Sanders, Pharoah

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    A Solar Eclipse Soundtrack

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    Songs from TV on the Radio, Brian Eno, Julianna Barwick and others than could well accompany the celestial event on Monday.TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,As you have probably heard, on Monday most people in the United States will be able to witness a solar eclipse that will plunge an ordinary afternoon into otherworldly darkness. Such events require planning. Where are you going to watch the eclipse? Who are you going to watch it with? And, most crucially for Amplifier purposes, what will you listen to during it?Today’s playlist aims to get you in the mood for this rare cosmic event. It features atmospheric ambient music from Brian Eno and Julianna Barwick as well as ethereal jazz from Alice Coltrane and Amaro Freitas. I also included a few songs that refer to moons and darkness, from Cat Stevens and Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, though I stopped just short of adding Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” because I have at least some restraint.As far as solar eclipses go, this one is relatively long: Along the totality line, the moon will block out the sun for about four minutes and 28 seconds. A few songs on this playlist run for approximately that duration, so if you press play on, say, Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” as soon as the eclipse begins, it can soundtrack the entire experience. If you want to take in the moment in reverent silence, though, I fully support that; this playlist will be here when the eclipse is over, if you want to extend the astronomical vibe. And if you want to spend your eclipse listening to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”? Well, that’s your decision, not mine.I do love the feeling of human interconnectedness that occurs during an eclipse, though. There’s something powerful about knowing that millions of people in all sorts of locations will be stopping what they’re doing and perhaps reflecting on the fact that, for all our differences, we’re all living under the same sky. Who knows? Maybe some of us will even be listening to the same music.I’m being followed by a moonshadow,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Pharoah Sanders Beckoned the Gods on the Intimate ‘Pharoah’

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      The three-song 1976 recording arrives in a new boxed set at what seems a perfect moment to deepen our appreciation for the saxophonist’s role in music history.In trying to capture what lay at the powerful core of the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders’s music, the British journalist Valerie Wilmer once referenced a conversation with a Nigerian composer. “In all ritual song there is that slow beat, trying to call the gods,” the (unnamed) musician had told her. “There’s no rush. It’s a slow process, as though one is praying.”“Pharoah Sanders,” Wilmer declared, achieved “precisely this mood” in the music he made in the late 1960s and ’70s, just before and then after his mentor, John Coltrane, died.Sanders generally used large ensembles to get there, with horns, mixed percussion and multiple basses cracking open the firmament over incantatory grooves. But in summer 1976, after parting ways with Impulse! Records — “the house that Trane built,” and his home for more than a decade — he dialed down. He traveled with his wife Bedria and a small band to a rustic studio in upstate New York, and recorded what would become one of his most intimate and serene works, titled simply “Pharoah.”Made in the weeks leading up to what would have been Coltrane’s 50th birthday, the album includes the highlight “Harvest Time,” 20 minutes and all of Side A, with Bedria on harmonium and a restful prayer coming from Sanders’s saxophone. Released in limited batches on LP the following year, and then in a small run of CDs in the 1990s, “Pharoah” has been passed around for decades mostly as a bootleg. For those who have experienced it, the album often becomes a touchstone. Sanders’s work can feel so grand, so tapped-in, so collectively powerful, it’s hard to isolate his expression within the fray. The saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings once wrote that he found it “difficult to regard Pharoah Sanders as an individual,” meaning this as a deep compliment. But not so on “Harvest Time.”One person who felt this record’s formative influence was Sam Shepherd, the multi-hyphenate musician who records as Floating Points. He released a collaborative album, “Promises,” with Sanders in 2021, the year before the saxophonist died at 81. If you’d heard “Harvest Time,” you could easily recognize that the expansive, high-contrast “Promises” was written in conversation with it.Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-Nyström“Promises” came out on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint, and Shepherd urged the label to think about reissuing “Pharoah” next. Then they learned about the existence of some live recordings of “Harvest Time” from a 1977 European tour. This Friday it all comes out as a remastered vinyl set, in a creatively packaged box that includes a bonus LP with two live versions of “Harvest Time.”Sanders had been at Coltrane’s right hand for the last two years of the bandleader’s career, when his music turned explosive and totally free. In 1968, the poet and critic Amiri Baraka wrote that he could envision Sanders “coming through the desert to claim what I think will be his. His birth rite, as left to him, by Trane, his own true father.” Man, expectations.Sanders handled it by making the music the focus, not his role within it. “He was very humble, quiet, liked to listen,” the guitarist Tisziji Muñoz, who recorded the indelible guitar accompaniment on “Harvest Time,” said in an interview. “But he had a strong viewpoint. If he had to tell you something, you’d have to be prepared for it.”Greg Bandy, the drummer on “Pharoah” and a longtime Sanders collaborator, said that when the saxophonist did speak, his words had magnitude. “He used to say, ‘Tell about the one that made us all!’ And that’s how it went. What can you say about that? That’s a mouthful of information,” Bandy said in an interview. “Pharoah was just naturally born with the spirit.”Born in 1940 in Little Rock, Ark., Sanders arrived in New York in the early 1960s, by way of a Bay Area blues and jazz scene that had more or less rejected him. “You should go play in New York,” he remembered people telling him. “Learn all the standard songs, get your tuxedo and learn how to work — learn how to live this kind of life.”Sanders in Frankfurt in 2013. “Pharoah” was made in the weeks leading up to what would have been his mentor John Coltrane’s 50th birthday.Manfred Roth/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesThat’s not exactly how it went. In New York, the blues came to him. Sanders lived without an address for over two years, but he developed a reputation on the avant-garde, and a lifestyle centered on wellness and music. He practiced yoga with the saxophonist Marion Brown, and carried a jar of whole wheat germ in his saxophone bag.Sanders became known for changing his saxophone reeds as often as his side musicians, forever seeking the perfect “sound.” That pursuit produced some remarkable albums in the late 1960s and ’70s, like “Karma” (featuring his anthem, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” with Leon Thomas on yodeling vocals), “Thembi” and “Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun).” But he turned off more critics than he appealed to, especially his split-tone saxophone playing, which was both an expression of catharsis and a callback to West African techniques of “vocal chording.”On “Pharoah,” Sanders embraced the less incendiary elements of his style. As he said candidly in an interview after the album’s release, he’d hoped that isolating his tender side might produce “something that would sell well.”The session had come about when Bob Cummins, a self-taught audio engineer who had recently started a small label called India Navigation, approached Sanders, his musical hero, with an offer to record at the humble Nyack, N.Y., studio that he’d built with his wife, Nancy. He insisted that Sanders bring a lean setup, suggesting a spartan bass-and-sax recording, but when the saxophonist arrived, he had Bedria and five other musicians with him. (For Sanders, this was a small group.)It all became a bit of a disaster — except the record itself. Somehow, Cummins’s spare setup proved just sufficient, and the three tracks on “Pharoah” stand out from everything Sanders had been playing in that period: They resist peaking, staying quieter and more direct.“Harvest Time” centers on a finger-plucked guitar, with an underwater tremolo effect, alternating — in classic Sanders style — between just two chords. (In the recovered live recordings included with this release, Sanders plays Muñoz’s part on the saxophone; those chords are the song’s melody.) In come Steve Neil’s steady bass, Sanders’s searching lines and then Bedria’s gusts of harmonium, filling the air.In some ways this was in the spirit of Trane, but it was also outside his shadow, casting toward ambient music. On another track, “Love Will Find a Way,” Sanders reaches for a jazz-rock sound more related to Santana or the Grateful Dead, letting Muñoz’s distorted guitar lines tear ahead.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSanders would rerecord that song in 1977, in a distant-cousin version, for Arista, committing to a more commercial route with a backing of CTI Records-esque strings. The LPs that followed often felt like negotiations between his id and his audience, often to rewarding result, like on “Journey to the One” and “Beyond a Dream.”In his 2020 tribute to Sanders, Hutchings mentioned that the elder’s music represented “the cyclical view which sees the prominence of individual players as transient but the group contribution as reaching for eternity.” That is, he was just a vessel — an awesome one. By that view, maybe it shouldn’t be hard to defend the decision to present a concert next week at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring Sanders and Floating Points’s “Promises,” with Hutchings filling in on the tenor saxophone parts. By another perspective, it’s a bit off-putting to see a younger musician dropped in to fill the shoes of such a purposeful figure.There is something more appealing about the “Harvest Time Project,” a traveling performance scenario that will put Muñoz together with an intergenerational mix of musicians in an active upholding of Sanders’s pursuit. A workshop performance — potentially the best kind, for this group — will be held on Oct. 14 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn (featuring the bassist Joshua Abrams, the guitarist Jeff Parker, the drummer Chad Taylor, the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis), before it heads to Europe.Bedria Sanders said music was a verb, not a noun, for Sanders, a constant lifeline. “Music was something to elevate you above all this other stuff that was going on, to a more spiritual realm,” she said in an interview, remembering their six years together. “To put you back on focus, to get back to yourself and what you really are here for. To get back to the natural state of the universe, which is peace.” More

