Jazz
Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Duke Ellington
A few years ago, Zachary Woolfe, a New York Times critic and editor, posed a question: What are the five minutes or so that you would play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music? How about Mozart? Or the violin? Or opera? Over the course of more than 25 […]
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Plotting the Future of the Most Storied Studio in Jazz
The building’s presence on the state and national registers does not protect it from being altered or even demolished by a future owner, Rothschild said. To gain that protection, Sickler has applied for a preservation easement, which would be attached to the property’s deed and involve periodic inspections. It also costs $10,000, and Sickler said […]
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The 1975’s Chamber-Pop Confessions, and 8 More New Songs
Matty Healy, the proudly enigmatic singer-songwriter of the 1975, leads his group into chamber-pop with “Part of the Band,” the first song from an album due in October, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” He sings about “cringes and heroin binges,” about a “vaccinista tote-bag chic barista” and about literary-minded gay liaisons — “I was […]
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Girls Are Outnumbered in Jazz. At This Summer Camp, They Run the Show.
COPENHAGEN — On a morning in late June, 16 girls arrived at an urban courtyard for the timeless summer ritual of camp drop-off. Some came clutching their parents’ hands; others raced ahead to greet old friends. One young teenager with strawberry-blond curls, who had come because her working parents told her she couldn’t sit home […]
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Cardi B’s All-Star Team-Up, and 9 More New Songs
An event record that sounds like an off-the-cuff late-night studio session, “Hot ____” is lean verging on spare, measured verging on reticent. Individually, everyone’s verse is frisky, but Cardi B’s the most so — she plays with pattern, and tosses off some sharp barbs (“I don’t know what’s longer, man, my block list or my […]
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Beyoncé’s ‘Break My Soul,’ and 12 More New Songs
The first song from Beyoncé’s album due July 29, “Renaissance,” has a clubby house beat and an attitude that equates defiant self-determination with salvation. She and her co-producers, Tricky Stewart and The-Dream, work two chords and a four-on-the-floor thump into a constantly changing track. They sampled shouted advice — “Release your anger! Release your mind! […]
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Drake Looks for Love, Repeatedly, and 9 More New Songs
Less than 10 months after “Certified Lover Boy,” Drake has returned to monopolize summer. His surprise-released seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” is a balmy mood piece —somewhere between a D.J. mix and one very long song — and after a series of weighty, overstuffed albums, it’s refreshing to hear him return to a lighter register, à […]
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Yeah Yeahs Yeahs’ Apocalyptic March, and 10 More New Songs
The first new Yeah Yeah Yeahs song in nine years isn’t a guitar blast. It’s a solemn, cavernous synthesizer march with late-arriving guitars and other, often elusive sounds flitting above a steadfast bass line. The lyrics hand off a damaged world to a next generation — “the kids” — who “never had no chance” but […]
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Samora Pinderhughes Explored Incarceration in Song. The Result Is ‘Grief.’
OAKLAND, Calif. — Near the end of a sold-out show earlier this month, celebrating the release of his visionary second album, “Grief,” the vocalist, pianist, composer and activist Samora Pinderhughes asked the audience to sing with him. He was about to hit the coda to “Process” — a heart-baring anthem of solitude and self-forgiveness, which […]
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