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    Listen to Rudolph: A New Year Is Both a Comfort and a Fiction

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookListen to Rudolph: A New Year Is Both a Comfort and a FictionA 1976 TV movie that imagined years as people is a helpful reminder that a new page on the calendar is an arbitrary creation.“Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” was a follow-up to the better-known Christmas special, but the second movie has lessons for our pandemic year.Credit…Rankin/Bass ProductionsJan. 4, 2021, 4:06 p.m. ETIf 2020 were a person, what would it look like? I imagine someone tired, ravaged, beaten down by illness and police brutality, and weary from trying to stay afloat in a sinking economy. We’ve personified 2020 in articles and memes and GIFs, speaking of it as though it were a living, breathing antagonist in our collective story. And this past New Year’s celebration was not so much about the birth of a new year as about the death of an old one that no one asked for.I was thinking of the poor pallor and limping gait of 2020 as I watched the 1976 Rankin-Bass stop-motion movie “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” over the holidays. The film highlighted something that 2021 will surely come to prove: the ways we mark time are arbitrary, ultimately a fantasy in which our memory of a year often only accounts for the extremes of our experience: the best and worst things that happened to us. Time is unwieldy and untameable, so much larger than the ways we define it, and it continues whether or not we mark its passage.I grew up watching all the Rankin-Bass Christmas movies, with Heat Misers and Snow Misers and Burgermeister Meisterburgers, but “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” always seemed the odd man (or, more accurately, odd reindeer) out. Unlike the others, which stuck to Christmas and its traditions, with stories of Santa and special holiday magic, “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” focused on our celebration of passing time.The follow-up to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” set its protagonist on a new mission: After saving Christmas with his shiny schnoz-beacon, Rudolph must track down Happy, the baby new year, who has run away because people keep making fun of his Dumbo-esque ears. The aged Father Time tells Rudolph that if Happy isn’t found by midnight on New Year’s Eve, it will remain Dec. 31 forever.Rudolph encounters various silly side characters along the way, and the most delightful part of the movie for me was always his jaunt among the Archipelago of Last Years, with each year, personified based on prominent events and attitudes, getting its own island where time is locked. (I now wonder if the plot was swiped from the writer’s table at “Doctor Who.”)One Million B.C. is a cave man living among dinosaurs, and 1776 looks like Benjamin Franklin. We don’t get to see every island but learn that on 1492 island, people were too busy discovering things to help, and that 1965 was too noisy. Rudolph also mentions the island of 1893, the year of a major depression, but they have never heard of Happy.It’s a cute joke, one I missed as a kid but that caught my attention now: You could imagine 2020 there, passed over by Rudolph because its inhabitants have also never heard of Happy. But the premise reveals its own holes. For one, the personifications are America- and white-centric. America was born in 1776, but it was also the year of a deadly hurricane in Guadeloupe and a war against Cherokee tribes. And the island descriptions are all deliberately myopic: 1893 was the year of a depression but it was also the year of the Belgian workers’ strike and the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1965, when civil rights protests and Beatlemania were in full swing, it was definitely a year of noise but also silences: the death of Winston Churchill, the assassination of Malcolm X, deaths of civilians and soldiers in Vietnam. And then the quiet face of Mars, photographed for the first time by Mariner 4, hanging like a red ornament, suspended in the silence of space.But this is how we think of time: one adjective at a time, the best or the worst within the narrow confines of our own perspectives. Otherwise we’d go mad, accounting for every second of every day, every victory and trifle.“Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” is a reminder, however, that there’s comfort in that, to think that our worst years also contain someone else’s best, that our best years are tempered with the worst, and that there’s a larger narrative always happening beyond the turn of a calendar page.So we’ve kicked the old year out onto its island, and welcomed baby Happy 2021 hoping for the best. There is still a pandemic. There are still people sick and dying or unemployed. But on New Year’s Day I passed by children playing in the park and texted a friend about her exciting new job offer. I happily browsed new art to hang in my apartment, listened to music and watched a TikTok musical. Our celebration of the passage of 2020 is arbitrary, because there is more to come: the good and the bad and the everything in between.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Pop Music Fandom Became Sports, Politics, Religion and All-Out War

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Great ReadHow Pop Music Fandom Became Sports, Politics, Religion and All-Out WarOn social media this year, the stan was ascendant, fueling commercial competition, trolling and other arcane battles. How did we get here?Superfans’ antics reached the mainstream this year, but have operated at a constant hum since the internet helped turn pop music loyalty into a 24-hours-a-day job.Credit…Son of Alan/Folio ArtDec. 25, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETBenjamin Cordero, a high school student from western New York, has a thing for pop divas, but especially Lady Gaga.Previously a casual fan of whatever was on the radio, Cordero was converted when the singer performed during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2017, and in the bountiful time since — which included “A Star Is Born” — his devotion has only grown.Earlier this year, as Lady Gaga prepared to release her latest album, “Chromatica,” Cordero joined Twitter, the current hub of pop superfandom, where he dedicated his account to all things Gaga. He tweeted thousands of times during the pandemic, often in dense lingo and inside jokes, along with hundreds of his fellow travelers, known as Little Monsters — internet friends whom he calls his “mutuals.”But these days, in these circles, joy and community are rarely enough. There are also battles to be waged and scores to be settled with rival groups or critics. And for Cordero, that meant trolling Ariana Grande fans.In October, with “Chromatica” having registered as a modest hit, Grande’s own new album, “Positions,” leaked online before its official release. Cordero, who liked Grande well enough but found her new music to be lacking, shared a link to the unreleased songs, much to the consternation of Grande fans, who worried that the bootlegged versions would damage the singer’s commercial prospects.Taking on the role of volunteer internet detectives, Grande fans proceeded to spend days playing Whac-a-Mole by flagging links to the unauthorized album as they proliferated across the internet. But Cordero, bored and sensing their agita, decided to bait them even further by tweeting — falsely — that he’d subsequently been fined $150,000 by Grande’s label for his role in spreading the leak. “is there any way I can get out of this,” he wrote. “I’m so scared.” He even shared a picture of himself crying.“They were rejoicing,” Cordero recalled giddily of the Grande fans he’d fooled, who spread the word far and wide that the leaker — a Gaga lover, no less — was being punished. “Sorry but I feel no sympathy,” one Grande supporter wrote on Reddit. “Charge him, put him in jail. you can’t leak an album by the world’s biggest pop star and expect no consequences.”This was pop fandom in 2020: competitive, arcane, sales-obsessed, sometimes pointless, chaotic, adversarial, amusing and a little frightening — all happening almost entirely online. While music has long been intertwined with internet communities and the rise of social networks, a growing faction of the most vocal and dedicated pop enthusiasts have embraced the term “stan” — taken from the 20-year-old Eminem song about a superfan turned homicidal stalker — and are redefining what it means to love an artist.On what is known as Stan Twitter — and its offshoots on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr and various message boards — these devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship wins and shooting percentages. They pledge allegiance to their favorites like the most rabid political partisans or religious followers. They organize to win awards show polls, boost sales and raise money like grass roots activists. And they band together to pester — or harass, and even dox — those who may dare to slight the stars they have chosen to align themselves with.“These people don’t even know who we are, but we spend countless days and months defending them from some stranger on the internet,” said Cordero, who later revealed his Grande prank, gaining nothing but the ability to revel in the backlash.“When someone says something about Lady Gaga that’s negative, a little bit of yourself inside is hurt,” he explained of his own loyalty. “You see yourself in your favorite artists — you associate with them, whether it’s just the music or it’s their personality. So when someone insults your favorite artist, you take that as a personal insult, and then you find yourself spending hours trying to convince someone in China that ‘Born This Way’ was her best album.”“It’s definitely a playing field to us,” Cordero said. “We throw them in the ring, they battle it out, we cheer them on.”This year — one in which so much of everyday life was confined to virtual spaces because of the coronavirus — such antics garnered mainstream attention when fans of the K-pop group BTS targeted President Trump (and donated to Black Lives Matter) or when Taylor Swift supporters spit venom at those critics who thought her new album was anything less than perfect. Recently, NBC was forced to apologize after fans of Selena Gomez revolted in reaction to an off-color joke about the singer in a reboot of “Saved by the Bell.”But these battles also occurred at a near-constant clip on a smaller scale, in large part because of the incentives of the platforms where we now gather.In the past, “the media that we had didn’t facilitate these huge public spaces where attention is a commodity,” said Nancy Baym, an author and researcher who has studied fan behavior online since the 1990s. “There’s been this very long process of fans gaining cultural attention, gaining influence, and recognition of how to wield that influence, and now we’re seeing it more because media are at a point where it’s really putting it out there in front of us.”Before destinations like Twitter, YouTube and Spotify — where numbers and what’s trending are central to the interface — there were self-selecting mailing lists, bulletin boards, Usenet news groups, fan sites and official URLs, where Grateful Dead or Prince fans could gather to digitize lyrics, sell tickets or trade tapes.The availability of analytics, including sales figures and chart positions, has helped transform fandom into something quantifiable.Credit…Son of Alan/Folio Art“It was more about the community within — connecting with other fans of the same artist — and wasn’t as competitive,” Baym said. “In some ways it was competitive, but it was more, ‘How many times have you seen them live?’”In the early 2000s, Myspace in many ways marked a turning point, presaging an era of social media in which fans could connect directly with artists in a way they hadn’t before, causing some people to become more hostile, abusive or entitled, Baym said. At the same time, “American Idol” pitted fandoms against one another in the form of a popular vote, and what were once more insular conversations among enthusiasts began oozing outward.Matthew James, 22, who started the nostalgic blog Pop Culture Died in 2009 when he was 15, recalled when music forums like ATRL or LiveJournal communities like Oh No They Didn’t! were a temporary escape. “You would log in after your day at school or work, and you had that small window of time on the internet,” he said. “Even 10 years ago, it was still confined to these corners — you could really distance yourself very easily. Now that is not possible since everything has been moved from separate websites to these centralized social media platforms.”