Pop and Rock Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Reviving ‘The Wiz’ Through ‘the Blackest of Black Lenses’

      by

      Schele Williams first saw “The Wiz” when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most “beautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.”Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of “The Wiz,” and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the show’s soaring finale, “Home,” as one of her audition songs.Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (“Aida”) and an associate director (“Motown”), she is directing the first Broadway revival of “The Wiz” in almost 40 years. It’s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what “The Wiz” has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture. The show blends Afrofuturism with classic Americana to enact a sort of creative reparation, reframing an allegory about perseverance and self-determination to feature Black characters who, in the ’70s, had rarely appeared in popular children’s stories.The 1978 Motown film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, was a critical and box-office flop. But the movie has been a trippy favorite of family living rooms for multiple generations, and the musical has remained a staple on local stages around the country.“The weight of that is not lost on me,” said Williams.The new production of “The Wiz,” beginning previews on March 29 at the Marquis Theater, arrives in New York after a 13-city national tour that began in September. The creative team said its goal is to celebrate both the property’s legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The Ultimate Hurray for the Riff Raff Primer

      by

      Listen to Alynda Segarra’s catalog as their latest album, “The Past Is Still Alive,” arrives.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last week, I published a profile of the 36-year-old singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, who makes spirited and defiant music under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff.* Their ninth LP, “The Past Is Still Alive,” comes out today, and though 2024 is still young, it’s an early contender for my favorite album of the year.Yes, I did say ninth album, which means that Segarra has quite the back catalog. Today’s playlist can serve either as an introduction to Hurray for the Riff Raff or, if you’re already familiar with them, a mix that places their new songs in rich conversation with what’s come before.Segarra grew up in the Bronx and left home just after turning 17, eventually ending up busking in a street band in New Orleans and riding freight trains during the hottest Louisiana months. Playing in communal spaces and collaborating with other musicians, they developed a repertoire of Appalachian folk, Delta blues and classic country, with the requisite Tom Waits song thrown in.By 2014, on the breakout album “Small Town Heroes,” Segarra had found their own unique voice as a songwriter who was able to adapt traditional forms to speak to present concerns. This playlist’s leadoff track, “The Body Electric,” is a perfect example: Sparsely arranged and sung with conviction, it is a kind of revisionist murder ballad that questions that genre’s history of violence against marginalized people. “He shot her down, he put her body in the river,” Segarra sings of the doomed Delia Green, before offering a line that would come to define the political motivation of subsequent HFRR albums: “He covered her up, but I went to get her.”Over the past decade, Segarra has released a consistently strong run of albums that update traditional folk music to consider modern scourges like gentrification (on the epic 2017 album “The Navigator”) and climate change (on the elegiac 2022 release “Life on Earth”).But “The Past Is Still Alive” is something else: a memoir, a travelogue, a loose campfire singalong. These songs have the sort of direct, plain-spoken confidence that comes with age. On “The Navigator,” Segarra created a protagonist named Navina and built a whole alternate universe in order to tell a story that had parallels to their own. Here, Segarra is narrating their own experiences, etching their own story into the American songbook, and asserting that they belong there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      SZA’s ‘Saturn,’ and 8 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Rhiannon Giddens, Norah Jones, Les Amazones d’Afrique and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.SZA, ‘Saturn’The song SZA introduced in a commercial during the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and released to streaming services in multiple versions; one, the sped-up version, brings out its clear pop structure. But the real-time version is better. The song is about a longing for the better place that her karma has earned: “Stuck in this paradigm/Don’t believe in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer around her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal lines argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, looking beyond Earth and insisting, “There’s got to be more.” JON PARELESLes Amazones d’Afrique, ‘Musow Danse’“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title track of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to dance floors. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and traditional drumming; it features Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the chorus, “Rise up African woman!” PARELESA.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Kiss the Future’ Review: Seeing U2 in Post-Siege Sarajevo

