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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Brazilian Jazz

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      When the term “Brazilian jazz” arises, one might think of bossa nova, or Sergio Mendes (its most popular purveyor), and stop there. But there’s a world beyond those sunny instrumentals and bright vocals, where artists like Hermeto Pascoal, João Donato and Leny Andrade show that Brazilian jazz can be funky, soulful and esoteric. This type of jazz had deeper resonance beyond the oceanfront views it conjured.The origins of Brazilian jazz are often traced to the late 1950s, to the advent of bossa nova by the composers Donato and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Blending samba (a style of music born out of the Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia) with American jazz, bossa nova — which means “new wave” — reached its apex in 1964 when “The Girl From Ipanema,” sung by the Brazilian vocalist Astrud Gilberto, hit the U.S. singles chart, and won the Grammy for record of the year in 1965. Yet before the song’s success, American composers like Quincy Jones, Herbie Mann and Dave Brubeck recorded bossa nova albums, which stoked the curiosity of U.S. listeners.Thanks to the contributors below, a mix of musicians, writers and scholars, we get to hear Brazilian jazz beyond the gravitational pull of bossa nova and samba, from its height in the ’60s to the present day. And while you’ll see familiar names pop up more than once, they’re often in conversation with others from the broad space of the genre. Traces of bossa nova and samba emerge, but these selections also take fusion, ambient and psychedelia into account. You can find a playlist at the end of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jeff Caltabiano, writer and historianSão Paulo Underground, “Jagoda’s Dream”Brazil, a country rich with Indigenous musical traditions, has had an ongoing dialogue with the (North) American jazz tradition since the 1950s. That dialogue has broadened well beyond the breezy straightjacket of bossa nova. The visionary American composer and cornetist Rob Mazurek spent eight years living in Brazil, and has been in musical conversation with the São Paulo-born musicians M. Takara and Guilherme Granado for two decades, with the group São Paulo Underground. Takara and Granado go back even further, having met as teenagers in the city’s punk scene. Granado’s hazy keyboards open up “Jagoda’s Dream,” from the band’s third album, “Três Cabeças Loucuras” (“Three crazy heads”), from 2011. The song was written for their friend’s daughter, with a melody and harmony by Mazurek and an infectious cavaquinho rhythm pattern by Takara. The cavaquinho, a miniature guitar with a bright sound, is prominent throughout. During the recording, Takara played cavaquinho with his hands while playing the drums with his feet. Richard Ribeiro played second drums. The song is a firecracker that represents São Paulo’s creative music scene and its hybrid of sounds. A chorus of voices takes us out, wordlessly repeating the rhythm pattern, about to wake from Jagoda’s magnificent dream.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Joyce Moreno, singer and composerTenório Jr., “Embalo”In the early 1960s, bossa nova was at its peak in Brazil and was also growing worldwide. Some Brazilian musicians who were fluent with both bossa nova and jazz began to organize themselves into instrumental groups, mostly trios, but adding horns on occasion. They created music — samba-jazz they called it — with inventive improvisation, sultry rhythms and creative harmonies. One of the most brilliant pianists to emerge from the samba-jazz movement was Tenório Jr. In 1964, at 23, he recorded his one and only album as a leader, “Embalo,” which is now widely acknowledged a classic of the genre. On the title track, a composition by Tenório arranged by the alto saxophonist Paulo Moura, Tenório’s solo is a gorgeous example of the heights that made-in-Brazil jazz could achieve. Unfortunately, that recording is the only taste of Tenório’s genius we still have. In Buenos Aires in 1976, while on tour as a sideman for the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, Tenório mysteriously “disappeared” in Argentina on the eve of that country’s military coup (a story told in the excellent animated film “They Shot the Piano Player” by the Spanish filmmakers Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal). Tenório’s music, however, lives on forever.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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      Elton John, After Eye Infection, Says He Couldn’t See His Own Musical