“With iPhones and everything, we’ve seen that small window of time you could be a fan turn into 24/7,” James added. “People never log off.”Paul Booth, a professor of media studies at DePaul University, researches how people use popular culture for emotional support and pleasure. In an interview, he noted that in the last decade, “It’s gone from a general understanding that there are people out there that call themselves fans, but we don’t really know who they are or what they do to, ‘I’m a fan, you’re a fan, everyone’s a fan.’ It’s absolutely become everyday discussion.”“Before, those people existed, but they were meeting in the basement yelling at each other,” he said. “Now they’re meeting on Twitter and yelling at each other, and everyone can see it.”While early stereotypes about fanatics focused on possessed, shrieking teeny-boppers or stalkers and killers, from Mark David Chapman to “Misery” and Yolanda Saldivar, fans were taken more seriously as a subculture in the late 1990s and 2000s, when they were seen as creators themselves, spawning zines, fan fiction and YouTube montages.But with the rise of internet-first congregations like Beyoncé’s BeyHive, Justin Bieber’s Beliebers and Nicki Minaj’s Barbz in the 2010s, an evangelical fervor became a prerequisite and the word “stan,” used as both a noun and a verb, continued to gain prominence and even positive connotations.“It’s a reclamation of the negative term as a badge of honor — ‘I am a stan because I feel so much for this artist,’” Booth said.As the politicization of the internet ratcheted up after Gamergate in 2014, fan groups increasingly adopted the tactics of troll armies from 4chan and Reddit, working in large anonymous groups — often behind celebrity avatars that broadcast fealty — to bend online conversation to their will. And unlike admirers of “Star Wars” or Marvel properties, which are more sprawling narrative fandoms, music fans — like supporters of Bernie Sanders or President Trump — are often investing in a single individual, making things even more personal.“It all boils down to emotions, which is something we don’t take seriously enough in our culture,” Booth said. “When people are passionate about something to the point that they’re identifying with it, and it becomes part of who they are — whether it’s a political party, a political person or celebrity — they’re going to fight.”They’re also going to buy. As artists have come to recognize their direct influence over swaths of their online public — sometimes siccing them on detractors, or at least failing to call them off — they have also come to rely on their constant consumption, especially in the streaming era.“You might have a local” — stan slang for a casual fan — “buy a record,” said Cordero, the Lady Gaga loyalist. “But a person on Stan Twitter probably bought that record 10 times, streamed a song on three separate playlists and racked up hundreds and hundreds of plays.”He added: “It’s basically promotion, free labor — we’re practically chained against the wall with our phones.” (Lady Gaga recently advertised “Chromatica”-branded cookies as an “Oreo Stan Club.”)In addition to fueling a merchandise boom, these pop fans have taken it upon themselves to learn the rules governing the Billboard charts and the streaming platforms that provide their data, hoping to maximize commercial impact for bragging rights.“Shall we tighten up our muscles and get ready for a long march?” asks the “Ultimate ARMY Streaming Guide” posted to one fan site for BTS, whose faithful call themselves Army. Tips include to avoid bulk buying (“there is usually a purchase limit or it will count as one purchase only”); to compile playlists instead of looping tracks (“it will appear as a bot”); and to not put the songs on mute (“Don’t worry, you can plug in earphones if you’re planning to stream the whole day!”).The guide was written by a BTS fan named Avi, who is 26 and lives in Jakarta, Indonesia. She went “down the rabbit hole” after seeing the boy band perform at the American Music Awards in 2017, she said, and found community in the fandom. In addition to gathering online, Avi and her fellow BTS fans like to get together in person to celebrate the members’ birthdays from afar, buying them a cake, posing for pictures and making charitable donations in their name.“I’ve never seen anyone insincere when it comes to BTS,” Avi said in an interview. “No one is forcing us to do anything. It feels like we’re promoting BTS, but we are also promoting our own voices, our own struggles, our own hope for a better world.”By running up the group’s numbers, landing them atop various charts and trending-topic lists, the fans hope to inspire curiosity in others to check out BTS and take in the group’s messages of self-love. “I think of it as my own voice,” Avi said. “What I do for BTS, it’s not for them. I’m doing it with them.”But some see these relationships between fans and idols as parasocial ones — largely one-sided interactions with mass-media figures that masquerade as friendship — and worry about the long-term mental health effects of such devotion.Haaniyah Angus, a writer and former teenage stan who has written about her experiences in the subculture, noted that standom was “very heavily dependent on capitalism and buying” in a way that convinced consumers, on behalf of “really rich people,” that “their win is your win.”“For me and a lot of people I knew, a lot of it stemmed from us being very lonely, very depressed and anxious being like, ‘I’m going to forget what I’m going through at the moment and I’m going to focus on this celebrity,’” she said.This dynamic often served to stamp out dissent within the ranks, which was once seen as a crucial component of fandom.“I don’t think that toxic fandom is synonymous with stan culture,” said Booth, the fan studies researcher. “But I think one of the dangers of stan culture — that is, the danger of a group of fans who are so passionate about something that they’ll shut down negative comments — is that it can often shut down much-needed conversations where our media and celebrities let us down.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Pop and Jazz Wrapped Up the Past in 16 Boxed Sets

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Pop and Jazz Wrapped Up the Past in 16 Boxed SetsReissues and deluxe editions of albums by PJ Harvey, Lil Peep, Charles Mingus and others provide fresh looks at familiar works, and the creative processes that birthed them.Iggy Pop’s “The Bowie Years” revisits the two albums David Bowie produced for the Stooges frontman, “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life,” with a host of extras.Credit…UMeJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Giovanni Russonello and Dec. 23, 2020Neneh Cherry, ‘Raw Like Sushi (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’(Virgin/UMC; three CDs, $63.89; three LPs, $75.98)Alive with isolated, collagelike layers and exuberant ad-libs (“Now, the tambourine!”), the Swedish pop artist and rapper Neneh Cherry’s cult classic debut album, “Raw Like Sushi,” is a remixer’s dream. This 30th-anniversary set contains a vibrant remastered version of the original LP, along with two entire discs of imaginative remixes: Massive Attack transforms the synth ballad “Manchild” into a snaking, meditative groove, while the early hip-hop producer Arthur Baker reworks two different extended club mixes of Cherry’s ebullient hit “Buffalo Stance,” furthering its eternal cool. LINDSAY ZOLADZCredit…UMeCream, ‘Goodbye Tour Live 1968’(Polydor; four CDs, 66-page book, $69.98)Cream — Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass, Ginger Baker on drums — was a power trio of flashy virtuosos with big egos; it lasted only from 1966 to 1968. While its studio work was disciplined and cooperative, marrying blues to psychedelia, its live sets were improvisatory free-for-alls, with all three musicians goading one another and grappling for attention. This collection gathers three full California concerts from October 1968 along with Cream’s last show, Nov. 26 at the Royal Albert Hall; half of the tracks, including an entire San Diego concert, were previously unreleased. The nightly set list barely varies, but the performances are explosive jams — tempos shift (listen to the assorted “Crossroads”), vocal lines swerve and stretch, guitar solos take different paths each night. The California shows were carefully recorded, but with historic stupidity, the BBC filmed Cream’s last shows yet only captured the music in muddy, low-fi mono. Cream’s members didn’t think they played well at their farewell, and through the murk, that final show is full of wailing excess and rhythm-section overkill. But it deserved better preservation. JON PARELESBela Fleck, ‘Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions’(Craft; three CDs, one DVD, $49.99)The banjoist Bela Fleck visited Africa in 2005 with a film crew for a five-week trip to Mali, Gambia, Tanzania and Uganda, tracing the banjo’s African origins and collaborating with African musicians. The results were a documentary, “Throw Down Your Heart,” two albums of collaborations recorded in Africa and, in 2009, a tour with Toumani Diabaté, a Malian master of the harplike kora. Live recordings from the 2009 tour were released earlier this year as “The Ripple Effect,” a showcase for tradition-bridging melodies, flying fingers and shimmering plucked-string counterpoint. This box gathers them all, including a newly expanded version of the documentary. The whole project shows Fleck learning from every encounter and figuring out countless ways that his bright, speedy, bluegrass-rooted picking and runs can intertwine with African tunes and rhythms. PARELESCredit…UMePJ Harvey, ‘Dry — Demos’(Island; one CD, $13.98; one LP, $24.98)When a 22-year-old Polly Jean Harvey and her band released their sensual, earth-rumbling 1992 debut album, “Dry,” some listeners and critics regarded its songs as almost feral outpourings of spontaneous intensity. A recently released collection of demos proves, once and for all, they were remarkable and carefully constructed achievements of songcraft. Available for the first time as a stand-alone album, “Dry — Demos” is sparse, often consisting of just Harvey’s mesmeric voice and rhythmic stabs of guitar. But the bones of enduringly sturdy songs like “Dress,” “Sheela-Na-Gig” and “O Stella” are, impressively, already locked in place. As a finished product, “Dry” was hardly overproduced or polished, but the incredible artistic confidence of these demos brings the album’s elemental power, and Harvey’s songwriting gifts, into even greater clarity. ZOLADZElton John, ‘Jewel Box’(UMe/EMI; eight CDs in hardcover book, $109.80; four LP set “Deep Cuts Curated by Elton,” $89.98; three LP set “Rarities and B-Side Highlights,” $59.98; two LP set “And This Is Me…” $35.98)Elton John’s “Jewel Box” is at least three projects side by side; its vinyl versions make them available separately. For two CDs of “Deep Cuts,” John selects non-hit album tracks; he likes sad songs with dark lyrics, collaborations with his idols (Leon Russell, Little Richard) and music that evaded his usual reflexes. Three CDs of “Rarities 1965-71” — with five dozen previously unreleased songs — detail his songwriting apprenticeship with the lyricist Bernie Taupin, a good argument for Malcolm Gladwell’s proposition that expertise requires 10,000 hours of practice. At first they tried to write potential hits that were generic enough for others to cover; John once called them “pretty horrible.” The duo learned by obvious imitation, with near-miss mimicry of both British and American approaches: the Beatles, Motown, Phil Spector, country. They made and scrapped “Regimental Sgt. Zippo,” an album of pop psychedelia. Gradually, they homed in on a distinctive Elton John style: openhearted, big-voiced storytelling backed by two-fisted piano. Two more discs are housekeeping — an archive of B-sides and non-album tracks — and the final pair, “And This Is Me …” is a playlist of songs mentioned in John’s memoir, “Me” — which gives him a chance to end with his 