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      Kodak Black Is Arrested on Drug Charges in Florida

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      The authorities said they found dozens of oxycodone tablets and $75,000 in cash while searching the rapper’s car after he was pulled over in Fort Lauderdale on Friday.The rapper Kodak Black was arrested on Friday in South Florida on felony drug charges, the authorities said. It was the latest in a long string of legal woes for Black, 25, who was serving prison time on weapons charges when President Donald J. Trump commuted his sentence on his last day in office last year.At about 4:30 p.m., Florida Highway Patrol troopers saw Black driving a purple Dodge Durango in Fort Lauderdale with tinted windows that appeared darker than allowed under state law.The troopers confirmed that the car’s registration was expired. After pulling Black over, they observed “a strong odor of marijuana” coming from inside the car, the Highway Patrol said in a statement. The troopers searched the car and found a clear bag containing 31 oxycodone tablets and nearly $75,000 in cash, the Highway Patrol said.Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was arrested and taken to the Broward County jail in Fort Lauderdale. He was released on Saturday on a $75,000 bond, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said.Black was charged with one count of trafficking oxycodone and one count of possession of a controlled substance, according to the Broward County Clerk’s Office. He pleaded not guilty and requested a jury trial, court documents show.Bradford Cohen, Black’s lawyer, said on Twitter that there were “always additional facts and circumstances that give rise to a defense, especially in this case.” Cohen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Black’s lawyers filed a motion on Sunday to “inspect, weigh and independently test” the tablets that the authorities have identified as oxycodone pills.Black, who is from Pompano Beach, Fla., topped the Billboard album charts in December 2018 with his album “Dying to Live.” But his career suffered as he has faced various drug, weapons, sexual assault and robbery charges over the years. Early Monday morning, he posted his mug shot on Instagram with the caption, “Not Again.”In 2019, Black pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges, admitting that he lied on background check forms while buying firearms earlier that year. Prosecutors said two of the guns were later found at crime scenes.Black had served about half of a 46-month prison term when Trump commuted his sentence in the final hours of his presidency.Shortly after his release, Black put out a song called “Last Day In,” expressing his hopes for the future: “This my first day out the joint, so that’s my last day in.” More

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      The Middle Eastern Party Scene Thriving in Brooklyn

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      Several New York City parties offer spaces where anyone and everyone can let loose, come together and find comfort in Middle Eastern and North African music.Just before midnight on a Friday in June, a short line formed outside Elsewhere, a music venue and nightclub in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Saphe Shamoun, one of the D.J.s performing that night, gingerly approached two women in the queue.“Are you here for Laylit?” he asked. They nodded, and Mr. Shamoun directed them toward another entrance — and a much longer line — further up the block.Laylit, or “the night of” in Arabic, is a party based in New York and Montreal that spotlights music from the Middle East and North Africa and its diaspora.It has had a residency at Elsewhere since October, but this night was special: The event had become so popular that for the first time, it was being held not in the venue’s smaller rooms but in its cavernous hall, where over 800 people would soon dance under a shimmering disco ball and hypnotic light show.On the bill: a performance by Anya Kneez, a Lebanese drag queen, and D.J. sets highlighting Arabic pop, hip-hop, folk and electronic music.A decade ago, it was practically unheard-of for a major New York club to regularly host a Middle Eastern-themed party. But now, Laylit is part of a thriving scene in Brooklyn that puts Middle Eastern and North African music front and center.The events vary in style, but they all celebrate cultures that the promoters say have been overlooked in the West. And they offer many New Yorkers a sense of comfort in a teeming city that can nonetheless feel isolating, especially after more than two years of a pandemic.“It’s so, so beautiful to see the community coming together,” said Felukah, a hip-hop artist who moved to New York from Egypt in 2018 and is a regular at Laylit and other parties like it. “The sounds remind me of home.”For some partygoers, nostalgia is the main attraction. Yet each event also looks toward the future, be it through challenging stereotypical notions of Middle Eastern culture or by championing inclusivity and progressive ideals.Laylit, for one, has created a shared space for Arabs who hold those values, said Mr. Shamoun, a Syrian D.J. and Ph.D. candidate who founded the party in 2018 with Wake Island, a Montreal-based music duo made up of Philippe Manasseh and Nadim Maghzal.Ironically, it wasn’t until the two left their native Lebanon that they embraced its sounds.“It wasn’t cool when I was growing up to play Arabic music,” Mr. Maghzal said.“It was actually uncool,” Mr. Manasseh added.And after emigrating to Montreal in the early 2000s, they actively separated themselves from their culture, fearing discrimination and feeling a sense of duty to assimilate, Mr. Manasseh said.But now, they use Laylit as an outlet to rediscover their roots. In September, they’ll be celebrating the party’s fourth anniversary with another show at Elsewhere, and a tour across Montreal, Detroit and Washington, D.C.Ana Masreya, an Egyptian drag queen, getting ready before a drag show at Littlefield, in Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesDisco Tehran, a dance party and performance project that channels the international music culture of 1970s Iran, was also born out of the immigrant experience. The organizers, Arya Ghavamian and Mani Nilchiani, said it took years to get it off the ground.Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Ghavamian, an Iranian filmmaker who had moved to the United States a few years earlier, approached an organization about throwing a party to celebrate Nowruz, a holiday that marks the beginning of the Persian New Year and is observed in several countries across Central and West Asia. “It was a ‘no,’” Mr. Ghavamian said.A few years later, he began hosting get-togethers in his apartment where he would cook Persian cuisine and invite musicians to play. By early 2018, his apartment could no longer accommodate the crowds, so he and Mr. Nilchiani hosted their first public Disco Tehran event: the long-shelved Nowruz celebration.The party has since expanded and evolved, and it now includes a film project and community outreach efforts. It celebrated its fourth anniversary last month at the Sultan Room, a nightclub and eatery in Bushwick, with an eclectic playlist and performances by Alsarah and the Nubatones, an East African retro pop band, and Epilogio, a Puerto Rican indie-funk band.Disco Tehran, Mr. Ghavamian said, “is about a collection of different cultures who may not have anything to do with each other on a given day, but they come together.”And the project is on its third European tour, which gives the organizers the sense that they “have a place wherever we are in the world,” Mr. Ghavamian said. Its next New York event is Aug. 13, at the Knockdown Center in Queens.Yalla! Party Project also grew out of intimate apartment gatherings, hosting its first public event in the spring of 2018. (“Yalla” translates to “let’s go” or “come on” in Arabic.) Its founder yearned for a queer party that featured Southwest Asian and North African music.Over the years, Yalla! has expanded into an arts collective and community-building exercise. It is starting a professional directory to help people find jobs and it runs a market that supports small businesses run by women, people of color and queer people.Its parties reflect New York’s cultural diversity. At a May show at the Sultan Room, an Eritrean henna artist drew intricate patterns on a man’s palm while partygoers danced to R&B and Lebanese pop. Yalla! also ramped up programming during Pride month, with four events spread across venues in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.Hanan Selim, center, dances with her husband and friends during a Haza party in Bushwick, Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesOnce word of Yalla! got around, similar events followed. It was at an early Yalla! show where Mr. Maghzal, of Laylit, first spun Arabic music. A year later, a drag queen named Ana Masreya — her name means “I’m an Egyptian woman” in Arabic — organized a Middle Eastern and North African cabaret called Nefertitties, a play on the name of the ancient Egyptian queen.Ana celebrated her show’s third anniversary in May with an event at Littlefield, in Gowanus, and visited Washington, D.C., for a cabaret in late June. For her grand entrance at the anniversary show, she was carried in on a makeshift sedan chair, shrouded by a gold mesh sheet, which she later removed to reveal a gold crown modeled after that of Nefertiti.Onstage, Ana spoke about her experience being a publicly known L.G.B.T.Q. person from the Middle East, a region where homosexuality is largely taboo and can, in some nations, lead to persecution. “It’s mad scary sometimes,” Ana said.The night featured drag performances by Rifi Royalty, who is Egyptian American, and Meh Mooni, who is Iranian American; a set by Felukah; and a belly-dancing contest set to an Egyptian song that is a staple at Arab parties: “Shik Shak Shok.”The following week, the song would be played again at the Sultan Room’s rooftop during Haza, a dance party and radio show that began in 2019 and spotlights artists from the Middle East and African diasporas and beyond.One of its founders, an Egyptian American D.J. and creative writing consultant who performs under the name Myyuh, grew up in a predominantly white town in Connecticut, where she said she was largely detached from Egyptian culture. She felt embarrassed when her mother would blast Arabic music at home, she said.But at Haza, she turned to it for comfort — and blasted it on a pulsating dance floor while fellow Arabs ululated in celebration under the Bushwick sky. (Haza will return to the Sultan Room for its next show on July 29.)“We’re creating a totally different experience with these songs,” Myyuh said.Her co-founder, an Egyptian D.J. and audio engineer who performs under the name Carmen Sandiego, likened the experience to a hug.“It’s everything that you know and love,” she said. “And it’s not just you, but the person next to you is singing the same thing because they understand why this is so meaningful.”For Mr. Shamoun, of Laylit, that experience is particularly important for those who have fled the Middle East amid war, uprisings and refugee crises.“We’ve been robbed of a present and a future in the Arab world,” he said.When he’s behind the decks at his shows, he often spots recent immigrants and hopes the songs he plays transport them back home, if only for a few minutes.As the events continue to generate buzz, few of the promoters appear to be in competition — in fact, most of them collaborate with each other.Ana Masreya performed at a Laylit party earlier this month, drawing cheers from the crowd, while Myyuh was in the D.J. lineup.Mr. Manasseh believes the scene grew out of what he calls an “affirm yourself on the dance floor” movement that took hold after the aughts and grew stronger when Donald J. Trump became president.Rock was suddenly out, dance and electronic music were in, and more people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. people were creating spaces where they felt seen and heard.Even though Laylit is seemingly rooted in faraway cultures, Mr. Manasseh credits its existence to a single city.“All this was inspired and enabled by New York,” he said. More

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      After 350 Years of Tradition, a Boys’ Choir Now Admits Girls

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      The Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, is the latest English choir to start including female singers, a move some fear will reduce opportunities for boys.CAMBRIDGE, England — At 8 a.m. one recent Thursday, the boys of the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, stifled yawns as they began their first rehearsal of the day with some vocal exercises. Soon, the room was filled with a host of “Ooo” and “Zah” sounds.Once the choir was warmed up, Andrew Nethsingha, its music director, called upon boy after boy to sing a couple of lines of a psalm solo.Then, the director did something none of his predecessors had, in the choir’s entire 350-year history: He called upon a girl to sing. Amelia Crichton-Stuart, 10, quickly pushed her glasses up her nose and sang, high and pure, two lines about how God’s “right hand is full of righteousness.”“Very good,” Nethsingha said, with a smile. After one of the other choristers pointed out that Crichton-Stuart had sung one word incorrectly, not lengthening it as in the notation, Nethsingha said he preferred what she had sung. “We’re going to change the choir to do your version!” he told Crichton-Stuart, who beamed with joy.For centuries, British choral music has been a largely male space, with the country’s cathedrals and chapels filled with the angelic voices of boy choristers, who perform daily services with male singers supplying the bass parts.The choir arrives at St John’s College Chapel for an evensong service earlier this month. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAmelia Crichton-Stuart said the boys had been “really welcoming.”