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      After a performance of “The Devil Wears Prada” in London, John told the crowd that the effects of an eye infection were continuing to limit his eyesight.Elton John’s eyesight problems have persisted to the point where he could not see a performance of his own musical in London on Sunday night, he told the crowd after the show.John, 77, appeared onstage after a charity performance of the musical “The Devil Wears Prada,” for which he wrote the score, at the Dominion Theatre.“I haven’t been able to come to many of the previews, because as you know I’ve lost my eyesight, so it’s hard for me to see it,” he said, wearing bright red sunglasses. “But I love to hear it.”John announced in a social media post in September that an eye infection this summer had left him “with only limited vision in one eye.”“I am healing, but it’s an extremely slow process and it will take some time before sight returns to the impacted eye,” he added. “I have been quietly spending the summer recuperating at home, and I am feeling positive about the progress I have made in my healing and recovery thus far.”He provided an update on “Good Morning America” late last month. “I unfortunately lost my eyesight in my right eye in July,” he said. “It’s been four months now since I haven’t been able to see, and my left eye’s not the greatest. There’s hope and encouragement that it should be OK.”Asked about a possible new album, he replied: “Going into the studio and recording, I don’t know, because I can’t see a lyric for a start. I can’t see anything, I can’t read anything, I can’t watch anything.”John did not respond to requests for comment on Monday sent through his talent agencies.When “The Devil Wears Prada” opened in Chicago in 2022 with a different cast, The New York Times said in a review, “The songs unfold pleasantly enough, with flashes of glam and morsels of wit, but they tend to feel last-season.”The musical is based on the 2006 film and the 2003 best-selling semi-autobiographical novel by Lauren Weisberger. The London production stars Vanessa Williams.John also wrote the score for “Tammy Faye,” which is set to close on Broadway this week after only 29 regular performances. He has also written the score for some hits, including “Billy Elliot” and the long-running “The Lion King.”In January, John picked up an Emmy, giving him a lifetime sweep of the major American awards, an accolade known as an EGOT — an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. But he was not present at the ceremony to receive the Emmy because of a knee operation. More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,’ by Richard Schoch

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      An incisive new book, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” examines the extraordinary career of the master of the musical.HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, by Richard SchochIn the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming essay collection, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “not, then, a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”The Sondheim perspective is the subject of 11 essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one on “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “How (Not) to Deal With Injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” and so on through the Sondheim playlist. This conceit of art as self-help is common enough — Jane Austen has come in for a lot of it, as have Shakespeare and the 19th-century Russian novelists — as to practically be a subgenre at this point, in which publishers take a subject they are nervous may be too nerdy or niche for a general audience and try to reframe it in more popular terms. It rarely works, trying to turn apples into bananas — there are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto “life lessons” in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside out, that is, as someone who has wrestled with how to perform and direct him. And what a joy the author’s take on it all is. I was happy simply to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, close reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send In the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a bit in range” that required “short phrases firmly closed off with consonants.” This is why Judi Dench — not a singer, either — performed the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s 1995 revival of “A Little Night Music,” and why Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Trevor Nunn’s 2009 Broadway revival, did not. (On hearing the opening bars, I recall, Zeta-Jones assumed a stricken Torch Song expression as if something terrible was about to happen — which, of course, it was.)Laurence Guittard and Judi Dench in the 1995 London production of “A Little Night Music.”Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock PhotoStritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home, abject, self-loathing, from the cast recording of “Company” after her ninth flubbed take of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” reminding us that Sondheim favored cranky, brilliant leading ladies who drove everyone mad until they hit their mark. He takes us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, writing in relation to Gypsy Rose Lee, “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme of Sondheim’s, raising questions of where in his characters the composer resides. That Sondheim, a gay man who by his own account didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of straight marriage remains curious. But while Schoch uses the example of the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly of his own coming out in his 30s, he doesn’t get into Sondheim’s life.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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      in Movies

      Bringing the Magic of ‘Fanny and Alexander’ to the Opera Stage

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      A new opera by Mikael Karlsson and Royce Vavrek, directed by Ivo van Hove, aims to capture the lavishness of Ingmar Bergman’s film, in half the time.Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” luxuriates in space. In its longest version, a television mini-series that spanned more than five hours, the camera lingers on interiors that in their accumulating details say as much as the characters, who themselves say quite a lot.Bergman made another edit of the film, of a little more than three hours, for theatrical release. But the longer “Fanny and Alexander” spends 90 minutes alone on a single Christmas Eve and morning in the lives of the loving but complicated Ekdahl family in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.Opera, too, is a slow-moving art form that luxuriates, but in different ways. Composers and singers relish sound, not sight. And so, in a new opera based on “Fanny and Alexander,” opening at La Monnaie in Brussels on Dec. 1, that Christmas scene takes half as long as it does in the TV cut. It’s one of several changes that were made for this adaptation, composed by Mikael Karlsson to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, and with a starry team that includes the director Ivo van Hove and the singers Sasha Cooke, Thomas Hampson and Anne Sofie von Otter. (The production will be streamed on multiple platforms on Dec. 13.)The director Ivo van Hove and the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, rehearsing the new opera. Ingmar Bergman, van Hove said, is “a realist about human emotions, but he is also poetic.”Simon Van RompayMost obviously, the opera has a running time of two and a half hours, less than half that of the longer cut of the film. Still, the stage version will be recognizably “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s partially autobiographical coming-of-age tale, in which fantasy lives freely alongside reality as a vast tableau of human experience is seen through the eyes of a child. Bergman, who had planned for it to be his last film, said around its release, in 1982, that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”The film plays on television every Christmas in Sweden, and Karlsson, who is Swedish, said he felt the most pressure to get that holiday scene right. When he, Vavrek and van Hove met early in the opera’s development, van Hove suggested hurrying through Christmas to get to the wedding: the marriage of Alexander’s recently widowed mother to the local bishop, the precipitating event of the story’s darkest dramas.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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      in Music