      by

      Nenad Cicin-Sain’s smoothly calibrated documentary is part timeline of the concert’s development and part testament to the city’s defiance during the Bosnian War.On Sept. 23, 1997, the rock band U2 performed to thousands of fans in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the year after the 1,425-day siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces ended.“Kiss the Future,” Nenad Cicin-Sain’s smoothly calibrated documentary, is partly a timeline of how this concert came to be and partly a sketch of life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. This is history told through emotions as much as through well-documented events, conveying both the resilience of Sarajevans and the power of pop music (without falling into too much celebrity self-regard).People who lived through that time, especially cultural figures, recount how unthinkable the war and siege felt to their diverse, vibrant city. Snipers meant death was always near; a Miss Sarajevo pageant and an underground music scene helped express the city’s defiance.In the early 1990s, U2’s “Zoo TV Tour” concerts featured Sarajevans via satellite, beamed onto giant screens. (Bill S. Carter, who is credited with the film’s screenplay, figures prominently here first as an aid worker, and then as a U2 whisperer.) These guest appearances began to feel like a stunt — but not so for U2’s 1997 Sarajevo show, which Bono recalls as uplifting.That concert comes across as a true catch-in-the-throat moment of symbolic celebration, opening with a Muslim choir and a local punk band. In a way, it’s U2 playing the emotional role of its classics, where Bono’s yearning voice and an echoing guitar can sound as though they’re reaching out to us across troubled waters.Kiss the FutureNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Jennifer Lopez and ‘This Is Me … Now’: Is She for Real?

      by

      “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a movie built on her latest album, is a showcase for the exhausting, never-ending, hazardous work of being Jennifer Lopez.Nobody who winds up at a “what’s the strangest moment in this new J. Lo thingy” contest should worry. There are no wrong answers.The parts in which Fat Joe plays Dr. Melfi to Jennifer Lopez’s Tony Soprano bewilder as intensely as the too-many scenes in which Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Kim Petras and Neil deGrasse Tyson (to pick merely six of a dozen names) bickeringly represent the astrological signs. None of these people appears to have been on the set at the same time. The only performers persuasively sharing the screen are Jenifer Lewis and Jenifer Lewis, and that’s only because she’s doing Gemini.A number about a quickie wedding is called “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but the groom has already hand-delivered Lopez’s invitation. It’s “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but first with a stop at what could be Westeros or Themyscira or “The Cell.” Least forgettable is the sight of our star, in a tank top and up to her neck in elbow warmers, riding a headache ball to squelch a power-plant disaster.Lopez has titled these 53 minutes (and an additional 10-minute-plus credits sequence) “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.” She’s released it, on Amazon, alongside an album of new songs, a few of which provide grist for the visual component. The album is a so-so buffet of sounds that get called contemporary or urban: music that could have been produced at any point in the last 25 years, which isn’t the same as calling it timeless. Lopez has been never on any sort of cutting edge. She’s often where music just was; and that can leave her stranded the way she is here.For “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” she gives “just was” both frenetic cinematic accompaniment and her physical all. In addition cowriting, Lopez goes out on a limb and takes the role of what can rightly be called “Me,” a husband-hunter jailed in such metaphorical music-video scenarios as “glass house” and “love factory.” In that second one, she and two dozen coveralled co-workers bang out some electrocuted, hydraulic choreography while the operation’s giant, once-malfunctioning heart sputters back to life and spews radioactive positivity. These are the only vaguely satisfying numbers. If the wishy-washy, parable-making and haywire everything else won’t cohere into true beauty or credible horror, then camp it is. Ladies and gentlemen: Jennifer Lopez and her Oppenheimer Dancers!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jimmy Van Eaton, Purveyor of the Sun Records Beat, Dies at 86

      by

      His drumming lent spontaneity and imagination to the unfettered sound of seminal rock ’n’ roll records by Jerry Lee Lewis and others.Jimmy Van Eaton, who played drums on epoch-defining hits, including Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and lent spontaneity and imagination to the unfettered sound of the influential Memphis label Sun Records, died on Feb. 9 at his home in Tuscumbia, Ala. He was 86.His daughter Terri Van Eaton Downing said the cause was complications of kidney disease.Mr. Van Eaton’s impeccably deployed accents and fills were heard not just on Mr. Lewis’s recordings but also on popular singles by Charlie Rich (“Lonely Weekends”), Johnny Cash (“Guess Things Happen That Way”) and others. He toured with Roy Orbison and Conway Twitty and, as the de facto house drummer at Sun, played on “Raunchy,” the bluesy instrumental by the saxophonist Bill Justis that reached the Top 10 in 1957.Mr. Van Eaton in an undated photo. What he played with Jerry Lee Lewis, he said, was “a shuffle with a backbeat” and not a straight 4/4 beat.Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Van Eaton, who was sometimes billed as J.M., was a full-time musician only briefly, from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and performed sporadically after that before settling into a career as a financial adviser. His influence, though, was abiding and deep — especially his momentous work with Mr. Lewis, which had an impact comparable to that of other groundbreaking rock ’n’ roll drummers like Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine.“A lot of people try to copy” the sound of those Jerry Lee Lewis records, Mr. Van Eaton was quoted as saying in “Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll,” by Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins. But, he added, they can’t do it because what he played was “a shuffle with a backbeat” and not a straight 4/4 beat.“I never could play that straight country shuffle,” Mr. Van Eaton continued. “Maybe for eight or 16 bars, but after that I start falling off the stool. I’ve got to concentrate, and when you concentrate, you lose the feeling.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Covering the Rise of Tracy Chapman

