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      Bad Bunny Leads 2022 Latin Grammy Nominations With 10

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      Rosalía has eight nods, while Jorge Drexler and Christina Aguilera have seven each for the awards, which will be held on Nov. 17 in Las Vegas.Bad Bunny, the chart-topping Puerto Rican star, dominates the nominations for the 23rd annual Latin Grammy Awards, leading stars from across the spectrum of Latin music, like Shakira, Rosalía, Carlos Vives and Jorge Drexler.Bad Bunny, whose “Un Verano Sin Ti” is an international blockbuster — and the biggest LP of the year in the United States — has a total of 10 nods in seven categories, including album of the year, according to an announcement on Tuesday by the Latin Recording Academy, which has been presenting the awards since 2000. The Mexican songwriter and producer Edgar Barrera has nine, and both Rosalía, the genre-blending Spanish performer, and the Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro follow with eight.Artists with seven nominations include Drexler, the doctor-turned-songwriter from Uruguay who first came to international attention in 2004 when he won an Academy Award for a song from the film “The Motorcycle Diaries,” and Christina Aguilera, the American pop diva behind hits like “Genie in a Bottle” and “Beautiful,” who released a Spanish-language album, “Aguilera,” this year.Camilo, a playful Colombian pop singer with a handlebar mustache, whose recent music has been documenting his domestic life, has six nods, as does Carlos Vives, a veteran singer-songwriter from Colombia with 15 Latin Grammys already.This year’s Latin Grammys will honor music released from June 1, 2021, to May 31, 2022. To be considered, songs must be new and contain lyrics in Spanish, Portuguese “or Indigenous dialects of our region, regardless of where such product was recorded or released,” according to a statement from the academy.In addition to album of the year, Bad Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — is nominated in the record of the year category for “Ojitos Lindos,” featuring the Colombian electronic duo Bomba Estéreo. “Un Verano” is also up for urban music album, and Bad Bunny’s other nods reflect his prolific work over the last year, solo and in collaboration.Bad Bunny competes against himself in the urban fusion/performance category (with “Tití Me Preguntó” from “Un Verano,” as well as “Volví,” a track with the New York bachata band Aventura); in reggaeton performance (two non-album tracks, “Lo Siento BB:/” with Tainy and Julieta Venegas, and “Yonaguni”); and in best urban song (“Tití Me Preguntó” and “Lo Siento”). Another non-album track, “De Museo,” is up for rap/hip-hop song.One surprise this year: a shutout for “Encanto,” the animated Disney film that came out in late 2021. Its songs, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer behind “Hamilton,” draw from Latin styles including salsa and Colombian folk music, and tracks like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” became ubiquitous hits. The soundtrack was eligible for awards, and was submitted for consideration, according to the academy, but it failed to get any nominations.In addition to “Un Verano,” the album of the year field includes “Aguilera”; Rosalía’s “Motomami”; Drexler’s “Tinta y Tiempo”; Bomba Estéreo’s “Deja”; Marc Anthony’s “Pa’lla Voy”; Alejandro Sanz’s “Sanz”; Fonseca’s “Viajante”; Sebastián Yatra’s “Dharma”; and Elsa y Elmar’s “Ya No Somos los Mismos.”Also up for record of the year are “Pa Mis Muchachas” by Aguilera, Becky G and Nicki Nicole, featuring Nathy Peluso; Rosalía’s “La Fama,” featuring the Weeknd; Anitta’s “Envolver”; Camilo’s “Pegao”; “Te Felicito” by Shakira and Alejandro; Pablo Alborán’s “Castillos de Arena”; Karol G’s “Provenza”; “Baloncito Viejo” by Vives and Camilo; Drexler’s “Tocarte,” with C. Tangana; Juan Luis Guerra’s “Vale la Pena”; and the title track of Anthony’s “Pa’lla Voy.”“Tocarte,” “Provenza,” “Pa Mis Muchachas” and “Baloncito Viejo” are also up for song of the year, a songwriter’s award. The other nominees in that category include Rosalía’s “Hentai”; “A Veces Bien y a Veces Mal,” as performed by Ricky Martin and Reik; “Agua,” performed by Daddy Yankee, Alejandro and Nile Rodgers; Mon Laferte’s “Algo Es Mejor”; Fonseca’s “Besos en la Frente”; Carla Morrison’s “Encontrarme”; Yatra’s “Tacones Rojos”; and “Índigo,” as performed by Camilo and Evaluna Montaner.The nominees for best new artist are Angela Álvarez, Sofía Campos, Cande y Paulo, Clarissa, Silvana Estrada, Pol Granch, Nabález, Tiare, Vale, Yahritza y Su Esencia and Nicole Zignago.Tainy, who worked on both Rosalía and Bad Bunny’s albums, is competing for producer of the year against Barrera (Camilo, Maluma), Eduardo Cabra (Elsa y Elmar, Mima), Nico Cotton (Conociendo Rusia, Elsa y Elmar) and Julio Reyes Copello (Fonseca, Cami & Art House).The awards are voted on by members of the Latin Recording Academy, which include artists, songwriters, producers and other music creators in all genres. The ceremony will be held on Nov. 17 in Las Vegas.A complete list of nominees in all 53 categories is here. More

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      Robert Fripp Lightens Up

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      No one expected to see the leader of King Crimson dancing in a tutu on YouTube. In a rare interview, the guitarist explains “an entirely different trajectory.”Robert Fripp became a rock star without acting like a showman. As the guitarist and leader of King Crimson — the band he founded in 1969 — Fripp, 76, has written music that’s barbed, visceral, complex and ambitious, seizing the vanguard of progressive rock yet reaching a broad audience.King Crimson’s catalog has found multiple generations of admirers among musicians, including the Rolling Stones, the Clash, the Mars Volta, Black Midi and even Kanye West, who sampled “21st Century Schizoid Man” in the song “Power,” which has been streamed more than 135 million times. (The deal involved is still under litigation.)Fripp’s guitar riffs are saw-toothed and dissonant; his solos lines slice and sear. But onstage, he has always been the picture of an introvert: seated, taciturn, entirely concentrating on his guitar.