      Yunchan Lim Plays Chopin With the New York Philharmonic

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      Performing with the New York Philharmonic and Kazuki Yamada, Lim played Chopin’s F minor Concerto with imperturbable calm and eloquence.David Geffen Hall is very nearly sold out for the New York Philharmonic’s performances this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So jump, if you can, at the vanishing chance to hear Yunchan Lim play Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F minor.In the spirit of the season, let’s give thanks for this 20-year-old pianist from South Korea. On Wednesday at Geffen Hall, Lim played in the spotlight as if he’d been doing it for decades, with such imperturbable calm and eloquence that it was hard to believe that two and a half years ago he was essentially unknown.It was June 2022 when he burst onto the international scene as the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition with a rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto that became a YouTube sensation. The two blockbuster Rachmaninoff concertos have been early calling cards for Lim, but this year has included a lot of Chopin, including an astonishing traversal of all 24 études at Carnegie Hall and on a new recording.Chopin, with his restrained refinement, is an even more natural fit for Lim than Romantic warhorses like Rachmaninoff. Lim’s playing never feels seething or sweaty; he seems like he has all the time in the world, without ever giving a sense of showboating or indulgence.In the first movement of the concerto on Wednesday, he was dreamily flexible in his phrasing without ever losing the music’s pulse. The slow central Larghetto was achingly poised, its 10 minutes framed by two perfect notes, both A flats: the first deep and softly buttery, the last a pinprick of starlight.This movement is an opera aria without voices and, like a great bel canto singer, Lim understands that coloratura ornaments mustn’t distract from, but actually emphasize, the long, sustained central line of the music. In the finale, he exuded graciousness, attentive to details of touch, as in a passage whose texture moved swiftly from silvery to steely without ever losing smoothness.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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      Kim Hill Is Building Her Seat at the Table

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      After walking away from the Black Eyed Peas, the artist and designer has been making work on her own terms.Before the Black Eyed Peas were a stadium act fronted by Will.i.am and Fergie, they were a trio of quirky Los Angeles-based rappers who often collaborated with Black female singers. Macy Gray, best known for her 1999 hit “I Try,” sang on their first two albums, released in 1998 and 2000. But their closest female collaborator in those days was Kim Hill.Hill, now 54, never formally joined the group (she got her own solo deal with the band’s label, Interscope Records), but she toured with them for five years and contributed vocal hooks to tracks like “The Way U Make Me Feel” (which she co-wrote) and “What It Is,” both released in 1998. The video for the latter shows her mugging for the camera alongside Will, Taboo and Apl.de.ap and, while her sultry vocals temper their young-man energy, she’s too goofy and fully clothed (in a fuzzy tangerine bucket hat, jeans and a trench coat) to present as what she calls a “come hither” chanteuse.That kind of typecasting never appealed to Hill. Growing up in a suburb of Syracuse, N.Y. — where she sang gospel at church but also performed with the city’s predominantly white children’s choir — she learned to use her wit to put people at ease and honed her sense of when it was time to make an exit. “I never feel like I have to be stuck somewhere that doesn’t feel good energetically or spiritually,” she says. “When it’s time to dip, it’s time to dip.”After majoring in dance at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue music. Label representatives looking for the new Mariah or Whitney were befuddled by this Black girl performing folksy songs with R&B vocals over hip-hop beats. But she connected with the Peas’ misfit energy when she met them at an artist showcase in 1995. She remembers thinking, “These are my people.”For the next five years, Hill traveled the world with the group, but eventually, she believes, her bandmates seemed to resent the attention she was getting from fans and the press. At the label, she perceived an ambient though unspoken discontent about her refusal to sexualize her image. In 2000, she says, she got word that the band was getting a raise from which she’d been excluded and felt sure it was time to part ways. When the Peas’ third album, “Elephunk” (2003), introduced Fergie — who proved central to their crossover success — Hill watched the group’s ascent with the pain of one left behind, as well as some big-sisterly pride.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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      in Theater