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      Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

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      Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist and composer celebrated for music that was at once spiritual and visceral, purposeful and ecstatic, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death was announced in a statement by Luaka Bop, the company for which he had made his most recent album, “Promises.” The statement did not specify the cause.The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming. He first gained wide recognition as a member of John Coltrane’s groups from 1965 to 1967. He then went on to a fertile, prolific career, with dozens of albums and decades of performances.Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.Gilles Petard/RedfernsMr. Sanders played free jazz, jazz standards, upbeat Caribbean-tinged tunes and African- and Indian-rooted incantations such as “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” which opened his 1969 album, “Karma,” a pinnacle of devotional free jazz. He recorded widely as both a leader and a collaborator, working with Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Joey DeFrancesco and many others.Looking back on Mr. Sanders’s career in a 1978 review, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote, “His control of multiphonics on the tenor set standards that younger saxophonists are still trying to live up to, and his sound — huge, booming, but capable of great delicacy and restraint — was instantly recognizable.”Mr. Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020: “I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark, on Oct. 13, 1940. His mother was a cook in a school cafeteria; his father worked for the city. He first played music in church, starting on drums and moving on to clarinet and then saxophone. (Although tenor saxophone was his main instrument, he also performed and recorded frequently on soprano.) He played blues, jazz and R&B at clubs around Little Rock; during the era of segregation, he recalled in 2016, he sometimes had to perform behind a curtain.In 1959 he moved to Oakland, Calif., where he performed at local clubs. His fellow saxophonist John Handy suggested he move to New York City, where the free-jazz movement was taking shape, and in 1962, he did.At times in his early New York years he was homeless and lived by selling his blood. But he also found gigs in Greenwich Village, and he worked with some of the leading exponents of free jazz, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Sun Ra.It was Sun Ra who persuaded him to change his first name to Pharoah, and for a short time Mr. Sanders was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.Mr. Sanders made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” for ESP-Disk in 1964. John Coltrane invited him to sit in with his group, and in 1965 Mr. Sanders became a member, exploring elemental, tumultuous free jazz on seminal albums like “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Sanders went on to record with his widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, on albums including “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” both released in 1970.Mr. Sanders had already begun recording as a leader on the Impulse! label, which had also been Coltrane’s home. The titles of his albums — “Tauhid” in 1967, “Karma” in 1969 — made clear his interest in Islamic and Buddhist thought.His music was expansive and open-ended, concentrating on immersive group interaction rather than solos, and incorporating African percussion and flutes. In the liner notes to “Karma,” the poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka wrote, “Pharoah has become one long song.” The 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” moves between pastoral ease — with a rolling two-chord vamp and a reassuring message sung by Leon Thomas — and squalling, frenetic outbursts, but portions of it found FM radio airplay beyond jazz stations.During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Sanders’s music moved from album-length excursions like the kinetic 1971 “Black Unity” toward shorter compositions, reconnections with jazz standards and new renditions of Coltrane compositions. (He shared a Grammy Award for his work with the pianist McCoy Tyner on the 1987 album “Blues for Coltrane.”) His recordings grew less turbulent and more contemplative. On the 1977 album “Love Will Find a Way,” he tried pop-jazz and R&B, sharing ballads with the singer Phyllis Hyman. He returned to more mainstream jazz with his albums for Theresa Records in the 1980s.But his explorations were not over. In live performances, he might still bear down on one song for an entire set and make his instrument blare and cry out. During the 1990s and early 2000s he made albums with the innovative producer Bill Laswell. He reunited with the blistering electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock — who had been a Sanders sideman — on the 1991 album “Ask the Ages,” and he collaborated with the Moroccan Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania on “The Trance of Seven Colors” in 1994.Mr. Sanders at the 1996 North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands.Frans Schellekens/RedfernsInformation on Mr. Sanders’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sanders had difficult relationships with record labels, and he spent nearly two decades without recording as a leader. Yet he continued to perform, and his occasional recorded appearances — including his wraithlike presence on “Promises,” his 2021 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points — were widely applauded.Reviewing “Promises” for The Times, Giovanni Russonello noted that Mr. Sanders’s “glistening and peaceful sound” was “deployed mindfully throughout the album,” adding, “He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”Mr. Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-NyströmIn 2016 Mr. Sanders was named a Jazz Master, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States, by the National Endowment for the Arts.In a video made in recognition of his award, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington said, “It’s like taking fried chicken and gravy to space and having a picnic on the moon, listening to Pharoah.” The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin said, “It’s like he’s playing pure light at you. It’s way beyond the language. It’s way beyond the emotion.” More

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      2021 in Jazz: Intimacy and Conversation

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThroughout the coronavirus pandemic, jazz’s flexibility has become an asset. It informed how 2021 played out in the jazz world — the return of Pharoah Sanders with a new, unlikely collaborator, the electronic musician Floating Points; interesting intersections with hip-hop that call back to earlier jazz fusion; duet recordings that emphasize call and response, two artists communicating across the empty transom.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the pandemic is continuing to shape the world of jazz recordings, how the genre revives its heroes and also some promising new artists.Guests:Giovanni Russonello, who covers jazz for The New York TimesMarcus J. Moore, who writes about music for The New York Times and othersConnect 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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      For Jazz Musicians in 2021, Two Was the Magic Number

