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      The Bald Power of Sinead O’Connor

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      The Irish singer’s shaved head was as much a part of her identity and allure as her sound.It was the bald head that became the avatar of a million dreamy rebellions; the shaved pate that bridged the gap between the angry and the sublime. It is almost impossible to think about Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer whose death was reported on July 26, or her work, without thinking about her hair. Or lack of it.Without thinking about the striking curve of her shorn skull on the cover of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” her face below caught mid-scream; the nakedness it seemed to convey in the 1990 video of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” as her blue eyes brimmed with tears; the purity of the line on the cover of her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings.” Which contains an entire chapter entitled “Shaving My Head.”It was effectively her signature — in a 2014 story in Billboard Ms. O’Connor, 56 when she died, identified herself as “the bald woman from Ireland” — along with her Dr. Martens and torn jeans, and it followed her throughout her life, just as much as her ripping up the photo of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 did. Even in the few periods when she grew her hair back, she was often referred to as the “formerly bald” Sinead O’Connor. And as such, she was an integral part of the renegotiation of old stereotypes of gender, sexuality, rebellion and liberation that is still going on today.“I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she told The New York Times in 2021.Now that female baldness has become more common, has become a badge of identity for women such as Ayanna Pressley, the representative from Massachusetts who went public with her alopecia in 2020, and X González, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student (then known as Emma) who became a campaigner for gun control, not to mention the Dora Milaje of “Black Panther,” it can be hard to remember how extraordinary it was when Ms. O’Connor emerged. “Shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin in 1991. “I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.”Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesBut that seeming repudiation of her own porcelain beauty in the wake of a spate of teen pop queens, at a time when armoring yourself in a helmet of big hair was a big thing and shaving your head was still largely seen as a punishment, was as much of a statement of singularity as her sound. Perhaps, it was also the first sign of the controversial politics to come, including refusing to play the national anthem before her concerts and stenciling the logo of Public Enemy into the side of her head at the 1989 Grammys when the show’s organizers declined to televise the first-ever award for Best Rap Performance.She offered various explanations of the choice. All the stories come down to the same thing in any case, which was a refusal to cater to traditional definitions of “pretty” as established by the male gaze as long ago as Rapunzel and Lady Godiva.In shearing her head “she was literally shearing away a false narrative,” said Allyson McCabe, the author of “Why Sinead O’Connor Matters.” In 1991 Ms. O’Connor told Spin, “shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing. I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.” However, she also said, “The women who are admired are the ones that have blond hair and big lips and wear red lipstick and wear short skirts, because that’s an acceptable image of a woman.” And, “Because I have no hair, people think I’m angry.”In a 2017 TV interview she told Dr. Phil that it was because during her abusive childhood her mother had compared her with her sister, who had long red hair, unlike Sinead. “When I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter,” Ms. O’Connor said in the interview. “And that’s why I cut my hair off. I didn’t want to be pretty.”The cover of Ms. O’Connor’s memoir.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Associated PressA still from her music video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.”In the interview she also said, “It’s dangerous to be pretty, too, because I kept getting raped and molested everywhere I went,” and “I did not want to dress like a girl. I did not want to be pretty.”In her memoir, she wrote that she was working on her first album in London, and had been told by a male music executive she should grow her (buzzed but not shorn) hair long and start to dress more like a girl. The next day she went to a barbershop and had it all shaved off.During the period after the “S.N.L.” appearance, when she was rejected by the music industry and revealed she had been diagnosed as bipolar, Ms. O’Connor’s bald head was taken as a sign of instability (just as it was later with Britney Spears). The fact that she continued shaving her skull for the rest of her life suggested it was, rather, a sign of selfhood.The first time she looked in the mirror after that visit to the barbershop, she wrote in the book, “I looked like an alien.” Another way to put it, however, is she looked like the woman she became. And in becoming that woman — in giving herself that permission — she helped extend it to us all. More

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      Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at the Bayreuth Festival Experiments With AR

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      Cutting-edge technology has again come to the Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner premiered his final opera with the latest stagecraft in 1882.For Richard Wagner, the latest technology was crucial to staging his operas.In Bayreuth, Germany, where he opened a hilltop theater in 1876 to realize his vision for his works, he promised that “the most up-to-date artistic resources will be used to offer you scenic and theatrical perfection.”That year, the Rhinemaidens at the start of his “Ring” were supported behind the scenes by wheeled machines that made them seem to swim. A projector with prisms tried to create the effect of gods walking across a rainbow. The auditorium was dimmed — unusual at the time — to focus the audience’s attention and enhance the illusions.Nearly 150 years later, cutting-edge technology has come again to Bayreuth: augmented reality, which adds a dense, often impenetrable layer of surreal imagery to Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which opened on Tuesday.Among the many AR images visible through special glasses are motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze.Joshua HiggasonThis medium could hardly be further from the creaky machinery and gas lighting of the 19th century. But the goal is the same as Wagner’s: to create “scenes such as you might imagine had come from an ideal world of dreams.”But there’s a catch.After a squabble within the notoriously squabbling Bayreuth Festival about funding the expensive augmented reality, or AR, glasses, money was allotted for 330 sets in a theater of 1,925 seats.So 83 percent of the audience just experiences the old-fashioned article: Wagner’s operatic mystery play about a young man who ends up redeeming the ailing rituals of a corps of Holy Grail knights, straightforwardly staged and superbly sung, and conducted with muscular solidity by Pablo Heras-Casado. A much smaller group, including critics, gets the glasses, which superimpose on that live staging a crowded AR environment that is constantly in motion.Are the 83 percent missing much?They miss the space between them and the stage seeming to fill with twinkling stars as the soft prelude begins. The bare trees rotating in the ether. The motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze. The asteroids. The fly that seems to land on the outside of the AR lenses.Later, the flocks of birds, blood-red globules and spiky strawberries. The slithering snakes and spinning, silently cackling skulls. The blossoming flowers. The arrows, spears, machetes, axes, grenades and severed arms. The forlornly quivering plastic bags and the bounding fox. The rocky ledge that appears to fill the area beneath the seats in the