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      Cynthia Weil, Who Put Words to That ‘Lovin’ Feeling,’ Dies at 82

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      With her husband and songwriting partner, Barry Mann, she wrote lyrics for timeless hits by the Righteous Brothers, the Animals and Dolly Parton.Cynthia Weil, who with her writing partner and husband, Barry Mann, formed one of the most potent songwriting teams of the 1960s and beyond, churning out enduring hits like the Drifters’ “On Broadway” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” signature tunes of the baby boomer era, died on Thursday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 82.Her death was confirmed on Friday by her daughter Jenn Mann, who did not specify a cause.“​​We lost the beautiful, brilliant lyricist Cynthia Weil Mann,” the chart-topping singer and songwriter Carole King wrote in a statement posted on social media.Recounting the friendship and rivalry that she and her former husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, shared with Ms. Weil and Mr. Mann (a friendship memorialized in Broadway’s “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” from 2014), Ms. King added, “The four of us were close, caring friends despite our fierce competition to write the next hit for an artist with a No. 1 song.”Ms. Weil and Mr. Mann, who were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, notched their first hit — “Bless You,” recorded by Tony Orlando — in 1961, two years after the music supposedly died with the Iowa air crash that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, known as the Big Bopper.In fact, the pop and rock explosion of the 1960s was just beginning, thanks in no small part to key contributions from songwriters like themselves, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond and Ms. King, who were part of the star-studded songwriting community centered on the Brill Building, the storied hit factory on Broadway and 49th Street in Manhattan.Ms. Weil and her husband toiled two blocks away, in fact, at 1650 Broadway. It was a humble setting in which to create musical masterpieces.“There were, like, three or four writing rooms there, and each room had an upright and an ashtray, because everybody smoked like crazy back then,” Mr. Mann said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Even though it was sparse, we worked and worked, and,” he added with considerable understatement, “some good things came out of there.”Ms. Weill with her husband and songwriting partner, Barry Mann, during the induction ceremony. Chad Batka for The New York TimesThose good things included two soaring, almost sepulchral No. 1 singles for the Righteous Brothers: “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” from 1964, which in 1999 the music licensing agency BMI ranked as the most played song on radio and television of the 20th century, and “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” from 1966.Another potential hit written for the Righteous Brothers, “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” (1965), ended up in the hands of Eric Burdon’s band, the Animals, who added some grit to it that helped it become an anthem for battle-weary soldiers in the Vietnam War. (“In this dirty old part of the city,” Ms. Weil’s lyrics began, “Where the sun refused to shine, people tell me there ain’t no use in tryin’).Whatever the style or genre, Ms. Weil supplied a trademark touch of poetry and wit. In her statement, Ms. King said her favorite Weil lyric is in the song “Just a Little Lovin’ (Early in the Mornin’),” recorded by Dusty Springfield in 1968: “Just a little lovin’ early in the mornin’ beats a cup of coffee for startin’ off the day.”While many of their songs became emblems of the 1960s, Ms. Weil’s lyrical success continued well after the mud of Woodstock had dried.In 1977, Dolly Parton hit No. 1 on the Billboard country chart and No. 3 on the pop chart with the Weill-Mann song “Here You Come Again.” (The song brought Ms. Parton a Grammy Award for best female country vocal performance.) In 1980, the Pointer Sisters hit No. 3 on the pop charts with “He’s So Shy,” which Ms. Weil wrote with Tony Snow.“There’s no reason a person shouldn’t write better 20 years after they start,” she said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1986. “Writers know more and have more life experience to draw on.”Which is not to say that she found it easy to stay on top in the music business. “You kind of have to sit through the trends,” she continued. “Live through bubble gum and disco and everything else we’ve lived through. You’ve got to be a creative survivor.”Ms. Weil was born on Oct. 18, 1940, in New York City, the younger of two children of Morris Weil, who owned a furniture company, and Dorothy (Mendez) Weil.Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later on the Upper East Side, she trained as an actress and dancer and dreamed of a life in theater, a subject she later majored in at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.