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      A host of outstanding duet albums emphasized musicians not only collaborating but truly listening to each other.The violinist and multimedia artist Laura Ortman stood onstage at the Stone earlier this month clad in a bejeweled paisley jacket with a bow under her arm. She welcomed the crowd with an interested smile, and explained that the music that evening would be “dedicated to distance.” After the set she spoke again, saying that throughout it she had been meditating on the feeling of “never being close enough.”The first 20 minutes were played only in duet with the pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, and they were probably the most affecting part. The musicians weren’t heavy-handed about the set’s theme, but about 15 minutes in, after a hefty silence, Ortman played a few sharp, playful curlicues on the violin and Alcorn responded with a restive note held in the lower register. They carried on like this for about a minute, and the tension was noticeable from below: two communicators, stuck at opposite ends of multiple spectra at once — melody/drone, high/low, rhythmic/unfixed — finding a way to direct and follow at the same time.Throughout 2021, I often got the most out of records made by duos, which allowed me to hear musicians not just collaborating but conversing directly. It likely wasn’t just the pandemic that brought me there, or that led to so many great duet recordings this year: We’ve been tunneling toward mutually assured isolation for a long time, embracing a digital existence that has reorganized, among other things, how we talk to each other and how we make music.The pair of electromagnetic, almost sensual albums released by the saxophonist Sam Gendel and the bassist Sam Wilkes seem to be having an intimate conversation with this moment. They recorded “Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar,” released in 2018, and its follow-up, “Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs,” out this year, live to tape during a series of casual performances outside restaurants in Los Angeles, with each musician manning a setup of loops, effects and other manipulators. They hardly sound like live albums, but they’re not studio recordings either.Sam Wilkes, left, and Sam Gendel recorded two albums live to tape during a series of performances outside restaurants in Los Angeles.Her Productions“Honestly, it’s an extension of hanging out and connecting on some stuff and then saying, ‘Oh, let’s jam,’” Gendel said in a video interview with Wilkes last week. “Then after we jammed, it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s move the jam down the street and play in front of some people, low-key, just unannounced.’” Some members of their impromptu audience were transfixed; others, they said, carried on eating and chatting.It works: Gendel and Wilkes seem so intently focused on each other, they might not need an audience. But there’s plenty of room for your ears, if you tap into the space they’ve created.Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, a pair of hip-hop producers with Hall of Fame résumés, teamed up a few years ago with a shared goal: to challenge themselves to take their chops up a notch, not just as producers but as instrumentalists.“That became the aspiration — to go beyond just sampling, to really understand, like, Man, what were they thinking about when they played this?” Muhammad said in a video interview, referring to the jazz musicians whose recordings he has sampled so heavily from, as a member of A Tribe Called Quest and after.Younge and Muhammad invited some of their ’70s jazz heroes — Roy Ayers, Brian Jackson, Gary Bartz — into the studio, and recorded a series of short albums through a process that was heavily improvised. They’ve been releasing those records throughout the pandemic on their own label, Jazz Is Dead. Loose and vernacular and charged with reverence, these LPs have the ambient feeling of a studio outtake from a recording session that never happened, caught somewhere in the airspace between 50 years ago and today.The pianist Jason Moran self-released a duet performance he’d given at the Big Ears Festival in 2019 with the drummer Milford Graves.Tony Cox, via Big Ears FestivalUnlikely cross-generational collaborations bore rich fruit in other realms of the jazz world this year, too. In the spring, the pianist Jason Moran self-released an arresting duet performance he’d given at the Big Ears Festival in 2019, alongside the drummer and polymath Milford Graves. The young vocalist Nick Hakim and the elder saxophonist Roy Nathanson created a tender and playful album, “Small Things,” in Nathanson’s basement in early 2020. The eminent jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders teamed up with the electronic musician and composer Floating Points, né Sam Shepherd, to record “Promises,” which both expanded and cooled down each musician’s natural aesthetics. It landed at the top of many critics’ best-of-2021 lists, including mine.The duet has a long and fertile history in jazz, though in the course of an artist’s career it’s usually seen as a detour, not a main road. Even Louis Armstrong, jazz’s first great soloist, made some of his finest early recordings in duet with the pianist Earl Hines; ever since, the format has offered listeners a close perspective into both the playing and the listening of jazz’s great improvisers. And from the 1960s it has been a preferred format on the avant-garde, where free-form improvising can really reward a smaller format. When Graves, who died this year, was in his 20s and already well into a Promethean career, his duet with the piano titan Don Pullen became a vehicle for artistic innovation, economic self-determination (through their collaborative label) and political visioning.Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson are contemporary improvisers who approach abstraction from two different angles: Courvoisier as a pianist at the bridge between free jazz and European classical music, and Halvorson as a deconstructive guitar improviser, strongly affiliated with (for lack of a better term) the Brooklyn jazz scene. Their second duo album, “Searching for the Disappeared Hour,” was a chance to mine the jazz canon for inspiration while finding ways to playfully disrupt each other’s style.They re-listened closely to “Undercurrent,” the famed album of duets by the guitarist Jim Hall and the pianist Bill Evans, and sought to create something with a similar quality of attentive mystery. Courvoisier and Halvorson each contributed about half the compositions on “Disappeared Hour,” and each one wrote with the other player in mind. Then, once the pieces were written, the other musician went in and tinkered with them.“I love her melodies: She has this typical Mary sound, a very unique way of writing,” Courvoisier said in an interview. “Sometimes I’d ask her, ‘Can I reharmonize that one?’ She said, ‘Sure.’” This worked in both directions. “She does the same with my songs,” Courvoisier said. “She’ll hear me and say, ‘Can I bend that note?’ I’ll say, ‘Great.’”When improvised music comes wild and untethered, as theirs often does, some listeners lose their bearings. But when someone says they’re not sure how to engage with music like this, I suggest listening to it simply as a feeling, not as a bunch of strategies or linguistic parts. In duo scenarios, it’s especially easy to listen that way, mostly because that’s how each player is hearing the other: through feeling.Sara Schoenbeck is one of the few improvising bassoonists of her pedigree, but she rarely makes music as a leader. When she decided a few years ago to make an album under her name, a duet format made sense: Hers is a quiet, unwieldy instrument; playing in duos allows her “not to have to stress about using amplification, or not have to change the way that I would naturally want to play,” she said in an interview.The self-titled album that she released last month consists of nine duets, each with a different musical partner; including original compositions, open-ended improvisations and one cover of a tune by the slowcore band Low, each track is arresting in a different way. One of the quietest — and the one that most rewards careful listening — features the saxophonist and avant-garde eminence Roscoe Mitchell. Playing with him, Schoenbeck said, made her think about patience. It was a reminder that the way to show someone you’ve heard them isn’t always to respond.She said she’d challenged herself with this question: “How much can you start from a small idea, and not move too quickly?” And Mitchell, she said, is “kind of a master at that.”“When you’re performing, your endorphins change; your idea of time and space changes, and it’s really easy to move too quickly,” Schoenbeck added. “So that’s something I’ve come back to: How do you not move too quickly, how do you stay in a space, how do you gradually change the language that’s happening? It’s hard.” More

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      10 Works of Art That Evaded the Algorithm This Year