2020 Oscar winner, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again.” PARELESLil Peep, ‘Crybaby’ and ‘Hellboy’(Lil Peep/AUTNMY; streaming services)Platforms change, their overlords get finicky, they get sold to conglomerates that might not respect the historical legacies they contain. Which is why it is crucial for artist catalogs that live in only one place online to be spread as far as possible. It’s a relief that the two key early Lil Peep albums, “Crybaby” and “Hellboy” (from 2016), have finally made it up from SoundCloud to other streaming services (fully cleared, with only minor tweaks). Lil Peep — who died in 2017 — was a critical syncretizer of emo and hip-hop: He was swaggering, dissolute and deeply broken, a bull’s-eye songwriter and a rangy singer and rapper. During this era, he finally figured out how all of those pieces fit together, especially on “Hellboy,” a pop masterpiece that pop just wasn’t ready for yet. JON CARAMANICACredit…Photo by Jochen Mönch, Design by Christopher Drukker‘Charles Mingus @ Bremen, 1964 & 1975’(Sunnyside; four CDs, $28.98)Charles Mingus was stubborn, self-righteous — and open to just about anything. When this bassist and composer gave his first concert in Germany in 1964, at the Radio Bremen studios, he was leading one of the finest bands of his career: a sextet that could carry a ton of weight while turning on a dime, like a dump truck made by Maserati. With Johnny Coles on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on reeds, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone, Jaki Byard on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums, the band followed Mingus’s plucky lead, leaping between Ellingtonian miniatures, bluesy hollers and extended avant-garde improv. The group’s now-legendary performances on that tour might well have represented a high-water mark. But when he returned to Bremen 11 years later, with a quintet, his penchant for misdirection and ludic sophistication had only grown stronger. Both shows are presented side-by-side in this four-CD set, which features remasters of the original radio source tapes. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOCredit…UMeCharlie Parker, ‘The Mercury & Clef 10-Inch LP Collection’(Verve; five LPs, 20-page booklet, $69.99)By the end of the 1940s, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was only a few years into his recorded career as a bandleader but he’d already turned jazz inside-out, contouring the next frontier in American modernism as one of bebop’s lead architects. The impresario and producer Norman Granz recognized Parker’s brilliance — and he saw the potential to broaden his appeal, by shining a softer spotlight on his lemon-cake tone and his richly coiled melodies. The 10-inch LPs that Parker recorded with Granz between 1949 and 1953, for the Mercury and Clef labels, offer portraits of the artist from many angles, including the steaming “Bird and Diz,” the only studio session to feature the Big Three of bebop (Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk); the gauzy orchestral fare of “Bird With Strings”; and “South of the Border,” mixing big-band jazz with Mexican and Afro-Caribbean styles. This boxed set features five newly remastered albums from that period, most of which have been out of print on vinyl since the ’60s. Faithful to their original format, the albums come on 10-inch discs, packaged with David Stone Martin’s now-classic artwork, while the booklet includes new essays from the pianist and jazz historian Ethan Iverson and the Grammy-winning writer David Ritz. RUSSONELLOCredit…UMeIggy Pop, ‘The Bowie Years’(Virgin; seven CDs, $99.98)In 1977, David Bowie restarted Iggy Pop’s career by producing two albums for him — “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life” — and joining Pop’s band on tour. Bowie admired Pop’s pure-id approach to songwriting and performing, but smoothed him out just a little — supplying some glam-rock-tinged backup — and spurred him onward, suggesting concepts and approaches. And the punk rock that Iggy and the Stooges had presaged nearly a decade earlier was taking hold in the United States. The alliance was fertile for both of them; Bowie would have a 1980s hit remaking their collaboration, “China Girl,” a song about acculturalization, imperialism and lust from “The Idiot.” This box includes the two studio albums, the howling 1978 live album “T.V. Eye” (with Bowie in the band on keyboard and backup vocals), a disc featuring rawer alternate mixes from the albums and three live Iggy concerts from 1977. Two of the live discs are low-fi and redundant, but a fierce 1977 set from the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland documents a telling rock moment. PARELESCredit…New West RecordsPylon, ‘Box’(New West; four LPs and 200-page hardcover book, $149.99; four CD version to be released in March 2021, $85.99)Formed in 1978 by art-school amateurs in Athens, Ga., Pylon made hardheaded, pioneering, danceable post-punk. Bass and drums staked out sinewy, deliberate, unswerving riffs. The guitar poked into interstices with pings or echoey chords or scratchy syncopation or dissonant counterpoint. Laced through the instrumental patterns, riding or defying them, were vocals by Vanessa Briscoe Hay: declaiming, rasping, chanting, confiding and yelling while she sang about daily life as a pragmatic revelation — and, onstage, moved like no one else. “Box,” on vinyl, includes Pylon’s first two albums, “Gyrate” (1980) and “Chomp” (1983), plus a disc of extras including Pylon’s brilliantly decisive first single, “Cool”/“Dub,” and a find: the band’s first recording, a vivid 1979 rehearsal tape that shows Pylon already fully self-defined. Pylon was very much of its time, akin to Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Bush Tetras and Pylon’s Athens predecessors and supporters, the B-52’s. But Briscoe Hay’s arresting voice and the music’s ruthless structural economy have made Pylon more than durable. PARELESCredit…Rhino RecordsLou Reed, ‘New York (Deluxe Edition)’(Rhino/Warner Bros.; three CDs, two LPs and one DVD, $89.98)Three decades after its release, Lou Reed’s midcareer 1989 opus, “New York,” retains a haunting present-tense resonance: “Halloween Parade” mourns West Village neighbors lost to an epidemic, “Last Great American Whale” frets about environmental collapse, and Trump and Giuliani even cavort through the appropriately titled “Sick of You.” This deluxe edition, released a year after the record’s 30th anniversary, features both a live album and a previously unreleased concert DVD. But its most revelatory additions are the small scraps of Reed’s “work tapes,” capturing such intimate moments as Reed figuring out the chord progression that would become the album’s hit “Dirty Blvd.,” or humming what the bass should sound like on a demo of “Endless Cycle.” Despite his shrugging exterior, these tapes show how deeply Reed cared about the details. ZOLADZCredit…Rhino RecordsThe Replacements, ‘Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)’(Rhino/Warner Bros.; three CDs and one LP, $64.98)Like their beloved Big Star, the Replacements were never quite in the right place at the right time — or maybe, whenever either band was on the brink of mainstream rock stardom, their self-destructive tendencies kicked in. Regardless, the Mats’s fifth album, “Pleased to Meet Me” from 1987, was at once their record company’s last push for success (see the echoing “Jimmy Iovine Remix” of the great single “Can’t Hardly Wait,” which, apparently, even the Midas-like producer couldn’t turn into a radio smash) and a spiritual communion with their underappreciated heroes (the group recorded the album at Big Star’s former Memphis stomping ground Ardent Studios, with their sometime producer Jim Dickinson). The resulting LP, naturally, was caught in the middle: It was too polished to ascend to the cult status of “Let It Be” from 1984, but too snarling and strange to be a hit. This fantastic and exhaustive deluxe edition (featuring 29 never-before-released tracks), though, finally puts it in its proper context: Raw and unvarnished demos (including the final recordings made with their original guitarist, Bob Stinson) restore these songs’ barbed, punk energy, while a rich spoil of melodic leftovers reassert this period as a golden age of Paul Westerberg’s songwriting. ZOLADZCredit…Janette BeckmanStretch and Bobbito, ‘Freestyle EP 1’(89tec9/Uprising Music; streaming services)For some mid-90s New York rap obsessives, the ne plus ultra collaboration is “The What,” by the Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man. For others, it’s “Brooklyn’s Finest,” from the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z. The connoisseur’s choice, however, might be traced back to the night in February 1995, that Big L brought Jay-Z up to the Columbia University radio station WKCR-FM for “The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show,” then the definitive proving ground for the city’s MCs. The result is startlingly good — an excellent showing from Jay-Z, still shaking loose of the twisty syllables he leaned on in his earliest recordings. But Big L — who was killed in 1999 — is the radiant star here, delivering left-field boasts in ice-cold arrangements. Previously available only on hard-to-find cassette releases and online rips, it appears here in an official release for the first time (though sadly without the between-verse banter). It’s one of three unearthed freestyles on this EP — the others are a Method Man and Ghostface Killah team-up, and also the Notorious B.I.G.’s first radio freestyle, a hellacious rumble from 1992. CARAMANICACredit…Cash MoneyVarious Artists, ‘Cash Money: The Instrumentals’(Cash Money/UMe; two LPs for $24.98 or streaming services)The beats used for many of the late 1990s breakout hits of New Orleans’s Cash Money Records were head spinners, one after the next — Juvenile’s fleet, squelchy “Ha,” B.G.’s prismatic “Bling Bling,” Lil Wayne’s chaotic “Tha Block Is Hot.” This compilation gathers those and many others — made mostly by the in-house maestro Mannie Fresh — for a set that lands somewhere between bounce futurism and avant-garde techno. It’s an expanded version of the label’s “Platinum Instrumentals” compilation from 2000, but a less disciplined one, too — the sleepy funk of “Shooter” is wildly out of place here, one of a few more straightforward Lil Wayne tracks that would have been better left off, inconsistent with the pure digital esoterica that made the label impossible to emulate. CARAMANICAVarious Artists, ‘Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music’(Dust-to-Digital; 100 MP3s and liner notes, $35)Excavated Shellac is a website created by Jonathan Ward, a collector of 78-rpm recordings of global music who shares his finds and his research. The digital collection “Excavated Shellac” unearths 100 of his previously unavailable discoveries from nearly as many countries, most released only regionally and long ago. They are extensively annotated, translating lyrics and delving into musicians’ biographies and each country’s recording history. It’s a trove of untamed three-minute dispatches from distant places and eras, full of raw voices, rough-hewed virtuosity and startling structures. Try the ferocious fiddle playing of Picoglu Osman from Turkey, the blaring reeds and scurrying patalla (xylophone) momentum of Sein Bo Tint from what was then Burma, or the accelerating, almost bluegrassy picking and singing of Tiwonoh and Sandikola, from Malawi. Nearly all the tracks are rowdy; as Ward’s notes explain, disc recording favored performers who were loud. PARELESCredit…David GahrGillian Welch, ‘Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs’(Acony; three CDs and 66-page book, $49.99; three LPs and 66-page book, $79.99)The four dozen songs on this collection were all unreleased until this year — they were recorded by the modern folk hero Gillian Welch and her longtime partner, David Rawlings, in a fevered stretch to fulfill a publishing contract in 2002. And yet these are the sketches of a patient perfectionist. Like most of the music Welch put out in that essential era, these songs are marked by the omniscience she builds with small details and her studiously unhurried voice (bolstered by Rawlings’s sturdy sweetness — see especially “I Only Cry When You Go”). It is a torrent of material from an artist who’s long communicated by trickle. And given the music’s