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      Russell Batiste Jr., the Drumming Heartbeat of New Orleans, Dies at 57

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      A pyrotechnic funk and R&B mainstay, he was a vital figure in his home city as a member of one of its celebrated musical dynasties.Russell Batiste Jr., a pyrotechnic drummer and scion of one of New Orleans’s most celebrated musical dynasties, whose furious style and genre-busting approach provided the rhythmic pulse for bands like the Meters and Vida Blue and musical artists like Harry Connick Jr., died on Sept. 30 at his home in LaPlace, La., outside New Orleans. He was 57.The cause was a heart attack, said his brother Damon Batiste, a former percussionist with the Batiste Brothers Band and a former producer for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.As a member of a family that has put its stamp on New Orleans music for generations, Russell Batiste was a mainstay of the city’s funk and R&B scene, performing with a long string of prominent local bands like George Porter Jr. & Runnin’ Pardners, the Wild Magnolias and Dumpstaphunk.A multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, he pushed boundaries with the trio Vida Blue, named after the Cy Young Award-winning pitcher of the 1970s and ’80s. He formed the group in the early 2000s with Page McConnell, the keyboardist for Phish, and Oteil Burbridge, a bassist with the Allman Brothers Band. With its atmospheric blend of jazz, funk and electronica, the trio recorded three albums, starting with its debut release in 2002, and toured extensively in that decade.Even so, New Orleans was where Mr. Batiste’s music seemed to belong. His bands Russell Batiste & Friends and Russell Batiste and the Orchestra (sometimes spelled Orkestra) From Da Hood packed local clubs like the Maple Leaf Bar and Le Bon Temps Roule for years, channeling the city’s rich, diverse musical heritage.“He captured the spirit of Congo Square,” Damon Batiste said in a phone interview, referring to the New Orleans site where enslaved people were allowed to gather for music and dance in the early 19th century. “Everything he played was funk, but he blended in marching band, second line, Haitian, Cuban and African rhythms. He was playing to the spirits of our ancestors.”Playing with a ferocity that would sometimes shatter his foot pedals, he added, Mr. Batiste “was like lightning and thunder, all at the same time.”Even as a sought-after sideman on albums like Mr. Connick’s “She” (1994), Mr. Batiste said he was more interested in finding musical transcendence through collaboration than in gaining individual glory.Mr. Batiste in July at the Essence Festival in New Orleans. He was a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.Erika Goldring/Essence, via Getty Images“Anybody can solo,” he said in a 2005 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “Anybody can sit behind the drums and go nuts. Anybody can play riffs on the bass, and anybody can play songs on the piano. But playing music is when two or more people get together from out of nowhere and turn it into something.”David Russell Batiste Jr. was born on Dec. 12, 1965, in New Orleans, the oldest of three children of David and Patricia (Cummings) Batiste. His parents divorced in the early 1970s.Born into a family of musicians, young Russell seemed to have his course mapped out for him from an early age. His father played with soul luminaries like Jackie Wilson and Isaac Hayes in the 1960s and ’70s and was a member of the Meters, the seminal New Orleans funk band, before starting his own influential funk band, David Batiste and the Gladiators. It later merged into the noted family ensemble the Batiste Brothers Band, led by his brother Paul.Russell’s younger cousin Jon Batiste is the Grammy Award-winning pianist, singer and songwriter and former bandleader for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”“When I was growing up, I’d see Russell at the Maple Leaf and his band the Orchestra From Da Hood,” Jon Batiste said in a recent television news interview. “He was our kind of blueprint.”Mr. Batiste earlier this year performing with his cousin Jon Batiste at the Maple Leaf, one of several New Orleans clubs that his bands packed over the years.Josh Brasted/WireImage, via Getty ImagesRussell did not take long to establish his identity within the family. He started gigging with the Batiste Brothers Band at local clubs when he was 6. “When I was 8 years old, I opened up for the O’Jays and the Drells and the Chi-Lites at City Park Stadium,” he said in a recent interview on the podcast “The Jake Feinberg Show.”At St. Augustine High School, Mr. Batiste played drums in the school’s nationally famous Marching 100 band.After graduating in 1983, he enrolled at Southern University at New Orleans, where he studied under the jazz saxophonist Kidd Jordan (who died in April). But he left college after two years to become the drummer for the singer Charmaine Neville (who comes from another New Orleans music family). He joined the Meters, which evolved into the Funky Meters, in 1989.By that time, however, Mr. Batiste was battling substance abuse, which impeded his career for a time, Damon Batiste recalled. “Imagine being a rock ’n’ roll star, and people loved to be around you and you’re naïve,” his brother said. “He didn’t have his family around him.” Russell found sobriety in the 1990s.In addition to his brother Damon, Mr. Batiste’s immediate survivors include his father; his mother, Patricia Johnson; his stepfather, Newman Johnson; his sisters, Tasha Batiste, Lakisha Johnson, Monique Santiago, Merinda Bell, Tish Allen, Eboni Batiste and Chanell Batiste; four other brothers, David Guys, Aaron Duncan, Jamal Batiste and Ryan Batiste; his sons, Christopher and Darryl; and a daughter, Nareal.Considering the family he came from, Mr. Batiste could never have imagined another career, he said late in life. “I was born with a pair of sticks in my hand,” he told Mr. Feinberg.Recalling an old family 8-millimeter home movie, he added: “I’m not even 1 yet, and I’m sitting on a lady’s lap behind a set of drums with a pair of sticks hitting the drums. That’s the way I was born, man. It was just in me.” More

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      After Viral Beef, Robert Glasper Returns to the Blue Note