“I was always fixated on Broadway,” she said in a 2016 video interview with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “I wanted to write for Broadway, I had always pictured myself doing something on Broadway.”She channeled those youthful longings into the lyrics for “On Broadway,” which she originally wrote from the point of view of a small-town girl dreaming of a future on the Great White Way — a dream that, the lyrics acknowledged, often comes with dashed hopes:They say the neon lights are bright on BroadwayThey say there’s always magic in the airBut when you’re walking down the streetAnd you ain’t had enough to eatThe glitter rubs right off and you’re nowhereMs. Weil eventually changed the song’s protagonist to a male for the Drifters’ version, which charted No. 9 as a single in 1962. Sixteen years later, George Benson lodged his own jazz-inflected version at No. 7.In addition to her husband and daughter, Dr. Mann, a psychologist, she is survived by two granddaughters.Despite her Broadway ambitions, Ms. Weil’s career took a different turn in 1960, when she met Mr. Mann, who had already co-written a couple of Top 40 hits, including one he recorded himself in 1961, the doo-wop sendup “Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp Bomp Bomp),” which he wrote with Mr. Goffin.It was Ms. Weil who first noticed the man with whom she would craft a career and life. As her daughter recalled by phone, her mother had asked Don Kirshner, the Brill Building power broker music publisher, to find her a writing partner, hoping it would be Mr. Mann. She “thought he was really hot,” Dr. Mann said.Instead, Mr. Kirshner set up a meeting with a different up-and-coming songwriter. On the day of that meeting, Ms. Weil “was sitting and waiting,” Mr. Mann recalled, “and in walks Carole King. She thought, ‘Oh, what a drag, I don’t want to have to write with that chick.’”He added, “It worked out fine for both of them.” More

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      Redd Holt, Drummer on ’60s Instrumental Pop Hits, Dies at 91

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      He played in the Ramsey Lewis Trio when it released “The ‘In’ Crowd” in 1965, and a group he co-led recorded the funky hit “Soulful Strut.”Redd Holt, a drummer who in the 1960s, before jazz fusion became a popular term, struck a beat that had both the kick of funk and the delicacy of jazz on a number of surprisingly popular instrumental tunes, died on May 23 in Chicago. He was 91.The death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of lung cancer, his son Reginald said.Mr. Holt scored his biggest hit as the drummer with the pianist Ramsey Lewis’s trio, whose original lineup also included Eldee Young on bass.In 1965 — nearly 10 years after the band’s first record — they came out with “The ‘In’ Crowd,” a live album whose title track was a cover of a recently popular song by the R&B singer Dobie Gray.The Lewis Trio version superseded Mr. Gray’s, reaching the top of the Billboard R&B chart and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their “‘In’ Crowd” won the 1965 Grammy Award for best instrumental jazz performance by a small group or soloist.The group had found a winning formula — repeating a catchy melody over and over, as in a pop tune, adding a bluesy rhythm and leaving room for improvisation. Later in 1965 they released the album “Hang On Ramsey!” It included two bluesy instrumental covers of pop songs that also appeared as singles: the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Hang On Sloopy,” which the McCoys had made a No. 1 hit in 1965. The trio played each of them to shouts of encouragement from a live crowd.Success, however, proved the be the group’s undoing. In 1966, following disagreements over artistic direction and money, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young left Mr. Lewis to form the Young-Holt Trio, later renamed Young-Holt Unlimited. (Mr. Lewis replaced Mr. Holt with Maurice White, who went on to found Earth Wind & Fire.)Mr. Holt, left, and Mr. Young in about 1968, after they had broken with Ramsey Lewis to form their own jazz ensemble, Holt-Young Unlimited. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Holt and Mr. Young continued making music in a pop-friendly vein. Their 1968 single “Soulful Strut,” with a funky, danceable groove, reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, behind Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It on the Grapevine” and “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” a joint release by Diana Ross & the Supremes and the Temptations.(“Soulful Strut” sounded a lot like an instrumental version of “Am I the Same Girl?,” a late-’60s single by the soul singer Barbara Acklin. Some questioned whether Mr. Young and Mr. Holt had actually played on the recording credited to them, suggesting rather that they had allowed their band name to be used for work done by studio musicians who had backed Ms. Acklin. Reginald Holt said that Carl Davis, the producer of both songs, told him that his father and Mr. Young had indeed played on “Soulful Strut,” and that his father would laugh when questioned about it.)Another Young-Holt single, “Wack Wack,” reached No. 40 on the charts in 1967. With a monotone male voice repeating the word “whack” in the manner of a quacking duck, the song expressed the merry spirit of Mr. Holt’s style of jazz.Isaac Holt was born on May 16, 1932, in Rosedale, Miss., a Mississippi River town in the northern part of the state. He got his nickname when he was young, a reference to his light-toned skin. His father, Willie, worked in a lumber yard, and his mother, Mary (Gilliam) Holt, was a homemaker who sometimes taught crocheting and worked as a nurse’s aide.Redd’s father took him to see traveling minstrel shows when he was a boy, and he was particularly struck by the one-legged tap dancer Peg Leg Bates moving to the rhythm of a trap drummer.“I went home and from the moment on, I was banging on my mother’s pots and pans and buckets,” Mr. Holt told The Journal and Courier of Lafayette, Ind., in 1992. “That’s how it all came to be.”The family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Redd grew up in the city and lived there the rest of his life, mostly on the South Side. He served in the Army from 1954 to 1956.He played with Chicago jazz luminaries as a teenager, and he belonged to a local seven-piece jazz band called the Clefs. When several members were drafted, only Mr. Holt, Mr. Young and Mr. Lewis remained. They formed a trio, calling themselves the Gentlemen of Jazz, but changed the name when they were advised that it made more commercial sense to name the group after their pianist.In later years Mr. Holt performed in his own band, Holt Unlimited, and occasionally played reunion shows with Mr. Young and Mr. Lewis. Mr. Young died in 2007, and Mr. Lewis died last year.Mr. Holt married Marylean Green in 1954. In addition to his son Reginald, she survives him, along with two other sons, Isaac and Ivan; a brother, Benjamin; eight grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.Mr. Holt kept up a regular Friday night gig in Chicago until the onset of the pandemic, and he loved to talk about his craft with high school students.“Kids are hip,” he told The Journal Herald of Dayton, Ohio, in 1977. “They have open heads.” More