elemental beauty, it seems absurd that it languished for all this time, all but unrecorded by others. CARAMANICAAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Breakout Stars of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Breakout Stars of 2020Here are the 12 stars and trends that managed to thrive and shine in an impossible year.Clockwise from bottom left: Sarah Cooper, Maria Bakalova, the hand of the artist Salman Toor, Jonathan Majors and Radha Blank.Credit…Clockwise from bottom left: Lacey Terrell/Netflix; Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times; Peter Fisher for The New York Times; Adria Malcolm for The New York Times; Douglas Segars for The New York Times Dec. 23, 2020Updated 7:44 a.m. ETWhile plenty of us felt trapped this year, wandering through the same spaces and talking to the same people, it was the artists and entertainers who kicked open windows to new sights, sounds and experiences. Yes, the pandemic dealt a significant hit to the culture world, but nothing could derail its creativity. So, despite the limitations, stars in a variety of disciplines managed to thrive and shine, and by doing so, made a difficult year more tolerable for most everyone. Here are 12 artists and trends who gave us a fresh perspective in 2020.Radha Blank wrote, directed and starred in the autobiographical satire “The 40-Year-Old Version.”Credit…Douglas Segars for The New York TimesFilmRadha BlankRadha Blank was the hero many of us needed in 2020, when the concept of time got an overdue interrogation. In her autobiographical satire “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” which was on Netflix, she portrays a playwright who — refusing to believe that her dreams have an expiration date — pivots to rap as a grown woman. Like her character, Blank, who grew up Brooklyn, is a 40-something playwright who knows what it’s like to fight to elevate her voice.And elevate it she did. She wrote, directed and starred in the film, her first feature, a New York Times Critic’s Pick that A.O. Scott called “a catalog of burdens and also a heroic act of unburdening.”In “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Cole explores sexual assault, truth, revenge and trauma; she also created the HBO series.Credit…Natalie Seery/HBOTelevisionMichaela CoelMichaela Coel may have created the most important TV show of 2020: “I May Destroy You.” The series, which premiered on HBO in June, is inspired by Coel’s own experience with sexual assault, and in it, she deftly plucks apart ideas around truth, revenge, anxiety, trauma and fear.Coel, a 33-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and actor, plays a writer who is drugged and raped in a bathroom stall. The assault leaves her traumatized and grappling with hazy, fragmented memories. “Coel brings a superb discipline to the portrayal of distress,” wrote Mike Hale, a TV critic at The Times.In a critic’s notebook, Salamishah Tillet, a professor and contributing critic at large for The Times, noted that the show could be considered “part of a larger cultural trend in which Black women’s experiences with sexual assault are appearing with greater frequency and treated with more sensitivity.” (She pointed to the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” and TV shows like “Queen Sugar,” “The Chi” and “Lovecraft Country” as examples.)“By offering multifaceted endings,” Tillet went on, “Coel gives victims of sexual assault, particularly Black women who have survived rape, some of the most radical and cathartic moments of television I have ever witnessed.”ComedySarah CooperSarah Cooper, 43-year-old comedian, made her mark in 2020 by pantomiming the words of President Trump in viral videos that have been viewed tens of millions of times across social media. Jim Poniewozik called her first Trump lip-sync, “How to Medical,” a “49-second tour de force” and said Cooper was helping to develop “a kind of live-action political cartooning.”“Cooper’s Trumpian drag is partly a caricature of performative masculinity,” Poniewozik wrote.The success of her videos helped land Cooper a Netflix special, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by Natasha Lyonne. “This special shows that she can do much more than lip-sync,” Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist at The Times, said of the production. “She has a promising future as an actor in television or movies.” She currently has a show in the works for CBS.Maria Bakalova, the Bulgarian actress who plays Borat’s teenage daughter in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” Credit…Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesFilmMaria BakalovaIt’s no easy feat to stand out next to the unabashed actor-prankster Sacha Baron Cohen, but Maria Bakalova, a 24-year-old from Bulgaria, was riveting as the teenage daughter of his Borat character in his most recent mockumentary film. As the culture reporter Dave Itzkoff put it in The Times: “Sacha Baron Cohen may be the star of ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,’ but it is Maria Bakalova who has emerged its hero.”Her performance also grabbed headlines for an edited scene involving President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is seen putting his hands down his pants in a hotel room, where Bakalova, impersonating a TV journalist, is interviewing him. He later denied any wrongdoing.About the opportunity to star in a major American film, Bakalova said: “I will be really grateful to Sacha for giving this platform to an Eastern European, to play a strong and complicated character who’s not just one thing.”Adrienne Warren was nominated for a Tony for her starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.” Credit…Molly Matalon for The New York TimesTheaterAdrienne WarrenAdrienne Warren’s starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” earned her a Tony nomination in October for best actress in a musical. But it was her vocal and steadfast stand on racial injustice, including in the arts world, that brought Warren, 33, more deeply into one of the most urgent conversations of 2020. In an impassioned, impromptu speech this summer — during the Times event Offstage: Opening Night on the subject of being Black on Broadway — she questioned whether she even wanted to continue performing as part of an institution that didn’t stand up for people like her.“The last thing on my mind right now is me going back to Broadway,” Warren said. But in an interview with The Times after her nomination, she said, “I know this is what I’m supposed to do, but the question is whether I want to do it at the address I’ve been doing it.”As for what a dream role might look like for her in the future: “I want to make sure that I’m telling stories that represent me as a Black woman and also push the needle forward in ways that resonate with people, both in this nation and abroad,” she said.Jonathan Majors made a mark in both HBO’s “Lovecraft Country” and the Spike Lee drama “Da 5 Bloods.”Credit…Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesTelevisionJonathan MajorsJonathan Majors isn’t afraid of pain, and that may just be his secret to success. “I’m willing to hurt more,” he told Alexis Soloski in The Times over the summer. “It doesn’t bother me.”The 31-year-old star had a big year doing just that to great effect onscreen, as a Korean War veteran in the supernatural HBO thriller “Lovecraft Country,” set in 1950s Jim Crow America, and the son of a Vietnam War veteran in “Da 5 Bloods,” Spike Lee’s drama for Netflix that was named a Critic’s Pick in The Times by A.O. Scott.“Emotions in the men in my family run deep,” Majors told Soloski — who described him as “an actor of precision and intensity.” When asked if acting gave him a place to put those big emotions, he said: “With acting, it was almost like I was in a corridor, and it just appeared to me and said, ‘Go that way, son.’ I didn’t get in trouble once I started acting. I had a place to put the energy, to put my focus.”The artist Christine Sun Kim performing in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl in Miami in February.Credit…A J Mast for The New York TimesArtChristine Sun KimIn February, just minutes ahead of the Super Bowl in Miami, the artist Christine Sun Kim stood at the 40-yard line performing in American Sign Language as Yolanda Adams sang “America the Beautiful” and Demi Lovato sang the national anthem.“As a child of immigrants, a grandchild of refugees, a Deaf woman of color, an artist and a mother, I was proud to perform,” she wrote in an Op-Ed for The Times afterward. But because only a fraction of her performance was aired, she called the experience “a huge disappointment — a missed opportunity in the struggle for media inclusiveness on a large scale.”“Being deaf in America has always been political,” she wrote.Kim, 40, who was born in California and is now based in Berlin, has spent years channeling this perspective into her art. At the Whitney Biennial in New York last year, she exhibited hand-drawn charcoal drawings from her “Degrees of Deaf Rage in the Art World,” and in 2013, the Museum of Modern Art selected her for its exhibition “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” dedicated to sound art.“I want people to start thinking about what deafness means,” she told Vogue this year, “and maybe that will reduce the stigma and society will be more inclusive of people with disabilities.”MusicVerzuzYou could call it a battle, a face-off, a showdown. But Verzuz is also something else entirely: a pandemic pivot, cutting right to the very core of quarantine entertainment by combining livestreaming and nostalgia while filling a hole left by canceled live shows and shuttered clubs.Since April, Verzuz, the creation of Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, has streamed over 20 battles. Each one has brought together two hip-hop or R&B heavyweights: Gladys Knight vs. Patti LaBelle, Erykah Badu vs. Jill Scott, Gucci Mane vs. Jeezy, Babyface vs. Teddy Riley, Snoop Dogg vs. DMX, Ludacris vs. Nelly, to name a few. Millions of people have tuned in.Initially, Verzuz was streamed on Instagram Live. In July, Verzuz and Apple Music announced they’d struck a partnership which allowed the videos to be viewed live and on-demand on that platform, too.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The Times, called the events staples of this era and “less battles in the conventional sense than choreographed chest-puffing combined with bows of respect.” To that point, there is no winner winner. As Swizz Beatz told ABC News: “The people won, the culture won, the music won.”The artist Salman Toor has his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” up at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Credit…Peter Fisher for The New York TimesArtSalman ToorThe painter Salman Toor was about to have his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art early this year when the shutdown thwarted the whole thing. He took it pretty well. “My first reaction was, thank God,” he told The Times in June. “I’m not a social animal.” But disappointment inevitably crept in as he realized the exhibition might never happen.Thankfully for him and fans of figurative and queer art, the show eventually did go up at the Whitney, where it will appear through April. And that’s only the start for Toor. Over the summer, he joined the gallery Luhring Augustine, which will open an exhibition of his work in the next few years.Toor, 37 — who was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the United States in 2002 — primarily depicts gay men of South Asian descent. In The Times, the writer Ted Loos described Toor’s contemporary settings: “iPhones appear here and there, the glow emanating from them emphasized with bright lines.” Toor said that he aspired to represent “what this new free space is like,” referring to living an openly queer life. In Pakistan, gay sex is illegal. “People are curious to know what it means to have the freedom of so much choice, and what is the nature of that freedom and what is the cost of that.”TheaterElizabeth StanleyUp against Adrienne Warren for that Tony is Elizabeth Stanley, who was nominated for her gutting performance as Mary Jane — “a brittle tiger mom suppressing secret trauma,” as Jesse Green, a theater critic for The Times, put it — in “Jagged Little Pill,” based on Alanis Morissette’s smash album from 1995. When Broadway shut down, Stanley, 42, did not take too long