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      Mounting his fifth annual residency at the Blue Note (after a viral beef at the Grammys), the pianist, producer and composer is hungry for a challenge.In February, on the night of this year’s Grammy Awards, the pianist, producer and composer Robert Glasper was enjoying himself in the audience at the Microsoft Theater when he realized he didn’t have his phone. He had given it to his assistant earlier in the evening, before taking the stage to accept the award for best R&B album — his second win in that category and fifth career Grammy.When he retrieved the phone, Glasper saw that it was filled with messages about the R&B singer Chris Brown, who was among the nominees whom he had just bested. Brown had reacted to the loss with a discourteous post to his 131 million followers on Instagram: “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper,” appending a crying laughing emoji to the word “who.”The comment, which Brown followed with a video comparing his success on the record charts to Glasper’s, was an attempt to undercut his rival’s achievement. But Brown had fallen into a trap. Over the previous 10 years, Glasper had been methodically chipping away at the boundaries between jazz — the music for which he originally became known — hip-hop and R&B. In some ways, his winning album, “Black Radio III,” was designed to force precisely the kind of showdown with contemporary Black popular music that Brown’s intemperate posting had unwittingly supplied.Scrolling through his phone at the venue, Glasper was almost giddy.“Oh yeah,” he thought to himself. “This is going to be great.”Glasper, 45, whose long face and soft features are capped by closely trimmed hair, ascended the ranks of modern jazz nearly 20 years ago. Born and raised in Houston, he arrived in New York to study at the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in 1997, right as the neo-soul movement, pioneered by artists like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, was integrating jazz instrumentation and vocal performance into a chart-topping variant of R&B.At the New School, Glasper befriended the singer Bilal, a member of a loose musicians collective called the Soulquarians with D’Angelo, Badu, the producer J Dilla, and the rappers Common, Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) and Talib Kweli, among others. The group shared recording space at Electric Lady Studios and occasionally attended concerts together. At the same time, Glasper was getting an education in the world of straight-ahead jazz while playing piano in bands led by Christian McBride and Russell Malone — both took him on tour, at the expense of his attendance record — and forming his own acoustic trio.The Blue Note residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites Glasper’s extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHis first album, “Mood” (2004) and two follow-ups for Blue Note Records, “Canvas” (2005) and “In My Element” (2007), hewed largely traditional, with an occasional nod to hip-hop, as on the “In My Element” track “J Dillalude.” But by the release of his fourth album, “Double Booked” (2009) — half featuring the Robert Glasper Trio and half featuring a new electric fusion ensemble called “The Robert Glasper Experiment” — Glasper’s inner Soulquarian was edging into view.“Real jazz is supposed to reflect the times you’re in; that’s the true history and tradition of the music,” he said. “I’m not supposed to sound like Thelonious Monk did when I have so much more music to be influenced by.”The “Black Radio” series, which Glasper described as a distillation of his brand, made breathing room for those influences. The first album, released in 2012, featured several of his neo-soul compatriots — Badu, Bilal, Musiq Soulchild — as well as rapping from Lupe Fiasco and Bey, with covers of songs by David Bowie and Nirvana thrown in for good measure.“Black Radio” earned Glasper his first Grammy Award (for best R&B album) and set him on a collision course with popular culture not seen from a jazz musician this century. He played piano on several tracks of Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released a remix album with the house music producer Kaytranada and was recruited by the actor Don Cheadle to compose the score for “Miles Ahead,” a 2015 biopic of Miles Davis.“He has that desire to get to the next level,” said Common, who appeared on “Black Radio 2” (2013) and formed the group August Greene with Glasper and the drummer/producer Karriem Riggins. “He wants to be the one that people will look to and say, ‘Yeah, he was the greatest of that time.’”Last month, Glasper arrived at a recording studio in Downtown Brooklyn to work on his latest film score, for a documentary about Luther Vandross, one of his mother’s favorite artists. “The first time I fell in love with acoustic piano wasn’t Duke Ellington, or Monk, or Herbie — it was Luther,” he said, crediting Nat Adderley Jr., Vandross’s longtime pianist and arranger. His large frame was draped in a black T-shirt with a portrait of Dilla, whose idiosyncratic production style inspired a generation of hip-hop and jazz musicians before and after his death in 2006.“Watching him work changed the way I play,” Glasper said.A couple of days after the session, Glasper would fly to Johannesburg for nearly two weeks to play festival dates. He is also working on a Christmas EP and composing another film score, for a documentary about Billy Preston. On Wednesday, back in New York, he began his annual, monthlong residency at the Blue Note Jazz club, colloquially known as “Robtoberfest.” The residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites his extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting. It has become known for drawing A-list surprise performers (Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock are fans) and, this year, will mix tributes to giants like Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey with featured performances from Bey, Norah Jones, Yebba, D Smoke, Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington, among others.Glasper finds scoring films a welcome challenge. “Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy,” he said.Jasmine Clarke for The New York Times“It’s a reflection of his unique contribution to music,” said Alex Kurland, the director of programming at the Blue Note. “He enables everyone around him to sound great and to feel great.”Since the pandemic, Glasper has lived full time in Los Angeles. He got an apartment there in 2017 on the suggestion of Martin (with whom he, Washington and the producer 9th Wonder perform as Dinner Party) and to be closer to the film business. He composed the music for the 2020 film “The Photograph,” starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield, and for the television series “Run the World,” “The Best Man: The Final Chapters” and “Winning Time.” (He has also appeared in front of the camera, including in a small role on Showtime’s “Black Monday,” the since-canceled series Cheadle starred in and executive produced.)Of his many jobs, Glasper said he finds scoring the most challenging. It requires two acts of translation — from image to sound, and from director to composer — for which his background as an artist provided little preparation.“Directors will ask you to do weird things: ‘I need this to feel melancholy — but in a calypso way,’” he said, laughing. “But it’s good exercise. Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy.”During the pandemic, he was inspired to make “Black Radio III” in part because his usual, “easy,” recording methods were unavailable to him. Instead of inviting musicians to jam live in a studio, he worked more like a hip-hop producer, crafting beats and soliciting vocal performances remotely. The result — featuring, among many others, H.E.R., Ty Dolla Sign and, on a special edition produced in partnership with the streetwear label Supreme, Mac Miller — is the most accessible and thoroughly modern music Glasper has released.Even Chris Brown eventually had to pay his respects. The day after his viral Grammys outburst, the singer posted a public apology: “After doing my research I actually think your amazing,” he wrote.Glasper gladly accepted — and quickly printed “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper?” on T-shirts. More

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      Alicia Keys Steps Into a New Spotlight