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicTracy Chapman’s ascent to the pop stratosphere in 1988 was not in any way guaranteed. She was making folk music in a time of stadium rock and hip-hop. She was orienting her songs around social concerns. And yet, after a few fortuitous turns in the summer of that year, Chapman’s “Fast Car” became a global anthem. And its success landed her on the cover of Rolling Stone.For a young Black woman on her first album, it was a startling achievement. The magazine was relatively cloistered in its coverage, but Chapman proved a force to reckon with. The story, written by Steve Pond, is a crucial document — but it is also prophetic, capturing how Chapman was skeptical of the spotlight, and even of the reasons people had embraced her so assiduously.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Chapman’s rapid rise to pop royalty, how her music figured into the broader musical conversation of the late 1980s, and the ways in which she’s changed little over the decades.Guest:Steve Pond, a longtime music journalist for Rolling Stone and The Los Angeles Times who is now the awards editor of The WrapConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Live Performance in New York: Here’s What to See This Spring

      by

      “The Notebook” and “Cabaret” land on Broadway. Olivia Rodrigo’s tour stops in Manhattan. Plus: Herbie Hancock, Heartbeat Opera and Trisha Brown Dance Company.BroadwayTHE NOTEBOOK Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel (adapted for the screen in 2004) is now a sweeping musical tale of romantic idealism and the decades-long love between Allie and Noah. The Chicago Tribune gave a glowing review to the 2022 Chicago Shakespeare Theater premiere, and several performers from the Chicago cast, including Maryann Plunkett as Older Allie, will reprise their roles. The show features a book by Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) and music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, with Michael Greif and Schele Williams directing. Now playing at the Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan.THE WHO’S TOMMY The show, with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend who wrote the book with Des McAnuff, was on Broadway 30 years ago, but this new take, which had its premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, is very heavy on visual spectacle (and, egad, how theatrical effects have changed in three decades!). Tommy is a traumatized child who witnesses violence and loses his ability to see, hear and speak. He plays mean pinball, though, and in the strange spectacle becomes something of a messiah. The leads, including Ali Louis Bourzgui (Tommy), Alison Luff (Mrs. Walker) and Adam Jacobs (Captain Walker), are revisiting the roles they played at the Goodman. Choreography is by Lorin Latarro (“Waitress”), and McAnuff directs. Performances begin March 8 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan.Louis Bourzgui in “The Who’s Tommy.”Liz LaurenLEMPICKA The life of the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka was not a screamingly obvious topic for a Broadway musical, but an impressive team has collaborated on this show. The Polish-born Lempicka (1898-1980), who was married, twice, to men, but had female lovers as well, lived through two world wars, surrounded by cultural and political change in Russia, Paris and California. Rachel Chavkin directs a cast led by Eden Espinosa as Lempicka, who returns to the role that wowed critics in productions at the Williamstown Theater Festival and La Jolla Playhouse. The show features music by Matt Gould and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer; they collaborated on the book. Performances begin March 19 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan.SUFFS The hard-fought passage of the 19th amendment, which codified women’s right to vote in 1919, is the focus of this musical by Shaina Taub. In addition to the challenge of being book writer, lyricist and composer, Taub also stars as Alice Paul (1885-1977), a leader of the National Woman’s Party. She and a group of like-minded women, including Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James) and Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), battle the patriarchy and, at times, one another. Directed by Leigh Silverman. Performances begin March 26 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan.HELL’S KITCHEN Alicia Keys makes her Broadway debut with this semi-autobiographical jukebox musical about a 17-year-old girl named Ali, raised in a small Manhattan apartment by her protective single mother alongside a community of artists. The show features music and lyrics by Keys, a mix of hits, including “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” and new songs. The show’s premiere last year at the Public Theater received decent, if not exceptional, reviews, but c’mon, this girl is on fire. The book is by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Maleah Joi Moon, Shoshana Bean and Brandon Victor Dixon will reprise their roles. The busy Michael Greif (see also “The Notebook”) directs. Performances begin March 28 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More