third act.In AR style, the 3-D images don’t move with you as you move your head. Rather, you seem to be able to pan across an environment that surrounds you: not a realistic landscape but a galaxy of disembodied elements floating in the darkness, a free-association, stream-of-consciousness panoply linked, to varying degrees, to the plot.Some of the images’ textures are photorealistic, but most emphasize their computer-generated unreality, their unnatural angles and fake finishes, their eerie weightlessness. The aesthetic — with its collagelike excess of uncanny juxtapositions and its flat affect — evokes the digital art that has sometimes been winkingly called post-internet.Georg Zeppenfeld on the spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi set for Act I, designed by Mimi Lien.Enrico NawrathBut for those wearing the glasses, the union of the production’s AR and live aspects isn’t generally happy. The lenses are tinted, so the live performance looks considerably dimmed, and the staging’s frequent video projections are almost invisibly faint.The AR elements (designed, along with the video, by Joshua Higgason) often block the onstage action, even as those elements are fragmented enough to suggest they are offering a complement to that action, rather than a self-sufficient alternative.However dreamlike, the resulting visual confusion doesn’t convey the hypermaximalist, proudly absurdist overload of Bayreuth productions like Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 “Parsifal” or Frank Castorf’s 2013 “Ring.” This is because Scheib’s sensibility — in both the virtual and live spheres — is basically plain and direct.When I peeked below the glasses to watch bits of the performance without AR, there was nothing particularly imaginative or illuminating about this “Parsifal.” The first act takes place in a spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi landscape — the sets were designed by Mimi Lien — with a halo of flashing lights that brings to mind the spaceships of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”These Grail knights wear stylish, contemporary clothes — long tunics, yellow skirts, boldly patterned hoodies — designed by Meentje Nielsen. The sorcerer Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors. After Parsifal destroys the garden, the third act is set in a lonely desert encampment, alongside a machine on the blurry line between war and industry: maybe an earthmover, maybe a tank.The tenor Andreas Schager is tirelessly passionate and convincingly boyish as the guileless Parsifal, and the bass-baritone Derek Welton is mournful yet reserved as Amfortas, the wounded king of the Grail. The bass Georg Zeppenfeld is an elegiac Gurnemanz, who oversees the knights; the baritone Jordan Shanahan, a brooding Klingsor.Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is depicted as a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors.Enrico NawrathThe mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca sounds luxurious — lean yet velvety — as the ambiguous, ambivalent Kundry, cursed to shuttle forever between the realms of Klingsor and the Grail and a role too often screamed. Bayreuth’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich, is, as ever, poised and powerful. On Tuesday, the orchestra didn’t quite bring out the exquisite transparency and delicacy of some important passages, but Heras-Casado’s conducting was vibrant, even-keeled and well-paced.There were a few memorable AR moments. At the end of Act I, a boy in jeans seems to walk through the space, slowly flapping wings attached to his arms — perhaps a melancholy nod to the winged children in Stefan Herheim’s celebrated 2008 “Parsifal” here, just as the dam we seem to be at the bottom of at the start of Act II may be a reference to the hydroelectric plant that opened Patrice Chéreau’s centennial “Ring” at Bayreuth in 1976.Yet there is something bland and empty at the production’s core. It’s not clear what Scheib thinks the nature of the sickness is at the root of this Grail cult, so it’s not clear what Parsifal’s climactic redemption offers. If the final AR image of plastic bags, echoed by one onstage, gestures toward a critique of environmental despoliation, it’s a wan gesture.This means the augmented reality has little profound substance to support, just a jittery desire to stimulate — to ornament and impress — which is just what Wagner didn’t want from stage technology. Scheib’s AR decorations rarely inspire emotion or a sustained sense of wonder: the impression, as Gurnemanz says to Parsifal, of time becoming space.The inadvertent result of all the lavish resources is to prove the superiority of the live over the digital — to keep us sneaking back under our glasses from the augmented real to the really real. The closest parallel in the opera to contemporary technical wizardry is Klingsor’s false garden; it feels rather perverse to extend those artificial seductions to the rest of a piece that’s condemning them.We have come a long way from this opera’s premiere at Bayreuth in 1882, when Gurnemanz and Parsifal stepped in place as a painted backdrop scrolled by, turned by hand on rollers, to create the illusion they were walking. “The simplest of means,” one observer wrote, “had brought about an overwhelming effect.”For all its ambitions and expense, Scheib’s “Parsifal” never overwhelms.ParsifalThrough Aug. 27 at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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      Are You Ready? Gen Z Is Bringing Nu Metal Back.

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      Bands like Deftones and Slipknot are resonating with younger fans, thanks to TikTok, the Y2K revival and, of course, enduring teenage angst.When Deftones’s hit “Change (In the House of Flies)” blared out of Tyson Burden’s car stereo in April 2020, he started to choke up. It wasn’t the tune’s familiar growls or the teenage nostalgia it prompted that made him almost cry; it was his 15-year-old daughter, Nia LaVey Burden, sitting in the passenger seat and reciting the words to the song.“She knew all the lyrics, and my mind was blown,” said Mr. Burden, 39, a retail manager in Jacksonville, Texas. Turns out, Nia had discovered the band on TikTok a few months earlier. After the initial shock, he joined in, and the two threw their heads back and belted out the chorus.“It was just this really magical moment between parent and child where we love the same thing,” he said.Tyson Burden, right, started choking up when his daughter, Nia LaVey Burden, started reciting all the lyrics to Deftones’s “Change (In the House of Flies).”Tyson BurdenNia is part of a growing group among Generation Z that is listening to nu metal for the first time. The subgenre, considered one of the most accessible forms of metal, blends a heavy sound with elements of hip-hop, funk and alternative rock (think: Slipknot, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Kittie), and its lyrics often tackle dark subjects like pain, depression and alienation. Once popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has now found a second life among young listeners, thanks to TikTok, the Y2K revival and, of course, enduring teenage angst.For Asher Nevélle, listening to nu metal is inspiring. “You feel like you can do anything,” said Mr. Nevélle, 25, a musician based in Los Angeles who performs under the stage name Freak. “It’s this ‘I don’t care’ attitude. Like, you can look at me, you can stare at me, you can judge me, but I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing.”Silver chains, overly lacquered liberty spikes, pants so big they put ball gowns to shame — part of nu metal’s appeal is its flamboyant style, and celebrities have taken note. Billie Eilish is topping her oversize outfits with baseball caps à la Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit; Machine Gun Kelly is gelling his hair up into five-inch stalagmites; and in June, Justin Bieber was spotted in a pair of baggy wide-leg JNCO jeans.Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit once blew up a boat live on MTV.George DeSota/Newsmakers, via Getty ImagesBillie Eilish is known for wearing oversize outfits, often topped with a baseball cap à la Mr. Durst.Mauricio Santana/Getty ImagesRenee Dyer, 19, fell in love with nu metal fashion before the music. She doesn’t think a person needs to dress a certain way to be considered a fan, but her clothing choices are heavily inspired by nu metal. “It makes me feel as though I’m living in that era,” said Ms. Dyer, a retail associate who lives in Toronto. Among her favorite pieces are JNCO jeans and Tripp NYC pants. (“The bigger the jeans, the better!” she said.)During nu metal’s initial explosion, visual aesthetics were central to the scene by design, said Alex Strang, a cultural analyst at Canvas8, a market research agency. Bands adopted flashy costumes and provocative stunts to distinguish themselves and grab people’s attention. “If you’re TRL,” Mr. Strang said, referring to a television program popular in the early aughts, “and you see this weird thing with people rapping and shouting and being angry, and some people in boiler suits or wearing masks, you’re going to want to put it on TV, right?”Nu metal’s embrace of shock value led to a plethora of theatrical antics, such as when Mr. Durst blew up a boat live on MTV and when members of the band Mudvayne attended the Video Music Awards with fake bullet holes in their heads. More than two decades later, these bits are now ripe for recirculation on social media. For example, one popular Twitter account run by Holiday Kirk, a music journalist, posts bite-size clips of absurd moments in nu mental history, frequently garnering tens of thousands of views.On the internet, “everybody has access to everything all the time,” Mr. Strang said. “And so Gen Z kids will just cherry-pick the best bits of a bunch of different genres and be into everything and like everything. It’s like a bricolage in action.”Historically, nu metal has appealed to outsiders who felt a strong emotional connection with its gloomy subject matter. The most die-hard fans felt protective over their favorite bands and did not like the idea of “normies,” or people who were conventional or popular, listening to nu metal. In the 1990s, “either you were all in or you were a poser,” said Lynn Thomas, 53, a longtime Deftones fan from Pittsburgh, whose 21-year-old daughter discovered the band on TikTok.A growing group among Generation Z is listening to nu metal bands for the first time, including Deftones …Bridget Bennett/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images… and Slipknot.Jose Sena Goulao/EPA, via ShutterstockBut now many Gen Zers are more concerned with sociopolitical issues such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, “rather than, ‘Who am I hanging out with at the field party this weekend?’” Mr. Thomas said.These spaces may be less exclusionary now, but fans say there is still a sense of gatekeeping among nu metal heads — whether it’s older fans looking down on the newly initiated, or pretension from people of all ages about the bands they deem uncool. Since discovering the subgenre in January, Jay Katze, a 17-year-old high school student in Bradenton, Fla., has connected with some fellow listeners on the internet, but he has also been called a poser, a term he finds “silly” and “childish.”“Who do you expect to support the band you love if you’re pushing out anyone else who shows interest?” Mr. Katze said.Since discovering nu metal this year, Jay Katze, a 17-year-old student in Florida, has connected with other fans on the internet, but some of them have called him a poser — a term he finds “silly” and “childish.”Jay KatzeOff the internet, fans are also creating physical spaces to cultivate the nu metal community. For the past two years, Sam Gans, 31, and Danielle Steger, 38, both die-hard nu metal fans, have organized sold-out “Nu Metal Night” dance parties in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. People go “absolutely nuts” with their fashion at these quarterly events, Mr. Gans said, showing up with gelled and colored hair, studded belts, JNCOs, chain wallets and face paint.“There were people doing back flips off the stage,” Ms. Steger said of one New York party in March. “There was a whole row of headbanging, moshing.” One man kept asking the D.J.s to play “that one song” so he could propose to his girlfriend, Mr. Gans said. Nobody could hear him and figure out the name of the song — so the man never went through with the proposal.The nu metal wave isn’t lost on popular artists today, either. Grimes, 100 gecs, Rina Sawayama and Demi Lovato have introduced elements of the subgenre into their sound, and some bands who were part of the initial nu metal explosion are feeling the impact as well.In May, Kittie performed its first new song since 2011 at Sick New World, a music festival in Las Vegas featuring almost entirely nu metal bands. The group went on indefinite hiatus in 2017, but bookers started calling again in the fall of 2021 because of renewed interest, said Mercedes Lander, 39, Kittie’s drummer.“It did take a little bit of talking into,” Ms. Lander said of the offer to reunite. But one year after the initial request, Kittie got back together. “When we stepped onstage, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is how it’s supposed to be. This is what I’m supposed to be doing,’” she said. “This is a fantastic feeling.”In May, Kittie performed its first new song since 2011 at Sick New World, a music festival in Las Vegas featuring almost entirely nu metal bands.Greg Doherty/Getty ImagesTo Ms. Lander, it makes sense that the songs she wrote with her older sister, Morgan Lander, when they were teenagers still resonates with people. “It just kind of proves that teenage angst is timeless,” she said.Morgan, 41, Kittie’s frontwoman, shared the sentiment. “That’s not to say there isn’t still a fire and anger in us now — yeah, we’re still pissed,” she said, jokingly.Mr. Burden, the retail manager in Texas, said that after discovering his daughter was into Deftones, he showed her more of the band’s discography — particularly the album “White Pony,” which he loved as a teenager. And in May 2022, he even found himself at a scene he had dreamed about for over 20 years: screaming, headbanging and thrashing at a Deftones concert alongside hundreds of sweaty, decked-out fans. He just never imagined that he would be standing next to his daughter. More

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      Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: How an Unlikely Pair Soared Together

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      The crooner and the pop star seemed like unlikely collaborators when they joined up in 2014. But the two masters of reinvention inspired and bolstered each other’s careers.It’s still one of the most impressive flexes I’ve ever seen a musician pull off live — and at the age of 88, no less.In 2015, during the third of four sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga were sharing a bill, promoting their chart-topping, cross-generational 2014 duets album, “Cheek to Cheek.” They had a light, snappy chemistry on the songs they sang together, but the best parts of the night were their solo sets, each inviting their respective fan bases — Bennett’s tasteful traditionalists and Gaga’s sartorially zany but spiritually sincere Little Monsters — into the other’s world.For most of the concert, they’d been playing with a full band and orchestra, but for one number during his own set, Bennett summoned a single guitarist to join him in the snug radius of a spotlight. He told us the song was dedicated to his “best friend, Frank Sinatra,” and launched into a velvety rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon,” holding the microphone down at his side rather than bringing it to his lips. A few lines in, he set the mic down atop a piano and sang the rest without any amplification at all. The entire venue was suspended in a hush stillness, and Bennett’s voice was so strong and clear that you could hear every crystalline note, every enunciated lyric, even in the cheap seats.It was spellbinding, and so quintessentially Tony Bennett: the unshowy elegance, the inevitable name-dropping and, above all, the ease with which he suddenly transformed from the rat-a-tat every-crooner into a phenomenally gifted belter who could project like an opera singer.In August 2021, while battling Alzheimer’s disease, Bennett, who died on Friday at 96, made his final public appearance on that very same stage, again with Lady Gaga. He once again demonstrated strength and resilience, this time by simply performing at all. A poignant “60 Minutes” segment captured Bennett’s struggles in rehearsals but his ultimate triumph when he took the stage. In run-throughs, Gaga said, “He called me ‘sweetheart.’ But I wasn’t sure he knew who I was.” She witnessed a startling transformation, though, anytime the band struck the opening notes of another song and Bennett began to sing.“When the music comes on, something happens to him,” she said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”Here was the final act of an unlikely collaboration that had changed the trajectory of each musician’s career. When Gaga first linked up with Bennett for “Cheek to Cheek,” some skeptics saw it as nothing more than a savvy distraction, a way for a wild pop instigator to rebrand as a throwback jazz singer in the wake of her first major flop, the overblown (if, in hindsight, somewhat underrated) 2013 album “Artpop.” But the gusto, reverence and musical intelligence she brought to her work with Bennett undoubtedly won her fans and respect from an older generation of listeners. As I was filing out of Radio City that night in 2015, I couldn’t keep track of how many people I’d heard muttering versions of, “I had no idea that Lady Gaga could actually sing!”Bennett was no stranger to cannily timed reinvention, either. He stormed MTV when he was in his late 60s, recording an “Unplugged” album that featured collaborations with Elvis Costello and K.D. Lang, and that eventually won him a Grammy for album of the year. He sang with more eclectic and, in some cases, even younger musicians on his series of “Duets” albums, from 2006 to 2012. He found a kindred spirit in Amy Winehouse, but their connection was short-lived. Their great rendition of “Body and Soul,” for “Duets II,” was the last thing she ever recorded. It was released as a single posthumously, on what would have been Winehouse’s 28th birthday.Gaga satisfied Bennett’s desire to stay active and involved with a younger generation of musicians, and her professional stability made her into the most committed of his duet partners. But Gaga has also said that Bennett’s mentorship “saved” her life. The then-octogenarian’s example allowed her to think beyond the successes or failures of the present moment, and to value a musical career’s longevity. “I was so sad. I couldn’t sleep. I felt dead,” Gaga said of the time before “Cheek to Cheek.” “And then I spent a lot of time with Tony. He wanted nothing but my friendship and my voice.”It’s not that their voices or energies always blended particularly well — Gaga brought an antsy theatricality to their collaborations, while Bennett’s voice seemed to get even more laid-back and free of artifice as he aged — but the mutual admiration they shared was genuine enough to open the minds of their respective audiences and generational cohorts. With their Grammy-winning 2021 album of Cole Porter covers, “Love for Sale,” Bennett seemed to be passing the baton to Gaga, deeming her capable of continuing his lifelong task of keeping the Great American Songbook alive. And Gaga, in turn, was telling her Little Monsters to do their homework and appreciate American popular music’s rich history.One of their last, and most bittersweet, moments of mutual respect came during that 2021 Radio City show, forever immortalized in a “60 Minutes” clip that has been making the rounds on social media on Friday. After weeks of calling her “sweetheart,” the name finally came back to him when they were — where else? — onstage. “Whoa!” Bennett cried, to his duet partner’s obvious delight. “Lady Gaga!” More

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      Tony Bennett’s 10 Essential Songs

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      Over a career of 70-plus years, the singer infused his performances with a huge range, dramatic flair, rhythmic agility and an inquisitive approach to interpreting lyrics.When Anthony Dominick Benedetto was growing up in Astoria, Queens, during the Depression, his parents couldn’t afford to pay for the singing lessons he wanted. But he had a good teacher close to home: his father, John Benedetto, an immigrant from southern Italy who loved the songs of the old country and sang them to his two sons on their front stoop.Anthony Benedetto later took the advice of the comedian Bob Hope and adopted the more Americanized stage name Tony Bennett. He enjoyed a long, prolific career until his death on Friday at 96, with plenty of ups and downs, 20 Grammys and an Emmy, in addition to being a Kennedy Center honoree and the first interpretive singer to receive the Gershwin Prize from the Library of Congress.Voice lessons, however long delayed, were important to his development. After he served in World War II, Bennett studied, thanks to the G.I. Bill, at the American Theater Wing school in Manhattan. When he was still singing in his 90s, he credited his bel canto training — an Italian vocal style that dates back to the 18th century and that emphasizes a light tone — for maintaining his instrument.Bennett was equally at home with romantic ballads and jazzy saloon songs, and whether he was singing Cole Porter or Stevie Wonder, he brought a huge range, dramatic flair, rhythmic agility and an inquisitive approach to interpreting lyrics. In 1965, Frank Sinatra told Life magazine, “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business.” He held on to that distinction for decades to follow.Here are 10 of his greatest songs.“The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (1950)Bennett had been singing in Bob Hope’s live revue when he was signed to a contract by Mitch Miller, the pop-minded A&R chief at the venerable Columbia Records. In his first single for the label, it’s easy to hear what impressed Miller: Bennett cuts through the Spanish-inflected arrangement of this kitschy 1930s tango with an untethered expression of postwar bravado.“Strike Up the Band” (1959)Bennett was a big Count Basie fan, and he especially admired the Basie band’s surging use of dynamics, so he was well prepared for this session. His version of George and Ira Gershwin’s characteristically tricky “Strike Up the Band” lasts just over a minute and a half, but Billy Mitchell’s tenor sax solo is dazzling and it’s hard to name another singer who could navigate the band’s hard, swinging tempo with such élan.“I’m Thru With Love” (1961)Like Frank Sinatra before him, Bennett pushed back when Miller tried to steer him toward greater commerciality. Miller was “furious” and stormed out of the recording studio, Bennett later wrote, when the singer insisted on moving away from grand orchestral arrangements to record an album with only a pianist, his sympatico collaborator Ralph Sharon. The jazz standard “I’m Thru With Love” had previously been recorded by Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, but Bennett optimized the song’s melancholy tone in this streamlined version.“The Best Is Yet to Come” (1962)The album-opening title song from “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” became Bennett’s signature hit, but it’s the jaunty closer that sounds fresher now. He snagged “The Best Is Yet to Come” from a flop Broadway musical called “All American,” and turned it into a standard: Sinatra covered it two years later, and Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan, among others, eventually followed. It remained a concert staple for years, and no song better exemplifies what the critic Mark Rowland once called Bennett’s “radiance of spirit.”“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (1967)Bennett considered Count Basie and Duke Ellington the two greatest bandleaders he’d ever heard, and with the great Milt Hinton on bass and the Basie regular Joe Newman on trumpet, he swings effortlessly and joyfully on this Ellington jazz standard. Bennett had something close to awe for great jazz musicians, which may be why he never claimed to be part of that tradition. “I’m not a jazz singer,” he often said. “I’m a singer who likes jazz.”