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical inspired by the singer-songwriter’s teenage years in New York, is set to open Off Broadway.One night this summer, Alicia Keys fell asleep listening to show tunes.She was on vacation following a five-week concert tour, but her mind was still at work: For 12 years, she has been developing “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical based on her adolescence in a then-gritty New York neighborhood, and at the top of her to-do list was writing a new song for the actress playing the main character’s mother.So she took a nap with her headphones on, listening to a playlist of theatrical mom songs (think “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy” and “Little Girls” from “Annie”). When she woke up, she could feel the rhythm. She could hear the chords. She could see the title.She ducked into a closet and began to sing into her phone. She hopped online, doing a little research to strengthen her lyrics. And then, when she returned to New York, she began to write, in the wee hours after the meetings and the calls and the rehearsals, noodling at an upright piano in her Chelsea recording studio.“This is occupying a lot of space in my mind,” Keys said about the musical, considered but candid as she was driven to a downtown rehearsal hall, tuning out the traffic and focusing on getting where she wants to go.Maleah Joi Moon is making her professional stage debut as the show’s protagonist, the 17-year-old Ali.Elias Williams for The New York TimesThat day, where she wanted to go was the Public Theater, the celebrated but pandemic-weakened nonprofit where “Hell’s Kitchen” is to begin an Off Broadway run on Oct. 24. Even though Keys is not in it, demand is high: Each time more tickets go on sale, they are snatched up.“I am thinking a lot about ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ and obviously the goal for it to be tremendously beloved and really something that comes into the world in a way that is just like a storm, an incredible storm,” Keys said. “And the goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway. So that’s heavy on my mind.”With 15 Grammys, five No. 1 albums and about 5 billion song streams, Keys is an unusual figure in the music world — a classically trained pianist turned R&B singer-songwriter who signed a recording contract as a teenager and remains, at 42, determined, driven and resolutely in control of her creative and commercial life.Her musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is unusual too, in ways that seem promising. Unlike many biographical jukebox shows chronicling childhood to celebrity, this one is both focused and fictionalized, depicting a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali.“This is not Tina Turner, this is not the Temptations, this is not MJ, this is not Carole King — although all of those are phenomenal,” Keys said, referring to shows about pop stars. “It’s really so much more about relationships and identity and trying to find who you are, which I think is a continuous theme in all of our lives: Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who are we becoming?”In “Hell’s Kitchen,” Ali, like Keys, is the daughter of a white mother and a Black father and is growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized housing development just outside Times Square where 70 percent of the units are for performing artists. The supporting characters — a hyper-protective single mother, a life-changing piano teacher, an older boyfriend and an unreliable father — are based on figures in Keys’s own upbringing.At its heart, “Hell’s Kitchen” is a mother-daughter love story, featuring the stage veteran Shoshana Bean, left, during a rehearsal with Moon.Elias Williams for The New York Times“We’ve highly fictionalized the specifics,” said Kristoffer Diaz, a playwright and librettist who has been working with Keys on the show for more than a decade. Along the way, Keys and Diaz have been joined by the Broadway veteran Michael Greif, who directed “Dear Evan Hansen,” and by the choreographer Camille A. Brown, an in-demand dance-maker.In some ways, the show’s narrative structure resembles that of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans”: It is a coming-of-age story about a gifted teenager with a fractured family; it ends with the protagonist’s trajectory unclear, but audiences can fill in the blanks based on what they already know about the author’s accomplishments.Keys resisted suggestions that the musical give audiences a road map to Ali’s future — a future in which she might, like Keys, become a big star. “Sometimes they would push: ‘And how about we…?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘No,’” she said. “You just need to know that she is going to find something. Everything else is irrelevant.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is, in the eyes of its creative team, a mother-daughter love story. And, in an era when many musicals market themselves as love letters either to Broadway or to New York, this one falls squarely into the latter camp: Keys’s identity, as a person and as a songwriter, was shaped by the city in the 1990s, and that informs the show’s sounds (like bucket drumming) and movement (with echoes of social dances like the Running Man).The score, played by a band that will include a pianist visible to the audience even when actors pretend to be tickling the ivories, features Keys’s best-known hits: “Fallin’,” “No One,” “Girl on Fire,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” and, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z that has become an inescapable New York City anthem. Keys said she has written four new songs for the show, but that even existing songs have a new sound because they have been rearranged.“I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love,” Keys said, reflecting on her initial aspirations for “Hell’s Kitchen.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“The songs that you think you know,” she said, “you never heard like this.”Making a musical might seem like a swerve for Keys, but the truth is the overlap between the recording industry and musical theater is substantial. There is an ever-growing inventory of jukebox musicals biographical (“MJ,” about Michael Jackson) and fictional (“& Juliet”), as well as shows with original scores written by pop stars (“Here Lies Love”).Keys is a lifelong theatergoer who has dabbled in acting — she played Dorothy in a preschool production of “The Wizard of Oz” and had a cameo on “The Cosby Show” at 4 — but her passion was always music. She studied piano from age 7, was performing in a girl group and wrote her first song at around 11, and signed that recording contract at 15. Childhood moved fast — she skipped two grades and moved out at 16.“She knew a lot before she should have,” said her mother, Terria Joseph. (Mother and daughter both use stage names.)When Keys was a child, Joseph was a struggling actor — that’s how she qualified to live at Manhattan Plaza — who took survival jobs, particularly as a paralegal, while trying to find work as a performer. (Keys’s father, a flight attendant, did not live with them and was mostly not around; though Keys was close to her paternal grandparents, she was often estranged from her father. Now, she says, they are good.)Keys would tag along to auditions and rehearsals when her mother couldn’t afford a babysitter; when there was enough money, they would stand in line at the TKTS booth and buy discount theater tickets. Her mother recalls an early trip to “Cats,” and Keys remembers “Miss Saigon,” but the show that stands out most is “Rent,” in part because it’s about AIDS, which hit Manhattan Plaza, with its high population of gay artists, quite hard. “Rent,” like “Hell’s Kitchen,” was directed by Greif.She was valedictorian of her graduating class at the city’s Professional Performing Arts School, and attended Columbia University for a month before dropping out to pursue music. In 2001, with the release of “Fallin’,” and boosted by an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” her career took off.Keys has continued to see theater when she can, and in 2011 she co-produced a Broadway play, “Stick Fly,” about an affluent Black family wrestling with race and class. According to her mother, who is always trying to take her to more theater, Keys has long been thinking about developing her own show. “It was on her bucket list for some time,” Joseph said.