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    An Elastic and Impressive Year in Jazz

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    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThere was much to celebrate in jazz this past year — great new albums from Meshell Ndegeocello, Ambrose Akinmusire and Immanuel Wilkins; outstanding live performances by Cecile McLorin Salvant and Brandon Woody. It was also a year of reflection, following the passing of Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal, Jaimie Branch, Les McCann and others.Conversations about jazz often extended beyond the bounds of the genre, thanks both to work by open-minded jazz musicians (Kassa Overall, Chief Adjuah) uninterested in that label or the expectations that come with it, and also because of music released outside of the genre (Laufey, André 3000) that prompted conversations about who is included in jazz, and who should be left out.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about some of the year’s most impressive jazz releases, the ways in which its borders are softening, and who benefits, and suffers, when people working outside of formal jazz idioms are lumped into conversations about jazz.Guests:Marcus J. Moore, who writes about music for The New York TimesGiovanni Russonello, who writes about jazz for The New York TimesConnect 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

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      Rosalía Issues an English Request, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Fever Ray, Chloë, Cécile McLorin Salvant and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Rosalía, ‘LLYLM’Just before the first chorus of Rosalía’s airy new single “LLYLM,” the Spanish phenom sings, “Lo diré en ingles y me entenderás” — I will say it in English and you will understand me. There’s a brief moment of silence before Rosalía launches into a lilting, pop-radio-friendly hook, sung, yes, in English: “I don’t need honesty, baby, lie like you love me.” In the context of the song, it’s a plea to an uncaring partner, but in the grander scheme of Rosalía’s career, it’s also a playful wink at the idea of an English-speaking crossover hit. The nimble “LLYLM” pivots restlessly between these two worlds, and finds Rosalía — for now at least — having it both ways. LINDSAY ZOLADZFever Ray, ‘Kandy’The eerily alluring “Kandy” is almost a Knife reunion. Though it’s technically by Karin Dreijer’s shapeshifting solo project Fever Ray, it’s one of four songs on the upcoming album “Radical Romantics” that was co-written and co-produced by Karin’s brother and Knife bandmate Olof Dreijer. (It even features the very same synthesizer Olof used on the pulsating “The Captain,” from the Knife’s classic 2006 album “Silent Shout.”) Still, thematically, “Kandy” is of a piece with the other promising glimpses of “Radical Romantics” that Karin has previously offered, at once dark and hypnotically sensual: “After the swim,” the musician sings in a low croon, “she laid me down and whispered, ‘All the girls want kandy.’” ZOLADZClark, ‘Town Crank’Christopher Stephen Clark, the English musician who records as Clark, has built a huge, polymorphous catalog of instrumental music that ranges from stark, austere techno to exquisite chamber-music soundtracks. But he hasn’t sung lead vocals until now — on “Town Crank” from an album due in March, “Sus Dog,” with Thom Yorke of Radiohead as executive producer. “Town Crank” hurtles into motion, starting with dry, jittery acoustic guitar before mustering a full sonic barrage: a relentless electronic bass line, blasts of drums and distortion, orchestral flurries. Clark’s voice turns out to be like Yorke’s, a high, pensive tenor shading into falsetto; he sometimes multitracks it into Beach Boys-like harmonies, while his lyrics offer stray bits of sage advice: “Nothing comes about without a little tweaking.” JON PARELESCécile McLorin Salvant, ‘D’un Feu Secret’Cécile McLorin Salvant, one of her generation’s finest jazz singers, throws a high-concept curveball on her coming album, “Mélusine.” It retells a European folk tale — about love, a curse, broken promises and reptilian transformations — in songs new and old. “D’un Feu Secret” (“Of a Secret Fire”) is indeed old. It was composed in 1660 by Michel Lambert. “I could be cured If I stopped loving/But I prefer the disease,” it vows. McLorin sings it like an early music performer, poised and delicate with feathery ornaments. But the accompaniment, from her longtime keyboardist and collaborator Sullivan Fortner, is on synthesizers, savoring the anachronism. PARELESChlöe, ‘Pray It Away’The Beyoncé protégé Chlöe — of the sisterly R&B duo Chloe x Halle — goes full church girl on the fiery “Pray It Away,” the first single from her upcoming debut album, “In Pieces.” An unfaithful lover brings Chlöe to her knees and makes her wrestle with cravings for vengeance but, as she puts it in breathy vocals stacked to heaven, “I’ma just pray it away before I give him what he deserves first.” ZOLADZASAP Rocky, ‘Same Problems?’ASAP Rocky mourns the many rappers who have died young by questioning himself: “Am I a product of things that I saw?” he sings. “Am I a product of things in my songs?” His self-produced track is a haunted waltz, seesawing between two perpetually unresolved chords, with ASAP Rocky’s doleful voice cradled and answered by vocal harmonies from Miguel. “How many problems get solved if we don’t get involved?” he wonders. PARELESKimbra featuring Ryan Lott, ‘Foolish Thinking’Kimbra, a singer and songwriter from New Zealand, had her global triumph in 2011 as the duet partner (and comeuppance) for Gotye in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which won the Grammy for record of the year. Since then, she has persevered with her own kind of electronic pop, and in “Foolish Thinking” she collaborates with Ryan Lott, a.k.a. Son Lux. It’s a clear pop structure with an eerie refrain — “thought I could remove the pain/but that’s my foolish thinking” — delivered in an echoey, shadowy production, full of furtive keyboard patterns and variously miked vocals, sketching the longings of a partner who’s loyal but utterly confounded. PARELESRickie Lee Jones, ‘Just in Time’Rickie Lee Jones takes on jazz standards on “Pieces of Treasure,” an album due April 28. Her version of “Just in Time” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne, a song about last-chance romance — “The losing dice were tossed/My bridges all were crossed” — is simultaneously thankful and teasing. With Mike Mainieri’s vibraphone scampering around her voice, Jones places her phrases slyly behind the beat, pausing to land each note just in time. PARELESJobi Riccio, ‘For Me It’s You’“Everyone has a person they sing their love songs to,” Jobi Riccio sings in “For Me It’s You,” a slow, terse, old-fashioned country waltz complete with a plaintive fiddle. It just gets torchier as that love goes unrequited. PARELESSamia, ‘Breathing Song’Deep trauma courses through Samia’s “Breathing Song,” from her new EP, “Honey.” Over stark, sustained keyboard chords, she sings “Straight to the ER/While I bled on your car”; the driver asks, “It wasn’t mine, right?” The chorus, sharpened by Auto-Tune, is “No, no, no” — it’s simultaneously denial, reassurance and proof of life. PARELES More