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesFor centuries, British choral music has been a largely male space.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe Rev. Dr. Mark Oakley gives the new choristers their white surplices, as they end their probationary period and join the choir.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe choirs have become an iconic part of British musical life, with the boys usually living and studying for free at schools linked to the choirs (the children of the St. John’s choir attend a school founded in the 17th century for the education of the choristers).In the 1990s, a host of cathedrals in Britain set up separate girls’ choirs to perform services, too, but the recent move by the Choir of St. John’s — generally considered one of England’s best — to mix genders has been greeted by choral insiders as groundbreaking. Some have celebrated it as a long overdue step toward equality, and others have agonized that it may herald the demise of boys-only choirs.Shortly after Nethsingha announced the change last October, three other choirs said they would be mixing girls and boys too, including St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle (a place of such tradition it has hosted numerous royal weddings, including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s in 2018).Nethsingha said in an interview that he knew the move was bold, but he also felt “rather late to the party,” since a couple of less prominent choirs, including the Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, mixed their choristers in the 1970s. Nethsingha received some complaints about the decision, he added, mostly on the college’s Facebook page.Other choirs who have decided to mix boys and girls said they had similarly received a few negative reactions. Charles Harrison, the choir master at Chichester Cathedral, said he was sent “half a dozen” letters of complaint, including one from a regular donor who announced they were withdrawing their support.The choir’s new members have also begun boarding at the choir’s associated school, just like the boys.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesBut Nethsingha said he didn’t regret the move. In April, he admitted Crichton-Stuart, alongside Martha Gritten, 9, and Ingrid B., also 9 (Ingrid’s parents did not want her surname included in this article for reasons of privacy). The girls began boarding at the choir’s associated school just like the boys. In the same month, Nina Vinther, 24, joined the choir’s adult ranks.Britain is not the only country whose choral world is agonizing over whether to include girls. In 2019, a German court blocked a 9-year-old girl’s attempt to join one of Berlin’s oldest choirs on the grounds that artistic freedom was more important than equal treatment — despite studies having shown that differences between young girls’ and boys’ voices are slight, and even professional singers can’t always tell the difference.Opponents of mixing choirs insist there are many good reasons to exclude girls. Alan Thurlow, a retired choral director and a vice president of the Traditional Cathedral Choir Association, which offers grants to men’s and boys’ choirs, said in a telephone interview that he worried if choirs admitted girls, it would mean fewer boys would be able, or want, to join.“You’re not making the choir bigger, you’re reducing the opportunity for boys,” he said, adding that boys can only sing high vocal parts for a few years before their voices change. A drop in the number of boys trained would also mean fewer bass and tenor singers for adult choirs, he added.Nethsingha said his choir was increasing the number of choristers from 20 to 25 to avoid reducing opportunities for boys. He hoped separate girls’ and boys’ choirs would continue to exist, he added. “I don’t want to be remembered in 100 years time as the chief destroyer of boys’ choirs,” he said, with a nervous laugh.During evensong, the choir stood in the chapel’s stalls, their voices soaring and echoing around the vast space.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt least one part of the choral world isn’t deliberating the implications of mixing: the children doing the singing. Last year, when Nethsingha told his boys that girls would be joining them, he said he braced himself for a “barrage of complaints.” Instead, the boys asked just four practical questions — including one about whether they had sufficient toilets for new joiners — then “went bouncing off to their lessons,” Nethsingha said.“They didn’t have any of the baggage that adults have,” he added.In an interview after the recent rehearsal, the girls seemed equally undaunted by joining a famed choir, with daily performances, international tours and recordings. Asked if they felt like pioneers, Gritten said, “Sort of, but sort of not!” She then looked at her fellow choristers and giggled.Crichton-Stuart said the boys had been “really welcoming,” and they played together in their dormitories. The best part of choir life so far, Gritten said, had been Ascension Day — commemorating Jesus’s rise to heaven — where the entire choir climbed up to the top of the college’s chapel, via a spiral staircase, and sung from its roof.Many major choirs here have made it clear they will not be mixing choirs on a daily basis. In May, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London announced that it would introduce a separate girls choir from 2025. Andrew Carwood, its music director, said in a telephone interview that the cathedral needed to raise 7.5 million pounds, nearly $9 million, to pay for choristers’ school fees and make changes to buildings to accommodate 30 new female singers. Boys and girls would likely sing together for major services, he added.The choir’s music director, Andrew Nethsingha, right, said he felt “rather late to the party,” just this year opening the choir to girls.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt St. John’s, the girls were already fully involved in all services. About eight hours after their morning rehearsal, 18 of the choir’s child members and 13 adult choral scholars walked into the college’s grand chapel, to sing that day’s traditional evensong service. Stood in the stalls, their voices soared and echoed around the vast space.At one point, the choir walked to the front of the chapel and performed an experimental piece involving an electronic backing of whale sounds, the girls’ red outfits standing out among the boys’ white robes. But many of the 60 worshipers in the chapel had their eyes closed, so absorbed in the music bouncing around them, they weren’t looking at who was making it. More

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      Maude Latour, a Columbia Student, Makes Existential Pop