“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” the Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said of Keys (above, at a rehearsal). “There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Stick Fly,” Keys said, “ignited this desire in me, across all mediums in regards to storytelling, to be able to start to hear, feel and see stories that I know exist, but in so many ways the world doesn’t see.” And when she started cooking up “Hell’s Kitchen,” she had audacious goals.“Because I have all the experience with seeing theater since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theater, too,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much to bring, so many worlds to collide and cross. I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love.”Hang on! There are people who can’t stand musical theater? Apparently, yes, and one of them is Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz, a renowned hip-hop producer.“He’s not a fan,” Keys said, laughing. “Do not bring him to the show where in the middle of the sentence they break out into the song. He falls asleep. He cringes. He can’t take it.”So one goal, Keys said, is simply to create a show her husband will like. (The two make up a power couple, with multiple homes and a significant contemporary art collection; they have two children together, and are also helping to raise his three children from previous relationships.)And what about reinventing theater? When I ask her about that word, she qualifies it — mindful of how it might sound and wary after two decades talking to journalists. Keys said she thinks about her project differently now, because she believes that over the last decade, Broadway has made strides.“I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway,” she said. “I want to be clear that there’s so many pieces that exist now that really do challenge, I think, what we were seeing. There of course needs to be more diversity on Broadway. Is there more already? Hell yeah. And we still need more.”I write about the business of Broadway, so one thing that has struck me, as I’ve been working on this profile, is Keys’s ownership — economic as well as artistic — of “Hell’s Kitchen.” Rather than finding Broadway producers to finance and shepherd the show, thus far she is doing so herself, retaining the rights to its commercial future.“I want to own my story,” she told me. “And I deserve to.”She consults, and is heard, on every strategic and creative choice: writing, casting, staging, marketing.Keys has been shuttling between her recording studio in Chelsea and the rehearsal space, while fine-tuning the show’s sound.Elias Williams for The New York Times“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public. “She’s been as involved as any artist I’ve ever worked with — she gets involved on a level of granularity that’s just astonishing. It’s not just music, but every sentence, every relationship, every actor. There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Maleah Joi Moon, who at 21 is making a professional stage debut playing Ali, was taken aback to realize that Keys, whose music was a staple in Moon’s childhood home, would actually be involved on a day-to-day basis.“When I saw the project, I was like, no way was she really attached to this,” Moon said. “And to find out, once I got into the rehearsal room, that she was going to be so heavily involved — it was insane.”Keys radiated warmth as well as intensity during a rehearsal, a novel (“The Vanishing Half”) at her elbow while she bounced in her chair to the beat and tapped out ideas on her phone. “She’s very specific with her notes,” said Shoshana Bean, the actress playing Ali’s mother.She teaches songs to the ensemble. (“You’ve never been to a more charged, lively and thrilling music rehearsal than when she’s running them,” Greif said.) She instructs the stars on vocal technique. (“She has expressed herself about what parts of my voice she wants me to use,” said Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Ali’s father.)She even attended auditions for understudies, and she told me she was relocating a piano in her studio to try to replicate the sonic environment of the theater, thinking she would record the songs in the show and give demos to the band “so they get the feel, they get the swing, they get the idea, they get the energy.”“I’m very, very anal,” she said, “and I know how I want everything to sound.”Control has been a central theme of Keys’s career. While still a teenager, she successfully extricated herself from the contract she had signed with Columbia Records, chafing at efforts to mold her image and sound.“It’s important for me to properly express how I feel at the moment and not have it filtered through other people,” she told Oprah at age 20. Now she preaches self-determination. “If you don’t know what you want for yourself, then you’ll never, never get there,” she told me. “You’ll always be deterred.”Several times, as we talked, she circled back to her concerns about the way the music industry treats artists, and she said one of her long-term goals is “redesigning the industry.”“I feel like as a young artist, we get very taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in these circumstances that do not benefit us to the level that it should,” she said. “And I’m lucky. I am in control of all of my music and all of the things that I’ve created. But let me tell you, that’s not the normal story. And I had to fight for it.”Maintaining creative and financial control has become “a mission,” she said, and with “Hell’s Kitchen,” she believes the lessons she has learned are paying off.“For the first time in my life,” she said. “I’m doing something exactly right.”That startled me, given her success. “Really?” I asked.The score is a mix of new songs and Keys’s best-known hits, including, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z.Elias Williams for The New York Times“I really do,” she said. She explained that with previous projects, “I didn’t start out right, but kind of ended up right.” But this time, she said, “I didn’t want to go out and get too diluted and get too many partners. We have all the right partners, all the right minds. It’s the right mixture of experience and also newness that I think is important to continue to create a new world.”One night in mid-July, I took the subway to Barclays Center to watch Keys do what she is best known for: perform. For 90 minutes she entertained a rapturous crowd of 11,894 — strikingly more diverse, and younger, than most theater audiences. Her sparkling Yamaha piano was in the center of the arena, on a rotating stage, with runways extending out so she could work the crowd.Just before the concert, as she often does, she presided over what she calls a Soulcare Session, promoting her skin care line (“I call them offerings, not products — products is too transactional”), talking up empowerment (“The theme today is reminding ourselves to own our own power”), and posing for pictures with superfans who had paid a steep premium for up-close access (“You can talk to me about anything you want,” she said). Her staff sprayed the patrons with a “reviving aura mist” and invited them to select keys (get it?) with words of affirmation; attendees sat on embroidered pillows, black beanbags and purple cushions and asked Keys about her wardrobe, her writing process, her childhood. Some spoke about how her songs had helped them endure disease or emotional hardship.Keys has long had an entrepreneurial streak — she started a babysitters club when she was 11 — and it is ever-expanding. “I’m really interested in business at this point,” she told me when I asked about what’s next.She’s all-in on “Hell’s Kitchen,” of course. She intends to further build up Key SoulCare. And she’ll make more music.“I feel like I’m in a place where I can express myself clearly,” she said. “I am clear about what I want, what I don’t want. Who I want to do it with, who I don’t want to. I’m unafraid to be very vocal and verbal about that, and I feel like I’m in a place where I can do anything, anything. And I haven’t even begun yet.” More