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      A Lost (and Found) John Coltrane Recording, and More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Claud, Silvana Estrada, Hannah Georgas and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.John Coltrane featuring Eric Dolphy, ‘Impressions’The strongest live recordings John Coltrane ever made — the ones that seem to capture his locomotive, shape-shifting powers at full speed, totally unbridled — come from his lengthy run at the Village Vanguard in fall 1961. At that point he had moved away from writing in complex, Fibonacci-like patterns of harmony; studying spiritual music, especially from India and Africa, he’d redoubled his commitment to structural simplicity. In short order, he would assemble the lineup that we now know as his classic quartet. On those Vanguard recordings you can hear it all happening: He’s moving fast, unburdening himself of the past, trying out new lineups and reworking his repertoire in real time.But this was a process that had been ongoing. There is always a back story. And this week, Impulse! Records announced that in July it will release an album of newly unearthed recordings that Coltrane made at the Village Gate, just blocks away from the Vanguard, two months before that run.There are a few big headlines here. For one thing, the album includes the only known live capture of Coltrane performing his composition “Africa.” But the big attraction is that Eric Dolphy — the visionary multi-reedist who played a key part in Coltrane’s musical development, and stars in those Vanguard tapes — plays almost as prominent a role here as the bandleader. On the album’s lead single, a 10-minute version of Coltrane’s “Impressions,” Dolphy’s bass clarinet doubles with McCoy Tyner’s piano as Coltrane plays the “Pavanne”-inspired melody, then both horn players turn in spiraling, fuming solos, drawing smoke out of the song’s simple form. The drummer Elvin Jones and the bassist Reggie Workman charge ahead so intensely, they barely even have time to swing. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBizarrap and Peso Pluma, ‘Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 55’The Mexican songwriter Peso Pluma continues his push toward global audiences in a collaboration with Bizarrap, the hitmaking Argentine electronic-music producer. He sings about being spurned, drunk, rebounding and flaunting his blingy Patek Phillipe watch as Bizarrap quantizes regional Mexican acoustic sounds — the syncopated chords and trombone of a brass band, the slapping bass lines of a bajo sexto, solos on high-strung Mexican guitars — into a computerized track. It sounds like there’s some Auto-Tune added to Peso Pluma’s growl, too. Near the end, Bizarrap plays a few EDM synthesizer chords that suggest club tracks are only a remix away. JON PARELESThe Weeknd with Playboi Carti and Madonna, ‘Popular’Here’s a cowbell-driven critique of a dystopian social-media dynamic, from the soundtrack of the new HBO show “The Idol.” Over a sleekly minimal funk track, the Weeknd sings, “Kill anyone to be popular/Sell her soul to be popular.” He enlisted the ultimate celebrity-savvy pop star, Madonna, to pop in with backups: “Spent my whole life running from your flashing lights,” she claims. “You can’t take my soul.” It’s not everyone’s predicament, but the Weeknd bets listeners care about it. PARELESTy Dolla Sign, ‘Motion’Ty Dolla Sign finds a new groove on the breezy, house-inflected single “Motion,” which is driven by a looped piano and an insistent beat. “Something takes over when we dancin’,” he croons nimbly on the summer-ready track, which was produced by Will Larsen and Stryv. “Bodies around us caught up in the wave.” LINDSAY ZOLADZBettye LaVette, ‘Hard to Be a Human’“Hard to Be a Human” is from Bettye LaVette’s next album, “LaVette!,” due June 16; it’s a set of songs by Randall Bramblett. LaVette sings about humankind as a flawed creation — “You gotta stop and wonder/Baby, why were you born?”— over a sputtering, tumbling Afrobeat groove, anchored like Fela’s music by a burly baritone saxophone. Every rasp and break in her voice sounds like one more obstacle overcome. PARELESHigh Pulp featuring James Brandon Lewis, ‘Dirtmouth’High Pulp, a Los Angeles collective with Seattle origins, blurs jazz, funk, math rock and indie rock. Its third album is “Days in the Desert,” due July 28. For “Dirtmouth,” a musicianly, meter-shifting fusion piece, it enlisted the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, who bursts into its minimalistic cycles with breath and gusto: a leaping, sprinting, stop-start human presence roiling the systematic composition. PARELESHannah Georgas, ‘Better Somehow’The Canadian songwriter Hannah Georgas digs into her own insecurity to fight against it, pushing herself to confront someone who can “insult me so casually.” She doesn’t want a rupture; as the production ascends from a modest folk-rock strum to a