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      The 22-year-old singer-songwriter just graduated with a degree in philosophy.Name: Maude LatourAge: 22Hometown: New York CityNow lives: In a four-bedroom apartment near Columbia University, with the same four roommates she has lived with since freshman year.Claim to fame: Ms. Latour is a singer-songwriter whose plush indie pop grapples with impermanence. She writes about composing a letter to her future self, cleaning a bedroom that always gets messy and, on her recent single “Trees,” mourning the loss of her grandmother, whom she searches for in the space between branches. Ms. Latour filmed the song’s music video during her final semester as an undergraduate at Columbia this spring, between classes on Virginia Woolf and the history of philosophy. “I’m majoring in, ultimately as a philosophy major, life being fleeting,” Ms. Latour said.Big break: A self-described choir kid, Ms. Latour began songwriting at 15 and uploading her music to Spotify at 17. In March 2020, during the early pandemic lockdown, Ms. Latour posted a video of herself singing “One More Weekend,” an upbeat rendering of an early college heartbreak, to TikTok, where it has been viewed more than 455,000 times. (It has more than 28 million streams on Spotify.) In 2021, during her junior year, Ms. Latour was applying to summer jobs when record labels approached her. She signed with Warner Music and released an EP, “Strangers Forever,” last October.Latest project: Ms. Latour went on a North American tour this spring, squeezing in six shows during spring break and the rest on weekends. Ms. Latour said she cried onstage at Bowery Ballroom in Lower Manhattan, while dedicating her song “Lola” to friends in the audience who are survivors of sexual assault. (“Keep my girls protected/ I’m turned on when I’m respected,” she sings.) “Diderot says you can’t have authentic emotions onstage,” said Ms. Latour, referencing the French philosopher’s “Paradox of the Actor.” “I was like, ‘What?’ All I do is go onstage and feel and bleed out my emotions in front of people.”“The way I feel at the old age of 22 is so much more complicated than when I was 19,” Ms. Latour said.Braylen Dion for The New York TimesNext thing: Later this month, Ms. Latour will play Lollapalooza, her first festival, on the same day as Metallica. “I’m on the same stage as them, so their drum kit and stuff is going to be behind me,” she said. Ms. Latour is also working on an EP she described as a queer coming-of-age set in the “enchanted forest” that is New York City. “The way I feel at the old age of 22 is so much more complicated than when I was 19,” she said. “I’m trying to grow up with my music.”Borrowed threads: Ms. Latour’s iridescent, Y2K-era stage outfits are a joint effort between herself and her four roommates. The magenta corduroys, rhinestone belt and rust-orange Nike jacket she wore on tour were sourced from her roommates’ closets. Wearing her friends’ clothes helps ease Ms. Latour’s nerves. “I feel hugged by their presence,” she said. More

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      Monty Norman, Who Wrote 007’s Memorable Theme, Dies at 94

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      He composed the instantly recognizable melody for the first James Bond film, “Dr. No.” It has accompanied the agent on his adventures ever since.Monty Norman, who in the early 1960s reached into his back catalog, pulled out a song about a sneeze and transformed it into one of the most recognizable bits of music in movie history, the “James Bond Theme,” died on Monday in Slough, near London. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his family on his website.Mr. Norman began his career as a singer, but by the late 1950s he was making a name for himself writing for the musical theater, contributing to “Expresso Bongo,” “Irma la Douce” and other stage shows. A 1961 show for which he wrote the music, “Belle, or the Ballad of Dr. Crippen,” had among its producers Albert Broccoli, who had a long list of film producing credits.As Mr. Norman told the story, Mr. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had acquired the film rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels at about the same time. Mr. Broccoli asked if he’d like to write the score for the first of the films, “Dr. No.” He wasn’t particularly familiar with the books, he said, and was lukewarm about the idea — until Mr. Saltzman threw in an incentive: a free trip to Jamaica, where the movie was being shot, for him and his family.“That was the clincher for me,” Mr. Norman told the BBC’s “The One Show” in 2012. “I don’t know whether the James Bond film is going to be a flop or anything, but at least we’d have a sun, sea and sand holiday.”He was struggling to come up with the theme, he said, until he remembered a song called “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” from an unproduced musical version of the V.S. Naipaul novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” on which he and a frequent collaborator, Julian More, had worked.“I went to my bottom drawer, found this number that I’d always liked, and played it to myself,” he said. The original (which opened with the line “I was born with this unlucky sneeze”) had an Asian inflection and relied heavily on a sitar, but Mr. Norman “split the notes,” as he put it, to provide a more staccato feel for what became the theme song’s famous guitar riff.“And the moment I did ‘dum diddy dum dum dum,’ I thought, ‘My God, that’s it,’” he said. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes.”“Dr. No” premiered on Oct. 5, 1962, in London. Another piece of music was vying for public attention then — that same day the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do” — but the Bond theme caught the public imagination too. Luke Jones, a music producer and host of the podcast “Where is MY Hit Single?,” said the theme, which regularly turned up in various ways in subsequent Bond movies, was just right for “Dr. No” and for the franchise.“The Bond theme encapsulates many key aspects of the 007 brand in a very short space of time,” Mr. Jones said by email. “That iconic guitar riff perfectly accompanies footage of Bond doing just about anything.”“It’s such a simple melody,” he added, “that children can and have been singing it to each other in the playground for decades. Then, finally, an outrageously jazzy swing-era brass section that offers all the glamour of a Las Vegas casino.”A version of the theme recorded by the John Barry Seven was released as a single and made the pop charts in England. But there was controversy ahead.Mr. Barry, then early in what would be a long career of creating music for the movies, had orchestrated Mr. Norman’s theme, but in later years he was sometimes credited with writing it, and he didn’t discourage that notion.Mr. Norman in 2001. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes,” Mr. Norman said of his 007 theme.