“Something” (1971)Between 1951 and 1963, Bennett released 19 songs that reached the Top 20 of the Billboard singles chart. Then the Beatles came along and the hits stopped. The Columbia Records honcho Clive Davis pushed Bennett to cover modern pop hits, and on the day he began a new record a new record that included Beatles and Stevie Wonder songs, Bennett vomited, Davis recalled. The singer was a trouper, though; the “woo!” he interjects in the middle of George Harrison’s “Something” is almost convincing.“Some Other Time” (1975)Bennett had an affinity for pianists: Art Tatum was an enduring influence, he had a long partnership with Ralph Sharon, and he made one of his best albums with Bill Evans. Though he wasn’t a master of urban ennui on the level of Sinatra, Bennett does wring all the bittersweet rue out of this song, written by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for the musical “On the Town,” by singing in parallel with Evans’s lyrical, prudent piano.“I Got Lost in Her Arms” (1986)For much of the ’70s, the toll of drugs, divorce, tax problems and depression wore Bennett down. Then his son Danny took over as his manager and engineered a return to Columbia Records. Maybe more significantly, Bennett reunited with Sharon and recorded his acclaimed comeback with just piano, bass, drums and an orchestra. His voice was now rougher, but especially on his version of Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in Her Arms,” he adjusted by infusing his lower register with savvy understatement.“When Do the Bells Ring for Me” (1990)Bennett loved the Great American Songbook, but eventually, a prolific singer runs out of pre-rock standards and needs to find slightly younger material. So Bennett was delighted when, in a restaurant one night, he heard the piano bar stalwart Charles DeForest perform a song he’d written, “When Do the Bells Ring for Me” It became a concert showcase for Bennett, thanks to its climactic high notes, and when he sang it at the Grammys in 1991, he got a standing ovation.“I Get a Kick Out of You” (2021)Biographically, Bennett couldn’t have had less in common with Cole Porter, a Midwesterner born to substantial privilege. But Porter’s giddy use of double and triple rhymes was perfect for Bennett’s rubato trickery, so his second album with Lady Gaga was a Porter-only affair, released five years after Bennett was given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. And let’s be honest, it’s a kick to hear a 95-year-old master sing, “Some, they may go for cocaine.” More

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      Tony Bennett, Champion of the Great American Songbook, Is Dead at 96

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      From his initial success as a jazzy crooner through his generation-spanning duets, his career was remarkable for both its longevity and its consistency.Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans, died on Friday in New York City. He was 96.His publicist, Sylvia Weiner, announced his death.In February 2021, his wife, Susan Bennett, told AARP The Magazine that Mr. Bennett learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. He continued to perform and record despite his illness; his last public performance was in August of that year, when he appeared with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in a show titled “One Last Time.”Mr. Bennett’s career of more than 70 years was remarkable not only for its longevity, but also for its consistency. In hundreds of concerts and club dates and more than 150 recordings, he devoted himself to preserving the classic American popular song, as written by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.From his initial success as a jazzy crooner who wowed audiences at the Paramount in Times Square in the early 1950s, through his late-in-life duets with younger singers gleaned from a range of genres and generations — most notably Lady Gaga, with whom he recorded albums in 2014 and 2021 and toured in 2015 — he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.Mr. Bennett stubbornly resisted record producers who urged gimmick songs on him, or, in the 1960s and early ’70s, who were sure that rock ’n’ roll had relegated the music he preferred to a dusty bin perused only by a dwindling population of the elderly and nostalgic.Mr. Bennett was surrounded by autograph hunters as he left a performance in 1951. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”Associated PressInstead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century — Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra — and carried the torch for them into the 21st. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” And though he saw his popularity wane with the onset of rock and his career went through a trough in the 1970s, when professional difficulties were exacerbated by a failing marriage and drug problems, he was, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgment.“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.It’s hard to overstate Mr. Bennett’s lasting appeal. He was still singing “San Francisco” — which led many people to think he was a native of that city, though he was actually a through-and-through New Yorker — more than half a century later. He sang on Ed Sullivan’s show and David Letterman’s. He sang with Rosemary Clooney when she was in her 20s, and Celine Dion when she was in her 20s.He made his film debut in 1966, in a critically reviled Hollywood story, “The Oscar,” playing a man betrayed by an old friend. And though he did not pursue an acting career, decades later he was playing himself in movies like the Robert De Niro-Billy Crystal gangster comedy “Analyze This” and the Jim Carrey vehicle “Bruce Almighty.” He was 64 when he appeared as a cartoon version of himself on “The Simpsons.” He was 82 when he appeared on the HBO series “Entourage,” performing one of his trademark songs, “The Good Life.”A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.Mr. Bennett and Dianne Feinstein, at the time the mayor of San Francisco, hanging on to one of the city’s cable cars in 1984.Jeff Reinking/Associated PressMr. Bennett also performed for Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, during his state visit to England in 1996. He sang at the White House for John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and at Buckingham Palace at Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th anniversary jubilee.An ‘Elusive’ VoiceHe won his first two Grammy Awards, for “San Francisco,” in 1963, and his last, for the album “Love for Sale,” with Lady Gaga, in 2022. Altogether there were 20 of them, including, in 2001, a lifetime achievement award. By some estimates, he sold more than 60 million records.The talent that spawned this success and popularity was not so easy to define. Neither a fluid singer nor an especially powerful one, he did not have the mellifluous timbre of Crosby or the rakish swing of Sinatra. If Armstrong’s tone was distinctively gravelly, Mr. Bennett’s wasn’t quite; “sandy” was more like it. Almost no one denied that his voice was appealing, but critics strove mightily to describe it, and then to justify its appeal.“The voice that is the basic tool of Mr. Bennett’s trade is small, thin and somewhat hoarse,” John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 1962. “But he uses it shrewdly and with a skillful lack of pretension.”In a 1974 profile, Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker, called Mr. Bennett “an elusive singer.”Performing in the Newport Jazz Festival at Carnegie Hall in 1976. Frank Sinatra once described Mr. Bennett as “the best singer in the business.”D. Gorton/The New York Times“He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos,” Mr. Balliett wrote. “He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer.” But, he added, “Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together.”Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience.He had a storyteller’s grace with a lyric, a jazzman’s sureness with a melody, and in his finest performances he delivered them with a party giver’s welcome, a palpable and infectious affability. In his presentation, the songs he loved and sang — “Just in Time,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “Rags to Riches” and “I Wanna Be Around,” to name a handful of his emblematic hits — became engaging, life-embracing parables.Frank Sinatra, whom Mr. Bennett counted as a mentor and friend, once put it another way.