“Some players can put on a really great show playing guitar. I can’t,” Fripp said in a rare video interview from Long Island, where he was preparing to teach one of his Guitar Craft seminars. His white shirt, vest and tightly knotted tie were a sartorial contrast with his hair: a gray, upright Mohawk. “I have to focus and pay attention very closely. I have no room for jumping around or symbolic gestures. So the excitement isn’t in what the player is doing in terms of his gestures. It’s in terms of the music which is appearing.”But during the pandemic, Fripp has showed a new public face: droll, chatty and unpretentious. He and his manager, David Singleton, are on a speaking tour called “That Awful Man and His Manager,” promising to discuss music and business and to answer fan questions; it comes to City Winery in Manhattan on Friday. (The “awful man” designation teases at Fripp’s many disgruntled former bandmates and business associates.)Spurred by his wife, the pop-rock singer Toyah Willcox, in 2020 Fripp started co-starring in a charmingly homemade weekly series of YouTube videos, “Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch,” that has them attacking pop and rock hits from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” often in costumes and makeup. The couple has also danced — both in tutus — to “Swan Lake.”Outside of King Crimson, Fripp has made ambient music using Brian Eno’s “Frippertronics” looping setup; added indelible solos to songs like David Bowie’s “Heroes”; produced albums for Peter Gabriel, the Roches and Daryl Hall; written voluminously in an ongoing online diary; and taught Guitar Craft seminars, where he seeks to instill the same technical and philosophical discipline — an important word for Fripp — that he brings to his own playing.He has repeatedly dissolved and reconfigured King Crimson to his shifting but exacting specifications. “When there is nothing to be done, nothing is done: Crimson disappears,” Fripp has said. “When there is music to be played, Crimson reappears. If all of life were this simple.”A documentary, “In the Court of the Crimson King,” appeared at festivals earlier this year, and Fripp completed a book, “The Guitar Circle,” with the lessons of his Guitar Craft seminars. He is about to release a collection of his long-accruing aphorisms about music, ethics and creativity in three sets of 78 cards each, the same number as a Tarot deck. Leaving no merchandising opportunity unturned, he also offers personalized, handwritten, metal-leafed versions of his aphorisms.A chat with Fripp invariably spirals outward, from the particulars of guitar tunings to what he jovially calls, with an expletive, “cosmic” horse manure. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What makes a man go on tour with his manager?Probably to present our work to the world in a way that doesn’t quite get across in social media, in the same way that performance, for me, is really the only place where you connect with music. When you meet someone face to face, you can engage. And a key part of the so-called speaking tour is likely to be the Q&A.During the pandemic you became very active on social media. Did YouTube change your life?Yes, very much indeed. The main change in my life, following lockdown, is I got to spend time with my wife for the first time in 34 years of marriage up to that point. And I loved it. I have a wonderful, dear wife, but I kept leaving her. For me, lockdown was an opportunity to address some subjects of interest to me, including catching up on my academic reading in music. But there is my dear wife thinking, “This old character is losing it — I’ve got to get him going.” So then out came the tutu and “Swan Lake,” which was something of a turning point in my life.You’ve been more performative on YouTube than you have been for 40 years in King Crimson.I think that’s probably true.“Some times have been better than the others,” Fripp said, “but riches and popularity have never been on the top of my to-do list.”Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesIs that going to change you when you go back to performing concerts?I don’t think I can look back. I think the future has now shot off on an entirely different trajectory. A personal interest for me is kicking received opinion. Because if you were only seen in a certain way, there is a richness in life which is somehow closed to you. A question: Have you seen Toyah and Robert live sitting in with the Trevor Horn band at the Cropready festival?Yes, you played Lenny Kravitz and tuned your guitar in the standard tuning, E-A-D-G-B-E, for the first time since 1984. You broke your streak. But most of your lockdown songs were probably written in standard tuning.That’s right. I’m learning to play in E again. And after spending nearly two years working very hard, translating classic rock riffs into a C pentatonic tuning — that’s C-G-D-A-E-G — to actually tune to E is a lot easier, but it’s also a challenge.How did the C tuning start?I was in the Apple Health Spa on Bleecker and Thompson back in September 1983, in the sauna at half past 10 in the morning, almost asleep, and the tuning flew over my head. At the time I couldn’t understand what it was for. I was asked to give a guitar seminar at Claymont Court in December 1994, to raise funds for the running of the estate and the children’s school. There was a click and I realized the tuning was for the guitar class. So at that point, anyone who came into a Guitar Craft seminar was pretty much on the same page. Whether you had experience or not, you have a new tuning. Including me.Which has now led to the book, “The Guitar Circle.”It’s pretty much what, as a young guitarist, I would have liked to have known. The aphorisms are probably the most useful part of the book.What unanswered questions do you still have?I know pretty much all I need to know at this point in my life. But it’s a question of engaging with it. And I hesitate because it’s so easy to get involved in cosmic horse [expletive]. An understanding is what you can take onstage that’s entirely practical.Speaking of the stage, the most recent version of King Crimson turned the typical setup inside out, putting the drums up front and the other musicians in the back. Why did you do that?It’s a very simple story. I think maybe it was July 2013 — Toyah and I were visiting chums in Vauxhall. I was sipping gently on prosecco, and for some reason I asked the question, “If King Crimson were to perform tomorrow night, what would it be?” And then it appeared: three drummers at the front, the conventional front line at the back. It was what we call the point of seeing, and I trust points of seeing in that way. And then I knew what King Crimson would be if it formed.But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to take that up because King Crimson for me is grief. Nothing else in my life can happen when King Crimson is in go mode. It is such a responsibility. The background to King Crimson is in the counterculture. And we probably wouldn’t use the term today, but the aim was to change the world. Can music change the world? Well, back then, all the young players and probably most in the audience would say, “Of course it can.” But moving 53 years later, we’d say, Well, that’s horse [expletive]. But for me it’s not. It’s still an ongoing concern and a responsibility to the originating intention within King Crimson, which is something that is always possible when music is available. That is a continuing theme and a continuing imperative.Isn’t there some pleasure in performing?During the rehearsals, as we were playing