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      Jazz’s Year of Reckoning With Tradition

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicFor the last few years, jazz around the globe has been in a creative renaissance. Scenes in Chicago, London and Los Angeles have pushed the genre in novel creative directions, and reinvigorated the music as nightlife.But is it quietly radical to re-embrace the songbook? How much history does a musician have to imbibe to be properly heretical? In 2022, questions like these were addressed, implicitly and explicitly, by singers like Samara Joy and Cécile McLorin Salvant and instrumentalists like Immanuel Wilkins and Jaimie Branch.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about jazz’s rites of passage, the ways in which freedom is expressed even amid convention, and artists who are agitating against history.Guests:Harmony Holiday, a poet and essayist who writes about music for Frieze and othersGiovanni Russonello, who writes about jazz for The New York TimesConnect 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

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      Best Jazz Albums of 2022

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      In a year of growth and reflection, the music stretched and relocated in often unpredictable ways.At the end of the seventh album on this list (no spoilers), the poet and philosopher Thomas Stanley’s voice rises up over a clatter of drums and saxophone, offering a darkly optimistic take on the state of jazz. “Ultimately, perhaps it is good that the people abandoned jazz, replaced it with musical products better suited to capitalism’s designs,” he muses. “Now jazz jumps up like Lazarus, if we allow it, to rediscover itself as a living music.”Jazz is jumping up, for sure — though not always where you expect it to, and certainly not in any predictable form. Some of the artists below wouldn’t call the music they make jazz at all. Maybe we don’t need to either. Let’s just call these albums what they were, each in their own way: breakthroughs, bold experiments and — despite everything around us — reasons for hope.1. Cécile McLorin Salvant, ‘Ghost Song’Known mostly as a brilliant interpreter of 20th-century songs, Cécile McLorin Salvant has never made an album as heavy on original tunes, nor as stylistically adventurous, as this one. Her voice soars over Andrew Lloyd Webber-level pipe organ in one moment, and settles warmly into a combo featuring banjo, flute and percussion in the next.2. Immanuel Wilkins, ‘The 7th Hand’With his quartet, Wilkins shows that tilted rhythms, extended harmony and acoustic instruments — the “blending of idea, tone and imagination” that, for Ralph Ellison, defined jazz more than 50 years ago — can still speak to listeners in the present tense.From left: Rashaan Carter, Immanuel Wilkins and Nasheet Waits. Wilkins’s “The 7th Hand” is a showcase for classic ideas about jazz that still speak to audiences today.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times3. Fred Moten, Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, ‘Moten/López/Cleaver’It’s a shame that hearing the poet and theorist Fred Moten’s voice on record is such a rare thrill. On “Moten/López/Cleaver,” his first LP accompanied by the quiet, rolling drums of Gerald Cleaver and Brandon López’s ink-dark bass, Moten is after nothing less than a full interrogation of the ways Black systems of knowledge have been strip-mined and cast aside, and yet have regrown.4. Anteloper, ‘Pink Dolphins’The creative-music world is still recovering from the loss of Jaimie Branch, the game-changing trumpeter who died in August at 39. “Pink Dolphins” is the second album from Anteloper, her electroacoustic duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, and it shows what Branch was all about: unpurified, salt-of-the-earth sound, packed with a generous spirit.5. David Virelles, ‘Nuna’Whether foraging into dark crannies of dissonance on the lower end of the keyboard or lacing a courtly dance rhythm into an otherwise scattered improvisation, the pianist David Virelles pays attention to detail at every level. He clearly listens to peers: Matt Mitchell, Jason Moran, Kris Davis. He draws from modernism and its malcontents: Morton Feldman, Olivier Messaien, Thelonious Monk. He pulls heavily from Cuban folk traditions: Changüi, Abakuá, danzón. And on “Nuna,” ‌his first solo-piano record, he spreads that across all 88 keys.6. Samara Joy, ‘Linger Awhile’“Linger Awhile” is a rite of passage: a by-the-book, here’s-what-I-can-do debut album. Fortunately, Samara Joy’s harmonic ideas are riveting enough and her voice so infectious that it doesn’t feel like an exercise. On “Nostalgia,” just try not to crack a smile at the lyrics she wrote to the melody of Fats Navarro’s 1947 trumpet solo while you simply shake your head at her command.Samara Joy’s “Linger Awhile” is a standout debut album.Noam Galai/Getty Images 7. Moor Mother, ‘Jazz Codes’With “Jazz Codes,” the poet and electronic artist Camae Ayewa declar‌es her love for the jazz lineage, and ‌registers some concerns. On “Woody Shaw,” ‌over Melanie Charles’s hypnotizing vocals, Ayewa laments the entrapment of this music in white institutions; on “Barely Woke,” she turns her attention to the culture at large: “If only we could wake up with a little more urgency/State of emergency/But I feel barely woke.”8. Angelica Sanchez Trio, ‘Sparkle Beings’The stalwart avant-garde pianist Angelica Sanchez steers a new all-star trio here, with the bassist Michael Formanek and the drummer Billy Hart, letting melodies explode in her hand and locking in — closely but not too tightly — with Hart’s drums.9. Makaya McCraven, ‘In These Times’Makaya McCraven, the Chicago-based drummer and producer, spent years recording, stitching together and plumping up the tracks that appear on “In These Times.” Mixing crisply plucked harp, springy guitar, snaky bass lines, horns, drums and more, he’s drawn up an enveloping sound picture that’s often not far-off from a classic David Axelrod production, or a 1970s Curtis Mayfield album without the vocal track.10. Samora Pinderhughes, ‘Grief’One piece of a larger multimedia work, the original songs on “Grief” grew out of more than 100 interviews that the pianist, vocalist and activist Samora Pinderhughes conducted with people whose lives had been impacted by the criminal justice system. Mixing gospel harmonies, simmering post-hip-hop instrumentals and wounded balladry, the music shudders with outrage and vision. More

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      Carnegie Hall Will Host Concert in Support of Ukraine