“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” he told Life magazine in 1965. “He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”Mr. Bennett in London in 1972, where he filmed his “Tony Bennett at the Talk of the Town” television show.Associated PressMr. Bennett passed through life with as unscathed a public image as it is possible for a celebrity to have. Finding even mild criticism of him in reviews and interviews is no mean feat, and even his outspoken liberalism generally failed to attract vitriol from the right. (An exception was his call, after the drug-related deaths of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, for the legalization of drugs, a view loudly denounced by William J. Bennett, the former drug czar, among others.)With the possible exception of his former wives, everyone, it seemed, loved Tony Bennett. Skeptical journalists would occasionally try to pierce what they perceived as his perfect veneer, but they generally discovered that there wasn’t much to pierce.“Bennett is outrageous,” Simon Hattenstone, a reporter for The Guardian, wrote in 2002. “He mythologizes himself, name-drops every time he opens his mouth, directs you to his altruism, is self-congratulatory to the point of indecency. He should be intolerable, but he’s one of the sweetest, most humble men I’ve ever met.”Son of QueensAnthony Dominick Benedetto was born on Aug. 3, 1926, in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, and grew up in Astoria. His father, Giovanni, had emigrated from Calabria in southern Italy at age 11, departing just two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in April 1906. His mother, Anna (Suraci) Benedetto, was born in New York in 1899, having made the sea journey from Italy in the womb. Their marriage was arranged. Giovanni and Anna were cousins; their mothers were sisters.In New York, where Giovanni Benedetto became John, he was a grocer, but beleaguered by poor health and often unable to work. Anna was a factory seamstress and took in additional sewing to support the family. Anthony was their third child, their second son, and the first of any Benedetto to be born in a hospital. Giovanni, who sang Italian folk songs to his children — “My father inspired my love for music,” Mr. Bennett wrote in his autobiography — died when Anthony was 10.He was an artist, too, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” Here he worked on one in 1969 in his Manhattan apartment. Bob Wands/Associated PressHe sang from an early age, and drew and painted, too. He would become a creditable painter as an adult, mostly landscapes and still lifes in watercolors and oils and portraits of musicians he admired, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” His first music teacher arranged for him to sing alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the opening of the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in 1936.For a time he attended the High School for Industrial Arts (now called the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, but he never graduated. He dropped out and found work as a copy boy for The Associated Press, in a laundry and as an elevator operator.“I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place,” he recalled. “People ended up having to crawl out between floors.”At night he performed at amateur shows and worked as a singing waiter. He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines, an experience he described as “a front-row seat in hell,” and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.After Germany surrendered, Mr. Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands and for a time was featured in a ragtag version of the musical “On the Town” — directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct “Bonnie and Clyde” and other notable films — in the opera house in Wiesbaden.Mr. Bennett at the opening of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 1966.Las Vegas News Bureau, via European Pressphoto AgencyHe returned to New York in August 1946 and set about beginning a career as a musician. On the G.I. Bill, he took classes at the American Theater Wing, which he later said helped teach him how to tell a story in song. He sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.A series of breaks followed. He appeared on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the “American Idol” of its day. (The competition was won by Rosemary Clooney.) There are different versions of the biggest break in Mr. Bennett’s early career, but as he told it in “The Good Life,” he had been singing occasionally at a club in Greenwich Village where the owner had offered Pearl Bailey a gig as the headliner; she agreed, but only on the condition that Joe Bari stayed on the bill.When Bob Hope came down to take in Ms. Bailey’s act, he liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. Hope had a condition, however: He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, and insisted it be changed. Dismissing the name Anthony Benedetto as too long to fit on a marquee, Hope christened the young singer Tony Bennett.The Hits Roll InThe producer Mitch Miller signed Mr. Bennett to Columbia Records in 1950; “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was his first single. Miller was known for his hit-making prowess, a gift that often involved matching talented singers with novelty songs or having them cover hits by others, for which he was criticized by more serious music fans and sometimes by the singers themselves.He and Mr. Bennett had a contentious relationship. Mr. Bennett resisted his attempts at gimmickry; Miller, who believed that the producer and not the singer was in charge of a recording, applied his authority. Still, together they achieved grand success.By mid-1951, Mr. Bennett had his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” That same year, his version of the Hank Williams ballad “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit No. 1; three years after Williams died in 1953, Mr. Bennett performed it in his honor at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.Other trademark songs followed: “Rags to Riches” in 1953; “Stranger in Paradise,” from the Broadway show “Kismet,” also in 1953; Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “Just in Time,” from the show “Bells Are Ringing,” in 1956. That same year, Mr. Bennett was host of his own television variety show, a summer replacement for a similar show that starred another popular Italian American crooner, Perry Como. In 1958, he recorded two albums with the Count Basie band, introducing him to the jazz audience.Mr. Bennett with his daughter, Joanna, in London in 1972.United Press InternationalIn the 1950s, Mr. Bennett toured for the first time, played Las Vegas for the first time and got married for the first time, to Patricia Beech, a fan who had seen him perform in Cleveland. The marriage would founder in the 1960s, overwhelmed by Mr. Bennett’s perpetual touring, but their two sons would end up playing roles in Mr. Bennett’s career: the older one, D’Andrea, known as Danny, became his father’s manager, and Daegal, known as Dae, became a music producer and recording engineer.In July 1961, Mr. Bennett was performing in Hot Springs, Ark., and about to head to the West Coast when Ralph Sharon, his longtime pianist, played him a song written by George Cory and Douglass Cross that had been moldering in a drawer for two years. Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bennett decided that it would be perfect for their next date, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and it was.They recorded the song — of course it was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — six months later, in January 1962. It won Mr. Bennett his first two Grammys, for best male solo performance and record of the year, and worldwide fame. In “The Good Life,” he wrote that he was often asked if he ever tired of singing it.