before shifting her energy toward digital performances.In April, she told Deadline that she’d already been wondering about what else she could do during the pandemic: “How can I twist to this and find something new and exciting out of this time?”What came of that question epitomized what much of theater looked like in 2020: creating new digital spaces for live performance.In April, she delivered a jaw-dropping rendition of “The Miller’s Son” from “A Little Night Music,” for the acclaimed event “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration.” In June, she sang her wrenching rendition of “You Learn,” from “Jagged Little Pill,” for an Opening Night Times event on the future of Broadway. On Dec. 13, Stanley and her “Jagged Little Pill” co-stars reunited for “Jagged Live In NYC: A Broadway Reunion Concert.”Kali Uchis performing in Atlanta in 2018. She recently released the album “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).”Credit…Paul R. Giunta/Invision, via Associated PressMusicKali UchisIn 2018, Kali Uchis released a debut album titled “Isolation.” Clearly she was ahead of her time. In November, the Colombian-American artist — with a moody, seductive, dance-inducing style — dropped her second studio album, this time predominantly in Spanish, “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).” (Its lead single, “Aquí Yo Mando,” features the up-and-coming rapper Rico Nasty.) The album “goes genre-hopping and era-hopping, from romantically retro orchestral bolero to brittle reggaeton,” Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic of The Times, wrote this month.Having grown up between Colombia and the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, Uchis, 26, had many inspirations and influences, she told Interview magazine. “The last thing I ever want to do is be a predictable artist. I love that my fans never know what to expect when I drop a song.”DanceThe Year of the SoloIt wasn’t just that the coronavirus put an end to live performance in March. The need for social isolation uprooted every part of what gets a dance onto a stage: Suddenly, there were no more classes, no more rehearsals. How to fill that void? The solo.This solitary form has provided an outlet for frustration, for sadness and even for euphoria as dance artists continue to find meaning through movement. It’s true that some attempts have been sentimental and aimless, but much good has emerged from it, too. Instagram, from the start, illuminated these explorations in a steady stream of posts; choreographers worked with dancers remotely to create films in which the body could be fearless and free. “State of Darkness,” Molissa Fenley’s 1988 solo revived for seven dancers, was a glittering, harrowing reminder of the achievement that comes from strength, both internal and external.One of its interpreters, the dancer Sara Mearns, said that she saw herself as “someone that has gone through really, really hard times, but then in the end has come out stronger and on top.” Yes, dance and dancers are suffering right now. But the solo has given it — and them — a powerful voice. — Gia Kourlas, dance critic for The New York TimesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2020, in Their Words

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Artists We Lost in 2020, in Their WordsGabe Cohn, Peter Libbey and Dec. 22, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETIt’s always difficult to lose a favorite actor or a beloved musician. But in 2020, a year of crisis upon crisis, some of those losses were especially painful, brought on by a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone. The artists on this list could help us better understand the time we’re living through, or at least help us get through it with a smile or cathartic cry. Here is a tribute to them, in their own words.Chadwick BosemanCredit…Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times“When I dared to challenge the system that would relegate us to victims and stereotypes with no clear historical backgrounds, no hopes or talents, when I questioned that method of portrayal, a different path opened up for me, the path to my destiny.”— Chadwick Boseman, actor, born 1976 (Read the obituary.)Ann ReinkingCredit…Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“It’s crucial to know where the work stops and your life begins.”— Ann Reinking, dancer, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)Larry KramerCredit…Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.”— Larry Kramer, writer, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Luchita HurtadoCredit…Anna Watson/Camera Press, via Redux“When that first photograph was taken of Earth from space and you saw this little ball in blackness … I became aware of what I felt I was. I feel very much that a tree is a relative, a cousin. Everything in this world, I find, I’m related to.”— Luchita Hurtado, artist, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Sean ConneryCredit…Bob Haswell/Express, via Getty Images“If you start thinking of your image, or what the mysterious ‘they’ out there are thinking of you, you’re in a trap. What’s important is that you’re doing the work that’s best for you.”— Sean Connery, actor, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Little RichardCredit…Eloy Alonso/Reuters“I’m not conceited — I’m convinced.”— Little Richard, singer, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Alex TrebekCredit…Alamy“My life has been a quest for knowledge and understanding, and I am nowhere near having achieved that. And it doesn’t bother me in the least. I will die without having come up with the answers to many things in life.”— Alex Trebek, TV host, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Othella DallasCredit…Beda Schmid“Dancing and singing is all I always wanted. Doing what you want makes you happy — and old.”— Othella Dallas, dancer, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Eddie Van HalenCredit…Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty Images“All I know is that rock ’n’ roll guitar, like blues guitar, should be melody, speed and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”— Eddie Van Halen, guitarist, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)Ennio MorriconeCredit…Paul Bergen/EPA, via Shutterstock“In my opinion, the goal of music in a film is to convey what is not seen or heard in the dialogue. It’s something abstract, coming from afar.”— Ennio Morricone, composer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)Diana RiggCredit…Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“The older you get, I have to say, the funnier you find life. That’s the only way to go. If you get serious about yourself as you get old, you are pathetic.”— Diana Rigg, actress, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)Helen ReddyCredit…Herb Ball/NBC Universal, via Getty Images“I would like to thank God because she makes everything possible.”— Helen Reddy, singer, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Jerry StillerCredit…Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times“Laughter is the answer to all the pain I experienced as a kid. When I’m not doing it, it all gets eerie and weird. I am only left with the memories that inhabit me that can only be knocked out by hearing laughter.”— Jerry Stiller, comedian, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Christiane Eda-PierreCredit…Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“I have never had any support, I have not been encouraged by anyone, it is not in my character or the customs of my family. I made myself on my own, thanks to my work.”— Christiane Eda-Pierre, singer, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Milton GlaserCredit…Robert Wright for The New York Times“I am totally a believer in the idea that style is a limitation of perception and understanding. And what I’ve tried in my life is to avoid style and find an essential reason for making things.”— Milton Glaser, designer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)CristinaCredit…Ebet RobertsMy life is in a turmoilMy thighs are black and blueMy sheets are stained so is my brainWhat’s a girl to do?— Cristina, singer, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Adam SchlesingerCredit…Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty Images“I’d rather write about a high school prom or something than write about a midlife crisis, you know?”— Adam Schlesinger, songwriter, born 1967 (Read the obituary.)Anthony ChisholmCredit…Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m an actor. I can play a lizard, anything. I’ve worked in ‘nontraditional’ theater. I did ‘Of Mice and Men.’ Played Slim. The great Joe Fields did a Willy Loman. We as actors want to act.”— Anthony Chisholm, actor, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Olivia de HavillandCredit…Julien Mignot for The New York Times“I would prefer to live forever in perfect health, but if I must at some time leave this life, I would like to do so ensconced on a chaise longue, perfumed, wearing a velvet robe and pearl earrings, with a flute of champagne beside me and having just discovered the answer to the last problem in a British cryptic crossword.”— Olivia de Havilland, actress, born 1916 (Read the obituary.)Krzysztof PendereckiCredit…Rafal Michalowski/Agencja Gazeta, via Reuters“Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books, not everybody has to do it. Music is not for everybody.”— Krzysztof Penderecki, composer, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Helen LaFranceCredit…Bruce Shelton, via Associated Press“If I do something somebody likes, well, I’m satisfied because somebody liked what I did, but I don’t think it’s important.”— Helen LaFrance, artist, born 1919 (Read the obituary.)Kirk DouglasCredit…Associated Press“If I thought a man had never committed a sin in his life, I don’t think I’d want to talk with him. A man with flaws is more interesting.”— Kirk Douglas, actor, born 1916 (Read the obituary.)Aileen Passloff, leftCredit…Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“I was strong and tireless and full of passion and loved dancing as deeply as one could ever love anything.”— Aileen Passloff, dancer, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Kenny RogersCredit…Wally Fong/Associated Press“I love my wife, I love my family, I love my life, and I love my music.”— Kenny Rogers, singer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)Peter BeardCredit…Shawn Ehlers/WireImage, via Getty Images“An artist who goes around proclaiming that the art he’s making is art is probably making a serious mistake. And that’s one mistake I try not to make.”— Peter Beard, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)Charley PrideCredit…Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images“What we don’t need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgment of what belongs and what doesn’t.”— Charley Pride, singer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)Elizabeth WurtzelCredit…Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times“The way I am is that I put everything I have into whatever I’m doing or thinking about at the moment. So it’s not right when people say I’m self-absorbed. I think I’m just absorbed.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel, author, born 1967 (Read the obituary.)Leon FleisherCredit…Steve J. Sherman“I was driven, if anything, even harder by all of my successes. There was always more to attain, and more to achieve, and more musical depths to plumb, and lurking behind it all, the terrifying risk of failure.”— Leon Fleisher, pianist, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)Zoe CaldwellCredit…Patrick A. Burns/The New York Times“I know the business of acting is sharing an experience, provoking an emotion. I don’t want to use the world love. It’s an abused word, hackneyed. But the truth is that I love to act in the theater.”— Zoe Caldwell, actress, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Louis Johnson, leftCredit…Marbeth“I am a dancer who loves dance, any kind of dance. In choreographing, I don’t think of dance as ballet, modern or anything, just dance.”— Louis Johnson, dancer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Terrence McNallyCredit…Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I like to surprise myself. I’ve always been attracted to projects where I don’t know how they’re going to turn out. If I ever evince bravery in my life, it tends to be at a keyboard.”