the notes, I felt the music move into the notes. There is a quite distinct experience of King Crimson as an individuality in this thing, entirely apart from whoever is playing it, moving into this certain place onstage. And for me, that is validation. But if, for whatever reason, a performance doesn’t meet what is possible, it is an acute suffering for me.People can recognize your guitar tone from a single note. What do you want that tone to be?True. That’s all.The actual sound of the note may change, like if you’re sustaining or whatever. But that’s the criterion. Is this note true? And I remember with King Crimson, I think it was in Preston — it might have been Darby — in the autumn of 1972. And I threw off a lick. And it was awful. It felt like I was lying to my mother. It violated conscience for that one lick. I was lying to music and that was appalling. And it still irks me to this day.What have you learned from all the pop songs you’ve been playing on YouTube? When I heard “Toxic,” that sounded like a Crimson riff.Some of the riffs, I think, “Hmm, maybe we supped at the same table.” I love playing classic rock riffs. They are relatively easy, providing you’re alert when you’re playing them. It was a privilege playing in Crimson, but it was a very specific repertoire. As a guitar player, it’s like the Olympics of guitar, phenomenally difficult lines, and it required two to four hours of practicing a day. Now, King Crimson is not in go mode. I can step back from it to a certain extent and move my attention into learning E tuning.You’re touring with your manager, and you have an aphorisms deck called Finance. How does having to earn a living affect your music?I have no problem singing for my supper. My sense has always been: Present your work to the public. Some people change their work to meet what they believe their public is. Well, that might work for a while, but I have no idea what my public will want, so if I hear something, I follow it. If I see something, I follow it and present it to the public, trusting that there will be a sufficiency in order for a supper to arrive. And historically that’s worked. Some times have been better than the others, but riches and popularity have never been on the top of my to-do list.I’ve learned to trust the music, trust the process. And it’s important that the audience should know they are as important as the musician. If the audience is present and engaged and listening, the relationship is qualitatively different. When that happens, the moment becomes actually real. And there is a profound satisfaction in there. And then you go back, you get on the bus and you drive overnight to the next venue and it all begins again. More

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      Bad Bunny, No. 1 Again, Puts a Spotlight on Inequities in Puerto Rico

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      Days before his latest album notched its 11th week atop the Billboard 200, the pop superstar released a music video paired with a documentary by Bianca Graulau.Another week, another hundred-odd-million streams and yet another No. 1 for Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican pop superstar whose album “Un Verano Sin Ti” has dominated the upper rungs of the Billboard chart since it came out in May.In its 19th week of release, “Un Verano” notches an 11th time at No. 1, the most at the top since Drake’s “Views” had a 13-week stint in 2016. The runs for both albums are nonconsecutive, but Bad Bunny has the distinction of never dipping below No. 2. (“Views” fell as low as No. 4 during its first 19 weeks out.)In its most recent week, “Un Verano” had the equivalent of 97,000 sales in the United States, including 132 million streams, according to Luminate, the tracking service that powers Billboard’s charts. Since its release, the album has had the equivalent of about 2.4 million sales, and its songs have racked up 3.3 billion streams.The accomplishment comes as Bad Bunny is selling out stadiums across North America — including two nights at Yankee Stadium last month — and has become increasingly outspoken about political and social issues in Puerto Rico. On Friday, he released a 23-minute video, which segues from a music video for his song “El Apagón” to an 18-minute documentary by Bianca Graulau, a journalist, called “Aquí Vive Gente” (“People Live Here”).Her film looks at inequities in Puerto Rican real estate, including the eviction of some low-income residents of San Juan to make way for million-dollar homes that cater to mainland speculators and cryptocurrency traders. “They’re evicting Puerto Ricans to get rich with what’s from here, with what’s native from here,” one woman, who said she was given 30 days to leave her apartment, tells Graulau in the film.Bad Bunny’s video also explores the longstanding problems with Puerto Rico’s power grid, which has struggled to recover after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Outages this year led to protests against Luma Energy, a private company that took it over in 2021. The video arrived as Hurricane Fiona knocked out power across all of Puerto Rico, and led to widespread flooding.Three new albums placed high on this week’s chart. The Canadian rapper Nav opens at No. 2 with “Demons Protected by Angels,” while Ozzy Osbourne, the 73-year-old metal god and onetime reality-TV star, starts at No. 3 with his latest, “Patient Number 9.” The country singer Kane Brown debuts at No. 5 with “Different Man.”Also this week, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4, extending its historic chart run with an 87th time in the Top 10. More

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      For the Gloriously Over-the-Top Rina Sawayama, Less Is Less

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      The pop singer and songwriter’s first album was a master class in maximalism. Its follow-up, “Hold the Girl,” still carries weighty subjects, but largely without its chaotic edge.The British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama’s kaleidoscopically eclectic debut, “Sawayama,” ranks among the best and most imaginative pop albums of this still-young decade. Gloriously excessive but intimately personal, “Sawayama” sounded like an internet browser with too many open tabs blasting away — perhaps a vintage Christina Aguilera hit, a black metal song and an episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — that somehow overlapped in synergistic, mashed-up harmony.Though she was a pop outsider who’d self-funded her head-turning 2017 EP “Rina,” Sawayama’s album, which arrived in April 2020, garnered her A-list fans like Elton John, with whom she later rerecorded a version of her queer anthem “Chosen Family,” and Lady Gaga, who tapped Sawayama and her producer Clarence Clarity to remix — with their signature over-the-top flair — a track off “Chromatica.”But toward the end of Sawayama’s catharsis-chasing second album, “Hold the Girl,” out Friday, there’s a song so sparse and restrained, it almost sounds like the work of a different artist. “Send My Love to John” is a narrative-driven ballad, crooned over country-tinged, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, subtle enough to spotlight the pathos in Sawayama’s voice and the song’s lyrics.