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      Contemplation, not clicks: Our critic looks back on marble sculptures in Rome, songs of “atmospheric anxiety” and the Frick Collection in a new light.From left: A performer in “Catasterism in Three Movements”; one of the Torlonia Marbles; a detail from the refurbished Hôtel de la Marine in Paris. Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Tom Bisig, Basel; Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times; James Hill for The New York TimesThe coronavirus pandemic is a health crisis with so many cultural sequelae: above all, the absorption of all facets of our lives deeper into networks and phone screens. Even more than last year, I’ve been drawn to art, music and movies that, in one way or another, evade the workings of likes and shares — and carve out a place for human creativity in a world too governed by algorithmic logic.‘Cézanne Drawing’The apple of my eye. The Museum of Modern Art’s meticulous, almost overwhelming summer exhibition distilled modernism’s father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family. Those bottom-heavy pears, those clumpy bathers. Those short daubs of green and blue in his views of Mont-Sainte-Victoire. Those Provençal rock formations — rocks of air and watercolor, Cézanne as geologist! What these hundreds of sheets reconfirmed, right on time, was that your art will never change another person’s life if it merely shows what you think. You need the distinction, the seriousness, that can only come from form. (Read our review of “Cézanne Drawing.”)“Bathers,” an 1890 pencil and watercolor work by Paul Cézanne, was featured in a Museum of Modern Art show.Metropolitan Museum of ArtRyusuke HamaguchiI’d call the 42-year-old Japanese film director the most exciting in years if he weren’t so … calm. “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi’s unfailingly precise tale of a widowed actor sublimating his grief through his chauffeur and Chekhov, has virtues one fears have gone missing from cinema: long takes, guillotine-crisp editing, an unhurried faith in the importance of images. Like Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh before him, Hamaguchi contrasts his unobtrusive camerawork with the conventions of theater — in this case, a multilingual “Uncle Vanya” production that builds to a silent, heart-stopping finale, when the troupe’s Sonya sighs “We shall rest!” in Korean sign language. Add to that “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Hamaguchi’s three-part fugue of love and intuition also released this year, and you have the emergence of a stunning talent who finds the romance in rigor. (Read our review of “Drive My Car.”)Barney & FriendsTwo decades ago his world-making was mistaken for American Wagnerism; but Matthew Barney is more collaborative and more relaxed than you’d think, and he’s doing the best work of his career in the lighter register first seen in his 2019 film “Redoubt.”For the performance “Catasterism in Three Movements,” this September at the Schaulager in Switzerland, he ceded more than half the evening to the Basel Sinfonietta, who performed Jonathan Bepler’s churning music alongside a Berniniesque sculpture of copper, brass and scorched pine. Three women brought the remainder of “Catasterism” to life: the contact improvisation pioneer K.J. Holmes, the Cree hoop dancer Sandra Lamouche, and the athlete Jill Bettonvil as a sharpshooting Diana who pumped a dense-as-flesh Barney sculpture full of lead. (Read our review of Matthew Barney’s “Redoubt.”)K.J. Holmes, a Cree hoop dancer, was featured in “Catasterism in Three Movements,” a collaboration between the artist Matthew Barney and the composer Jonathan Bepler.Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation; Tom Bisig, Basel‘The Torlonia Marbles’Alone in Rome this spring, at the nearly empty Capitoline Museums, I saw the first public display in half a century of the greatest collection of ancient art in private hands. Travel restrictions made an accidental sleeper of the Torlonia family’s Greek and Roman sculptures: dozens of portrait busts, a hirsute billy goat reclining like a love god, a shattered Hercules recomposed from a hundred shards. Rome was my first trip abroad since the pandemic, and I’d submit to a dozen P.C.R. tests to see this actually legendary collection before it disappears again on Jan. 9. (Read our report on the Torlonia Marbles.)More than 90 rarely exhibited sculptures were on display in the “Torlonia Marbles” exhibition at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times‘Promises’Astral but never spacey, architectural yet also boundless, this nine-movement, album-length composition deserved every one of the rave reviews that rained down upon its release in March. As Pharoah Sanders’s subdued tenor sax (and occasional vocalizations) weave around the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings and the synths and celesta of Sam Shepherd — a.k.a. Floating Points, a British electronic musician nearly five decades Sanders’s junior — “Promises” comes to feel like a self-regulating ecosystem, an ever denser net of music and motion. These guys knew what they were doing when they chose, for the album’s cover, a painting by Julie Mehretu, whose retrospective this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art had the same accumulating grandeur. (Read our review of “Promises.”)Frick MadisonThe secret to good decorating: just buy the best stuff and do nothing! The Frick’s down-to-the-pith reinstallation in the Whitney’s vacated building refiltered the Vermeers and Velázquezes we thought we knew, and isolated Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” in a sublime Brutalist cell illuminated by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows. What Frick Madison has proved, more subtly, is that we can give art context in a hundred digital formats; museums’ bigger challenge is carving time and space to really look. (Read our story on the making of Frick Madison.)Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” is illuminated by one of the architect Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows while on display at the Frick Madison.Gus Powell for The New York TimesThe Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’I feel as useless / As a tree in a city park / Standing as a symbol of what / We have blown apart …. As forests burned in B.C. and diplomats dithered in Glasgow, the Toronto singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, turned in an unreserved, openhearted album of atmospheric anxiety, in which guitars mingle with greenhouse gases and loss is measured in metric tons. She knows we don’t need artists to tell us the climate has changed; we need them to tell us how we have. (Read our interview with the singer.)Parisian RenovationsParis had a quartet of major cultural openings this year. The Bourse de Commerce, renovated by Tadao Ando for the contemporary art collection of François Pinault, drew the most Instagram shares, but it was two renovated historical sites — the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Parisian history, and the Hôtel de la Marine, the stupefyingly grand naval headquarters — that best married old and new. The city’s sweetest surprise is the old Samaritaine department store, reopened after 16 years, its Art Nouveau expanses renewed with the undulating glass of the Japanese firm Sanaa. (Read our story on the restoration of the Hôtel de la Marine.)The Hôtel de la Marine, the former headquarters of France’s Ministry of the Navy, has reopened as a museum.James Hill for The New York TimesBooks Are Back!Closer to home, the New York Public Library re-emerged from a far too long pandemic closure with a sweet new home: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, formerly the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, rethought and revived by the Dutch firm Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle. Its clean white expanses have computers galore (there’s even a Bloomberg terminal for budding teen traders), but the core remains its 400,000-strong circulating book collection, open for free browsing. A few years ago, the N.Y.P.L. was planning to sell this place, and to exile the books in its main research branch to New Jersey. The Niarchos — as well as Toshiko Mori’s renovation of the Brooklyn Public Library — is an affirmation that cities need readers, and readers need print. (Read our review of the new library.)Daniil Medvedev’s MockeryThe year’s finest and funniest performance art took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium, when the lanky young Russian smacked his last serve, won the U.S. Open title — and dumped his whole body onto to the court, miming a PlayStation move as he lolled like a dead fish. As arrogant as it was ridiculous, Medvedev’s side flop has stuck with me all this fall as a Gen-Z master class in how to stay human in a world of memes. If you must dive into the algorithm, then do it with total contempt. (Read our profile of the “octopus” Daniil Medvedev.) More