big harmony chorus, she only hopes honesty will clear the air, so “I can love you better.” PARELESClaud, ‘Crumbs’“I can feel the little things adding up, the little crumbs I hate cleaning up,” the Chicago singer-songwriter Claud murmurs on this tender, muted acoustic tune from “Supermodels,” due in July. The sweetly shrugging register brings Clairo to mind, as Claud, who uses they/them pronouns, stacks vivid, accumulating snapshots of a relationship in stasis. In the end, though, they sing with a resigned sigh, “I will for you, I will for you, whatever you want.” ZOLADZSilvana Estrada, ‘Milagro y Desastre’Most of the songs the jazz-loving Mexican songwriter Silvana Estrada released in 2022 — on the album “Marchita” and the EP “Abrazo” — were sparse and pensive. “Milagro y Desastre” (“Miracle and Disaster”) begins in the same spirit, with plain keyboard chords and the possibility that “No one is going to save themselves.” But midway through, she finds companionship. She decides to stay with someone until morning; she’s joined by a growing string ensemble and bolstered by a traditional beat and vocal harmonies. As she repeats the title, she sounds content, and ready, to face down miracles or disasters. PARELESGunn Truscinski Nace, ‘On Lamp’The guitarists Steve Gunn and Bill Nace and the drummer John Truscinski, improvisers whose paths have overlapped in various ensembles, have made a trio instrumental album, “Glass Band,” that’s due in July. It includes “On Lamp,” an undulating, not-quite-ambient piece that threads a wandering, slow-motion melody through a stereo dialogue of acoustic guitars and subdued tom-tom syncopations, like a glimpse of a distant caravan. PARELES More

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      Moons, Junes and 7 Summer Tunes

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      Listen to a playlist that summons the heady days of a fresh season.Florence Welch, presumably in a June mood.Djamila Grossman for The New York TimesDear listeners,I do not know how this happened, but it did: It is already June.When I think June, I think moons … and spoons — that most infamously clichéd of all rhyme patterns, which Joni Mitchell both mocks and (internally) capitulates to in the second verse of “Both Sides Now,” when she admits that sometimes love does feel exactly the way those mushy, sing-songy ditties from your youth predicted it would:Moons and Junes and Ferris wheelsThe dizzy dancing way you feelAs every fairy tale comes realI’ve looked at love that wayMaybe Mitchell was thinking of Doris Day and Gordon MacRae (yes, that rhymes too) singing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” in a 1953 film of the same name. Or maybe she was thinking of any of the countless versions of that oft-covered standard, which was written back in 1909. In any event, she wasn’t the first songwriter to bemoan that rhyme pattern’s overuse: By 1923, the Tin Pan Alley satirist Billy Murray was already tired enough of the whole moon/June/spoon thing that he included this line in his song “Stand Up and Sing for Your Father”:Oh I’m so sick of all these ditties about “moon” and “spoon” and “June”So will you stand up and sing for your father an old time tuneRest assured, there will be no such ditties on today’s playlist. But there will be a collection of songs that reference the month of June, or summon those heady days of late spring/early summer. Two of them are by artists with “June” in their names, which is sort of cheating, but I doubt you’d begrudge any opportunity to hear Johnny duetting with Ms. Carter.I tend to think of June as a time of excitement and joy — Juneteenth! Pride! Kids getting out of school for the summer! — so I was a little surprised that most of the songs I know about the month skewed melancholy. Maybe the phenomenon of June Gloom isn’t limited to Southern California, spiritually speaking. Or maybe there’s a bit of sadness inherent in any transitional moment. Regardless, may this playlist — featuring songs from the Kinks, the Everly Brothers, the Decemberists and more — help you over that hump and into the light.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Nina Simone: “Memphis in June”I love the slow, swooning pacing Simone brings to this 1961 version of Hoagy Carmichael’s song — as if the early summer heat had made her contentedly woozy. The tempo and sparse arrangement allow the listener to linger on the scene she describes, which is as vivid as an imagistic poem: “Memphis in June/A shady veranda/Under a Sunday blue sky.” Sounds divine. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Everly Brothers: “June Is as Cold as December”Released on their 1966 album “In Our Image,” this mid-period Everly Brothers tune is a warning to stay away from that icy gal June, who apparently “doesn’t have a heart to offer anymore.” The Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds were all influenced by the harmonies and arrangements of the Everly Brothers, but here — listen to that rich, chiming guitar sound — they’ve clearly learned a thing or two from their students. (Listen on YouTube)3. The June Brides: “In the Rain”Here’s a jaunty little ditty from the British indie-pop band the June Brides, who in the mid-80s put out a string of skittishly melodic singles and EPs that were beloved by a cult audience that included, among others with discerning tastes, a teenage Dave Eggers. You’ve got to love a rock band with a trumpet player and a violist. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Kinks: “Rainy Day in June”Speaking of rain, here’s a drizzly mood piece from the Kinks’ great 1966 album “Face to Face.” Ray Davies gets points for rhyming “June” with “gloom,” “tomb” and “doom” — no moons and spoons for this guy, thank you very much! (Listen on YouTube)5. Florence + the Machine: “June”On this track from Florence + the Machine’s 2018 album “High as Hope,” Florence Welch sings wistfully of “those heavy days in June, when love became an act of defiance.” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Decemberists: “June Hymn”Like “Memphis in June,” this song from the Portland, Ore., group the Decemberists (featuring backing vocals from the folk greats Gillian Welch and David Rawlings) is full of crisp imagery that evokes, as the vocalist Colin Meloy puts it, “summer’s early sway”: “Pegging clothing on the line/Training jasmine how to vine/Up the arbor to your door.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Johnny Cash & June Carter: “Jackson”I couldn’t resist. (Listen on YouTube)Up jumps the moon to make it so much grander,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Moons, Junes and 7 Summer Tunes” track listTrack 1: Nina Simone, “Memphis in June”Track 2: The Everly Brothers, “June Is as Cold as December”Track 3: The June Brides, “In the Rain”Track 4: The Kinks, “Rainy Day in June”Track 5: Florence + the Machine, “June”Track 6: The Decemberists, “June Hymn”Track 7: Johnny Cash and June Carter, “Jackson”Bonus tracksThe Fontane Sisters, too, have that moon, June, spoon feeling.Plus, in this week’s Playlist, we have a long lost recording from John Coltrane, along with new music from the Weeknd, Claud and more. More

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      The North to Shore Festival Comes to New Jersey

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      A new arts festival featuring local and marquee-name talent is coming to the Garden State.Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, along with the first lady, Tammy Murphy, had a vision: A new performance festival in their home state that could rival South by Southwest in Texas or Bonnaroo in Tennessee. And they had a plan to distinguish it.“Austin and Nashville are great towns,” the governor said, referring to two famous arts hubs that are connected to notable festivals. “But if you stop to consider the cultural priorities of the states that govern them, you say, ‘Wait a minute.’ You’re hoodwinked if you get taken by the coolness.”A festival in New Jersey, they argued, would be produced in a state whose values align with issues like gun safety and reproductive rights, a bragging right difficult to come by in the south. But what organizers are really touting with the event, which is being produced for the first time this summer, is the mix of homegrown talent and national acts (Halsey, Santana, Jazmine Sullivan) performing across three different cities, from the state’s largest city to the coast.The North to Shore Festival will roam from Atlantic City to Asbury Park to Newark throughout the month. Its inaugural run will feature more than 220 acts — including music, comedy, dance and film — in 115 venues. “When you combine all the talent we have in New Jersey with the fact that our values are on the right side of history, we thought, there’s no reason we couldn’t give this a shot,” Mr. Murphy said.In May, the festival doubled in size, in part because of a commitment to local talent. Grants of up to $5,000 were handed out to 58 New Jersey-based artists.“What I love about it is that it’s a combination of the biggest names in entertainment and comedy and film,” said John Schreiber, president and chief executive of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, which is producing the festival, “but it’s also a chance to turn up the volume on the local folks I call the local heroes — the artists, the creators, the presenters, the producers — who work in these cities 365 days a year.”One example of this kind of artistic convergence is “You Got VERRRSED: NJ Poets vs. New York Poets,” which will take place in Newark on June 24, the day after Marisa Monte, a Grammy Award winner, performs there.In each host city, venues stretch beyond the familiar. Newark, for example, will host “Jersey Club 101,” a combination dance lesson and party, at Ariya Plaza Hall, a local dance club known for hosting private events and the occasional concert, on June 24.On June 9 in Atlantic City, a brewery, The Seed: A Living Beer Project, will host a multidisciplinary event, “From Earth to Cup,” with live music, pottery making and samples of its craft beers. The following afternoon at Sovereign Avenue Field, a popular skatepark, local hardcore and punk bands will play free shows in the “Back Sov Bullies Concert.”While Asbury Park’s famous rock club, the Stone Pony, will see its share of action — with Eric B. & Rakim, Brian Fallon, Demi Lovato and the B-52’s all scheduled to perform — stages at the lesser-known Watermark, down the street, will also be in heavy rotation and can expect to see more traffic than usual.Alexander Simone and his seven-piece band, the Whodat? Live Crew, will play there on June 14. Mr. Simone, 34, who is from the area and the grandson of Nina Simone, won a grant to take part in North to Shore with the band, which leans toward funk and R&B, after being nominated by local fans. The recognition confirmed something he already knew: “I am definitely one of the most known bands in this community,” he said.Now he hopes that other parts of the country will pay more attention to his music. “Artists are coming this way, to Jersey, and bringing people with them the way South by Southwest brings people to Texas,” he said. “They’re coming to see what we have to offer on this end.”Billboards along the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike are promoting the festival. Mr. Schreiber said he expects more than 350,000 people to attend. The overall windfall for New Jersey’s economy, he added, could be $100 million. “We’re betting the economic impact in all three of these