      Review: ‘We Are Your Robots,’ Still Tuning Up

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      In Ethan Lipton’s musings on A.I., Mozart has a place alongside humpback whales.Are they not men? The members of the onstage combo in Ethan Lipton’s new show are, in fact, robots, despite looking like middle-aged male representatives of the human species. They may play tunes for the benefit of the audience members, but their main purpose, Lipton informs us, is to find out “what you want from your machines, so we can make your lives better.” (Lipton narrates the show and performs lead vocals.) The purpose of the evening, it appears, is for these sophisticated high-tech creatures in gray suits to undergo deep learning.And as the title “We Are Your Robots” implies, our humble servants are respectful of boundaries. “I know, for example, that it is illegal for a robot to tell a human being what to do with their own body,” Lipton says. “Because only other humans are allowed to do that.”That line is sneakily effective because Lipton’s wry delivery and hangdog mien have a way of softening blows and prompting double takes. The agreeable, light-on-their feet songs, have a similar effect, lulling us into the kind of complacent comfort that tech companies gamble on. But taken as a whole, the show, which is directed by Leigh Silverman, feels stifled by slightly monotonous whimsy.Produced by Theater for a New Audience and Rattlestick Theater, “We Are Your Robots,” which just opened at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is described as a musical. But it is closer to a loosely articulated song cycle that feels like a souped-up evening at Joe’s Pub.Over the past couple of decades, Lipton has carved an idiosyncratic niche of one in the New York theatrical ecosystem with such shows as “No Place to Go” and “The Outer Space.” He is at his best with a firmer narrative structure, as in the zany western “Tumacho,” which had the tough luck of reopening in March 2020 after a short earlier run.“We Are Your Robots,” on the other hand, is held together not so much by its theme as by its retrofuturist space-age aesthetic; a clean-cut art pop redolent of They Might Be Giants and David Byrne’s literate, faux-naïf sensibilities; and Lipton’s turn as a ham-on-wry narrator. (Lee Jellinek did the set, dominated by a stylized visual that recalls both a face and a cassette tape; Alejo Vietti conceived the costumes; Nevin Steinberg handled the sound design.)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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      At the Brooklyn Academy, Musical Journeys Through Minefields

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      The Silkroad Ensemble’s “American Railroad” and Alarm Will Sound’s “Sun Dogs” used music and images to engage with difficult topics.The completion of the transcontinental railroad was a herculean achievement. In 1850, the United States had 10,000 miles of track; by 1900, trains carried people, goods and ideas from coast to coast over 215,000 miles of track. Recently, historians have begun to tally the human cost of this construction project, especially among the people who performed the dangerous and backbreaking labor and the Native tribes whose lands and livelihoods were slashed through by the tracks.On Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Silkroad Ensemble brought this history to life in “American Railroad,” an evening of multimedia storytelling that probed collective scars while letting musical lineages tangle in beguiling ways. Carried by the joyful collaboration of brilliant improvisers, the performance proved that this ensemble has lost none of its verve since Rhiannon Giddens, a musical polymath and scholar of Appalachian music, became artistic director in 2020. (The ensemble was founded in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma to celebrate the cultures along the ancient Silk Road.)A haunting tune from Appalachia, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” anchored the program. A work song created by incarcerated Black laborers, it describes the deadly cave-in of a railroad tunnel. Giddens sang it with a voice splintering with emotion over a background of harsh percussive thuds.Individual numbers paid tribute to dispossessed Native Americans, Irish famine refugees and Chinese laborers cut off from their families by racist immigration laws. While each time the cultural context was deftly sketched through specific sounds — a Celtic harp, a pentatonic tune — the interplay of instruments native to other regions revealed new affinities. Historical photographs, projected above the stage, added visual poignancy.Rhiannon Giddens, the artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, singing “Swannanoa Tunnel.”Ellen QbertplayaAt times, though, the program had a didactic streak that felt at odds with the polycentric spirit of the music making. The inclusion of an Indian-inspired segment with fiery tabla solos by Sandeep Das was a musical highlight. But the accompanying text slide, drawing links between the transcontinental railroad and industrialization in British-ruled India, brought an unnecessary whiff of the classroom. Silkroad is involved in curriculum design in middle schools in underserved communities across the country, and at moments like these, the desire (stated in its publications) to “reset the narrative” in historiography feels heavy-handed.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