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Press Association, via Associated PressMr. Norman sued The Sunday Times of London over a 1997 article that gave Mr. Barry credit and played down his own contributions. The article, he told a jury when the case went to trial in 2001, “rubbished my whole career.” The jury found in his favor and awarded him 30,000 pounds. Mr. Barry died in 2011.Monty Noserovitch was born on April 4, 1928, in London to Abraham and Ann (Berlyn) Noserovitch. His father was a cabinet maker, and his mother sewed girls’ dresses.When he was 16 his mother bought him a guitar, and he once studied the instrument with Bert Weedon, whose manual “Play in a Day” would influence a later generation of rock guitarists. According to a biography on Mr. Norman’s website, Mr. Weedon once gave him a backhanded compliment by telling him, “As a guitarist, you’ll make a great singer.”By the early 1950s, Mr. Norman was singing with the big bands of Stanley Black and others, as well as appearing on radio and onstage in variety shows. Later in the decade he started writing songs, and that led to his work in musical theater. He was one of the collaborators on “Expresso Bongo,” a satirical look at the music business, staged in 1958 in England with Paul Scofield leading the cast.He, Mr. More and David Heneker collaborated on an English-language version of a long-running French stage show, “Irma la Douce,” which made Broadway in 1960 under the direction of Peter Brook, who died this month. The show was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best musical.Mr. Norman’s lone other Broadway venture was less successful. It was a musical parody he wrote with Mr. More called “The Moony Shapiro Songbook,” and the Broadway cast included Jeff Goldblum and Judy Kaye. It opened on May 3, 1981, and closed the same day.Mr. Norman’s marriage to the actress Diana Coupland ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Rina (Caesari) Norman, whom he married in 2000; a daughter from his first marriage, Shoshana Kitchen; two stepdaughters, Clea Griffin and Livia Griffiths; and seven grandchildren. More

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      ‘Anonymous Club’ Review: The Joy of Creation

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      The Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett goes on a world tour in this music documentary, and finds that a change is needed.The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett started out as a DIY artist, home-recording energetic songs communicating knotty feelings. Early in this documentary, written and directed by Danny Cohen, a cheery interviewer leads into a question by saying that it’s not too common to hear artists “singing about panic attacks.” This reflects more on the limited listening experience of the interviewer than anything else, but you get the idea.The images in “Anonymous Club” are pretty conventional for a music documentary, particularly at the start. Barnett’s work blew up commercially after the 2015 release of her album “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.” World tours with a backing band followed: We see trucks being unloaded at stadiums, lighting rigs going up, and electric guitars rocking out with post-punk clamor.At Cohen’s request, Barnett kept an audio diary over several years. In it, she speaks about how the repetition of touring is giving her emotional state a beating. Barnett muses on the contradiction of how, in one performance, she might be “vivid and alive” and in the next “distant,” even though she’s going through the same motions with each show.Because Barnett is shy by nature, and prone to depression and anxiety, touring gets to be a special kind of drag. In public she’s a sport: When a glib German interviewer quotes her lyric “I’m not your mother/I’m not your bitch” and then asks with a grin “who are you mad at?” she doesn’t take the bait.Back at her home in Melbourne, she sits with her depression. Clearly a change is needed. A stripped-down tour with no backing band — and a musical collaboration with the drummer Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint — get Barnett back to the joy of creating. Perhaps not surprisingly, she achieves it in a setting not too different from the one in which she began.Anonymous ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      This Trumpeter’s Legacy Also Includes Composing String Quartets

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      A new boxed set of string quartets by Wadada Leo Smith, an anchor of American experimental music, reveals his sustained engagement with the form.The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has played an outsize role in American experimental music for the last 50 years.His early writings on “creative music” — distinct from both classical and jazz traditions — proved influential to a wide swath of artists in the 1970s, including the pianist and opera composer Anthony Davis.In more recent years, Smith’s work has incorporated collaborations with the pianist Vijay Iyer and the indie-rock group Deerhoof. Another major project was his “Ten Freedom Summers,” an ambitious, four-hour-plus suite that traces the civil rights movement over a long timeline, including sonic evocations of the Dred Scott case and the Jim Crow era.The string quartet writing in the suite — the four-CD recording was a finalist for the music Pulitzer in 2013 — gave most listeners their first chance to hear his work in that vein, previously found on just a few low-profile releases. “String Quartets Nos. 1-12,” a new seven-CD boxed set on the Finnish label TUM, fills out that history, revealing his sustained dedication to the format, going back to 1965 and his String Quartet No. 1 (revised in 1982).In a phone interview from his home in New Haven, Conn., he described string instruments as being in a four-way tie as his “favorite instrument,” along with piano, drums and his cherished trumpet. “The other instruments you can give or take away from me anytime.”These string pieces rarely start at full throttle. Instead, Smith offers an idea in a contemplative way: a polyphonic passage, a drone or a melody that starts, pauses and repeats with a slight but crucial change. Then those changes begin to proliferate and pile up. Unlike stun-gun experimentalists, Smith has a complex style that sneaks up on you, and feels all the more ravishing for its patient progress.That style will be familiar to fans of Smith’s work with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or A.A.C.M.), a collective born on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s. Autodidacticism was a cornerstone of the association’s ethos, a way to expand on members’ formal training. (During a stint in the Army, Smith studied in a U.S. Military band program; he later studied at the Sherwood School of Music and Wesleyan University.)By the time he joined the collective in 1967, Smith was already a practiced string quartet composer. “I had already finished at least two versions of String Quartet No. 1,” he said. “When I came to the A.A.C.M. nobody had string quartets, not a single person. And my string quartet had a really big impact — even though nobody ever heard it, because it never was played. But I showed it to people.”A lot of thought and revision went into the first quartet. “I wrote movement No. 1 over and over for three years,” he said, “because that was my initial training of how to write and how to think about strings.” Also part of the training: studying quartets by Debussy, Bartok, Beethoven and Ornette Coleman.In the new recording of that first quartet, you can hear traces of Bartok’s advanced harmony and Coleman’s intensity of attack. By the second quartet, though, Smith has found his recognizable, mature language, especially in the pacing.Smith’s compositional voice and approach to group performance are so strong that listeners may have a hard time teasing out the wide-ranging stylistic inputs. In the liner notes, Smith describes the inspiration of blues guitarists, like B.B. King and Muddy Waters, on his writing for strings.