“I answer, ‘Do you ever get tired of making love?’” he wrote.Just five months later, Mr. Bennett performed at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Sharon and a small orchestra. He got sensational reviews — though The Times’s was measured — and the recording of the concert is now considered a classic.But as the 1960s proceeded and rock ’n’ roll became dominant, Mr. Bennett’s popularity began to slip. In 1969, he succumbed to the pressure of the new president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to record his versions of contemporary songs, and the result, “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!” — including the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Something” — was a musical calamity, a record that Mr. Bennett would later tell an interviewer made him vomit.His relationship with Columbia soured further and finally ended, and by the middle of the 1970s Mr. Bennett had formed his own company, Improv Records, on which he recorded the first of two of his most critically admired albums, duets with the jazz pianist Bill Evans. (The second one was released on Evans’s label, Fantasy.) Together the two opened the Newport Jazz Festival, which had moved to New York, at Carnegie Hall in 1976.Improv went out of business in 1977, and without a recording contract Mr. Bennett relied more and more on Las Vegas, then in decline, for regular work. His mother died that year, and the profligate life he had been living in Beverly Hills caught up with him; the Internal Revenue Service was threatening to take his house. His second marriage, a tumultuous one to the actress Sandra Grant, collapsed — she would later say that she would have been better off if she had married her previous boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio — and he had begun using marijuana and cocaine heavily.Mr. Bennett in Las Vegas in 1972. By the middle of the 1970s he had formed his own company, Improv Records, but its success was short-lived.Las Vegas News Bureau, via European Pressphoto AgencyOne day in 1979, high and in a panic, he took a bath to calm down, and nearly died in the tub. In later years he would play down the seriousness of the event, but he wrote about it in “The Good Life,” describing what he called a near-death experience: “A golden light enveloped me in a warm glow. It was quite peaceful; in fact, I had the sense that I was about to embark on a very compelling journey. But suddenly I was jolted out of the vision. The tub was overflowing and Sandra was standing above me. She’d heard the water running for too long, and when she came in I wasn’t breathing. She pounded on my chest and literally brought me back to life.”Mr. Bennett turned to his older son for help. Danny Bennett took over the management of his career, aiming to have the American musical standards that were his strength, and his handling of them, perceived as hip by a new generation.Somewhat surprisingly, the strategy took hold. An article in Spin magazine, which was founded in 1985, declared Mr. Bennett and James Brown as the two foremost influences on rock ’n’ roll, and the magazine followed up with a long, admiring profile.A Career RevivalEncouraged by executive changes at Columbia Records, Mr. Bennett returned to the Columbia fold in 1985. The next year he released the album “The Art of Excellence.” WBCN in Boston became the first rock station to give it regular airplay. Released in the emerging CD format, it spurred the sales of Mr. Bennett’s back catalog as music fans began replacing their vinyl records with CDs.In 1993, Mr. Bennett was a presenter, along with two members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at MTV’s Video Music Awards. The next year he gave an hourlong performance for MTV’s “Unplugged” series, which included duets with K.D. Lang (with whom he would later tour) and Elvis Costello. The recording of the show won the Grammy for album of the year.The revival of Mr. Bennett’s career was complete. Not only had he returned to the kind of popularity he had enjoyed 40 years earlier, but he had also been accepted by an entirely new audience.Mr. Bennett in 1993. He continued touring and recording well into his later years, and collaborated with singers from a range of genres and generations.Wyatt Counts/Associated PressHe recorded albums that honored musicians he admired — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday — and he collaborated on standards with singers half, or less than half, his age. On the 2006 album “Duets: An American Classic,” he sang “If I Ruled the World” with Ms. Dion, “Smile” with Barbra Streisand and “For Once in My Life” with Stevie Wonder, and revisited his first Columbia single, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with Sting. Five years later, on “Duets II,” his collaborators included Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Ms. Winehouse.As the century changed, he was once again touring, giving up to 200 performances a year, and recording prolifically. In 2007 Mr. Bennett married a third time, to his longtime companion, Susan Crow, a teacher four decades his junior whom he had met in the late 1980s. Together they started a foundation, Exploring the Arts, that supports arts education in schools, and financed the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school in Queens. If there was a magical quality to Mr. Bennett’s life, as suggested by David Evanier in a glowing 2011 biography, “All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett,” it is encapsulated by a story Mr. Bennett told to Whitney Balliett in 1974.“I like the funny things in life that could only happen to me now,” he said. “Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head and everyone was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said, ‘Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?’ and hung up.” More

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      Jason Aldean Video for ‘Try That in a Small Town’ Pulled Amid Backlash

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      The country singer, who released the song in May, said the tune is an ode to the “feeling of a community” he had growing up. Critics say it is offensive.Country Music Television has pulled a music video for the song “Try That in a Small Town,” by the country music superstar Jason Aldean, which was filmed at the site of a lynching, amid accusations that its lyrics and message are offensive.The video, released in May, was shot in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., a site known for the 1927 mob lynching of Henry Choate, an 18-year-old Black man, and is interspersed with violent news footage, including protests. An American flag is draped between the building’s central pillars, while Aldean, strumming a guitar, lists what he imagines as big city behavior that would not be well received in a small town; “carjack an old lady”; “cuss out a cop”; “stomp on the flag.”State Representative Justin Jones of Tennessee, a Democrat, condemned the song on Twitter, describing it as a “heinous song calling for racist violence” that promoted “a shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism.”On Tuesday, CMT confirmed by email that it had stopped airing the video on Monday, but did not offer any explanation. The news was first reported by Billboard.Aldean defended himself on Twitter, asserting that he had been accused of “releasing a pro-lynching song” and being “not too pleased” with the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.“These references are not only meritless, but dangerous,” he said. “There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it — and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage — and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music — this one goes too far.”Aldean then made reference to his performance in 2017 at an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas, where a gunman opened fire from a hotel room, killing 58 people.“NO ONE, including me, wants to continue to see senseless headlines or families ripped apart,” Aldean said. The song, he added, referred to the “feeling of a community” he experienced growing up, where neighbors took care of one another, regardless of differences in background or belief.“My political views have never been something I’ve hidden from, and I know that a lot of us in this Country don’t agree on how we get back to a sense of normalcy where we go at least a day without a headline that keeps us up at night. But the desire for it to- that’s what this song is about,” Aldean said.BRB Music Group, which represents Aldean, could not be immediately reached for comment. More

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      The Jazzy Tune You Heard on Hold? This Part-Time Musician Made It.