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      Best Albums of 2021

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      Less isolation didn’t mean a return to normalcy. Albums with big feelings and room for catharsis made the most powerful connections.Olivia Rodrigo, Moneybagg Yo and Allison Russell stood out in 2021.From left: Grant Spanier; Noam Galai/Getty Images; Bethany Mollenkof for the New York TimesJon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesSongs of Trauma, Fear and TriumphThe past year was awash in recorded music — not only the stuck-at-home recordings that musicians occupied themselves with when touring evaporated during the pandemic, but also many albums that had been made before the lockdowns but had been shelved in hopes of some return to normalcy. The albums that resonated most with me during 2021 were songs of reflection and revelation, often dealing with traumas and crises, transfigured through music.1. Bomba Estéreo, ‘Deja’The Colombian duo Bomba Estéreo released “Deja” as a series of EPs tied to the ancient elements: water, air, fire, earth. Each new one broadened an album that entwines folklore and electronics, personal yearning and planetary concerns. With Liliana Saumet’s tartly endearing singing and rapping and Simón Mejía’s meticulously kinetic productions, the songs dance through their fears. (Read our interview with Bomba Estéreo.)Simón Mejía and Liliana Saumet of Bomba Estéreo released “Deja” as a series of EPs.Valerie Amor C2. Allison Russell, ‘Outside Child’Allison Russell, the longtime frontwoman of Birds of Chicago, transforms a horrific childhood — she was abused by her stepfather — into songs of joyful survival. “I’m still rising, stronger for my pain and suffering,” she sings. Drawing on soul, country, folk and deep blues, she connects her own story to myth and metaphor, remembering the trauma yet decisively rising above it. (Read our interview with Allison Russell.)3. Mon Laferte, ‘Seis’Sometimes visitors can see what residents take for granted. Mon Laferte is from Chile, but she has been living for more than a decade in Mexico and has immersed herself in its music. On “Seis,” she wrote songs that draw deeply on regional Mexican traditions — mariachi, banda, ranchera, corrido, norteño — to sing, in a voice that can be teasing or furiously incendiary, about deep passions and equally deep betrayals. (Read our interview with Mon Laferte.)Mon Laferte drew on Mexican traditions for one of two albums she released this year, “Seis.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times4. The Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’Tamara Lindeman, who writes songs and records as the Weather Station, surrounded herself with a jazzy, intuitive backup group for “Ignorance,” clearly aware of Joni Mitchell’s folk-jazz precedent. The rhythms are brisk and precise; winds, keyboards and guitars ricochet respectfully off her breathy vocal lines. She sings about impending disasters, romantic and environmental, and the widespread disregard for what’s clearly about to happen. (Read our interview with the Weather Station.)5. Mdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg guitarist born in Niger. Like Tinariwen, his band plugs North African rhythms and modal vamps into rock amplifiers and drums. But “Afrique Victime” further expands the sonic possibilities for Tuareg rock, from ambient meditation to psychedelic onslaught. Six-beat rhythms and skeins of guitar lines carry Moctar’s voice in songs that can be modest and introspective or unstoppably frenetic.6. Julien Baker, ‘Little Oblivions’“Beat myself until I’m bloody/And I’ll give you a ringside seat,” Julien Baker sings in one of the brave, ruthlessly self-indicting songs that fill “Little Oblivions,” an album about the toll of one person’s addictions on everyone around her. She played all the instruments herself, scaling her sound up to arena size and chiming like U2, even as she refuses herself any excuses or forgiveness. (Read our review of “Little Oblivions.”)7. Black Midi, ‘Cavalcade’The virtuosic British band Black Midi bristles in every direction: with jagged, skewed funk riffs; with pointed dissonances; with passages of Minimalistic, ominous suspense; with lyrics full of bitter disillusion. And then, just to keep things unsettled, come passages filled with tenderness and wonderment, only to plunge back into the fray. (Read our interview with Black Midi.)8. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’Olivia Rodrigo, now 18, fixates on a breakup with an adolescent’s obsessiveness on “Sour,” building on the audience she found as a cast member in Disney’s “High School Musical.” With Taylor Swift as a role model for craftsmanship, her songs are as neatly detailed as they are wounded, and the production whipsaws through styles — calm piano ballad, ethereal choir harmonies, fierce distorted guitars — to match every mood swing. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)Olivia Rodrigo’s songs are neatly detailed.Erica Hernandez9. Esperanza Spalding, ‘Songwrights Apothecary Lab’“Songwrights Apothecary Lab” was the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding’s pandemic project; she consulted neuroscientists, music therapists and ethnomusicologists to devise music for healing, and an online user’s guide prescribes the purpose of each song. But the songs are equally effective off-label; they encompass meditations, serpentine jazz compositions, calm or turbulent improvisations, open-ended questions and sly bits of advice, the work of a graceful, perpetually questing mind. (Read our interview with Esperanza Spalding.)10. Tyler, the Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’A life of luxury can’t mollify Tyler, the Creator. He’s no longer the trolling provocateur he was a decade ago when he emerged with Odd Future, but he’s still intransigent and high-concept. After singing through most of his 2019 album, “Igor,” he’s back to rapping, now simulating a mixtape with DJ Drama as hypeman. In his deep voice, he raps about all he owns and all he can’t control — mostly romance — over his own dense, detailed productions, at once lush and abrasive. The album peaks with an eight-minute love-triangle saga, “Wichita”: a raw confession, cannily orchestrated. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)Tyler, the Creator swings back to mostly rapping on his 2021 album.Luis “Panch” PerezAnd here are another 15 deserving albums, alphabetically:Adele, “30”Arooj Aftab, “Vulture Prince”Khaira Arby, “New York Live”Billie Eilish, “Happier Than Ever”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, “Promises”Flock of Dimes, “Head of Roses”Rhiannon Giddens with Franceso Turrisi, “They’re Calling Me Home”Idles, “Crawler”Ka, “A Martyr’s Reward”Valerie June, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers”L’Rain, “Fatigue”Arlo Parks, “Collapsed in Sunbeams”Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, “Raise the Roof”Omar Sosa, “An East African Journey”Jazmine Sullivan, “Heaux Tales”Jon CaramanicaProcessing Pain, Blurring BoundariesIn the second year of global quasi-paralysis, what made the most sense were, once again, albums that felt like wombs and albums that felt like eruptions. When there was nowhere to go, literally or metaphorically, there were still places to retreat — to the gut, to history, to memory, to forgetting.1. Mustafa, ‘When Smoke Rises’Did you mourn this year? Were you broken in some way that was beyond words? Mustafa’s debut album was there with you, a startling, primal chronicle of relentless loss and the relentless grace required to navigate it. In moments when the ground buckled, this album was a cradle. (Read our interview with Mustafa.)Mustafa’s debut album is a profound meditation on loss.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times2. EST Gee, ‘Bigger Than Life or Death’The latest in a string of excellent releases from the Louisville, Ky., rapper EST Gee, whose verses are refreshingly burly and brusque, and who tells stories sprinkled with surprisingly vivid left-field details. A bold back-to-basics statement, utterly free of filigree.3. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’The most important new pop star of the year delivered a debut album of poppy punk and punky pop that’s sometimes musically blistering and always emotionally blistered. A reminder that a failed relationship might leave you icy or bruised or drained, but in truth, it frees you to be emboldened. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)4. Moneybagg Yo, ‘A Gangsta’s Pain’Moneybagg Yo is a casually sassy rapper — a don of tsk-tsking, fluent in arched eyebrows, dispositionally blunt. This is his fourth major-label album, and it’s punchy and robustly musical. À la peak 2 Chainz, Moneybagg Yo boasts so long and so intently that he sounds fatigued, and in turn, uproarious.5. PinkPantheress, ‘To Hell With It’This is music about listening to music, about the secret places we burrow into in order to make sure our favorite songs can wash over us unimpeded. The singing is sweet and melancholic, and the production flirts with memory and time — stories of right now and back then, all told as one. (Read our review of “To Hell With It.”)6. Summer Walker, ‘Still Over It’The most emotionally direct vocalist working in R&B today, Summer Walker is a bracing listen. And this album, her third full-length release, is rawly vindictive and unconcerned with polish, the equivalent of a public-facing Instagram account that feels like a finsta. (Read our notebook on Summer Walker.)Summer Walker’s third album is appealingly unpolished and intimate.Theo Wargo/Getty Images7. Lana Del Rey, ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’Lana Del Rey albums have become pop music’s most compelling ongoing saga about American loneliness and sadness. This, the better of her two albums this year, is alluringly arid and dreamlike. (Read our review of “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.”)8. Tyler, the Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’In which the rapper who introduced himself a decade ago as the genre’s great anarchist reveals something that was long clear to close observers: He reveres tradition. Brick-hard rhyme structures. Ostentatious taunts. Mixtape grit. All of it. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)9. Playboi Carti, ‘Whole Lotta Red’Just an unyieldingly odd record. Notionally a cousin of mid-2010s SoundCloud rap, it also has echoes of 1980s industrial rock and also the glitchcore of the 2000s. It’s buoyant and psychedelic and totally destabilizing.10. Kanye West, ‘Donda (Deluxe)’“Donda” lives at the intersection of Kanye’s “Yeezus” era and his Jesus era. On the one hand, there’s scabrous, churning production that sets a chaotic mood. On the other, there are moments of intense searching, gasps for air amid the unrest. (Read our notebook on “Donda.”)11. Rauw Alejandro, ‘Vice Versa’Rauw Alejandro, the most imaginative meta-reggaeton Latin pop star, dabbles in drum ’n’ bass and baile funk on his second major-label album. But the star is his hypertreated voice, which is synthetically sweet and appealingly lush, almost to the point of delightful suffocation. (Read our review of “Vice Versa.”)Rauw Alejandro’s latest album puts a spotlight on his vocals.Thais Llorca/EPA, via Shutterstock12. Doja Cat, ‘Planet Her’Outlandish, eccentric, lustrous, mercenarily maximalist pop from the sing-rapper with the richest and keenest pop ear not named Drake.13. Chloe Moriondo, ‘Blood Bunny’Openhearted and effortlessly catchy indie punk-pop about lovelorn confusion and beginning to figure out you’re too cool for that. (Read our notebook on Chloe Moriondo.)14. Kidd G, ‘Down Home Boy’Why yes, those are Juice WRLD cadences in the singing on the year’s best country debut album. (Read our interview with Kidd G.)15. The Armed, ‘Ultrapop’Shrieking sheets of nervy noise — a battering ram.16. Carly Pearce, ’29: Written in Stone’A brief marriage, a messy divorce, a helluva album.17. Yeat, ‘4L’If “Whole Lotta Red” is too coherent for you, try Yeat.18. Conway the Machine, ‘La Maquina’A cold, cold, cold growl of a classic-minded hip-hop album.19. Farruko, ‘La 167’“Pepas” is here, along with a confidently expansive range of reggaeton styles.Farruko’s “La 167” is a showcase for reggaeton styles.Rich Polk/Getty Images20. Mickey Guyton, ‘Remember Her Name’A pop-country winner that feels both universal and singular. (Read our interview with Mickey Guyton.)