“If people can’t hear that, I don’t understand what’s wrong,” he said in the interview, with a laugh. “I can hear!”What about his String Quartet No. 3, “Black Church,” from 1995: Can the way the players tear through sequences of semitones be seen as a tip of the hat to fast-picked streaks of electric-guitar blues?“Yes, that’s a blues connotation feeling,” Smith said. “Secretly, I say that that string quartet is a blues and a spiritual — at least the first movement.” But the second movement, he said, is about rhythm and repetition.In his later string quartets, Smith has doubled down on those repetitions. In his notated scores, he often puts brackets over phrases in each string part, with numbers above a given bracket indicating methods of repeating the melodic material.While his five-line-staff writing is idiosyncratic, it seems conventional compared with the image-based “language scores” in his Ankhrasmation series. (The scores double as detailed artworks, and have been presented in galleries.) Players use a “constructed key” of Smith’s design when interpreting and creating their responses to the symbols and colors on each page. Some of his quartets require players to move back and forth between traditional notation and Ankhrasmation pages, within a single movement.An Ankhrasmation page from the score for String Quartet No. 11, Movement 9.Wadada Leo SmithNavigating this takes practice and dedication. And for decades, it meant there were strikingly few performances of this music. Smith said he stopped approaching established quartets in 2000. But after taking a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts in 1996, he found a group of talented young musicians in and around Los Angeles who were eager to learn his languages.That group, now called RedKoral — heard on the boxed set — boasts players with solid contemporary classical résumés. Shalini Vijayan (first violin) has worked with Southwest Chamber Music. Mona Tian (second violin) is part of the celebrated Los Angeles group Wild Up. The cellist Ashley Walters has played with several of Smith’s groups, and records as a solo artist.And the violist Andrew McIntosh is also a composer whose music was recently performed at the Ojai Festival. McIntosh said Smith had influenced his approach to composition. “I’m more willing now to take risks with the way material unfolds over time than I was five or 10 years ago,” he wrote in an email.Smith has called the ensemble “the most advanced advocate and performer of my music, ever.” RedKoral’s recent live performance of String Quartet No. 10 — “Angela Davis Into the Morning Sunlight” — helped to show how they’ve achieved this.Presented at Roulette in Brooklyn as part of this year’s Vision Festival, that rendition was slightly different from the recorded version. But the lyrical feeling of Smith’s motifs was also immediately identifiable.In an interview, Vijayan said Smith was rarely prescriptive when handing out new directives before a concert. Instead, she said: “It was always from a place of emotional inspiration. ‘What is the feeling behind this tonight?’ And it could be different every night.”That well-drilled flexibility allows the group to handle the Bartokian language of the first quartet as well as it handles the blues connotations of the third. Quartet No. 11, the 100-minute opus that takes up two discs in the boxed set, seems like a summation of the players’ ability to absorb everything Smith can throw at them.The second movement, dedicated to Louis Armstrong, is a three-page, multicolored Ankhrasmation score. It omits a traditional staff, but features repeating structures. Its final page indicates a chord in a low string range. Bracketed instructions specify that this chord be played six times, before a pause. Then four times (with another rest after). And finally five more times. It makes for a dramatic, arresting climax.String Quartet No. 11, Movement 2: Louis ArmstrongWadada Leo Smith and TUM RecordsThe next movement, dedicated to Smith’s mother, is more traditionally notated — and offers the riddling complexity that Smith builds from motivic repetition.String Quartet No. 11, Movement 3: Sarah Bell Brown-SmithWadada Leo Smith and TUM RecordsSmith’s sound is all over these performances. And his trumpet joins the mix for String Quartet No. 6 (one of four in the set that features guest players). There, RedKoral responds to the trumpet’s virtuosic shifts of instrumental color and dynamics with intimate, collaborative intelligence.“My playing of the trumpet — my drawings and construction of Ankhrasmation pieces — all of that goes into the expression of who I am,” Smith said. “All of my works express precisely who I am.” More

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      Far From Kabul, Building a New Life, With Music and Hope

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      LISBON — On some nights, when her dorm room here turns dark and the church bells stop ringing, the young trumpet player thinks about the distant afternoon when her uncle took her to the graveyard to gather stones.That was in Afghanistan, in the chaotic days after the United States withdrew last year and the Taliban reasserted control. Her uncle had insisted that they pay respects at the family cemetery before they packed their bags with walnuts and spices and books of poems by Rumi, before they began their lives as refugees.Standing by the graves, she watched as her uncle closed his eyes and listened to the wind. The ancestors, he said, were displeased with their decision to leave Afghanistan. Even the stones, he said, seemed to speak, urging them to stay.Zohra Ahmadi, 13, could not hear the voices her uncle described. But as she scooped rocks and soil from the cemetery into a plastic container, following her uncle’s instructions, she said she heeded his words, and vowed one day to return.CULTURE, DISPLACED A series exploring the lives and work of artists driven far from their homelands amid the growing global refugee crisis.On a sweltering May morning, when the sun had already melted buckets of ice at the seafood market and the priests at Nossa Senhora da Ajuda church were just beginning their morning verses, a series of unfamiliar sounds emanated from the top of a former military hospital in western Lisbon.The Afghanistan National Institute of MusicThe orchestra gathers for one of its first rehearsals since its members left Kabul for Lisbon.The strumming of a sitar, the pounding of tablas, the plucking of a violin — these were coming from the hospital, now the makeshift home of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. More than two dozen of its young musicians had gathered for one of their first rehearsals since arriving as refugees in December.Under the American-backed government in Kabul, the institute, which opened in 2010, had flourished, becoming a symbol of Afghanistan’s changing identity. It was a rare coeducational establishment in a country where boys and girls were often kept separate. While many programs focused exclusively on Afghan culture or Western music, it embraced both, preparing hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, for careers in the performing arts.Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, on the compound’s roof.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesMusic students playing soccer at the compound.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had long treated it as a threat. Fearing for their safety, more than 250 students and teachers as well as their relatives, fled Afghanistan and sought shelter abroad in the months after the American withdrawal, eventually arriving in Portugal, where they were all granted asylum. In their absence, the Taliban commandeered the institute, damaging instruments and turning classrooms into offices and dorms.As students prepared to make music that morning, Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, spoke about the role they could play in countering the Taliban, a presence even in the rehearsal room, with news of starvation, violence and persecution back home lighting up the students’ phones.“We can show the world a different Afghanistan,” said Sarmast, who was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play in 2014. “We will show how we can raise the voices of our people. We will show where we stand.”The orchestra rehearses in Lisbon. After the students fled Kabul, the Taliban commandeered their school and damaged instruments.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe students readied their instruments. First, they played a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.” Then they turned to a new work, “A Land Out of Earth?” written by a conductor of the orchestra, Mohammad Qambar Nawshad. He explained the inspiration for his piece: Aug. 15, 2021, the day the Taliban seized Kabul. He had stayed home, scared and shaking.“That was the day everyone left us alone, and we were in the hands of evil,” he said. “There was no longer any guarantee that a team of Taliban would not come search for each of us and kill us.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.He lifted his arms, locked eyes with the students, and the room filled with the sounds of violin and sitar.‘My Homeland’The orchestra plays a passage of a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.”First, it was the music of Tchaikovsky that captured Zohra’s imagination: the Neapolitan Dance from “Swan Lake,” which she liked to play on repeat as she danced around her room. Then she fell for more popular fare: big-band hits and standards by the singer Ahmad Zahir, the “Afghan Elvis.”By 9, Zohra was convinced: She wanted to be a professional musician — and a ballerina, a mathematician and a physicist. She decided to start with the trumpet. Her parents enrolled her at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, sending her from her native Ghazni Province, in southeastern Afghanistan, to Kabul to live with her uncle.She excelled at her music studies, mastering Afghan folk songs as well as classical works. But when the Taliban took power last year, her trumpet became a liability.Zohra was convinced from a young age that she wanted to be a professional musician.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had banned nonreligious music when it last held power, from 1996 to 2001. In the weeks after the American withdrawal, Taliban fighters harassed and intimidated musicians, and pressured radio stations, wedding halls and karaoke parlors to stop playing nonreligious songs.Zohra’s relatives worried she would be punished if she were caught playing her trumpet. In August, her uncle sent the instrument back to Zohra’s mother in Ghazni, along with a violin, a flute and a harmonium.“We didn’t want to keep anything in Kabul that showed we were playing music,” Zohra said. “I didn’t know what could happen to me if I were caught.”The books and paintings inside their home were also a risk, her uncle had determined. One night, in the wood stove they used to keep warm in the winter, he burned the family’s most prized possessions: works by Freud, novels by Salman Rushdie and portraits that his brother had painted.Zohra tried not to watch, running from the fire. But from a distance, she caught glimpses of her favorite books being destroyed. “My heart,” she said, “was burning.”Juma Ahmadi, Zohra’s uncle, in his room at the former military hospital.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesIn Portugal, the Afghans enjoy newfound freedoms. The boys and girls can go swimming together. They can date. The girls can wear shorts and skirts without fear of judgment. The older students can drink alcohol.But life in Lisbon has also been a challenge. The students spend their days largely inside the military hospital, where they eat, sleep, rehearse, wash clothes and play table tennis, nervous about venturing too far or making new friends. Unaccustomed to Portuguese food, they keep bottles of curry, cardamom and peppercorn in their rooms to add familiar flavors to traditional dishes, like grilled sardines and scrambled eggs with smoked sausage.On weekdays, they go to a local school for special classes in Portuguese and history, practicing phrases like “Bom dia” and “Obrigado” and learning about the country’s Roman Catholic heritage.Some students, including Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, a sitar player, made the 5,000-mile journey to Portugal alone. He has watched from a distance as friends and family share news of bomb attacks, mass unemployment and corruption scandals.Sorosh Warms UpAt an afternoon sitar class, Sorosh plays a traditional Afghan song.In phone calls and WhatsApp messages, Sorosh tells his family to stay strong and to imagine a day when the Taliban loses power. Not wanting to add to his families’ troubles, he avoids speaking about the challenges he faces adapting to life in Portugal. He wears a golden ring that his mother gave him two days before he left Afghanistan, to remember his family.“Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, with his sitar at the compound. “Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said of his family in Afghanistan, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesHe blames the United States and its allies, at least in part, for the turmoil in his home country.