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      Meet Harriet Goldberg, a late bloomer who went from a career in social work to the queen of hold music with her 2011 song “My Time to Fly.”Harriet Goldberg is the composer of what may be one of the most heard songs in the world today.This 74-year-old New Jersey native is, in her own words, a “late blooming, part-time musician,” who has never played a live gig and is unknown to the music industry at large.But every day since 2017, Goldberg’s jazzy instrumental, “My Time to Fly,” has been served up to countless callers who are put on hold by the customer service lines of businesses large and small. These include Capital One, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, Costco, Nasdaq, the Kansas Unemployment Office, Sagami Railway in Japan, Dartmoor Prison in England, scores of hotels and restaurants and, yes, The New York Times.Goldberg’s journey from a career in social work to the queen of hold music is an unlikely one. It’s the product of a passion that wasn’t acted on until she was in her late 40s.“When I was a kid, my family got a free piano,” Goldberg said in a phone interview from her home in Boston. “My dad wrote songs and played jazz as a hobby. I studied a little classical but mainly played folk, rock and the Beatles — the usual stuff for a child of the ’60s.”She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English from Boston University and a master’s in social work, and in her late 30s became a stay-at-home mother.“In my late 40s, my interest in jazz deepened, mainly standards and cabaret music,” she said. “I started composing songs based on the songs I loved. I knew my limitations and wanted to find someone who could help me with my writing.”Looking for a mentor, Goldberg turned to an old friend, the saxophonist Billy Novick, a onetime Berklee College of Music student who has appeared on more than 250 recordings, film and television scores and performed with artists including David Bromberg, Maria Muldaur, Willie Dixon and J. Geils.“Harriet and I knew each other for years and our collaboration started very organically,” Novick said in a phone interview from his home in Lexington, Mass. “She would show me her compositions and I would make suggestions to modify chord structure, melody and the like.”After a few years, Goldberg had enough songs to record an album. The result was “Bring Back the Moonlight,” from 2002, a 14-track collection of vocal tunes modeled on the lush classics she loved. Novick created arrangements, booked the studio and engineer, and found the musicians who played and sang on this and four more albums Goldberg self-released through 2021.“In my late 40s, my interest in jazz deepened, mainly standards and cabaret music,” Goldberg said.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesGoldberg didn’t know anything about her place atop the on-hold hit parade until 2019, when her collaborator told her.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesAware there were better opportunities for Goldberg’s compositions to be licensed as incidental music in film and television if they were instrumentals, Novick suggested she record wordless versions of her songs, most crucially, the title track to her 2011 album, “My Time to Fly.” But before this tune took off on phones, Goldberg gained a foothold by entering a song from her debut disc, “Suddenly You Walked By,” into a songwriting contest sponsored by Billboard magazine. Though she didn’t win the top prize, she earned a membership with Taxi, a firm that helps composers place music in film and television. By 2008, Goldberg was working with another catalog service, Crucial Music, and began having her music featured in shows, including “Californication,” “Hawaii 5-0” and “New Amsterdam.”In 2017, the time came for “My Time to Fly.”“We were working with Amazon, placing music in their films and television shows, when they asked us for music for Amazon Connect, a service that manages the call centers for tens of thousands of businesses worldwide, handling 10 million calls in a day,” Tanvi Patel, the chief executive of Crucial Music, said in an interview, noting that jazz is one of the top genres for hold music.Goldberg’s instrumental is “very upbeat and it really swings,” Patel added. “It sets a relaxed mood for what can be one of life’s more trying situations.”Goldberg, however, didn’t know anything about her place atop the on-hold hit parade until 2019, when she heard from her collaborator.“I was on hold with Capital One Bank and heard something familiar,” Novick said. “My first impression was I liked the sax player, but I honestly couldn’t pin it down. I listened again, opened my Shazam app and found out it was one of the songs I recorded with Harriet.”While Goldberg’s tune may be spinning more than any other at the moment, it isn’t earning her untold riches. The licensing agreement with Amazon was a buyout, earning Harriet a “four-figure flat fee” for its use in perpetuity.“It’s especially funny,” Goldberg said, “when I call my bank and get put on hold and it’s my own music that I have to listen to.”Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesBut the song has earned this late bloomer unexpected fandom — and some money. Through its release on her own label, Goldberg is making a modest income from streams, downloads and occasional CD sales. She is also garnering positive messages from fans via email and her SoundCloud page. The song’s popularity in Japan was even subject of a skit on “Tamori Club,” a sort of Japanese “Saturday Night Live.”“I’ve gotten many wonderful emails from around the world about the song,” she said. “The notoriety is very sweet, especially for a song that is thrust upon people as they are in what can turn into an unpleasant situation if it’s too long a wait.“It’s especially funny,” Goldberg added, “when I call my bank and get put on hold and it’s my own music that I have to listen to.”Dane Vannatter, the cabaret singer featured on the vocal version of “My Time to Fly,” sometimes performs it at club gigs.“Before he sings it, he holds up his phone and plays the instrumental version,” Goldberg said. “Then, he asks how many people have heard the tune. It’s usually most of the audience though they never can quite place exactly where they heard it.” More