… and 20 more albums for a more well-rounded year.42 Dugg, “Free Dem Boyz”Gracie Abrams, “This Is What It Feels Like”Aespa, “Savage”Jay Bahd, “Return of Okomfo Anokye”Benny the Butcher and Harry Fraud, “The Plugs I Met 2”Ivan Cornejo, “Alma Vacía”Jhay Cortez, “Timelezz”Dave, “We’re All Alone in This Together”Drake, “Certified Lover Boy”Halsey, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”Cody Johnson, “Human the Double Album”NCT 127, “Sticker”RXK Nephew, “Crack Dreams”serpentwithfeet, “Deacon”Spirit of the Beehive, “Entertainment, Death”Don Toliver, “Life of a Don”Rod Wave, “SoulFly”Tion Wayne, “Green With Envy”Wiki, “Half God”Young Thug, “Punk”Lindsay ZoladzOpening Up Hearts and MindsIn an emotionally hung over year when so many people were trying to process loss — of loved ones, of charred or flooded homes, of the world as we once knew it — some of the best music offered an opportunity to slow down and reconnect with feelings we may have rushed right by before truly acknowledging. Sometimes we just needed a voice to capture and echo the absurdity all around us, but other times records gave us a way of experiencing nothing less than mass catharsis.1. Adele, ‘30’It takes a certain kind of record to make me want to quote Rumi, but Adele really killed this, so let me say: “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”Adele has been our mass-cultural bard of heartbreak for the past decade, but in her music — save for the handful of instant-classic ballads scattered across her discography — I did not really get the sense that she was truly open in all the terror and glory that implies. Then she turned 30. “I’m so afraid but I’m open wide,” she sings on the divine “To Be Loved,” her imperial voice trembling but assured. Most breakup albums are full of anger, scorn, and blame, but this one is remarkably self-directed, a grown woman making a deeply considered choice to leap into the void and break her own heart wide apart. “I took some bad turns that I am owning,” she sings, audibly italicizing that last phrase, as if the preceding 10 tracks in all their startling honesty hadn’t already made that clear.On “19,” “21,” and “25,” Adele acted wise beyond her years: “We both know we ain’t kids no more,” she chided an ex on an album about being in her mid-20s, which also included a world-wearied number called “When We Were Young.” “30” refreshingly winds back the clock and finds her admitting that all along she was “just a child, didn’t get the chance to feel the world around” her. But now she sings like a mature woman who knows there’s still plenty of time to get wine-drunk on the everyday wonders of her own freedom, to break her heart open again and again in her newly omnivorous and sonically eclectic songs. This, at last, is Adele living up to her promise, pop majesty at the highest count. (Read our review of “30.”)Adele breaks her own heart open on “30.”Cliff Lipson/CBS2. Tyler, The Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’He’s still on the boat! Tyler has never sounded this breezy yet in control, but for all the luxurious braggadocio, there’s a darker undercurrent at work, too. “I remembered I was rich so I bought me some new emotions,” he raps at the beginning of the album; by the stunning penultimate track, the heart-tugging epic “Wilshire,” he’ll have to admit that’s impossible. Full of playful reflections on his past (“I was canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers”) and auspicious blessings for his future, “Call Me” finds Tyler dropping a stone into that murky blue and discovering unexplored new depths. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)3. Snail Mail, ‘Valentine’Lindsey Jordan begs, bargains and finally accepts the pain of heartache in this searing song cycle that further establishes her as one of indie rock’s brightest young stars. There’s a raw immediacy to these 10 songs that make them almost feel hot to the touch — the thrashing title track, the keening acoustic ballad “Light Blue,” even the slinky, synth-driven vamp “Ben Franklin.” Her nimble guitar work highlights a sharp ear for off-kilter melody, but at the core of “Valentine” is Jordan’s passionately hoarse voice, lungs filled to the brim with sound and fury. (Read our review of “Valentine.”)4. Jazmine Sullivan, ‘Heaux Tales’The chatty, candid interstitials woven through this wonderful album play out like an adult reunion of those young girls in the classroom from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” — now grown women swapping secrets, recollections and hard-earned wisdom. “Heaux Tales” is a prismatic, multiperspective snapshot of female desire in the 21st century, enlivened by the testimonies of friends like Ari Lennox and H.E.R. but made cohesive by the soulfully versatile voice of Jazmine Sullivan. She breathes life into a spectrum of emotions, from the sassy assertion of “Pick Up Your Feelings” to the naked yearning of “The Other Side,” proving that it would be too limiting to choose between being a hard rock or a gem. Aren’t we all a little bit of both? (Read our review of “Heaux Tales.”)Jazmine Sullivan explores the multiple dimensions of female desire in the 21st century on “Heaux Tales.”NAACP, via Reuters5. Illuminati Hotties, ‘Let Me Do One More’The indie producer turned surprisingly ebullient frontperson Sarah Tudzin is a personable and occasionally hilarious guide through the surreal ruins of late capitalism. “You think I wanna be a part of every self-appointed start-up?” she seethes in a punky, cartoonish voice, but a few songs later she’s exhausted enough to sound resigned to inevitable compromise: “The corner store is selling spit, bottled up for profit,” she sighs, “can’t believe I’m buying it.” Still, Tudzin’s songs glow with the possibility of human intimacy amid all the rubble, and they show off her mastery of so many different genres that by the end of the record, it seems like there’s no ceiling to her talent as both a producer and a finger-on-the-pulse songwriter. (Read our interview with Illuminati Hotties.)6. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’Hell hath no fury like a young woman out to prove she’s no one-hit wonder. From the opening guitar-crunch of the Zoomer primal scream that is “Brutal,” Olivia Rodrigo proves there’s so much more to her than could be expressed even in a song as exquisitely expressive as her seismic smash “Drivers License.” Rodrigo fashions teen-girl sarcasm into a lethal weapon on the dream-pop “Deja Vu,” rails against the Instagram industrial complex on the barbed social critique “Jealousy, Jealousy” and transforms a sample of one of her idol Taylor Swift’s sweetest love songs into a tear-streaked heartbreaker on “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back.” If it feels comparatively weak on the back end, that’s only because the first half of this album is probably the most impressive six-song run anybody put together this year. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)7. The Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’How do you make music about climate change without it sounding too didactic and abstract? Tamara Lindeman, the Canadian musician who records as the Weather Station, came up with a winning solution on her stirring album “Ignorance,” which finds her singing elegiac love songs to a dying planet. The graceful melancholy of “Tried to Tell You” surveys the natural beauty we’ve been too numb to mourn, while the sparse, jazzy “Robber” is a kind of musical tone-poem about large-scale corporate destruction. With her nimble voice — sometimes high and fluttery, other times earthy and low — and evocative lyricism, the songs of “Ignorance” animate, as one of her bandmates puts it, “the emotional side of climate change,” employing music’s depth of feeling to ignite political consciousness. (Read our interview with the Weather Station.)Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station finds artful ways to sing about the climate crisis.Angela Lewis for The New York Times8. Low, ‘Hey What’If only every band could sound this adventurous 30 years into existence. As their eerily heartfelt harmonies cut through with rhythmic blurts of electronic noise, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk sound, quite literally, like ghosts in the machine, imbuing vast, steely soundscapes with a disarming beauty. Following the sonic reinvention of the stunning 2018 album “Double Negative,” the Duluth band have continued to frame human yearning amid a churning and apocalyptic backdrop, with career-best songs like “Disappearing” and “Days Like These” capturing both the difficulty and the necessity of finding light in a dark age.9. Lucy Dacus, ‘Home Video’Lucy Dacus’s wrenching third studio album is as much an achievement of memoir as it is of songwriting, a vividly conjured coming-of-age story so personal that she used her own teenage diaries for research. “In the summer of ’07, I was sure I’d go to heaven,” she sings on “VBS” (as in, Vacation Bible School), before a gradual and all-consuming doubt begins to creep in. By the final song, when a friend tells her she’s afraid that their desires have rendered them “cursed,” Dacus responds, “So what?” As thoughtfully crafted as a collection of short stories, “Home Video” achingly chronicles the tale of a young person who loses her religion but in the process gains autonomy, a sense of identity and the glorious strength to tell her own truths in song. (Read T magazine’s interview with Lucy Dacus.)10. Dry Cleaning, ‘New Long Leg’“Are there some kind of reverse platform shoes that make you go into the ground more?” the ever-droll Florence Shaw asks, one of many absurdist yet somehow relatable philosophical questions she poses on the English post-punk band Dry Cleaning’s singular debut album. The instrumentation around Shaw swells like a sudden squall, but her deadpan, spoken-word musings — a mixture of found text, overheard chitchat and offbeat poetry — are the eye of the storm, remaining steady and strangely unperturbed in all kinds of weather.11. Billie Eilish, ‘Happier Than Ever’No record grew on me more this year than Billie Eilish’s patient and personal sophomore effort, which shuns repeat-the-formula predictability and unfolds at its own unhurried pace. It’s somehow even quieter than her sumptuously ASMR-triggering debut, until those sudden moments when it isn’t — as on the corrosive conclusion to the Nine-Inch-Nails-like “NDA,” or the fireworks display of pent-up frustration that rips open the title track. Exquisitely sequenced, this is a rare pop album that doesn’t show all its cards right away, but instead saves its strongest material for the end, building toward a satisfying finale and a hint at the potential versatility of her future. (Read our review of “Happier Than Ever.”)Billie Eilish’s second album, “Happier Than Ever,” reveals itself at its own pace.Rich Fury/Getty Images12. Mdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’The fluid and incandescent playing of the Tuareg guitar hero Mdou Moctar transcends borders, seamlessly fusing Western psychedelia with North African desert blues. “Afrique Victime,” his strongest and most focused record to date, showcases not only his quicksilver fingerwork but his innate gift for melody and songcraft, proving in every one of these nine blazing tracks that shredding is a universal language.13. Bitchin Bajas, ‘Switched on Ra’This shouldn’t work, or at least not nearly as well as it does: A drone synth outfit tackling the otherworldly compositions and complex harmonies of cosmic jazz pioneer Sun Ra? But Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas approach the task with equal parts reverence and playfulness, assembling an Arkestra of 19 different analog synths and in the process creating a prolonged musical meditation on time, space and the meaning of retrofuturism. The vibes are exquisite, and the whole thing sounds like the Muzak that would play in an intergalactic portal’s waiting room.14. Remi Wolf, ‘Juno’Here’s to anyone who takes a technically skilled voice and chooses to do something delectably weird with it. The Palo Alto native Remi Wolf’s pipes are strong enough to have propelled her to Hollywood on the 2014 season of “American Idol,” but she’s since carved out a much less conventional path, making bold, psychedelic pop that bursts at the seams with ideas, melodies and truly wild wordplay (“I love my family intrinsically, like Anthony Kiedis,” she sings, which — sure!). On “Juno,” one of the most promising debut albums of the year, Wolf throws everything she’s got at the wall — and a surprisingly high percentage of it actually sticks. (Read our interview with Remi Wolf.)Remi Wolf makes bold, psychedelic pop that bursts at the seams with ideas.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesSome runners-up worth mentioning:L’Rain, “Fatigue”Rostam, “Changephobia”Flock of Dimes, “Head of Roses”Lana Del Rey, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”/“Blue Banisters”Halsey, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”Palberta, “Palberta 5000”/Lily Konigsberg, “Lily We Need to Talk Now” More