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      Carnegie Hall said on Tuesday that it would host a concert in support of Ukraine later this month, to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people, express opposition to the Russian invasion and raise relief funds.The benefit, “Concert for Ukraine,” is to take place on May 23 at 8 p.m., and will feature more than a dozen artists and ensembles, including the Russian-born pianist Evgeny Kissin, the violinist Itzhak Perlman, the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and the singer Michael Feinstein.The Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York, an amateur ensemble that specializes in secular and sacred music from Ukraine, will also perform.“Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has been heartbreaking to witness the devastation that has been wrought there over the last two months,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in a statement. “In this time of crisis, it is important to remember that there are active ways that we can all play a part in helping those who are suffering and under attack.”Several benefits have been held by New York arts groups in support of Ukraine since the start of the invasion. In March, the Metropolitan Opera staged a concert featuring Ukraine’s national anthem and a piece by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, among others.Carnegie’s leaders have used the hall’s platform to defend Ukraine. Last week, in announcing its 2022-23 season, the hall said it would host the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine in February. The ensemble will play Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, featuring the Ukrainian American pianist Stanislav Khristenko, Brahms’s “Tragic Overture” and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, as part of a tour led by the Ukrainian American conductor Theodore Kuchar.“This is a turning point in history,” Gillinson said in announcing the season. “It’s really, really important that a dictator does not win. We felt we needed to very overtly support Ukraine.”Carnegie was among the first cultural institutions to fire artists with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia after his order to invade Ukraine. In February, the hall canceled appearances by the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, a longtime supporter of Putin, and the Russian pianist Denis Matsuev, who also has ties to Putin.At the same time, Gillinson has warned that arts groups should not discriminate against Russian performers on the basis of nationality and should be careful to avoid penalizing performers who are reluctant to publicize their views on the war.The benefit will feature a number of opera stars, including the soprano Angel Blue and the mezzo-sopranos Denyce Graves and Isabel Leonard; the violinist Midori; the mandolinist Chris Thile; the Broadway singers Jessica Vosk and Adrienne Warren; and musicians from Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, a group of young artists.Carnegie said proceeds would go to Direct Relief, a humanitarian aid group that supports relief efforts in Ukraine. More

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      Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Album Tackles a Newer Archive: Her Own