communities will far outweigh any of the investment we have to make,” Mr. Murphy said.Amanda Towers, a founder of the Seed, a Living Beer Project, which will host a multidisciplinary event with music, pottery and beer in Atlantic City.Jennifer Pottheiser for The New York TimesNatalie Merchant, accompanied by New York City’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s, will perform in Newark on June 25. “I think it’s really ambitious and impressive,” she said of the idea behind the festival.But her decision to participate did not have much to do with performing in a liberal-leaning state, Ms. Merchant said. “I tend to not penalize my fans in states with political conditions like abortion restrictions.” Instead, “I talk about them onstage.”The North to Shore Festival will take place June 4-11 in Atlantic City, June 14-18 in Asbury Park and June 21-25 in Newark. More

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      Alicia Keys Is Making a Musical. Her Own Life Inspired the Story.

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      The show is a highlight of the Public Theater’s new season, which will also include plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Itamar Moses, Mary Kathryn Nagle and Ife Olujobi.For more than a decade, Alicia Keys has been quietly developing a musical inspired by her own turbulent adolescence growing up among artists in New York City. Now that musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is almost ready for viewing: It will be staged this fall at the Public Theater, the downtown nonprofit where “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton” were born.By any measure, the musical will be big: It has a cast of 20, the biggest budget of any show the Public has ever done, and, of course, music by Keys, an R&B and pop singer who has sold tens of millions of records. The show will feature some of Keys’s best known songs, as well as new material she has written for the musical.“This is my pride and joy,” she said in an interview. “This is a major, major turning point in my journey.”“Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t precisely track the events of Keys’s own life, but there are strong parallels. Set in the 1990s, it takes place over a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali, who is being raised by a single mother in Manhattan Plaza, a large housing complex where many of the residents are performing artists; there is family tension, sexual exploration and musical discovery. (Ali, like Keys, is transformed by a passion for piano.)Keys has been deeply involved with the show’s development, and her own production company has the commercial rights to whatever life the show might have beyond the Public. “I’m never hands off,” Keys said. “There’s not one page, there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song, there’s not one melody, there’s not anything that happens in this piece that moves without me completely immersed in it and ensuring its authenticity.”The musical was Keys’s idea, and in 2011 she selected the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”) to write its book; in 2018, the two asked Michael Greif (“Rent”) to join the project as director, and Greif then brought it to the Public.“It’s very much about a young woman testing boundaries,” Greif said. “It’s a story about a series of collisions she has with very important people in her life when she’s 17, and how those collisions affect the person she was to become.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 24 and to open Nov. 19. An emerging actor named Maleah Joi Moon will play Ali; her mother will be played by Shoshana Bean (“Wicked”), and her estranged father will be played by Brandon Victor Dixon (“Hamilton”); Camille A. Brown will choreograph.The Public is already planning to stage “Hamlet” this summer, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Ato Blankson-Wood, as its sole Free Shakespeare in the Park production, but now will follow that with a new Public Works adaptation of “The Tempest,” with songs by Benjamin Velez and directed by Laurie Woolery. The Public Works program, which stages musical adaptations of classics featuring a handful of professional actors and a large ensemble of amateur New York City performers, began in 2013 with a different adaptation of “The Tempest.”“The Tempest” will be the final production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park until 2025; the Public is trying to figure out whether and where it might stage a production next summer while the Delacorte is being renovated.In October, the Public will partner with NYU Skirball to present three Seán O’Casey plays staged by Ireland’s Druid theater.Starting in November at its downtown theater, the Public plans to stage “Manahatta,” a play that connects Manhattan’s Native American history with its contemporary finance industry, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and directed by Woolery. That will be followed in February by “The Ally,” written by Itamar Moses and directed by Lila Neugebauer, starring Josh Radnor as an atheistic Jew whose social justice commitments are complicated by Middle East politics. In March comes “Sally & Tom,” written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, about a contemporary theater company trying to do a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. And in April is “Jordans,” written by Ife Olujobi and directed by Whitney White, a comedy about Blackness in an overwhelmingly white workplace.One thing the Public will not be doing: presenting its previously annual Under the Radar Festival of experimental work. “It’s entirely a financial decision,” said Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. “This does not mean the Public is abandoning its relationship with downtown experimental artists, but we’re going to be looking for a new way of embodying that.” More