“Threw away my name/It’s easier when it sounds the same,” Sawayama sings, from the perspective of an immigrant mother who came to the States in the early 1970s. The titular John is her son’s partner; Sawayama wrote it for a friend whose mother had difficulty accepting their sexual identity. The song is, in some ways, a fantasy of compassion, understanding and acceptance. “He’s there for you,” Sawayama sings on the wrenching bridge, “in all the ways I never was.”The therapeutic practice of “reparenting” — or learning to meet, as an adult, the needs you were denied as a child — is a core idea running through “Hold the Girl.” “Reach inside and hold you close, I won’t leave you on your own,” Sawayama, 32, sings on the title track, a bracing torch song that eventually fragments into skittering electro-pop. On the theatrical “Phantom,” she once again addresses her inner child, but this time it’s her older self that needs comfort: “I was wrong to assume I would ever outgrow you/I need you now, I need you close.”If this sounds like heavy lifting for a four-minute pop song, know that Sawayama has never stuck to light, conventional subjects. Part of what made her previous album so fresh was the way it fit under-sung human experiences — the slow but painful erosion of a friendship (“Bad Friend”), feeling disconnected from one’s birth country (“Tokyo Love Hotel”) or even the familial lineage of depression (“Akasaka Sad”) — into the familiar grammar of catchy pop songs. The gleeful gear-shifting nature of Sawayama’s sound, though, still made the album feel like joyride.“Hold the Girl” continues to mine deep material — “Imagining” addresses a mental health crisis; the opener, “Minor Feelings,” takes its title from a Cathy Park Hong essay collection — but the protruding eccentricities that once made Sawayama’s music so distinct often sound sanded down. Previous Sawayama standouts like “XS” and “STFU!” paired blingy pop production and hip-hop swagger with crushingly aggro guitars; what elevated them beyond simple Y2K nostalgia was the way they sounded, simultaneously, like every single song playing across the radio dial in 1999.The songs that fall flat on “Hold the Girl” — like the Kelly Clarkson-lite “Catch Me in the Air”; or the MTV reality-show-theme-song-that-never-was “Hurricanes” — instead sound like a faithful and earnest homage to a single bygone aesthetic. The big-tent affirmation of the closer, “To Be Alive,” shares a surprising affinity with Christian pop, not necessarily a sin, except for the way it tones down Sawayama’s idiosyncrasies in favor of something more universal. In creating a soft place for herself and her inner child to land, Sawayama has blunted some of her music’s sharper edges.There is, however, a bold and satisfyingly angry stretch across the middle of the album with some of its strongest material. The antsy, strobe-lit hyperpop of “Imagining” effectively captures a loss of control, while the brash, earth-quaking “Your Age” proves again that Sawayama is the rare contemporary artist who’s managed to make effective use of nü-metal. That song, too, derives its force from a cleareyed reconsideration of the past. Sawayama might be again addressing a lack of parental compassion, but the lyrics are ambiguous enough (“Now that I’m your age, I just can’t imagine/Why did you do it, what the hell were you thinking?”) that it could also serve as a re-examination of a relationship with a large age gap, à la Demi Lovato’s recent “29.”When things risk getting too heavy, Sawayama still knows how to take flight. The album’s best single is the devilishly fun “This Hell,” which throws a breezy shrug at high-strung homophobia (“God hates us? All right then/Buckle up, at dawn we’re riding”) and gets down to the more pressing business of partying. The mid-tempo highlight “Forgiveness” strikes a perfect balance between naturalistic sincerity and lavish melodrama. “I’m looking for signs,” Sawayama belts in an ascending melody that keeps escalating to the stratosphere. For one ecstatic moment, she sounds not like her own parent or even her own therapist — just her own co-pilot, ready to navigate the uncharted skies ahead.Rina Sawayama“Hold the Girl”(Dirty Hit) More

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      ‘Moonage Daydream’ Review: David Bowie’s Sound and Vision

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      Brett Morgen’s new documentary about the singer uses archival material, not talking heads. But the film is more séance than biography.The usual way of making a documentary about a famous, no-longer-living popular musician is to weave talking-head interviews (with colleagues, journalists and random celebrities with nothing better to do) around video clips of the star onstage and in the studio. The story tends to follow a standard script: early struggles followed by triumph, disaster and redemption. Movies like this clog the streaming platforms, catering to eager fans and nostalgic dads.Brett Morgen’s new film about David Bowie is something different. Titled “Moonage Daydream” after a semi-deep cut from Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” and showing in IMAX as well as other formats, it’s less a biography than a séance. Instead of plodding through the chronology of Bowie’s life and career, Morgen conjures the singer’s presence through an artful collage of concert footage and other archival material, including feature films and music videos. There are a lot of great songs, and thanks to Morgen’s dexterous editing, Bowie himself seems to provide the narration, a ghostly effect (he died in 2016) that resonates with some of his ideas about time, consciousness and the universe. He is not so much the subject of the film as its animating spirit.