— Terrence McNally, playwright, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)Jean ErdmanCredit…Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“I found myself involved with the dance as a child in Hawaii. We’d have picnics on the sand and get up and do hulas. I didn’t even know what I was talking about at the time, but I wanted to create my own theater.”— Jean Erdman, dancer, born 1916 (Read the obituary.)Bill WithersCredit…Jake Michaels for The New York Times“I’m not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don’t think I’ve done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia.”— Bill Withers, singer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)ChristoCredit…Andrea Frazzetta for The New York Times“I am allergic to any art related to propaganda. And everything: commercial propaganda, political propaganda, religious propaganda — it is all about propaganda. And the greatness of art, like poetry or music, is that it is totally unnecessary.”— Christo, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)John le CarréCredit…Charlotte Hadden for The New York Times“I’m horrified at the notion of autobiography because I’m already constructing the lies I’m going to tell.”— John le Carré, author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Mirella FreniCredit…Karin Cooper/Washington National Opera“Life nails you to something real in the falsehood of the stage. I have always felt a connection between daily life and art. I’ve always known where the stage door was, to get in and get out. Some others get lost in the maze. My reality has been my key.”— Mirella Freni, singer, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Ming Cho LeeCredit…Robert Caplin for The New York Times“I’ve been criticized for doing very Brechtian design, but when I go to a play or an opera, I love getting involved rather than just looking at it. I prefer a total theatrical experience to an analytical experience.”— Ming Cho Lee, theater designer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Lynn SheltonCredit…Stuart Isett for The New York Times“You can pick up a camera. The technology is there. You can get your friends together and you can make a movie. You should do it. Now.”— Lynn Shelton, director, born 1965 (Read the obituary.)Nick Cordero, center.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The producer kept telling me: ‘Get tough. Get mean. Get angry.’ But I’m a nice guy. I’m Canadian.”— Nick Cordero, actor, born 1978 (Read the obituary.)Toots HibbertCredit…Michael Putland/Getty Images“You have got to be tough. Don’t just give up in life. Be strong, and believe in what you believe in.”— Toots Hibbert, singer, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)Regis PhilbinCredit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times“I want people to enjoy what I do, and understand what I’m doing is for their enjoyment. And that’s all I can ask for.”— Regis Philbin, TV host, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Mary Higgins ClarkCredit…Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Let others decide whether or not I’m a good writer. I know I’m a good Irish storyteller.”— Mary Higgins Clark, author, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Irrfan KhanCredit…Chad Batka for The New York Times“No one could have imagined I would be an actor, I was so shy. So thin. But the desire was so intense.”— Irrfan Khan, actor, born 1967 (Read the obituary.)Betty WrightCredit…Paul Bergen/Redferns, via Getty Images“As long as you keep yourself in love with people, you can transcend time.”— Betty Wright, singer, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)John Prine Credit…Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesWhen I get to heavenI’m gonna take that wristwatch off my armWhat are you gonna do with timeAfter you’ve bought the farm?— John Prine, musician, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Year in Improvised Music: ‘Everything’s Changing. So the Music Should.’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Year in Improvised Music: ‘Everything’s Changing. So the Music Should.’The pandemic compressed live music onto screens, and Black Lives Matter protests brought it back to the streets. What will it all look like, and sound like, in 2021?Norman Edwards and Endea Owens playing outdoors. Ms. Owens helped put together bands to perform at protests.Credit…Anthony ArtisDec. 17, 2020When concerts and in-person gatherings shut down this spring, livestreamed shows quickly started to feel like a glorified last resort. I found myself avoiding them. But a Facebook video caught my eye one day in June, of the trombonist Craig Harris performing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Accompanied by the keyboardist Pete Drungle, framed by a flowering grove and a trellis, he played “Breathe,” a suite of concise and soothing music that sounds like the sum of Mr. Harris’s experiences on the New York scene since the 1970s.He had written “Breathe” after Eric Garner’s killing by New York police in 2014; it was his reflection on the notion of breath as a great equalizer, and as the source of Mr. Harris’s own powers as a trombonist. But at the start of this video, he turns to those affected by Covid-19. He offers the suite as “a sonic reflection for those who have passed, and those who are born,” Mr. Harris says. “We have to think about the lives of the people who are born in this period now. That’s a whole thing, the beginning and the end.”The performance was taped in May, before George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and its nightmarish resonance with Garner’s death. By the time Mr. Harris’s video was released in June, protesters were constantly in the streets, and the suite’s original message had become painfully relevant again. But even in this new light, the poise and sensitivity that Mr. Harris had intentionally brought to this performance didn’t feel out of place.For any lover of live performances — but especially jazz and improvised music — 2020 will be remembered, joylessly, as the year of the stream. Musicians have done their best with what they’ve had, usually by leaning into intimacy; we saw a lot of artists’ bedrooms this year. But it was actually in the moments when musicians zoomed out — when they made our perspective bigger, and connected this difficult moment with a greater sense of time — that improvised music did its most necessary work.With concerts impossible, the vocalist and interdisciplinary artist Gelsey Bell assembled “Cairns,” a remarkable audio tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; it’s part philosophy talk and part experimental music composition, built of Ms. Bell’s overdubbed vocal improvisations and the sounds of the cemetery as she walks.Green-Wood is a majestic place, and there is something robust and alive about it, even though generations of history lie in its soil. “As I started making it, I was really thinking about our relation to the land and the history it holds, and then where we find ourselves now,” Ms. Bell said of “Cairns” in an interview. “To be connected to the land you live on is to be connected to both its history and the other people that you’re sharing space with.”On the hourlong recording, Ms. Bell tells of various little-known but significant figures, using their histories to illuminate what she calls “the apocalyptic foundations of this place.” And she gives us the histories of the trees, instructing us to listen to the ways they sing to each other, and will continue to after we’re gone.Hiking up a hill, Ms. Bell and her collaborator Joseph White turn the sounds of her breathing and walking into a kind of mulchy, rhythmic music. “Because of breath, we’ll never forget how stuck in time we are, how mortal we are,” she says, making the word “mortal” sound like a good thing.It wasn’t impossible to make music via stream that really pulled people together — just rare — and on this front, couples had an advantage. The week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended all concerts be put on hold, the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and the pianist Sullivan Fortner propped up a camera beside the piano in their living room and broadcast a set of music via Facebook to thousands of viewers. The comments section turned into a chattery town square, full of nervous and grateful people unsure of what the coming months would bring.The bassist Dezron Douglas and the harpist Brandee Younger started performing duets from home every week, ultimately collecting them in a disarming album, “Force Majeure,” released this month. The saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and the drummer Tom Rainey got in the habit of recording their wide-ranging living room improvisations and publishing them on Bandcamp, in a series that continues under the name “Stir Crazy.”A listener taking in Gelsey Bell’s “Cairns,” an audio tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.Credit…Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesMs. Bell said she thought “about our relation to the land and the history it holds, and then where we find ourselves now.”Credit…Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesWorking alone, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg also started posting daily solo recordings in March on a Bandcamp page labeled “Plague Diary”; it now has nearly 200 entries. Listen for long enough and the tracks of overdubbed instrumentals and low, repetitive rhythms start to run together, like the hazy interminable feeling of existing at home amid lockdown.The saxophonist Steve Lehman swung in another direction, releasing a less-than-10-minute album, “Xenakis and the Valedictorian,” featuring snippets of exercises and experiments that he had recorded on his iPhone, practicing in his car each night so that his wife and daughter could have peace in the house.Continuing to perform during the pandemic — near impossible as it often was — was both a creative and a financial imperative for improvisers, many of whom saw all of their upcoming performances canceled in March. But newly liberated from obligation, inspired by the movement sweeping the country, many also began to organize.Much good critical attention was paid this year in the music press to the ways that our listening habits have had to adjust to lockdown, and to how performances have changed. But what about the institutions that also fell quiet — especially the schools and major arts nonprofits, which have perpetuated massive racial and economic disparities in access to the music? Will they all look the same when things come back online?The trombonist Craig Harris performed “Breathe” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in May.Credit…Brooklyn Botanic GardenMusicians across the world came together via Zoom to organize the We Insist! collective to address these questions, eventually coming up with a list of demands to promote racial equity in major educational institutions and philanthropic groups in the jazz world. A group of artists of historically underrepresented gender identities came together in the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians collective, striking a creative blow against patriarchy in jazz. And as protests overtook streets nationwide, jazz musicians were often there.The bassist Endea Owens showed up on the second day of protests in New York back in May, she said in an interview. She almost immediately felt a need to contribute music, and she helped put together bands that played daily at demonstrations over the next three weeks. “We were out there for two to three weeks, walking from Washington Square Park to the Barclays Center, just playing,” she said. “That created a ripple effect of something creative, something positive. You felt like you had to fight for your lives.”In Harlem, where she lives, Ms. Owens started a monthly series of masked, socially distanced cookout concerts. Using donations as well as money from her own pocket, she has handed out 100 free meals at each one, while paying underemployed jazz musicians to perform. As a member of Jon Batiste’s Stay Human, the house band for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Ms. Owens has been the rare jazz musician this year who could count on a steady paycheck.But without nightly gigs, she has still had an excess of downtime. Now that she has made connections with other organizers and mutual aid groups in the area, she is thinking about how to continue that effort into the future, even if the usual work opportunities for musicians come back.