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      Best Jazz Albums of 2021

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      In a year of continued uncertainty, musicians held their colleagues, and listeners, close.Esperanza Spalding, Pharoah Sanders and Jason Moran made some of the year’s strongest jazz releases.Clockwise from left: Will Matsuda for The New York Times; Sam Polcer for The New York Times; Heather Sten for The New York TimesEven the big-statement albums made by jazz musicians this year had a feeling of intense closeness: of large-scale problems being worked out within an enclosure, with limited tools and just a few compatriots. No surprise there, I guess. Twelve months ago, the year began with promise, but we’ve hardly returned to old comforts. Rather than breaking out, we spent 2021 getting used to a feeling of unquiet, making the most of being mostly alone. The best improvised music of the year understood that, and met us there.1. Pharoah Sanders, Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra, ‘Promises’Why fight it: This year’s big talker in the experimental-music world ended up being just as powerful as we’d hoped. Not really jazz, not exactly classical, definitely not electronic music per se, “Promises” is the first-ever collaboration between Pharoah Sanders, the octogenarian spiritual-jazz eminence, and Floating Points, nee Sam Shepherd, a 30-something British composer and polymath. They each use music to get at questions of healing — Shepherd typically as a solo musician, Sanders as a communitarian — and although “Promises” was recorded before the coronavirus pandemic began, it arrived a year into lockdown, just when we needed it most.2. Jason Moran, ‘The Sound Will Tell You’A pianist, visual artist, curator, writer and guiding force in jazz, Jason Moran has been quietly releasing albums on his Bandcamp over the past few years, after ending a lengthy relationship with Blue Note Records. He doesn’t have a publicist, and barely self-promotes beyond his personal social media feeds, but these releases are worth seeking out. Moran recorded “The Sound Will Tell You” alone in January, just as he was mounting an exhibition of deep-blue works on paper at Luhring Augustine in Tribeca. This is an intimate and tender, harmonically lush piano record, heavily inspired by the writings of Toni Morrison, blurred occasionally by electronic effects but always clear in its melodic intent. (Listen to “The Sound Will Tell You” on Bandcamp.)3. James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet, ‘Jesup Wagon’The tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis tends to blow hard into his horn, but he likes to save up extra breath in the bottom of his lungs, so that his notes don’t necessarily fade, but sometimes grow louder and stronger over time. It’s a way of broadcasting patience and urgency all at once, and reminding you that he’s in control. After years of mounting buzz, Lewis cashed in his chips with “Jesup Wagon.” The album’s seven original compositions — composed for an unorthodox quintet, with the life of George Washington Carver in mind — are built around yawning, polyphonic melodies (Lewis’s saxophone intertwined with Kirk Knuffke’s cornet) and layers of rhythm stacked underneath (William Parker’s bass and guimbri, Christopher Hoffman’s cello and Chad Taylor’s drums and mbira).4. Patricia Brennan, ‘Maquishti’Twinkling and mesmeric, the debut album from this Mexican-born, New York-based vibraphonist and marimba player mixes composed material with tracks that were improvised in the studio whole cloth. Some are retouched with echoey, scrambling effects, but none is particularly lush or layered. Moving way outside the standard language of jazz vibraphone, Patricia Brennan has created something like a landscape of vapor, full of wandering melodies lost in the fog.Patricia Brennan’s “Maquishti” blends composed tracks with improvisation.Noel Brennan5. Adam O’Farrill, ‘Visions of Your Other’Weaving, pulsing, fine-grain complexity, intense focus: They’re all at play in the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s tangled compositions. On “Visions of Your Other,” his third album with his quartet, Stranger Days (featuring Xavier Del Castillo on tenor saxophone, Walter Stinson on bass and Zack O’Farrill on drums), the group slips into the music like a perfectly tailored suit.Adam O’Farrill’s “Visions of Your Other,” his third album with his quartet, Stranger Days, is a study of intense focus.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York Times6. Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, ‘Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs’Sam Gendel, a saxophonist, and Sam Wilkes, a bassist, are millennial pals who seem equally interested in using music for the purposes of comfort and disruption. In 2018, they put out “Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar,” a stealthy little album that might have spluttered out of a vat where time, space, genre and the titular instruments themselves had all melted down into a roux. Recorded live to tape and released on Bandcamp, it became an underground obsession. Their follow-up LP, “More Songs,” contains nine additional tracks in the same vein, and it’s at least as hypnotic as the first.Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes followed up their 2018 release this year.Marcella Cytrynowicz7. William Parker, ‘Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World’The bassist, composer and organizer William Parker’s five-decade career sends a galvanizing message: Yes, you can do it all. You can play in and outside of any improvising style you choose; you can lead and you can follow; you can play the bass like a heavy rhythm instrument while coaxing grace and lyric from it. “Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World” is not one new LP, but in fact 10, each featuring Parker’s original music recorded with a different collaborator or band. So it works as a measure of his enormous range, and an index of his network on the downtown avant-garde — a scene that would hardly be the same without him.8. Sara Serpa and Emmanuel Iduma, ‘Intimate Strangers’Sara Serpa, a Portuguese singer whose voice is both small and bold, has spent the past few years immersing herself in the shocking history of Portugal’s colonial misadventures on the African continent, and responding through music. On “Intimate Strangers,” she collaborates with Emmanuel Iduma, a Nigerian memoirist and critic, who has written in evocative detail about the experiences of migrant laborers on the continent today. Through him, Serpa found a way to explore the present-day legacy of colonialism, while usefully decentering her own perspective. But the music remains distinctly Serpa’s: cool-toned, vocal-driven, abstract and yet immediately beautiful.9. Wadada Leo Smith/Douglas R. Ewart/Mike Reed, ‘Sun Beams of Shimmering Light’Nearing 80, Wadada Leo Smith retains one of the fullest and most arresting trumpet sounds around. But playing alongside him means getting in touch with silence, too, as if there might be energy coming from his horn that hasn’t yet become sound but still needs room to breathe. The saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Douglas R. Ewart — who, like Smith, moved to Chicago in the 1960s and became an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians — brings a similarly restful approach to improvisation. Working with the younger Chicagoan drummer Mike Reed, Smith and Ewart created an album of expanse and vision that lives up to its name. (Listen to “Sun Beams of Shimmering Light” on Bandcamp.)10. Esperanza Spalding, ‘Songwrights Apothecary Lab’“Songwrights Apothecary Lab” takes the form of an album here, but it began as more than that (and it’s likely to continue as more, too). Esperanza Spalding, the bassist, vocalist and self-described “songwright,” held residencies in New York and her native Oregon during the pandemic, bringing together a mix of healers and artists in search of new and therapeutic methods of making music. Each of the LP’s 12 tracks is a “formwela,” blending lyrical and wordless vocals, instrumental textures and hooks that condense out of thin air.Esperanza Spalding held residencies during the pandemic.Will Matsuda for The New York Times More