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      The vocalist who dares to take on older music with unsavory history turns inward on “Ghost Song,” her most revealing and rewarding album yet.Since her arrival on the jazz scene about a dozen years ago, Cécile McLorin Salvant has made a practice of shining a black light on the unsavory history of American popular song. She sings standards, show tunes and old novelties in a taut, flinty, elusively beautiful voice, erring toward material with difficult lyrics and tough places in history. Salvant wins over her audiences by tweaking them slightly: daring them to go there with her — not just into the archive, but toward the darkness of the past.Today, you’re as likely to hear jazz’s most decorated vocalist singing a tune like “You Bring Out the Savage in Me” (a Valaida Snow vehicle from the mid-1930s that Salvant has called “so ​​racist and perfect and hilarious”), or Burt Bacharach’s “Wives and Lovers” (sample lyric: “Wives should always be lovers, too/Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you/I’m warning you!”), as to find her doing the typical standard, or a jazz take on a pop tune, or an original.But on “Ghost Song,” a new album out on Friday, Salvant has applied that daring-to-go-there ethic to something else: herself, writing music that looks within and doesn’t blink. In conceiving the LP, Salvant spent more time leafing through her own notebooks than she did the Great American Songbook.“Some of my favorite stuff to read is always the letters and the journals and diaries,” she said, talking about the artists that inspire her. “I love to see where the thinking happens, and I think I wanted, in a way, to share that. I wanted to translate that feeling to an album.”Salvant, 32, was speaking via video chat from her apartment in central Brooklyn, and she brandished her notebook for the camera. It serves a lot of functions, she said: journal, day planner, sketch pad, lyric book.“Ghost Song” is her first album to feature more originals than covers, and it breaks away hard from the sounds and structures of small-group jazz, which Salvant had been treating as a kind of gilded cage. At the same time, she’s keeping her links to the past, through the mixing bowl of styles she writes in and the covers she’s included. Some tracks feature a banjo, a flute and hand percussion, but no bassist or drummer. On one, a cathedral-grade pipe organ pushes the piano aside. All together, the result is her most revealing and rewarding record yet.“It lifts everything up to have standards that we all play that are written by our peers, and I just feel like that’s missing a little bit,” Salvant said.Olivia Galli for The New York TimesA kind of romantic wariness, bordering on pessimism, forms a leitmotif on this album — though it rarely tips into despair. It’s there on her blazing cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” and on “Dead Poplar,” for which Salvant put music to a letter Alfred Stieglitz had written Georgia O’Keeffe, in which he sounds both loving and conflicted. It should tell you something that the sunniest original composition on the album is called “Thunderclouds.”The archive-trolling music for which she’s best known has garnered Salvant a level of steadily mounting success that’s almost unheard-of for a jazz musician these days. Each of her past three LPs won the Grammy for best jazz vocal album, and in 2020 she was named a MacArthur fellow. But as Salvant has embraced the unruliness of her creativity, she’s realized that the boundaries holding her in place as a virtuoso jazz vocalist were always artificial.The same day she releases “Ghost Song,” her first solo exhibition will open at Picture Room, a gallery near her home in central Brooklyn. The show, also titled “Ghost Song,” features a selection of her embroideries and drawings, which seem indebted in equal measure to the cutouts of Henri Matisse, the market paintings of Haitian tradition, the tapestries of Moki Cherry (“I’m obsessed,” Salvant said of the Swedish textile artist), and the eerie, three-dimensional canvases that Salvant remembers seeing her sister, Aisha McLorin, make when she was younger.She’s also been applying a designer’s eye to her own attire, which in the past few years has grown explosively colorful. Performing at BRIC JazzFest in October, in a duet with the pianist Sullivan Fortner — her frequent creative partner and her co-producer on “Ghost Song” — Salvant wore a flowing purple dress, silver boots and a wiry, oversize necklace that she had made herself, as she volleyed comfortably with Fortner over standards and Sondheim.