“There’s a big opportunity to make jazz feel more familiar and make it feel more accessible, where anyone can go to these shows,” Ms. Owens said. “I don’t even think it’s possible to go back to the way we did things. Everything’s changing. So the music should. The way we perform, the way we approach it, the places where we have this music.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020Listen to our critics’ favorites from a year in which much of the energy in music came from recordings.Credit…The New York TimesAnthony Tommasini, Zachary Woolfe, Joshua Barone, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, David Allen and Dec. 17, 2020Thomas Adès: Berceuse from ‘The Exterminating Angel’“In Seven Days”; Kirill Gerstein, piano (Myrios)The composer Thomas Adès and the pianist Kirill Gerstein’s artistically fruitful friendship has given us two essential albums this year: the premiere recording of Mr. Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring Mr. Gerstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon); and this one, which includes a solo arrangement of the harrowing and slippery Berceuse from Mr. Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel.” JOSHUA BARONEBerceuse from “The Exterminating Angel”Myrios◆ ◆ ◆Bach: Cello Suite No. 4, GigueBach: Complete Cello Suites (Transcribed for Violin); Johnny Gandelsman, violin (In a Circle)From the beginning of this movement, ornamented with the insouciance of folk music, it’s difficult to resist tapping along with your foot. That urge doesn’t really leave throughout the rest of the six cello suites, lithely rendered here on solo violin by Johnny Gandelsman. This is Bach in zero gravity: feather-light and freely dancing. JOSHUA BARONESuite No. 4, GigueIn a Circle◆ ◆ ◆Beethoven: Symphony No. 2, Allegro moltoBeethoven: Symphonies and Overtures; Vienna State Opera Orchestra and others; Hermann Scherchen, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The few new Beethoven symphonies released in this, his 250th birthday year, have largely offered more evidence for the drab state of interpretive tastes today. Not so the rereleases — above all this remastered and exceptionally bracing cycle that was eons ahead of its time when it first came out in the 1950s. Scherchen’s Beethoven — like this Second Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — is fast, sleek and astonishing detailed, as exciting as anything set down since. DAVID ALLENSymphony No. 2, Allegro moltoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Nadia Boulanger: ‘Soir d’hiver’“Clairières: Songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger”; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Myra Huang, piano (Avie)After Lili Boulanger, the gifted French composer, died in 1918 at just 24, her devoted older sister Nadia suffered doubts about her own composing and turned to teaching. On this lovely recording, the tenor Nicholas Phan performs elegant songs by both sisters, ending with Nadia’s misty, rapturous “Soir d’hiver,” a 1915 setting of her poem about a young mother abandoned by her lover. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Soir d’hiver”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, RomanceChopin: Piano Concertos; Benjamin Grosvenor, piano; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Elim Chan, conductor (Decca)There’s pianism of historic caliber on this release, and another mark of Mr. Grosvenor’s breathtaking maturity, even though he is still in his 20s. Summoning playing of pure poetry, he lavishes on these concertos all his lauded sensitivity, innate sense of pace and effortless way with phrasing. He’s matched bar for bar by Ms. Chan, an impressive young conductor who makes an occasion of orchestral writing that in other hands sounds routine. DAVID ALLENPiano Concerto No. 1, RomanceDecca◆ ◆ ◆Duke Ellington: ‘Light’“Black, Brown and Beige”; Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis (Blue Engine)If Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall performance of his “Black, Brown and Beige” remains matchless, its radio broadcast sound has dated, making the crispness of this faithful recent rendition worth savoring. Sterling interpretation and production values permit a fresh look at “Light,” including the elegant way Ellington weaves together motifs heard earlier in “Black,” just before a rousing finish. SETH COLTER WALLS“Light”Blue Engine◆ ◆ ◆Eriks Esenvalds: ‘Earth Teach Me Quiet’“Rising w/ the Crossing”; the Crossing (New Focus)Earlier this year, when singing together became just about the most dangerous thing you could do, Donald Nally, the magus behind the Crossing, our finest contemporary-music choir, began posting daily recordings from their archives. He called it “Rising w/ the Crossing,” also the title of an album of a dozen highlights. There’s David Lang’s eerily prescient reflection on the 1918 flu pandemic, performed last year, and Alex Berko’s stirring “Lincoln.” But I keep returning to Eriks Esenvalds’s dreamily unfolding appeal to the Earth, its text a prayer of the Ute people of the American Southwest: a work of true radiance, fired by the precision and passion of this spectacular group. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Earth Teach Me Quiet”New Focus◆ ◆ ◆Antoine Forqueray: ‘Jupiter’“Barricades”; Thomas Dunford, lute; Jean Rondeau, harpsichord (Erato)This is Baroque music as hard-rock jam: driving, intense, dizzying, two musicians facing off in a brash battle that raises both their levels. It is the raucous climax of an album that creates a new little repertory for lute and harpsichord duo, with arrangements of favorites and relative obscurities that highlight Thomas Dunford and Jean Rondeau’s sly, exuberant artistic chemistry. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Jupiter”Warner Classics◆ ◆ ◆Ash Fure: ‘Shiver Lung’“Something to Hunt”; International Contemporary Ensemble; Lucy Dhegrae and Alice Teyssier, vocalists (Sound American)I try not to be fussy with audio quality. But if anything calls for an exception, it’s this long-awaited collection of music by Ash Fure — works that experiment with how sounds are made and felt. So before hitting play, gather your focus, along with your best headphones or speakers, for an intensely visceral listening experience. JOSHUA BARONE“Shiver Lung”Sound American◆ ◆ ◆Handel: ‘Pensieri, voi mi tormentate’“Agrippina”; Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano; Il Pomo d’Oro; Maxim Emelyanychev, conductor (Erato)A shot of venom, boring its way into the brain: There are some arias that aim to soothe anxiety, but for pure cathartic transference of all the anger, fear and impotence that 2020 has sparked, this aria — “Thoughts, you torment me” — by the title character of Handel’s “Agrippina” is the ticket. The fiercely dramatic Joyce DiDonato brings her multihued mezzo and over-the-top embellishments to the music, while the period-instrument orchestra pushes things along with raw-edged insistence. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Pensieri, voi mi tormentate”Erato◆ ◆ ◆Handel: Harpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeHandel: Suites for Harpsichord; Pierre Hantaï, harpsichord (Mirare)Handel’s eight suites for harpsichord, published in 1720, haven’t always gotten as much attention or respect among performers as the keyboard works of Couperin, Rameau or, especially, Bach. Sometimes they’ve been viewed more or less as training exercises: good for technique but not quite sublime. Pierre Hantaï, known for his vivid Scarlatti, dispels the slightly derogatory preconceptions with suave danciness and lucid touch. ZACHARY WOOLFEHarpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeMirare◆ ◆ ◆David Hertzberg: ‘Is that you, my love?’“The Wake World”; Maeve Hoglund, soprano; Samantha Hankey, mezzo-soprano; Elizabeth Braden, conductor (Tzadik)With his playfully convoluted 2017 fairy tale opera “The Wake World,” David Hertzberg demonstrated that voluptuous, sweeping elements of grand opera could be reimagined for today. In the work’s swelling, shimmering climactic duet between a young seeker and her fairy prince, Ravel meets Messiaen, and Wagner meets Scriabin; the music is spiky, original and wondrous strange. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Is that you, my love?”Tzadik◆ ◆ ◆Nathalie Joachim: ‘Dam mwen yo’“Forward Music Project 1.0”; Amanda Gookin, cello (Bright Shiny Things)Even when brief and minimalist, Nathalie Joachim’s compositions cross complex ranges of emotion. Here, in a piece for cello (and vocals recorded by its composer), the somber cast of mood at the opening is complicated by a change in gait. The effect is akin to what you might feel inventing a new dance on the spot, while trudging through otherwise grim surroundings. SETH COLTER WALLS“Dam mwen yo”Bright Shiny Things◆ ◆ ◆George Lewis: ‘As We May Feel’“Breaking News”; Studio Dan (Hat Hut)Boisterous riffs and counter-riffs seem to suggest improvisatory practices; after all, this veteran artist has explored those practices. Yet George Lewis’s 25-minute joy ride is fully notated. And it was written for an Austrian ensemble which appreciates the chug and wail of Duke Ellington’s train-imitation music, as well as the rigors of extended-technique modernism. SETH COLTER WALLS“As We May Feel”Hat Hut◆ ◆ ◆Meredith Monk: ‘Downfall’“Memory Game”; Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble; Bang on a Can All-Stars (Cantaloupe Music)For almost 60 years, the composer and performer Meredith Monk has created works mainly for herself and her close circle, so it’s been an open question what will happen to those intricate, idiosyncratic pieces when she’s gone. This album of sympathetic but not slavish new arrangements — collaborations with the Bang on a Can collective — offers tantalizing experiments. The clarinetist Ken Thomson gives the hawing vocals of “Downfall,” part of Ms. Monk’s post-apocalyptic 1983 evening “The Games,” seductively sinister instrumental surroundings. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Downfall”Cantaloupe Music◆ ◆ ◆Tristan Perich: ‘Drift Multiply,’ Section 6“Drift Multiply” (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch)Music emerges out of snowdrifts of white noise on this mesmerizing track. Tristan Perich is one of the most innovative tinkerers in electronic music, creating works of vibrant mystery. In “Drift Multiply,” 50 violins interact with 50 loudspeakers connected to as many custom-built circuit boards that channel the sound into one-bit audio. The result is a constantly evolving landscape where sounds coalesce and prism, where the violins both pull into focus and blur into a soothing ether. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Drift Multiply,” Section 6New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Joseph C. Phillips Jr.: ‘Ferguson: Summer of 2014’“The Grey Land”; Numinous (New Amsterdam)Joseph C. Phillips Jr.’s “The Grey Land” is a stirring, stylistically varied mono-opera that draws on its composer’s reflections on being Black in contemporary America. The longest movement on the premiere recording makes an early textual reference to Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” while dramatizing an expectant couple’s unease in the wake of the death of Michael Brown. SETH COLTER WALLS“Ferguson: Summer of 2014”New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2, Andantino“Silver Age”; Daniil Trifonov, piano; Mariinsky Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The thoughtful pianist Daniil Trifonov explores the music of Russia’s so-called “silver age” of the early 20th century on a fascinating album that offers various solo works and concertos by Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The spacious yet fiendishly difficult first movement of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto is especially exciting. ANTHONY TOMMASINIPiano Concerto No. 2, AndantinoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Rameau: ‘The Arts and the Hours’“Debussy Rameau”; Vikingur Olafsson, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)Few musicians craft their albums with as much care as Vikingur Olafsson, whose “Debussy Rameau” is a brilliantly conceived, nearly 30-track conversation across centuries between two French masters. There is one modern intervention: Mr. Olafsson’s solo arrangement of an interlude from Rameau’s “Les Boréades” — tender and reverential, a wellspring of grace. JOSHUA BARONE“The Arts and the Hours”Deutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Jean-Féry Rebel: ‘Le Chaos’“Labyrinth”; David Greilsammer, piano (Naïve)In his riveting, aptly titled album “Labyrinth,” the formidable pianist David Greilsammer daringly juxtaposes pieces spanning centuries, from Lully to Ofer Pelz. The theme of the album is captured in Jonathan Keren’s arrangement of Rebel’s “Le Chaos,” which comes across like an early-18th-century venture into mind-spinning modernism. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Le Chaos”Naïve◆ ◆ ◆Rebecca Saunders: ‘Still’“Musica Viva, Vol. 35”; Carolin Widmann, violin; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Ilan Volkov, conductor (BR-Klassik)A renowned figure on Europe’s experimental music scene, Rebecca Saunders builds teeming systems of shimmying severity from the sparest melodic materials. In this live recording of her violin concerto, Carolin Widmann excels in fulfilling the score’s contrasting requirements of delicacy and power. Helping judge the balance is the conductor Ilan Volkov, an artist American orchestras might consider working with. SETH COLTER WALLS“Still”BR-Klassik◆ ◆ ◆Schubert: ‘Des Fischers Liebesglück’“Where Only Stars Can Hear Us: Schubert Songs”; Karim Sulayman, tenor; Yi-heng Yang, fortepiano (Avie)Intimate, sweet-toned and more easily given to dry humor than its powerful keyboard successors, the fortepiano should be a natural choice for Schubert lieder. Yet recordings such as this exquisitely personal recital — with the clear-voiced tenor Karim Sulayman and the sensitive pianist Yi-heng Yang — are still rare. Listen to them weave a storyteller’s spell in this song about a nighttime tryst in a fishing boat, and marvel at the emotional arc they weave with the simplest of gestures. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Des Fischers Liebesglück”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Ethel Smyth: ‘The Prisoner Awakes’“The Prison”; Experiential Orchestra and Chorus; James Blachly, conductor (Chandos)Ethel Smyth, suffragist and composer, is among several female composers receiving fresh, deserved attention as the classical music industry tackles its diversity problem. If they all receive recordings as perfect as this account of her last major work, we will all benefit. Half symphony, half oratorio, “The Prison” includes this striking chorale prelude, with dark and light in the same bars, at its heart. DAVID ALLEN“The Prisoner Awakes”Chandos◆ ◆ ◆Anna Thorvaldsdottir: ‘Mikros’“Epicycle II”; Gyda Valtysdottir (Sono Luminus)A subterranean hall of mirrors lures in the listener in this deeply affecting three-minute track. Gyda Valtysdottir’s cello takes on the guise of a modern-day Orpheus and the spectral sounds of the underworld as she layers her performance on top of two prerecorded tracks. As this protagonist cello line sighs, heaves and slackens, the taped parts add fragmented scratch tones, whispers and tremors, evoking terrain both alluring and treacherous. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Mikros”Sono Luminus◆ ◆ ◆Joseph Wölfl: Piano Sonata in E, Allegro“The Beethoven Connection”; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano (Chandos)No finer recording has emerged from the Beethoven celebration than this, and it has not a single work by Beethoven on it. Mr. Bavouzet’s inquisitive look at the musicians who were composing at the same time as their colleague and competitor features Muzio Clementi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Jan Ladislav Dussek — but it’s the forgotten Joseph Wölfl, who once battled Beethoven in a duel of keyboard skills, who comes out best, in this immaculate, charming sonata. DAVID ALLENPiano Sonata in E, AllegroChandos◆ ◆ ◆[embedded content]AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Best Comedy of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBest Comedy of 2020Comedians like Leslie Jones, Chelsea Handler and Hannibal Buress adjusted to the new abnormal, turning to Zoom, YouTube, rooftops and parks.The pandemic halted most live performance but comedians adjusted and adapted. Clockwise from bottom left: Leslie Jones, Eddie Pepitone, John Wilson and Ziwe Fumudoh.Credit…Clockwise from bottom left: Rahim Fortune for The New York Times; Troy Conrad; HBO; Chase Hall for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 5:59 p.m. ETThe comedy boom finally busted. Not only did the pandemic shut down comedy institutions, but New York clubs like Dangerfield’s, which was half a century old, and the stalwart The Creek & the Cave closed for good, as did the city’s branches of the improv powerhouse, the Upright Citizens Brigade. At the same time, comedians adjusted to the new abnormal, transitioning to Zoom and Instagram Live, and to shows in parks and on rooftops. It was a period of experimentation and stagnancy, contraction and accessibility, despair and occasional joy. In a low year, here were the highlights:Funniest SpecialDo you find an angry blue-collar guy yelling about being high on molly funny? Does the phrase “Stalin on Spotify” amuse you? Do pivots from ragingly unhinged roars to an NPR voice make you lose your breath in laughter? No? Not to worry: Eddie Pepitone will still delight. An overlooked master of the form, he’s perfected a persona of the silly grump that makes anything funny. Smart comedy that aims for the gut, his new special (available on Amazon Prime) is titled “For the Masses,” but he jokes that is by necessity, in one of several insults of his audience: “I would be doing jokes about Dostoyevsky if it wasn’t for you.”After leaving “Saturday Night Live” in 2019, Leslie Jones had a viral year that included the Netflix special “Time Machine.”Credit…Bill Gray/NetflixBest Complaint About 20-SomethingsLeslie Jones made the most of her first year after “Saturday Night Live.” Not only did she go viral roasting the clothes, furniture and décor of cable news talking heads in social media videos, but she made a dynamite Netflix special, “Time Machine,” where she castigated today’s young people for failing to have fun. “Every 20-year-old’s night,” she preached, “should end with glitter and cocaine.”Best 20-Something CounterAbout six weeks after the release of Jones’s special, the breakout young comic Taylor Tomlinson made an impressive Netflix debut with “Quarter-Life Crisis”; in it, she says she’s sick of people telling her to enjoy her 20s. “They’re not fun,” she said exasperated, in one of many cleverly crafted bits. “They’re 10 years of asking myself: Will I outgrow this or is this a problem?”Best Opening GambitBy describing her special in detail, beat by beat, at the start of Netflix’s “Douglas” — Hannah Gadsby’s follow-up to “Nanette” — she seemed to be eliminating the most important element of comedy: surprise. But like Penn & Teller deconstructing the secrets of magic while hiding some new ones, she just found a new way to fool you.In his YouTube special “Miami Nights,” Hannibal Buress told a story about an encounter with a police officer that led to his arrest.Credit…Isola Man MediaBest Closing StoryIn his funniest and most stylish special, “Miami Nights,” on YouTube, Hannibal Buress ended on a 20-minute story about an unsettling encounter with a police officer in Miami that led to his arrest. It’s a master class in comic storytelling that sent himself up, skewered the police, hit bracingly topical notes with throwaway charm while adding on a coda that provided the visceral pleasures of payback. It’s stand-up with the spirit of a Tarantino movie.Best Silver LiningOne nice side effect of the shutdown for live comedy is that in transitioning to digital, local shows became accessible to everyone with an internet connection. So it was a nostalgic treat that the weekly Los Angeles showcase Hot Tub, which pioneered weird comedy in New York before moving to the West Coast, once again became part of my comedy diet, via Twitch. While there were many new faces, much hadn’t changed, like the eclectic and adventurous booking and the dynamite chemistry of its hosts Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler.Best Alfresco SpecialStreet comedy, a subgenre of some legend, was all but dead when the pandemic pushed stand-up outdoors. By the fall, several comics, like Chelsea Handler and Colin Quinn, even made specials there, working crowds whose laughter did not echo against walls. The sharpest was “Up on the Roof” by the workhorse comic Sam Morril (it’s his second punchline-dense special of the year), the rare person to translate New York club comedy to rooftops (with the help of cameras on drones).Cole Escola portrays a cabaret performer in his YouTube special, “Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola.”Credit…Cole EscolaBest Sketch ComicWhen comedic dynamo Cole Escola produced his own special featuring deliriously bizarre characters wrapped in pitch-perfect genre spoofs, and released it on YouTube under the title “Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola,” he was surely not trying to embarrass networks and streaming services for never placing him at the center of his own show. But that’s what he did.Best New Talk ShowThe charismatic Ziwe Fumudoh has long been comfortable creating and sitting in the tension between the comedian and the audience in small alt rooms, but in her interview show on Instagram, she repurposed this gift for cringe and applied it to probing conversations on racism with guests like Caroline Calloway and Alison Roman. It made for essential viewing during a protest-filled summer.Best Siblings“I Hate Suzie” provided serious competition, but the best British comic import this year was “Stath Lets Flats,” which found a home on HBO Max. This brilliantly observed office comedy focuses on the mundane travails of an awful real estate agent and his sister. Jamie Demetriou (who created the show) starred, along with his real-life sister Natasia, better known in the United States because of her dynamite deadpan in the FX vampire comedy “What We Do in the Shadows.” The show is cringe comedy whose beating heart comes from their relationship. Look out Sedaris siblings. A new talent family has arrived.The stand-up comic Beth Stelling released a special on HBO Max titled “Girl Daddy.”Credit…HBO MaxBest Debut SpecialThe stand-up comic Beth Stelling’s pinned tweet is from 2015: “I’ve been called a ‘female comic’ so many times, I’ll probably only be able to answer to ‘girl daddy’ when I have children.” This year, she released a knockout special on HBO Max titled “Girl Daddy.” It’s a virtuosic performance, conversational while dense with jokes — with a portrait of her father, an actor who works as a pirate at an Orlando mini-golf course, that manages to be scathing, loving and sort of over it, all at the same time.Best Experimental ComedyIt’s a good sign for adventurous work that last year’s winner (Natalie Palamides’s solo shocker “Nate”) is now a Netflix special. But the revelation this year was HBO’s “How To With John Wilson,” a kind of reality show about New York City that pushed formal boundaries while unearthing the hidden and the overlooked in poignant, funny new ways.Best DirectionIn one of her final projects, Lynn Shelton masterfully shot the latest Marc Maron special “End Times Fun,” on Netflix, demonstrating that great direction doesn’t need to be about showy camera movements. Her shot sequences emphasized and played against Maron’s jokes, working together effortlessly, like dancing partners that intimately know each other’s moves. Two months later, in May, she died of a blood disorder. Memorializing her movingly on his podcast, Maron, her boyfriend, said: “I was better in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Best Albums of 2020? Let’s Discuss

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyPopcastSubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsThe Best Albums of 2020? Let’s DiscussAn absence of live music refocused attention on records, and work by Fiona Apple, Taylor Swift and Run the Jewels spoke loudly.Hosted by Jon Caramanica. Produced by Pedro Rosado.More episodes ofPopcastDecember 9, 2020The Best Albums of 2020? Let’s DiscussNovember 29, 2020Saweetie, City Girls and the Female Rapper RenaissanceNovember 18, 2020  •  More