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      Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points Meet in the Atmosphere

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      On “Promises,” their new collaborative album, Sanders’s tenor saxophone becomes one with the electronic composer’s web of humming synthesizers.When Pharoah Sanders first heard “Elaenia,” the stewy and transporting debut album by the British electronic musician and composer Sam Shepherd, who performs as Floating Points, he was rapt. It had been almost two decades since Sanders, the tenor saxophonist and American jazz eminence, had released a major new album, but he said he would like to try working with Shepherd.The natural affinity between the now 80-year-old Sanders and the 34-year-old Shepherd makes sense. Despite the generational differences, they’re united by an impulse toward constant expanse, and both see healing as central to the role of music. And each of them is interested in how duration works as a kind of artistic medium in itself.On “Crush,” his most recent solo album, Shepherd treated techno and house beats as a laboratory for experiments into the possibilities of disarray, while incorporating sophisticated orchestral arrangements. He recorded the album quickly at his home studio after a long tour, where he had honed his new creative direction in front of audiences while opening for the British band the xx. It meant that even as his composing delved more deeply into classical inspirations, he was in conversation with dance music.But “Promises,” his new collaboration with Sanders that will be released Friday, came about in a different way, over a week together in the studio in 2019, and rather than techno its deepest grounding is in a kind of minimalism. It’s basically one continuous 46-minute piece of music, written by Shepherd, though it is broken up into nine separate tracks, labeled “movements.” For the majority of the piece, a simple motif repeats — a twisty phrase of just a few notes, played on harpsichord and piano and synth, rising and disappearing at the rate of an enormous person’s sleeping breath — as a two-chord harmonic progression recurs around it.Shepherd adorned this with sometimes-spare, sometimes-soaring string arrangements, which the London Symphony Orchestra plays in conversation with his aerial synthesizer lines. Not until the latter half of the album does the orchestra fully come alive, with a rich and immersive passage on Track 6 — sometimes regal, sometimes bluesy — that almost eclipses the motif, but not quite.And then there is Sanders’s tenor saxophone, a glistening and peaceful sound, deployed mindfully throughout the album. He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.Like some of Shepherd’s synth phrases, Sanders’s saxophone sometimes announces itself faintly: You’ll just hear him breathing softly through the mouthpiece, or tapping it with his tongue, before he passes a full note through the instrument. When he plays his final notes of the album, at the end of Track 7, he does not so much disappear as become one with Shepherd’s web of humming synthesizers.Sanders is known for pioneering a manifestly spiritual approach to jazz, having taken the mantle from John Coltrane, his former boss, after Coltrane’s death in 1967. But before joining him Sanders had also worked in the mid-1960s with Sun Ra, the visionary bandleader, who converted Sanders’s given name, Ferrell, into Pharoah, and taught him by example how to reimagine the possibilities of a large ensemble. From his first release on Impulse! Records, “Tauhid” (1967), Sanders made suite-length pieces with medium-to-big ensembles that spanned multiple sections and hovered at various registers, as if traversing the layers of the atmosphere.Floating Points insists on something similar, in a different context. Listen to the synths and bubbling bass percussion of “Elaenia” (2015) or “Crush,” and then listen back to the commingled mallet percussion and reeds and wobbly bowed strings on an old Sanders track — say, the title piece of his 1972 album, “Wisdom Through Music”: It’s easy to toggle between them and stay in the same head space.“Promises” is basically one continuous 46-minute piece of music, written by Shepherd, with Sanders’s tenor saxophone deployed mindfully throughout.Eric Welles-NyströmLike Sanders, Shepherd had some of his earliest exposure to music in church, as a choirboy at Manchester Cathedral. He later earned a Ph.D. in the field of neuroepigenetics in 2014, studying the role of DNA in processing pain; his music, heady as it is, can often seem like a therapeutic bath. Where other virtuoso electronic composers these days, like Holly Herndon or Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), might use their control over our senses to unsettle, Floating Points usually feels like he’s taking care.He plays with sound at just about every frequency audible to the human ear; headphone listening will sometimes reveal deep bass rumbles or vanishingly high synth lines not fully audible through computer speakers. In the way of a great orchestral composer, he will introduce a particular synthesizer voice very faintly in the greater swarm, bringing it in gradually.Shepherd has also put our relationship to the natural world at the heart of his music, echoing a theme in Sanders’s work. His 2017 film-and-music project, “Reflections: Mojave Desert,” included recordings of the sounds of the desert swirling amid the post-rock he made with a band.Sanders’s music has always sounded like both an environment and a pure emotion, and his long, harmonically constant pieces could almost disabuse you of the entire idea of a start and an end. Nowadays, losing track of time is nearly impossible. On “Promises,” the greatest gift Shepherd has given us is that rather than emulating any style or genre from Sanders’s past work, he has found the nonmusical information inside it. By listening, he has heard how to slow down.Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra“Promises”(Luaka Bop) More