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      Jorja Smith’s ‘Falling or Flying’ Gives Polished Voice to Messy Emotions

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      The English songwriter uses vocal nuance instead of volume and lets the rhythms stir things up on her second studio album.There’s always a forlorn edge to Jorja Smith’s voice, even when things are going well. “A love like this is nothing I have known before,” she sings on “Make Sense,” a track from her new album, “Falling or Flying.” Even as she rejoices, “A home in you I’ve found,” the chords circle around a minor key and she sounds cautious, almost disbelieving.Smith, 25, has been delivering pensive British R&B since she emerged with “Blue Lights” in 2016, singing about racism and police violence. She has released a steady string of her own tracks and collaborated prolifically and internationally: with Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Burna Boy, Stormzy, Kali Uchis and Ibeyi, among many others.From the beginning, and more than ever on “Falling or Flying,” her second full-length studio album, Smith has kept her sound strictly focused. No matter how many layers are in the final mixes — and there can be plenty tucked in — the songs present themselves as minimal, with stripped-down riffs behind aching vocals. In other words, rhythms and blues.On first impression, Smith might seem diffident. Her tone is natural and understated, and as her catalog has grown, she has raised her voice less and less. Smith uses nuance instead of volume. With a voice that often sounds like it’s on the verge of tears, she brings flickers of vibrato, jazzy curlicues, grainy inflections and subtle pauses and accelerations to her phrasing. It’s not modesty at all — it’s precision, and it has been ever more sharply honed.Although Smith established herself as a ballad singer with songs like “Addicted” from her 2021 EP, “Be Right Back,” she has always been canny about rhythm. With “Falling or Flying,” she raises the tension in her songs by pushing the beat upfront, sometimes shifting it into double time. Smith isn’t joining the disco and house revival. On the contrary: She and her producers — especially Damedame, the partnership of Edith Nelson and Barbara Boko-Hyouyhat — come up with un-nostalgic beats. And while the tracks can be sleek, they strive to make Smith sound exposed, not glossy.Throughout the album, the insistent physicality of rhythm hints at the jitters that someone hides while putting on a brave face. “Try Me” opens the album with a Bo Diddley beat laced at first with finger-cymbal pings and later with a pistol-cocking sound, as Smith confronts naysayers and past wounds. “I don’t have to tell you what I’ve changed,” she sings.The songs on “Falling or Flying” are about primal needs: for love, for sex, for comfort, for understanding, for independence. As the rhythms push forward, Smith’s voice ponders and hesitates, working through doubts and then taking chances, physical and emotional.In “Little Things,” a hopping bass line and brisk Latin percussion drive a bold come-on — “Won’t you come with me and spend the night?” — while dissonant, syncopated piano chords hint at suppressed misgivings. The title song, “Falling or Flying,” is even more ambivalent about a new infatuation; with percussion and rhythm guitar ricocheting left and right, Smith urges, “Show me you want me.” Then she wonders, “Who else could get me to fall from these heights?”Most of the album is filled with goodbyes, not connections. “Go Go Go,” with a syncopated guitar backbeat and slamming drums harking back to the Police, summarily jettisons a lover who wouldn’t keep things to himself. In “Broken Is the Man,” Smith looks back on a relationship she now realizes was toxic: “Can you believe I put myself through that all/Just to realize you mean nothing to me,” she sings, over a slow, thudding beat; she won’t let it drag her down.But Smith refuses to simplify partners into heroes and villains; she knows it’s never that clear. The final stretch of the album moves back toward her old ballad mode — guitars, piano, string arrangements — as she sings about reluctantly, guiltily but unequivocally pulling away. “What if My Heart Beats Faster?,” the finale, contemplates the way even the closest partners ultimately can’t know each other. “Think that I’ve always been this way/Funny how life will change but they never figure it out.” It feels like an internal conversation that somehow turned into song. And the drums hit like a heartbeat.Jorja Smith“Falling or Flying”(FAMM) More

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      Bobby Schiffman, Guiding Force of the Apollo Theater, Dies at 94