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      Hipgnosis, the Album Artists Who Made Pink Floyd’s Pig Fly

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      The filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s documentary “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)” tells the tale of the London design company devoted to crafting the perfect LP sleeve.In early 1980, Aubrey Powell, the then-33-year-old co-founder of the pioneering British design company Hipgnosis, flew to Hawaii to photograph the cover for the British rock band 10cc’s “Look Hear?” album.The shoot involved a specific sheep (only one was available on Oahu, at a university farm) seated on an old-timey psychiatrist’s couch (which had to be constructed by a Honolulu props company) on the island’s North Shore. The sheep, out of its element and skittish from the crashing waves, ruined the first day of the session, so a veterinarian was called in to tranquilize the animal for day two. Success.The final cost of the sleeve design, including airfare and a sheep wrangler, came to £5,043 — about $26,000 in today’s money and a big sum for the time. (But then again, as Powell, known as Po, said in an interview, back then the music industry “was awash with money.”) In the end, at the behest of Hipgnosis’ other co-founder, Storm Thorgerson, the U.K. version of the LP jacket was dominated by the words “Are You Normal” in large capital letters. The photo of the sheep on the chaise longue was shrunk to about the size of a postage stamp.A scene from the documentary shows the 1980 shoot for 10cc’s “Look Hear?” album artwork, which involved a sheep.Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis LtdIn an interview, the 10cc singer and bassist Graham Gouldman admitted that though he’d had the album art explained to him in the past, he couldn’t recall what it meant. “But I know it’s a brilliant picture,” he said. As for all that pricey effort for such a tiny image? “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Gouldman said. “It’s art. So it’s got to be done.” He added, “And in Hipgnosis’ case, if you can get the record company to spend the money, then good for them.”The Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn, the director of “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” a documentary on the design firm that opens in New York on June 7, had a slightly different take. “It’s just not normal to fly all the way to Hawaii to do that picture,” he said. “But it makes for a good story.”“Squaring the Circle” is full of this and other good stories about the oft-absurd lengths the London-based Hipgnosis traveled in pursuit of the perfect LP sleeve in the era before Photoshop. Among the 415 album covers Hipgnosis made between 1968 and 1983 was Pink Floyd’s “Animals” (1977), for which a 40-foot inflatable pig was photographed floating between the chimneys of London’s Battersea Power Station. Unfortunately, the single cable affixed to the pig snapped, and up the balloon went — into the flight zone for Heathrow Airport.“That was all very exciting, and rather alarming,” recalled the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, whose bandmate Roger Waters came up with the idea for the shoot, “because it was obvious that you could have a major disaster for an airline that happened to fly into the escaping pig.” No planes were harmed in the making of the LP cover, but in the end, Hipgnosis had to resort to a photo collage to achieve the desired effect.The documentary — shot largely in high-contrast black and white by Corbijn, himself a rock photographer and video director known for his work with U2 and Depeche Mode — features new interviews with Powell, plus a number of high-profile former Hipgnosis clients, including all three surviving members of Pink Floyd (David Gilmour, Mason and Waters) and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Gouldman are also among the talking heads. Noel Gallagher, a fan, provides some modern-day context and comic relief.HipgnosisA selection of Pink Floyd album covers designed by Hipgnosis, clockwise from top left: “Atom Heart Mother,” “Wish You Were Here,” “The Dark Side of the Moon” and “Animals.”HipgnosisMuch of the film focuses on the close working relationship between Powell and Thorgerson, who came up together in the Cambridge, England, art scene of the 1960s, where they were friends with young members of Pink Floyd. (Peter Christopherson, a founding member of the British industrial band Throbbing Gristle who died in 2010, became a full partner in Hipgnosis in 1978.) The design studio would end up doing nearly all of Pink Floyd’s album covers, including “Atom Heart Mother” (1970), which was simply a photograph of a cow in a field, and, most famously, “The Dark Side of the Moon” (1973), with its iconic image of a triangular prism refracting light into a rainbow pattern. (Hipgnosis’ second-best-known cover also came out in 1973: Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy,” which features a group of naked children scaling basalt columns.)The “Atom Heart Mother” jacket in particular represented a major departure from the style of the time, which Mason described as putting “a picture of the lovable moptops on the front.”