“Does it matter? Do I bother?” he asks at the beginning, musing on the transience of existence. For anyone who grew up following the iterations of his persona and the evolution of his music, the answer, at least as far as the movie is concerned, is emphatically yes.Morgen, who has made documentaries about the Chicago 7, Kurt Cobain, Jane Goodall and the Hollywood producer Robert Evans, subordinates the dry facts of history to the mysteries of personality. “Moonage Daydream” is interested in what it felt like to be David Bowie, and also, as a corollary, what it felt like, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, to be interested in him. Context and evaluation — the sources and influences of his music; its relation to what was happening in the wider world — are left to the viewer to supply or infer. The work, and the artist’s presence, are paramount.For the most part, this approach works. Though Morgen bends and twists the timeline when it suits him, he traces an arc from the early ’70s into the ’90s, beginning in the Ziggy Stardust years and immersing the audience in Bowie’s otherworldly charisma at that moment. His bright orange hair, his brilliantly inventive fashion sense, his frank bisexuality and his almost casual mastery of divergent musical idioms made him an irresistible puzzle for the media and an idol to the restless and curious young.Appearing onstage in dresses, flowing suits and shiny space gear, he undid gender conventions with insouciant ease. He changed his look and his sound from one album to the next, leading critics to question his authenticity and interviewers to wonder about his true self.That mystery seems more easily solved now than it might have back then, and “Moonage Daydream” explains some of Bowie’s process and a lot of his thinking. The combined effect of the present-tense voice-over and the earlier interviews is to emphasize Bowie’s essential sanity. Perhaps more than most of his peers, he seems to have approached even excesses and transgressions with a certain intellectual detachment, taking an Apollonian perspective on an essentially Dionysian form.His postwar childhood is dealt with quickly. He notes the coldness of his parents’ marriage, and the influence of his older half brother, Terry Burns, who introduced young David to jazz, outlaw literature and modern art. Mainly, though, “Moonage Daydream” tacks away from Bowie’s personal life, editing sex and drugs out of its version of rock n roll.His first marriage, to Angie Barnett, isn’t mentioned at all. His second, to Iman, marks a transition from restless solitude to contented middle age. The emphasis, in both the narration and the images, is on Bowie’s work. His explanations of changes in style and genre are illuminating, and illustrated by shrewd musical selections. You don’t hear all the obvious hits — where was “Young Americans”? — but you do get a sense of his range and inventiveness, and a taste of some less-well-remembered songs. I was glad to be reminded of the anthemic “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me.”The documentary mainly focuses on Bowie’s work, and tacks away from his personal life.NeonWatching Bowie move through the phases of his career, from the avant-garde to the unapologetically pop, it’s clear, at least in retrospect, that his creative life was a series of experiments in an impressive variety of media. Morgen devotes some time to Bowie’s painting and sculpture, and to his acting, in films like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and in a Broadway production of “The Elephant Man.”Bowie was a pretty good actor, and also — this is shown rather than said — an exceptionally good dancer. His devotion to his work, and the pleasure he took in it, are the themes of “Moonage Daydream.” It’s a portrait of the artist as a thoughtful, lucky man. And perhaps surprisingly, given the mythology that surrounds so many of his contemporaries, a happy one.Moonage DaydreamRated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, the way it used to be. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Art Rosenbaum, Painter and Preserver of Folk Music, Dies at 83

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      As an artist and exponent of American traditional songs, he sought to blur the lines between outsider and insider art, and became a guiding force in the Athens, Ga., scene.ATLANTA — Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, Ga., his adopted hometown. He was 83.His son, Neil Rosenbaum, said the cause was complications of cancer.Art Rosenbaum’s passion for documenting a broad range of American musical traditions as they were passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms expanded upon the famous field recording work of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. An important inspiration was Pete Seeger, another high-profile 20th-century champion of folk music. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that Mr. Seeger had once told him, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.”Mr. Rosenbaum called it “good advice, and the kick in the rear that got me going.”“Outside Carnesville,” oil on linen, 1983-84. Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings often depicted the musicians he recorded, as he did here, with Mabel Cawthorn on the banjo.Art RosenbaumIn 2007, the Atlanta-based label Dust-to-Digital released the first of two box sets of compilations from Mr. Rosenbaum’s trove, “Art of Field Recording Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum,” which won a Grammy Award for best historical album.The pop music website Pitchfork called the release “revelatory” and “an indispensable counterpoint to Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music,’” a reference to the 1952 song compilation that remains a canonical touchstone for folk musicians.Like Mr. Smith, the bohemian polymath who compiled the “Anthology,” Mr. Rosenbaum was an accomplished visual artist. As an art teacher, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of Georgia, in Athens, where his energetic paintings, often depicting the musicians he recorded, and his ideas about the democratization of culture had an influence that resonated far beyond the classroom.Michael Stipe, the visual artist and singer with the Athens rock band R.E.M., who was a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s in the early 1980s, said Mr. Rosenbaum’s goal “was to blur the lines between what is outsider and insider, and to bring together this untrained music and art with trained music and art, and acknowledge that each have immense power, and that they’re not that far apart.”A portrait of Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. singer, a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s, as well as a subject of his paintings.Art Rosenbaum, Collection of the Peasant CorporationArthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on Dec. 6, 1938, in Ogdensburg, N.Y., in St. Lawrence County. His mother, Della Spark Rosenbaum, was a medical illustrator who encouraged her children’s artistic inclinations. His father, David Rosenbaum, was an Army pathologist who sometimes sang what his son described as “Northern street songs.” Arthur later recorded one of these songs, his father’s a cappella version of the ribald 18th-century Child ballad “Our Goodman,” and included it in the 2007 box set.The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, where Mr. Rosenbaum, entranced by traditional music, absorbed the Harry Smith anthology and the contemporary folk stars of the day. In high school he won an art contest at the Indiana State Fair and spent the $25 prize money on a five-string banjo. He went on to become a pre-eminent expert on traditional banjo playing and tunings and to record several albums.In the mid-1950s Mr. Rosenbaum moved to New York City, then the epicenter of the burgeoning folk revival, earning an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University. In the summers he worked at a resort hotel on Lake Michigan, where he began making recordings of nearby field workers from Mexico and the American South.In 1958, Mr. Rosenbaum tracked down and recorded in Indianapolis a musician named Scrapper Blackwell, whom he described as “one of the best and most influential blues guitarists of the 1920s and ’30s.” Back in New York, as Mr. Rosenbaum was fond of recalling, a fellow roots music obsessive named Bob Dylan would pester him for any details he could muster about Mr. Blackwell’s life and playing style.