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      Taking over for his father in 1961, he transformed a former vaudeville house in Harlem into a pre-eminent R&B showcase.Bobby Schiffman, who guided the Apollo Theater in Harlem through the seismic cultural and musical changes of the 1960s and early ’70s, cementing its place as a world-renowned showcase for Black music and entertainment, died on Sept. 6 at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his son, Howard.In 1961, Mr. Schiffman inherited the reins of the storied neoclassical Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Manhattan from his father, Frank Schiffman. The elder Mr. Schiffman, along with a financial partner, Leo Brecher, had taken over the theater — a former burlesque house that opened in 1914 as a whites-only establishment — in 1935.Frank Schiffman transformed the theater from a vaudeville house hosting acts like Al Jolson and the Marx Brothers into an epicenter for Black artists performing for largely Black audiences in an era of de facto cultural segregation. During the 1930s and ’40s, the elder Mr. Schiffman provided early exposure to countless African American luminaries, including Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington.Frank Schiffman was respected and feared for his fierce competitiveness. “In Harlem show business circles he was God — a five-foot-nine-inch, white, Jewish, balding, bespectacled deity,” the music writer Ted Fox observed in his 1983 book, “Showtime at the Apollo.”Bobby, the younger of his two sons, was more affable and easygoing, but lacked none of his father’s drive or ambition.“I don’t think Bobby Schiffman gets enough credit for being a great impresario,” Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. “Through enormous changes in musical tastes, styles and culture in general, he kept the theater going, doing 31 shows a week, seven days a week, year after year for decades, in a way that no other theater has ever been able to do.”His father had run the theater along the old vaudeville model, as a venue for variety shows. “Frank was old school,” Howard Schiffman said of his grandfather in a phone interview. “He was like Ed Sullivan. He thought that there should be a juggler and an animal act on every show.”Mr. Schiffman, second from left, with his father, Frank Schiffman; the tap dancer Honi Coles, who worked for many years as the Apollo’s production manager; and, standing, Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son and later the leader of the Ellington orchestra. Mr. Schiffman took over the Apollo from his father in 1961.via Apollo Theater“My father,” he added, “turned the Apollo into the R&B showcase that it became.”Faced with keeping the lights on at a compact 1,500-seat theater with little financial cushion, Bobby Schiffman “made it his business to find out what the people in the streets were listening to,” Mr. Fox said.“He would go into the bars and see what was on the jukebox,” he added, “he would talk to local D.J.s and record store owners to find out what was coming out, and book them while they were still unknown.”Winners of the theater’s famous and long-running Wednesday Amateur Night during Mr. Schiffman’s tenure included Gladys Knight, Ronnie Spector, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5.By providing support and exposure, he nurtured young stars “before they became superstars,” Mr. Fox said, “and would later appeal to them to appear, at great financial sacrifice, to come back and play for the people who made them.”During the years Mr. Schiffman managed the Apollo, it became a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said.Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesDuring Mr. Schiffman’s tenure as manager, the Apollo served not only as a launching pad to fame but also, eventually, as a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said. “It was the most important theater in the world. Once you could say you had played the Apollo, you could get in any door anywhere.”The Apollo’s reputation went global, thanks in part to hit live recordings made there by stars like James Brown, an Apollo regular, who recorded the landmark album “‘Live’ at the Apollo” in October 1962. Widely regarded as one of the great live albums, it hit No. 6 on the Billboard chart in 1963 and remained in the Top 10 for 39 weeks.The Apollo’s reputation went global thanks in part to albums like James Brown’s “‘Live’ at the Apollo,” which spent 39 weeks in the Billboard Top 10 in 1963.King“For years,” Mr. Schiffman said in a 2014 interview with The Daily News in New York, “you could write ‘Apollo Theater’ on a postcard, drop it into a mailbox anywhere and it would be delivered. How many theaters can you say that about?”Robert Lee Schiffman was born on Feb. 12, 1929, in Manhattan, the youngest of Frank and Lee Schiffman’s three children.He grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a suburb north of the city, where he attended A.B. Davis High School with Dick Clark, the future host of “American Bandstand.”After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from New York University, Mr. Schiffman spent the early 1950s working his way up the ladder at the Apollo. “He did every terrible job in the place, from cleaning bathrooms to taking tickets,” his son said.During Mr. Schiffman’s heyday at the Apollo in the 1960s, his office functioned as a nerve center for Black culture. Local politicians like Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and sports stars like Muhammad Ali would drop by for a chat.By the 1970s, however, Harlem was being increasingly buffeted by drugs, crime and economic decline, and the live-music business was changing. With color barriers in music breaking down, the Apollo was unable to maintain its lure for artists who had become arena-packing juggernauts.“The big stars would say, ‘We love you, Bobby, but we can play the Apollo and sell 1,500 tickets or play Madison Square Garden and sell 18,000,’” Howard Schiffman said.Mr. Schiffman finally shuttered the theater in 1976. The Apollo reopened under new management in 1978 but closed again the next year. In 1981, the media and technology executive Percy E. Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president, purchased the theater with a group of investors. It was declared a state and city landmark in 1983, and in 1991 it was taken over by the Apollo Theater Foundation, a nonprofit organization.Mr. Schiffman later oversaw the Westchester Premier Theater in Tarrytown, N.Y., before retiring to Florida.In addition to his son, from his marriage to Joan Landy, which ended in divorce in 1973, he is survived by his fourth wife, Betsy (Rothman) Schiffman; his stepsons from that marriage, Barry and Michael Rothman; six grandchildren; and two great-grandsons. His marriages to Renee Levy and Rusty Donner also ended in divorce.While the Apollo became famous for its stars and spectacle, Mr. Schiffman never forgot its unique role as a locus for Harlem life.“We were in the business of pleasing the Black community,” he said in an interview for the book “Showtime at the Apollo.” “If white folks came as an ancillary benefit, that was fine. But the basic motto was to bring the people of the community entertainment they wanted at a price they could afford to pay.”When he overstepped his bounds, the community let him know. “The highest price I ever charged was six dollars,” Mr. Schiffman added. “I tried seven for Redd Foxx once, and they stayed away in droves.” More

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      Corinne Bailey Rae Breaks Free on ‘Black Rainbows’

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      Inspired by art and artifacts, the English songwriter moves beyond pop on her fourth album.Corinne Bailey Rae dynamites her own musical past and embraces a larger historical one on her new album, “Black Rainbows.”With her self-titled 2006 debut, Bailey Rae established herself as an agile, airy-voiced pop songwriter; it reached No. 1 in her home country, Britain. Her big hit single, “Put Your Records On,” cheerfully but unmistakably called for celebrating a Black heritage.Bailey Rae hasn’t rushed her albums. Her second one, “The Sea” in 2010, dealt with her grief — at 29 — at the sudden death of her first husband, the saxophonist Jason Rae; the songs reflected on time, love and sorrow. For her 2016 album, “The Heart Speaks in Whispers,” she followed record-company advice to return to polished pop-soul love songs. By then she had married S.J. Brown, who has co-produced “Black Rainbows” with her.On “Black Rainbows,” Bailey Rae boldly jettisons both pop structures and R&B smoothness to consider the scars and triumphs of Black culture. “We long to arc our arm through history,” she sings in “A Spell, a Prayer,” the album’s opening song. “To unpick every thread of pain.”The songs on “Black Rainbows” flaunt extremes: noise and delicacy, longing and rage. In some, Bailey Rae reclaims her distant punk-rock past, when she was in a band called Helen. Others summon retro elegance, toy with electronics and move through multiple transformations. In the album’s genre-bending title song, Bailey Rae repeats the words “black rainbows” over a mechanical beat; her voice gets multiplied into a choir as a labyrinthine, jazz-fusion chord progression gradually unfurls, brimming with saxophone squeals.The album has a conceptual framework. Most of its songs are inspired by artifacts Bailey Rae saw at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, a former bank building that now holds a huge repository of African and African-diaspora materials gathered by the artist Theaster Gates: art, books, magazines, music and what the arts bank calls “negrobilia,” everyday objects that perpetuated Black stereotypes. For Bailey Rae, the collection summoned thoughts about slavery, spirituality, beauty, survival, hope and freedom.The cover of Bailey Rae’s fourth album, “Black Rainbows.”Thirty Tigers, via Associated PressAn ashtray in the shape of a Black child with an open mouth was a touchstone for “Erasure,” a pounding, screeching, distorted rocker about the exploitation of enslaved children; Bailey Rae blurts, “They took credit for your labor!” and “They put out lit cigarettes down your sweet throat!” Another, more ebullient rock stomp, “New York City Transit Queen” — with Bailey Rae overdubbed into a hand-clapping cheerleading squad — commemorates a cheesecake photograph of the teenager who was named “Miss New York Transit” in 1957.That song is followed by a different take on Black beauty: “He Will Follow You With His Eyes.” Bailey recites what sounds like old advertising copy — “Soft hair that invites his caress/Attract! Arouse! Tantalize!” — over a nostalgic bolero. But partway through the track, she casts off the cosmetics, with an electronic warp to the production and a scornful bite in her voice, as she sings about flaunting, “My black hair kinking/My black skin gleaming.”While Bailey Rae allows herself to shout on “Black Rainbows,” she doesn’t abandon the graceful nuance of her pop past. In the shimmering, billowing “Red Horse,” she envisions romance, marriage and family with a man who “came riding in/in the thunderstorm,” cooing, “You’re the one that I, I’ve been waiting for.”Bailey Rae shared a Grammy Award — album of the year — as a vocalist on Herbie Hancock’s 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute, “River: The Joni Letters,” and she welcomes Mitchell’s influence with the leaping, asymmetrical melody lines and enigmatic imagery of “Peach Velvet Sky,” which has Brown on piano accompanying Bailey Rae in an unadorned duet.“Black Rainbows” is one songwriter’s leap into artistic freedom, unconcerned with genre expectations or radio formats. It’s also one more sign that songwriters are strongest when they heed instincts rather than expectations.Corinne Bailey Rae“Black Rainbows”(Thirty Tigers) More