“We started making demands — which Pink Floyd totally backed us on — saying ‘No title, no name of the band on the cover,’” said Powell, now 76. “This was unheard-of in the world of marketing and record companies.” He described presenting the “Atom Heart Mother” artwork to the suits: “When you walked in there with long hair and earrings, showing them a picture of a cover of a cow, they would go apoplectic.”It tended to be Thorgerson, by all accounts a stubborn genius, driving the record executives to apoplexy. “The greatest line about Storm was that ‘He’s a man who wouldn’t take yes for an answer,’” Mason said. “It was almost inevitable that whatever was done, particularly by the record company, would involve Storm having to shout at them.”Thorgerson and Powell took different approaches to communicating with artists and labels.Hipgnosis LtdThorgerson, who died in 2013, could be confrontational with the musicians as well. “He didn’t care if it was Paul McCartney or Roger Waters, he would express himself quite vehemently,” Powell said. “And often I would have to go around fighting the fires to maintain some kind of credibility. At the end of the day, it kind of worked because I managed to persuade the artists that it was the idea that was important. Forget about Storm’s personality.”Corbijn said that, ultimately, the documentary was a “story of love and loss.” Hipgnosis came to an end at the dawn of a new era, in which music videos ruled and compact discs, with their significantly smaller artistic canvases, became the dominant mode of distribution. (Of course, today most people see album art in miniature on their phones.) Thorgerson and Powell, who were moving over to filmmaking, had a falling out over money and didn’t speak for 12 years after that. “It was like the end of a marriage,” Powell said. The two reunited after Thorgerson fell ill; he died of cancer at the age of 69.In more recent years, Powell said, he’s been heartened to see that Hipgnosis’ album covers have broken “that barrier to be taken seriously as fine art.” He added, “A lot of thought went into those pictures. We didn’t take photographs of the band and slap it on the front with their names big and the title in big white letters. This was work that was taken extremely seriously. And I hope that comes over in the film.”Powell pointed to Hipgnosis’ cover of Led Zeppelin’s final studio album, “In Through the Out Door” from 1979, which involved lovingly recreating an actual New Orleans juke joint in a studio in London. He indicated that making the album’s visuals (which, after all that work, came wrapped in a brown paper bag) likely cost more than it did for the band to record the music itself.“You know,” Powell said with a laugh, “that sums up the period of time.” More

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      Billy Joel Will End Madison Square Garden Residency in 2024

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      The singer-songwriter, one of New York’s most beloved musicians, will conclude his monthly gig at the Manhattan arena after his 150th career concert there.In December 1978, Billy Joel headlined Madison Square Garden for the first time, playing three shows on the tour for his first No. 1 album, “52nd Street.” Dozens more performances followed there over the years, and in January 2014, Joel began a monthly residency as the Garden’s first “music franchise.”Now the monthly gig is coming to an end. On Thursday, Joel and the Garden announced his final 10 shows in the series, saying the residency will conclude in July 2024 with his 104th show in the series, which will be his 150th lifetime performance at the Garden.“I’m kind of flabbergasted that it lasted as long as it did,” Joel said at a news conference at the Garden. “My team tells me that we could continue to sell tickets, but 10 years, 150 shows — all right already!”James L. Dolan, the chief executive of MSG Entertainment, which owns the Garden and other venues, added: “Billy Joel’s franchise run has made history — not only for Madison Square Garden, but also for the music industry overall.”Joel’s run at MSG has been a cultural phenomenon and a business unto itself. Every show has sold out, and aside from a dozen or two standards — you are all but guaranteed to hear “Piano Man,” “Allentown,” “New York State of Mind” and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” — the set list varies enough to keep fans coming back again and again. The roster of special guests has included Bruce Springsteen, Tony Bennett, Olivia Rodrigo and Joel’s daughter Alexa Ray Joel.The residency has continued on a roughly monthly schedule since its inception, aside from an 18-month break during the Covid-19 pandemic, returning in November 2021.According to the trade publication Pollstar, Joel’s residency has played to nearly 1.7 million people through its 89th performance in April, and sold $207 million in tickets. By his final show, the residency will have grossed over $250 million.The idea for the residency came about following Celine Dion’s two record-breaking runs in Las Vegas, which started in 2003 and ultimately sold about $660 million in tickets. But Joel balked at traveling there. “I knew I didn’t want to be a resident in a place like Vegas,” he once said. “I don’t even like Vegas.”Joel’s performances at the Garden have become “the Super Bowl of music events,” Dennis Arfa, his longtime booking agent, told The New York Times last year. It has also inspired a new residency model that has lately taken hold in the music business, with some superstar artists preferring longer stays at a smaller number of venues, rather than crisscrossing the map one gig at a time — a move that can reduce touring costs and provide a bit of branding buzz. Last year, for example, Harry Styles played 15 dates at the Garden and, in late 2022 and 2023, another 15 at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif.Joel, 74, will begin his 10 countdown shows on Oct. 20. A representative for the singer said that while he is ending this run, Joel is not retiring.“There’s only one thing that’s more New York than Billy Joel,” Mayor Eric Adams of New York said in a statement, “and that’s a Billy Joel concert at MSG.” More