“Shady Grove,” 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum sought out traditional Black and white musicians, revealing a shared cultural history.Art RosenbaumIt was in New York that Mr. Rosenbaum met the artist Margo Newmark, who became his wife and lifelong collaborator. She survives him.In addition to her and his son, Neil, a filmmaker and musician, he is survived by a sister, Jenny Rosenbaum, a writer; and a brother, Victor Rosenbaum, a concert pianist.After eight years of teaching studio art at the University of Iowa, Mr. Rosenbaum in 1976 took a similar job at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. With Athens as a home base, he and Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum continued making field recordings, many of them in and around Georgia, and giving the musicians they met opportunities to play before new audiences.“As these traditional musicians were identified and then brought out,” said Judith McWillie, an emerita art professor at the university, “and as there were more festivals and opportunities for them to play, people began to envision an identity for Georgia that was somewhat different from the one that it had. This was the 1970s, and coming off some extremely difficult times in the South.”Folk music, she said, revealed a shared cultural history: “The musicians Art brought out were Black and white.”In 1984, Mr. Rosenbaum recorded an album of stories and songs by Howard Finster, the self-taught artist, preacher and self-proclaimed “man of visions” whose work has become indelibly associated with 20th-century Georgia after its use on album covers by R.E.M. and the band Talking Heads.Untitled Diptych, 2014. Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings are allegorical works in which the old and the new cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space with modern-day hipsters.Art RosenbaumHe also recorded the McIntosh County Shouters, an African American group from coastal Georgia who performed the “ring shout,” which Mr. Rosenbaum described as “an impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion and expressive and formalized dancelike movements.” The ring shout, he asserted, was “the oldest African American performance tradition on the North American continent.”Brenton Jordan, a member of the group, said of the Rosenbaums, “It’s their legwork that actually kind of introduced the McIntosh County Shouters to the world.” He noted that the ring shout, once on the verge of extinction, has in recent years been performed by his group in Washington at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.The Rosenbaums published a book on the ring shout in 1998. With drawings of the performers by Mr. Rosenbaum and photos of them by Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum, it depicts a place and a culture that seems beguilingly out of phase with modern life.Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s other paintings and drawings are loose allegorical works in which the old and the new clash and cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space on the canvas with modern-day hipsters, skateboarders and documentarians (often Mr. Rosenbaum himself).As a painter, he was inspired by Cezanne and Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist. At times his work recalls the painting of Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist. Some of Mr. Rosenbaum’s works are large murals on historical themes.Pete Seeger once told Mr. Rosenbaum, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.” That advice set him on a decades-long project of seeking out unrecorded musicians.via Rosenbaum familyBeginning in the late 1970s, Athens saw an explosion of forward-thinking rock musicians, many of whom, like Mr. Stipe, had ties to the Georgia art school. Mr. Rosenbaum’s passions always ran to traditional music, but he remained an inspiration for contemporary musicians.Lance Ledbetter, the founder and co-director of the Dust-to-Digital label, recalled Vic Chesnutt, the brilliant, idiosyncratic Athens-based songwriter who died in 2009, speaking of Mr. Rosenbaum, quoting him as saying:“When you move to Athens, and you hear about this guy who plays banjo and knows all of these songs, you just follow him around like a puppy dog. And I’m not the only one who did that.” More

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      Ramsey Lewis, Jazz Pianist Who Became a Pop Star, Dies at 87

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      His 1965 recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” brought him to a place few jazz musicians reached in that era: the Top 10.Ramsey Lewis, a jazz pianist who unexpectedly became a pop star when his recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” reached the Top 10 in 1965 — and who remained musically active for more than a half century after that — died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 87.His death was announced on his website. No cause was given.Mr. Lewis, who had been leading his own group since 1956, had recorded with the revered drummer Max Roach and was well known in jazz circles but little known elsewhere when he and his trio (Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums) recorded a live album at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington in May 1965. The album included a version of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which had been a hit for the R&B singer Dobie Gray just a few months earlier, and which was released as a single.Instrumental records were a rarity on the pop charts at the time, jazz records even more so. But its infectious groove, Mr. Lewis’s bluesy piano work and the ecstatic crowd reaction helped make the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s rendition of “The ‘In’ Crowd” a staple on radio stations and jukeboxes across the country. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — eight points higher than the Dobie Gray original had reached.Two more singles in a similar vein quickly followed: covers of “Hang On Sloopy,” which had been a No. 1 hit for the McCoys in 1965, and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” “The ‘In’ Crowd” won Mr. Lewis the first of his three Grammy Awards. (The others were for the 1966 album track “Hold It Right There” and a 1973 rerecording of “Hang On Sloopy.”)Mr. Young and Mr. Holt left in 1966 to form their own group and had hit singles of their own. Mr. Lewis carried on with Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White, later a founder of Earth, Wind & Fire, on drums. That trio had a Top 40 hit in 1966 with a version of the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”That record proved to be the end of Mr. Lewis’s career as a purveyor of Top 40 singles, but it was far from the end of his career as a jazz musician. Over the years he would record scores of albums, in contexts ranging from trios to orchestras to collaborations with his fellow pianist Billy Taylor and the singer Nancy Wilson, and he was a constant presence on the Billboard jazz chart.There was always more to Mr. Lewis than his soulful hits suggested; he was a virtuoso with a thorough grasp of the harmonic complexity of modern jazz and a smooth touch reminiscent of earlier jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. But his success on the pop and R&B charts — where he returned in 1974 with “Sun Goddess,” an album partly written and produced by Mr. White and featuring members of Earth, Wind & Fire, on which Mr. Lewis played electric keyboards — led some jazz purists to view him with skepticism.That skepticism was long gone by 2007, when the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor for a jazz musician.Mr. Lewis in an undated photo. He once said he had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.” Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesCommenting on the perceived conflict between “jazz as entertainment and jazz as art” in a 2007 interview with DownBeat magazine, Mr. Lewis noted, “Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians.” He himself, he said in another interview, had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.”In announcing his Jazz Master honor, the N.E.A. pointed to Mr. Lewis’s eclecticism, praising him for a style “that springs from his early gospel experience, his classical training and a deep love of jazz.” It also acknowledged him as “an ambassador for jazz,” citing his work both in academia (he had taught jazz studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago) and in the media: In the 1990s he began hosting a syndicated weekly radio program, “Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis,” and in 2006 he hosted a public television series of the same name, which featured live performances by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Tony Bennett and many others.At around this time he also began composing large-scale orchestral works. His “Proclamation of Hope,” written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, where he was artistic director of the jazz series, and performed there by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009.Mr. Lewis found the challenge of composing that work daunting, he told The Associated Press, until he “threw away the thought of Tchaikovsky and others and sat at the piano and started improvising.” As a result, he said, “I was able to compose from my spirit rather than from my intellect.”In 1995, Mr. Lewis formed Urban Knights, an all-star ensemble with an ever-changing lineup of musicians who, as he himself had long done, straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. The group, whose lineup at various times included the saxophonists Grover Washington Jr., Gerald Albright and Dave Koz, released seven albums, the most recent in 2019.Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Chicago, one of three children of Pauline and Ramsey Lewis. His father worked as a maintenance man.Ramsey began taking piano lessons when he was 4 — he recalled his teacher telling him, “Listen with your inner ear” and “Make the piano sing” — and was soon playing piano at the church where his father, who encouraged his interest in jazz, was choir director.He attended DePaul University in Chicago but did not graduate; his career as a professional musician had already begun before he enrolled. While still a student at Wells High School, he had joined a local seven-piece jazz band, the Clefs. When four members of the band were drafted, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young became the Ramsey Lewis Trio.The trio signed with Argo Records, a subsidiary of the Chicago-based blues label Chess, and released their first album, “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentle-Men of Swing,” in 1956. The trio became a fixture on the Chicago nightclub scene, and many other albums followed, as did engagements at Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York City and at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. But the group remained relatively unheralded beyond Chicago.That changed with “The ‘In’ Crowd.”Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Janet; his daughters, Denise Jeffries and Dawn Allain; his sons, Kendall, Frayne and Bobby Lewis; 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His sons Ramsey Lewis III and Kevyn Lewis died before him.During the pandemic, Mr. Lewis presented a monthly series of livestream performances. An album drawn from those performances, “The Beatles Songbook,” is slated for release in November.While in lockdown he also wrote a memoir, “Gentleman of Jazz,” in collaboration with Aaron Cohen. It is scheduled for publication next year. More

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      Rivers Cuomo’s Very Complicated, Highly Organized Life

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      Preparing to release a new EP in Weezer’s “Sznz” series, the band’s leader explained how he keeps himself on track — and how he learned to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language.The Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo knows how people think about Weezer. The veteran rock band has dedicated much of 2022 to promoting “Sznz,” a four-part series of EPs that ostensibly correspond to the different seasons, but also stand in for eras in the band’s history. “‘Spring’ was the easy-breezy side of Weezer, nobody’s really going to object to that,” he said. “‘Summer’ was more like ’90s alt-rock Weezer, which lots of people will be relieved to hear.”The trick now was “Autumn,” due Sept. 22, which was still being written when we talked in mid-July. “‘Autumn’ is dance rock, which is not something we’ve traditionally been able to get away with,” he admitted. “It’s really hard to make it both dance and rock and Weezer. It’s very easy for that to turn into something that nobody likes.”Weezer certainly enjoys multitasking. Earlier this year, the band concluded the Hella Mega Tour, a joint bill with Green Day and Fall Out Boy that wrapped in Europe, where Cuomo said he experienced “the big dream when you were 12 years old lying in bed at night — 50,000 fans in stadiums, feeling the power of rock.” The band released two full-length records in 2021 and planned a Broadway residency for this fall that was ultimately canceled because of production costs and lagging ticket sales. And Cuomo is heavily involved in running his own Discord, a private chat server where Weezer fans are invited to talk with him, weigh in on new music and even act as de facto creative assistants.At home in Los Angeles during a rare moment of downtime, Cuomo spoke via phone about 10 of his beloved cultural products. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Mr. Rivers’ Neighborhood” The core musical values of my Discord are probably quite similar to the people who were posting on Weezer message boards in 2001, and maybe similar to people who were writing fan letters to [the Weezer superfans] Mykel and Carli in 1996. There’s maybe six or seven thousand people who have joined the server, and often the results of what I’m working on turn out better if I have lots of smart people helping out.2. Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas The thing I’ve found most fulfilling in my life in the last year or two is that every night, I go on my Discord and I livestream myself playing Beethoven’s sonatas in order. I play anywhere from 45 to 75 minutes, and it’s just so deeply satisfying to me. It’s like going on this tour of the most sublime emotional landscape — from the most tender moments to the most head-banging moments, tragic moments, frightening moments. It doesn’t matter what happened that day or what kind of mood I’m in — by the end of that hour, I’m good.3. Mouth Taping Sleep has historically been a little challenging for me — I’ll often wake up in the middle of the night, wide-awake, and my body and mind have no interest in going back to sleep. But somebody told me if you tape your mouth shut with athletic tape, you’ll get much deeper sleep. I tried it, and it works great. At night, I say good night to my wife and then keep my mouth shut. The first night I was a little panicky, and gasping for breath through my nostrils, but then my body calmed down and I got a great night’s sleep.4. TikTok As a consumer, TikTok is obviously amazing; it’s freakishly good at knowing what I’m actually interested in. As a creator, it’s a real game changer because now songs that would otherwise have zero chance of reaching an audience can become gigantic without the help or approval of any gatekeepers. The song “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” was a B-side from “Pinkerton,” and now it’s getting 100,000 streams a day. Another example is “The Good Life” — that’s a song we tried to release as a radio single, but nobody would play it. I just made a TikTok of me doing a stupid dance, and within 24 hours it had a half a million views.5. Coding The process of building and writing the script that would solve the problem — I realized I enjoy that more than whatever work I was supposed to be doing with the results. It satisfies a very deep part of my brain to work on making the systems around it more efficient, more automated; I’d be happy to spend 10 hours working to make something that would save 10 seconds of mindless labor. For decades, I’ve had boxes of cassettes and Dropbox folders of MP3 of demos, thousands of them. It didn’t seem right to put out vinyl or CDs, or even iTunes or Spotify. Building Weezify seemed like a cool solution to that longstanding problem of what to do.6. Asana Work Management Platform My life is quite complex now, and I have all these complicated projects like building apps, or building the four-part “Sznz” tetralogy. There’s all these ideas, so it’s great to have them in Asana; it’s like my long-term memory storage. When you move a task from the to-do column to the in-progress column, and click it, this rainbow-colored unicorn flies across the screen. It’s all very rewarding.7. Audible Semi-famously, we have a song called “The Grapes of Wrath,” which is all about my love for Audible and listening to it in the middle of the night. I’m listening to “The Corrections” now, and I’m not sure why, but there’s moments that strike me as so funny I burst out laughing at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I wake up my wife. It’s definitely a corrective against any sense of romanticization you might have about life before the hyper-internet era — and for me, life back in Connecticut, because I grew up in Connecticut. It’s like, [shocked voice] Oh, yeah! That was super bleak. That’s why I moved to L.A., and that’s why I’m doing what I do, and that’s why we invented the internet.8. Farm Tourism At the end of the tour, we spent a few days in the Cotswolds, in the English countryside. We would do things like go to a farm and feed the cows, or do some falconry. My daughter’s 15, so she wanted something a little more thrilling. There’s this giant, ancient castle called Warwick, with a dungeon you can go through. It’s one of those horrifying experiences where you have to participate. I had to go up there in front of everyone and go through this torture routine where they humiliate me; they’re not actually touching me, but they make me bend over in front of the whole crowd and basically castrate me. It was just horrifying, but I guess that’s the kind of tourism we’re into these days.9. Vipassana Meditation In May of next year, it will mark my 20th year of meditating two hours every day. It’s kind of the foundation on which everything else I do is placed. In 2003, I was kind of stuck after our fourth album; I started working with Rick Rubin, and he suggested meditation. When I first started, it was specifically like, “I’m doing this so that I can write better songs.” Now, it’s a little broader — I just want a better life, whatever that means. At the deepest level, it’s strengthening my equanimity so that whatever’s happening outside — good news, bad news — I can stay calm and be happy. And if I’m calm and happy, then I tend to treat other people better, and I tend to make decisions that are better for my own future and the people around me. Less shooting myself in the foot.10. Foreign Language Banter I’ve taken language classes before, but to do it systematically is new. This is me looking for ways to make touring fun, and it’s also helpful because it improves my stage banter, which is always the part of the show I’m most stressed about. I’m saying pretty basic stuff, but because it’s in their native tongue, it’s automatically amazing. I worked really hard at it, and then I was also able to write a script that accesses a Google spreadsheet. I have 100 common phrases in there, and then each column is a different language — all these different places we went, including Gaelic and Celtic and Basque. The script will look up the translation automatically and auto-populate any empty cell in the spreadsheet, so I can just look through that and know how to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language. More