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      Larry Chance, Who Helped Keep Doo-Wop Alive for Decades, Dies at 82

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      His career began in 1957, when he and some friends from the Bronx formed the vocal group that would become the Earls. He recorded his last song 65 years later.Larry Chance, whose Bronx vocal group the Earls was one of the most enduring acts of the doo-wop era, helping to keep alive the vocal harmonies, rhythmic syllables and onomatopoeic lyrics that had once been improvised on city street corners and in subway stations, died on Sept. 6 in a hospital in Orlando, Fla. He was 82.His daughter, Nicole Chance, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.Larry Chance and the Earls were distinguished as much for their longevity — the group began in 1957 as the High Hatters, and Mr. Chance was still performing in its latest incarnation this year — as for their hits, some of which became doo-wop anthems.The first doo-wop groups were Black, but there were white artists in the mix almost from the beginning. The Earls were among the first.“The Earls unknowingly became the forerunners of white doo-wop groups who took standards done by rhythm and blues balladeers and brought them to the attention of a new generation,” the music historian Jay Warner wrote in “American Singing Groups: A History From 1940 to Today” (1992).Among the group’s most popular records were “Life Is But A Dream,” (1961), a song first recorded by the Harptones, a Black doo-wop group, in 1955; “Never” (1963), an up-tempo torch song; and, most notably, “Remember Then” (1962), which, with its distinctive chant of “Re-mem-mem, re-mem-ma-mem-ber,” reached No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and became a staple of oldies radio.“Life Is But a Dream” was a hit on New York radio and prompted invitations for the group to appear with the disc jockey Murray the K at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn and on Dick Clark’s popular television show “American Bandstand.”The Earls’ signature song later became the ballad “I Believe,” whose inspiriting lyrics begin, “I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows/I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle glows.”The Earls’ 1965 recording of “I Believe” was far from the first; it had earlier been recorded by, among others, Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley and Frankie Laine, who had a hit with it in 1952. But it became a regular crowd-pleasing finale at the Earls’ live shows. The group dedicated its recording to Larry Palumbo, an early member who died in 1959 in an accident when he was in the Army.“I Believe” was an illustration of the music executive Hy Weiss’s faith in the group: Their demo version was released as the completed master.Mr. Weiss, who had offered the group a contract with his imprint Old Town Records shortly after hearing “Remember Then,” also figured in the transformation of Lawrence Figueiredo into Larry Chance. It happened just before “I Believe” was released.“Hy Weiss wanted him to step out front,” Mr. Warner wrote, “and though Figueiredo was reluctant, Weiss and his super salesmanship convinced him to take a chance when he said, ‘I’m gonna call you Larry Chance.’”The drummer Bobby Tribuzio, in a phone interview, characterized Mr. Chance, with whom he performed for six decades, as “a singer’s singer.” He was also a versatile entertainer (his solo shows incorporated comedy) and wrote songs, including “Get On Up and Dance (The Continental),” which he wrote with Jimmy Fracassi and the Earls recorded in 1976.When doo-wop’s popularity declined in the early 1970s, the group adapted by briefly becoming a nine-piece rhythm-and-blues ensemble called Smokestack. They resumed performing as the Earls during the subsequent doo-wop revival.In the 1980s, Mr. Chance also voiced the provocative radio characters Geraldo Santana Banana and Rainbow Johnson on Don Imus’s WNBC radio show.His last public performance was in June at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, N.Y., where he sang “Stand by Me” as a duet with the singer, songwriter and music historian Billy Vera. Mr. Chance’s last recording was a duet of the same song with Mr. Vera in 2022.Mr. Chance, left, in performance with Johnny Petillo of the Duprees in 2008. His last public performance was this year.Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesLawrence Figueiredo was born on Oct. 19, 1940, in the Bronx and raised in South Philadelphia — a neighborhood that also spawned the opera singer Mario Lanza, as well as Larry’s pop-music contemporaries Fabian, Frankie Avalon and Chubby Checker.His father, John, owned a construction company. His mother, Mary (Pedra) Figueiredo, was a homemaker.At the age of 6, Larry was cast in an elementary school production of “The Baker and the Pie Man.”“I was the baker,” Mr. Chance told Gene DiNapoli, an entertainer and podcast host, in 2020. “I got applause. I decided then that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”The family moved back to the Bronx in 1955. Mr. Chance later took some jobs with masonry companies to get by, but he pursued a singing career despite opposition at home.When he told his father he wanted a career in music, Mr. Chance recalled, “he told me, ‘Get a man’s job.’”In 1957, at around the time he graduated from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, he and four friends — Bob Del Din, Eddie Harder, John Wray and Mr. Palumbo — formed the High Hatters.They performed at local venues and were singing outside the entrance to a subway station when they were discovered by Johnny Powers, who recorded their version of “Life Is But a Dream” for his small Rome Records label.Mr. Chance lived for decades in Sullivan County, N.Y., close to the Catskills, where he performed in hotels. He later relocated to Florida to be near his daughter.In addition to her, he is survived by his wife, Sandra; a son, Christopher; and three grandchildren.As the lead singer of one of the most durable doo-wop groups, Mr. Chance understood from the beginning that talent and luck weren’t enough. “Remember Then” was played on the radio for the first time in 1962 on a program whose listeners were invited to phone in and vote for the best of five songs.“We had every kid in the North Bronx with a pocket full of dimes, and we just flooded that station with calls and won the contest,” he told Anthony P. Musso, the author of “Setting the Record Straight: The Music and Careers of Recording Artists from the 1950s and Early 1960s … in Their Own Words” (2007).He acknowledged, though, that luck might have played a role when the group was deciding on a new name. They couldn’t afford to purchase the tuxedos, canes, spats, toppers and other formal attire they fancied to redeem their original billing as the High Hatters, and they couldn’t agree on what to call themselves.“To make it fair, we stuck our finger in a dictionary and said whatever it falls on, that’s what we’ll be,” Mr. Chance told Mr. Musso. “I always said I was happy that I didn’t put my fingers about a quarter of an inch up, or we would have been called the Ears.”Jeff Roth More

