestral suite, Toscanini never conducted it. In his memoirs, Duke describes composing “Harlem” on a sea voyage from Europe to the United States. I can’t help thinking about Duke’s reflections on returning to his home while composing this poignant masterpiece.In 1999, a year after I joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, we celebrated Duke’s centennial by playing exclusively his music for that whole year. As we started the season, I was skeptical — which exposed my ignorance. Over that year I learned not only about Duke Ellington but about music. When I first heard “Harlem,” it changed me. It allowed me to discover the power of musical expression. Through his music, Duke teaches us about being human. When we listen with our hearts, we have the opportunity to become better people.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Was Your Personal Song of the Summer?

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      We want to know your seasonal anthem, for a future Amplifier playlist.In a recent edition of The Amplifier newsletter, Lindsay Zoladz shared her picks for this year’s Song of the Summer, including seasonal smashes like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”But the song that defined your summer doesn’t have to be a contemporary hit. Maybe it was an old song you discovered — or rediscovered — that captured an experience you were going through. Maybe it was a newer song that didn’t crack the Top 40. Or maybe it was a familiar classic that provided a perfect soundtrack for a vacation, a sunny stroll or a day at the beach when the summer, briefly, felt endless.If you’d like to share your song and your story with us, fill out the form below. We may publish your response in an upcoming newsletter. We won’t publish any part of your submission without reaching out and hearing back from you first.What was your personal song of the summer?We want to know your seasonal anthem, for a future Amplifier playlist. More

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      Eminem and LL Cool J Duel in Speedy Raps, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Sophie featuring Bibi Bourelly, Kim Deal, Tommy Richman and more.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.LL Cool J featuring Eminem, ‘Murdergram Deux’LL Cool J, 56, and Eminem, 51, show off old-school, high-speed, crisply articulated rhyme technique in “Murdergram Deux,” nominally a sequel to “Murdergram” from LL Cool J’s 1990 album “Mama Said Knock You Out.” It’s all boasts, threats, wordplay and similes — “’bout to finish you like polyurethane,” Eminem raps — set to a jaunty, changeable track produced by Eminem and none other than Q-Tip. Eminem has the slightly higher syllable count, while LL Cool J gets the last word, a cheerful callback to his commercial peak. JON PARELESSophie featuring Bibi Bourelly, ‘Exhilarate’The hyperpop visionary Sophie had mapped out a full album before she died in an accident in 2021; “Sophie,” completed by her brother and other collaborators, is due in September. “Exhilarate” takes the conventions of a big-room trance anthem — four chords, sumptuously reverberating synthesizer tones, a stately underlying beat — and warps them from the bottom up. Bibi Bourelly sings euphoric layered harmonies, proclaiming, “Got my foot on the gas/And I won’t stop for no one.” But the drumbeat leaves spaces instead of thumping four on the floor, while bass tones wriggle and melt and the midrange gets zapped with buzzy tones. The track’s entire last minute is a slow-motion collapse into entropy and silence. PARELESKim Deal, ‘Crystal Breath’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More