“They were our friends and helping us, telling us they were here to help us at any time,” Sorosh said. “When the Taliban took Afghanistan, they just left and disappeared. That’s why we are very hopeless and sad.”At night, the students often dream about Afghanistan. Amanullah Noori, 17, the concertmaster of the school orchestra, has recurring nightmares about Taliban attackers, armed with guns, descending on his parents’ home in Kabul. Sometimes he dreams about trying to return to Afghanistan, only to be blocked by the Taliban.He receives messages from friends back in Afghanistan, fellow musicians who have given up their careers because of Taliban restrictions on playing music. They tell him they have hidden their instruments inside closets and cellars, fearing they might be attacked for being artists.“The Taliban doesn’t want to hear music anymore,” Amanullah said. “They want a world that is silent.”Embracing Afghan IdentityStudents from a sitar ensemble play traditional songs, part of their effort to preserve Afghan culture.For months on end last fall, Zohra was trapped in Kabul, unable to get a passport to leave Afghanistan.She watched with envy as her classmates fled for Doha on special flights arranged by the government of Qatar. (A global network of philanthropists, artists, educators and officials helped the school get its students and staff, and their relatives, to safety.)As the weeks stretched on, Zohra began to doubt whether she would ever be able to join her friends and teachers. She remembered the days in Kabul when she and her classmates played music late into the night and sang together in the school choir.At her uncle’s home, Zohra passed the time by learning to weave handkerchiefs, bags and scarves. There were only a few books left in the home, which she read so many times, she said, that she could recite some passages by memory.Sometimes, when no one was watching, she said she put her hands in the air and pretended to play her trumpet.“I could hear it in my head,” she said, “just like when I was in the practice room.”Farida Ahmadi, left, and her cousin Zohra, in their room at the compound. When the Taliban took power last year back home, Zohra’s trumpet became a liability.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThen, in mid-November, nearly three months after the Taliban seized power, Zohra, her uncle, Juma Ahmadi, and her cousin, Farida, 13, who also studied at the institute, got their passports. They boarded a flight for Doha, where they were quarantined and awaited visas to enter Portugal.When they landed, Sarmast, the school’s leader, hugged them and cried as they rushed off the plane. They were the last three in the group to make it out of Afghanistan.“There was never a moment,” he told them, “when I doubted that I would get you out.”On her first day in Doha, Zohra started a journal. She wrote that she was heading to Europe to begin life as a refugee.“I am hopeful,” she wrote, “that the future in Portugal is bright for us all.”Sevinch Majidi, 18, and Shogufa Safi, 18, students at the institute, walking in the Lisbon neighborhood near the compound. Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesOver time, the girls — who make up about a quarter of the school’s 100 students — have begun to feel more at ease. They have learned to ride bicycles in the school’s courtyard. They occasionally join the boys for lunch at McDonald’s, teasing them about their stylish sunglasses. They go out on weekends, to the beach or shopping for clothes or chocolate chip cookies.Sevinch Majidi, 18, a violinist, said she felt she had the freedom to pursue her own education and interests in Portugal, free from expectations around marriage and child-rearing and the restrictions of Afghanistan’s patriarchal society.“When I was walking on the streets of Kabul, I was scared,” said Sevinch, who plays in an all-female ensemble at the school. “This is the first time I can walk without fear, without being scared.”The boys, too, are changing. While many of them felt pressure in Kabul to go to mosques regularly, some have taken a more relaxed approach to their faith in Portugal, choosing to sleep through services during the Eid holidays.Sami Haidari, 15, a cellist, enjoying a swim in the Tagus River. “We have water in Afghanistan,” he said, “but not like this.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesAfter rehearsal one day for upcoming concerts in Portugal and abroad, a group of boys went swimming in the Tagus River, on the edge of the Atlantic.Sami Haidari, a 15-year-old cellist, paused before he went into the water. He took in the ocean scene — men in fluorescent shorts stretched out on the sand next to women in bikinis — and wiggled his toes in the sand. Joining hands with his friends, he charged toward the water.“I feel free; the ocean brings us freedom,” he said after returning to shore, his teeth chattering. “We have water in Afghanistan, but not like this. Afghanistan’s water is very small. That’s not free.”Remembering HomeLife in Lisbon has at times been a challenge, but the students turn to music to remember Afghanistan and their families.In Lisbon, Zohra has embraced the strangeness of her new surroundings. She is a star student in Portuguese, she plays jazz in the wind ensemble, and she has learned to cook eggs and potatoes on her own.In her journal, she jots down her plans to lead a music school of her own one day, alongside reflections on music and a few short stories, including one about gamblers in New York City.“There are not any human beings without wishes and dreams,” she wrote in her journal. “I am one of these humans too. One can’t be without dreams because dreams give us hope.”“If you have a dream, follow it, even if it’s the worst of dreams,” she added. “One has to struggle for the best of dreams and for the worst of dreams.”Zohra at school. She is a star student in Portuguese.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesPortuguese vocabulary in Zohra’s room.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesInside Room 509 of the former military hospital, where she lives with her uncle and her cousin, she has hung drawings of ballerinas and horses. A poster lists the Portuguese words for family members: mãe, pai, irmão, irmã.There are reminders of Afghanistan: photos of her grandfather, decorated with hearts and butterflies; a book of poems; and a painting of her grandmother.Below a gold vase on the windowsill is the container of rocks and soil from the ancestral grave. Next to it, she keeps another container filled with the soil she collected from the campus of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul.Zohra said she still remembered peaceful days in Ghazni Province, when her family gathered near the mountains and made chicken soup and kebabs. She said she hopes that her parents can join her some day in Lisbon, too.Looking out at the Tagus River from her room, she said the people of Afghanistan needed music, just like residents of other countries.“I really want to go back to Afghanistan some day,” she said. “When the Taliban are not there.”Zohra’s room with a view. She would like to return to Afghanistan one day, she said, “when the Taliban are not there.”Isabella Lanave for The New York Times More