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      A 20-Minute Cleaning Playlist

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      Banish dust to the sounds of Outkast, Mitski and more.Outkast onstage in 2014: fresh, clean, etc.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,Over the weekend, I got my first cordless vacuum — a truly game-changing invention — and embarked upon an epic cleaning spree of my entire apartment. Free from the tangle of a cord or tether of an electrical outlet, I crept from room to room, hunting down anything that could be sucked up in this gleaming hand-held machine, feeling a lot like a Ghostbuster wielding a Proton Blaster. Dustin’, for once, made me feel good.I do not usually enjoy cleaning, so I often need some sort of trick or extra motivator to push me to do it: a fun new appliance, an upcoming gathering, an unending sneezing fit that reminds me it’s been way too long since I dusted. Or — I think you see where I’m going with this — a cleaning playlist.Today’s playlist is short by design: just six songs, clocking in at a little over 20 minutes. Most of us don’t always have the time to do a thorough deep cleaning of our living space — hey, I’ve got a newsletter to put out twice a week! — but we probably have a few increments of 20 spare minutes to squeeze in a little tidying up to stay ahead of mess and its accompanying anxiety.Last year, in a post on the website Apartment Therapy, Marlen Komar wrote about a similar rule she’d created for herself to ensure she didn’t spend her entire weekends cleaning: A few times throughout the week, she sets a timer for 20 minutes and cleans as much as she can for that duration. No more, no less. You know what’s even better than a 20-minute timer, though? A 20-minute playlist.A good cleaning playlist should be light, buoyant and — if you really want to have some fun with it — thematically focused on the task at hand. Eminem’s “Cleanin’ Out My Closet”? Technically on topic, yes, but in my opinion way too intense to soundtrack the actual cleanin’ out of one’s closet. I prefer the cool, weightless sheen of Outkast’s “So Fresh, So Clean” or the helpfully instructive groove of Parquet Courts’ “Dust”: “Dust is everywhere/Sweep!”May this playlist inspire you to do just that. And if you play it so much that you get sick of it, that probably means that your space is spotless. Reward yourself by crafting a 20-minute cleaning playlist of your own.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Parquet Courts: “Dust”“It comes through the window, it comes through the floor,” the members of the New York rock band Parquet Courts intone on this ode to those menacing, omnipresent particles of ick, from the 2016 album “Human Performance.” The tune is so upbeat, though, that it plays like a call to action against dust. Warning: This song may cause you to dance with your broom. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Cleaners From Venus: “Time in Vain”Time spent cleaning — or listening to the great, quintessentially jangly English band the Cleaners From Venus — is never time spent in vain. Bonus points for the title of the fantastic 1982 album on which “Time in Vain” appears: “Midnight Cleaners.” (Listen on YouTube)3. The Clean: “Thumbs Off”And here’s another pristinely titled, jangly post-punk group that took off in the early ’80s: New Zealand’s own the Clean. The pogo-ing beat, revving propulsion and catchy chorus melody of the 1983 single “Thumbs Off” prove, once again, that cleanliness is next to tunefulness. (Listen on YouTube)4. Mitski: “Washing Machine Heart”With its clomping, shoes-in-the-washing-machine percussion, this infectious 2018 Mitski single is the perfect soundtrack to unloading the laundry or — if you are a long-suffering New Yorker like me — sweatily lugging a sack of dirty clothes to the laundromat, silently cursing your decision to reside in an otherwise lovely city in which “in-unit washer/dryer” is considered a luxury amenity. Why?! (Listen on YouTube)5. Outkast: “So Fresh, So Clean”By the end of this playlist, no one will be referring to your home as “Stankonia.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Taylor Swift: “Clean”This sleek, serene closing number from Taylor Swift’s “1989” provides an opportunity to step back and appreciate what you’ve accomplished — and to give yourself permission to move on with your day. Vacuums down! I think you are finally clean. (Listen on YouTube)YKK on your zipper,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“A 20-Minute Cleaning Playlist” track listTrack 1: Parquet Courts, “Dust”Track 2: The Cleaners From Venus, “Time in Vain”Track 3: The Clean, “Thumbs Off”Track 4: Mitski, “Washing Machine Heart”Track 5: Outkast, “So Fresh, So Clean”Track 6: Taylor Swift, “Clean”Bonus TracksI’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of the albums that the Chicago-based songwriter and poet Jamila Woods has released — and I’ve even included a few of her songs in previous Amplifiers — so it was such a treat to get to profile her ahead of her forthcoming third album, “Water Made Us.” A lot of artists go into turbo-promotional mode before dropping a new album, but it was refreshing to find that Woods was spending six weeks right before her album’s release on a writing retreat in Italy. (Also: I am jealous.) If you’re looking for an introduction to Woods’ personal, poetic take on R&B, I’d highly recommend the first single from “Water Made Us,” “Tiny Garden.” More