“It’s very rare that we’ll actually talk about music. We never practice together,” Fortner said in a phone interview, explaining that they’re more likely to visit a museum in their off hours. “Her awareness of all of the arts informs her music, and it’s taught me to kind of do the same.”A big moment of creative unfastening for her arrived not long before the pandemic, when Salvant wrote “Ogresse,” a concert-length musical fairy tale that tells the story of a large beast with “chocolate brown” skin who lives in the woods and feasts on the people who come near her. Salvant first came to the idea for “Ogresse” after being struck by a painting by the Haitian artist Gerard Fortune depicting an Erzulie, or Voudou deity, whose urine becomes a flourishing stream full of fish. Salvant has since recorded “Ogresse,” which features a 13-piece chamber orchestra conducted by Darcy James Argue, and she intends to release it as an album. She’s also at work on a feature-length animated film to accompany the music, using her own drawings.For Salvant, coming into herself as a multidimensional artist has had a feeling of return. “It’s like this weird optical illusion, I guess, where it does feel like suddenly now I’m beginning to be on this quest — and in fact, I was always on it,” she said. “I remember lists of things I wanted to do as a kid: I wanted to be a playwright and I wanted to be an actress, and I wanted to design the sets of the plays that I wrote.”Salvant grew up in Miami surrounded by music, but she didn’t take an immediate interest in jazz. Her parents and grandparents, who hailed from Haiti and Guadeloupe, listened to some, but it struck her as belonging to a culture that wasn’t fully hers. “For me, it started off as thinking that it was completely dead and dried up,” she said. “There was something almost as exotic about it as the Paraguayan folk music that my mom used to listen to. It was just one of many world musics in the house.”At university in France, taking classical voice lessons while studying political science and law, Salvant felt herself being pushed toward jazz — partly because of others’ expectations, she said, but also by her own curiosity. “I was in a music school where there was a jazz program, and I was the only” — she hesitated — “American there. And they’re like, ‘It’s your music, you need to sing,’” Salvant said. “It’s so strange. It’s like that in-between space of: This is an exotic thing, but this is also the way in which I connect back to the country that I was born in, and this homesickness that I felt.”Jazz also proved a worthy outlet for her historical drive. Even now, as she has delved into more personal songwriting, that hasn’t meant abandoning her interest in the archive; much the opposite. “There’s something about us being so obsessed with our own time. I think that’s the tendency, and it’s so self-centered, so narcissistic in a way,” Salvant said. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s been around for thousands upon thousands of years, a lot of storytelling devices. And in a way, it’s quite humbling, and also really inspiring.”It was her love of Baroque “mad songs” — a genre with its own troubling history, related to the exploitation and othering that mentally ill patients were subjected to in 17th-century England — that led her to write “I Lost My Mind,” from “Ghost Song.” It starts with a verse of jazz-genre balladry (“Here am I, lounging on the sands of my hourglass/Watching the time drip, sand sketching strange glyphs/Feeling my mind slip off a cliff”), then dissolves into an echoing incantation over Aaron Diehl’s pipe organ. Salvant’s voice, overdubbed upon itself, deadpans: “I lost my mind/Can you help me find my mind?”On “Ghost Song,” she’s also on a mission to punch up the jazz ballad for the 21st century, and she does two covers that could well become new standards: Sting’s plangent “Until,” and Gregory Porter’s triumphant “No Love Dying” (which she and Fortner deftly combine, on Track 2, with “Optimistic Voices,” a chipper tune from “The Wizard of Oz”).“It lifts everything up to have standards that we all play that are written by our peers, and I just feel like that’s missing a little bit,” Salvant said of the contemporary jazz scene. “I’m not saying that it’ll be ‘No Love Dying,’ but I hope it happens with something.”She has written a moving ballad of her own, too: “Moon Song,” a kind of companion piece to the album’s bluesier, aching title track. “Moon Song” has the aesthetic of classic jazz, with Diehl leading a piano trio behind her, but its words meditate on the dangers and discomforts of love, in a way that few old standards do. But none of this feels totally fatalistic. More than anything, “Moon Song” is a demand for love without sacrifice — which is to say, devotion without possession.Let me pine, let me yearnLet me crawl, let me write you a songAnd long to belong to youWrite you a song from a distanceLet me love you like I love the moon.Cécile McLorin Salvant will perform music from “Ghost Song” at Jazz at Lincoln Center on May 12 and 13; jazz.org. More

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      Cécile McLorin Salvant Branches Out, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by FKA twigs and the Weeknd, Leon Bridges and Khruangbin, Animal Collective and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Cécile McLorin Salvant, ‘Thunderclouds’The headline here isn’t that the cream-of-the-crop jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant has serious creative appetites that run beyond the American-songbook-and-curios repertory, which she has so famously explored. That was becoming clear, slowly but surely, over the past few years. It’s that when she focuses instead on her own writing, and shifts away some from straight-on modern jazz, she also softens the archness and the neatness of her delivery. There’s a new, expanded range in both the music and the expression. “Thunderclouds” will help you clock the shift: an up-tempo lullaby of wistful, wounded hopefulness, its shapely chord changes carried loosely by the band and its bouncy rhythm nodding to Caribbean-infused jazz. “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky,” Salvant sings, repeating the phrase as if to convince herself. The song comes from a forthcoming album, “Ghost Song,” due in March; it’ll be her first for Nonesuch Records and her first to feature primarily originals. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLeon Bridges and Khruangbin, ‘B-Side’In a Texas alliance, the soul singer Leon Bridges is backed by Khruangbin, a trio from Houston that has soaked up global rhythms. “B-Side” is from a collaborative EP due in February. Khruangbin supplies mid-tempo, two-chord Afrobeat funk, with terse bits of rhythm guitar answered by tootling organ chords, as Bridges croons in falsetto about much he misses a distant lover. It sounds like a slice of a jam that went on much longer. JON PARELESAnimal Collective, ‘Walker’Plinking, cascading xylophone and marimba sounds and the nasal, pumping string tones of a hurdy-gurdy circle through “Walker,” a meditation on getting through grief that’s named after the songwriter Scott Walker. It’s less dizzying and more patient than much of Animal Collective’s catalog, and for its final minute, only plinks and stray words remain, like shards of mourning. PARELESTierra Whack, ‘Sorry’The high-concept miniaturist Tierra Whack has been releasing a series of three-song genre-testing EPs: “Pop?,” “Rap?” and now “R&B?,” which relies on slow-ticking drum machines and electronic tones. “Sorry” is cast as a phone message, “one last conversation” with someone who won’t answer. The synthesizer chords are frayed and quivery as her apologies tumble out — heartfelt but apparently too late. PARELESFKA twigs featuring the Weeknd, ‘Tears in the Club’Miserablism and sensualism pair elegantly in this collaboration between FKA twigs and the Weeknd. For twigs, an impressionistic singer, this marks her most pointed and theatrical vocals, and the Weeknd, who has long embraced deviant sadness on a grand scale, dials it back ever so slightly to match the beatifically aghast mood. JON CARAMANICARvssian and Future featuring Lil Baby, ‘M&M’On “M&M,” the Jamaican producer Rvssian serves up an ominous synth that sounds like a video game console on its last legs, tinny and fading. Lil Baby matches it with a needling singsong verse, and Future approaches it with an indignant wheeze. CARAMANICATyondai Braxton, ‘Dia’Tyondai Braxton’s new electronic track, “Dia,” emerges after a long silence. It has an insistent but implied beat, many layers of overt and implied syncopation, and a determination to keep changing. PARELES24kGoldn, ‘More Than Friends’Around 14 months ago, 24kGoldn was at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with his breakout single “Mood.” Now he’s remaking Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” It’s a cheeky success that feels like a grim concession. CARAMANICA More

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      Cuomo Announces Pop-Up Performances Across New York

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCuomo Announces Pop-Up Performances Across New York“NY PopsUp” will kick off Feb. 20 and run through Labor Day.A festival celebrating Little Island, the parklike pier being built downtown in the Hudson River, will coincide with the last days of “NY PopsUp.”Credit…Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesFeb. 8, 2021, 3:18 p.m. ETGov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who has made it clear that he sees the return of art and culture as key components of the economic revival of the state, announced Monday that a series of more than 300 free pop-up performances, “NY PopsUp,” would begin Feb. 20 and run through Labor Day.Mayor Bill de Blasio, meanwhile, announced details of the city’s Open Culture program, which will permit outdoor performances on designated city streets this spring.The state’s pop-up events are part of a public-private partnership, New York Arts Revival, and will feature more than 150 artists including Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, Mandy Patinkin, Renée Fleming and Hugh Jackman.Since the state does not wish to draw large crowds in the pandemic, many of the events will not be announced in advance.“We’re trying to thread the needle,” Mr. Cuomo said. “We want the performances. We don’t want mass gatherings, we don’t want large crowds.”The events, the state said, will take place in parks, museums and parking lots, as well as on subway platforms and in transit stations. People can follow a new Twitter and Instagram account, @NYPopsUp, for details about upcoming performances. Many will be shown online.The series will be spearheaded by the producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal, along with the New York State Council on the Arts and Empire State Development. It is part of an arts revival plan that the governor had announced during an address in January, when he had said the state would organize the pop-up performances beginning Feb. 4.The series will begin Feb. 20 at the Javits Center in New York City with a free performance for health care workers that will feature Jon Batiste, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Cecile McLorin Salvant and Ayodele Casel. The performers will travel across the city to all five boroughs, performing in parks and street corners, as well as at the footsteps of Elmhurst Hospital and St. Barnabas Hospital.Mr. Cuomo said some of the events would use flexible venues that do not have fixed seats, and could therefore be reconfigured to allow for social distancing, including the Shed, the Apollo Theater, Harlem Stage, La MaMa and the Glimmerglass Festival’s Alice Busch Opera Theater.In June, the opening of Little Island, the parklike pier being built downtown in the Hudson River by Barry Diller, and the Tribeca Film Festival, celebrating its 20th anniversary, will add to the expanding arts programming in the city.Little Island plans to hold its own festival from Aug. 11 to Sept. 5, which will coincide with the final weeks of “NY PopsUp” programming.Mr. de Blasio announced on Monday that the city would launch a new program to help some of the city’s cultural institutions apply for federal grants. The city’s effort, called “Curtains Up NYC,” will offer webinars and counseling to businesses and nonprofits that are connected in some way to live performances.“We have to make sure that New York City cultural institutions get the help that they need,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference.Asked whether any Broadway theaters could be allowed to reopen as his arts revival plans continue, Mr. Cuomo expressed hope.“I think that is where we are headed, right?” he said. “The overall effort is headed towards reopening with testing.”He announced last week that the state planned to issue guidance to begin allowing wedding ceremonies for up to 150 guests if attendees were tested beforehand.“Would I go see a play and sit in a playhouse with 150 people?” he said. “If the 150 people were tested and they were all negative, yes, I would do that. And the social distancing and the air ventilation system is proper? Yes, I would do that.”Commercial producers have repeatedly said that economics of Broadway preclude reopening at less than full capacity.New York reported at least 177 new coronavirus deaths and 9,923 new cases on Sunday. While the number of new cases has fallen from a post-holiday high last month, the average number of new daily cases and deaths is still far above where it was last summer and fall.Mr. Cuomo said that government had to take an active role to help the city and the state recover from the economic pain wrought by the pandemic. “It’s not going to be a situation where the economy is just going to come back,” he said. “We have to make it come back.”“New York leads,” he added. “And we’re going to lead in bringing back the arts.”Michael Gold contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More