Saturday, November 13, 2010

10/11 The ‘Nutcracker’ Chronicles: The Marathon Begins

November 10, 2010, 3:54 pm — Updated: 9:21 am -->
The ‘Nutcracker’ Chronicles: The Marathon Begins
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

A scene from New York City Ballet’s production of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.”

Readers who ever shared the stage with Drosselmeyer, watched a loved one dance with him or simply attended a cherished performance of “The Nutcracker” — I have a request: send us your photo memories and comments on this very American holiday classic.
Why, you ask? I’m about to undertake a “Nutcracker” marathon. Starting with two stagings of the seasonal classic before Thanksgiving, I hope to catch as many productions of this institutional Christmas ballet as I can around the United States, from coast to coast.
This won’t be some quantitative competition. Most of America’s “Nutcracker”s all happen on the same three weekends in December. I could see more, but only by taking all-day flights that arrived on time. Every time. In winter. As it is, the airline and ballet industries could alter my plans. But I mean to see at least 20 productions, some of them more than once.
Even seasoned ballet-goers shake their heads ruefully at news of this project. “The Nutcracker,” not my favorite ballet, played no part in my own childhood. But I’m hoping that the connections between “The Nutcracker” and America — connections I explore in this essay for Arts & Leisure — will lead me to discover both the ballet and the country in greater depth.
It’s not as if every company’s “Nutcracker” is alike. Far from it. In Balanchine’s version, at City Ballet this month, the Nutcracker and the heroine are children; they watch the climactic adagio danced by the Sugar Plum Fairy ballerina and her cavalier. In Alexei Ratmansky’s, a premiere being danced by American Ballet Theater next month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the hero and heroine are also children, but the couple who dance the great adagio are their imaginary visions of themselves. In Mark Morris’s “Hard Nut,” also at BAM next month, the children are played by adults, and in the adagio they are joined in love by a whole community of couples. And this only scrapes the surface of “Nutcracker” variations.
It is, of course, possible that by the end of December I will never want to see another “Nutcracker.” But I’ve already seen many over the last 30 years, and I’m still finding more in the music and the ballet’s implications.
Surely I’m not alone in my “Nutcracker” explorations. Help me in my project by sending in your memories. Submit your photos here and comments below. A gallery of reader photos will be posted on nytimes.com. And check back in with ArtsBeat over the next six weeks as I report on my travels.

23/10 NYT, The Range of Electronica, Cathedral to Jubilant

October 23, 2010, 2:09 pm — Updated: 2:38 pm -->
The Range of Electronica, Cathedral to Jubilant
By JON PARELES




Chad Batka for The New York Times
Gold Panda performing at Webster Hall on Friday.


I bookended Friday night with electronica: two Englishmen, Gold Panda and Jon Hopkins, early and the laptopper Baths late. All three traded in disorientation nearly as much as dance beats, but the early shift was far more decorous.

Gold Panda’s set was a ruminative travelogue through a sample library full of exotica: a jet plane landing, tinkling little bells, a non-Western violin, oohing female voices, a raga played on a sitar and joined by singers. The beat drifted in and out — Gold Panda doesn’t worry whether anyone’s dancing — and wasn’t elaborate, usually just a modest midtempo thump: the harmony was mostly minor keys. Ambiance for a serious dinner-party discussion of global affairs.

Jon Hopkins, who collaborates on Brian Eno’s impending album “Small Craft on a Milk Sea,” started with low, slow thuds. He wasn’t going to waste his subwoofers, and soon he’d be doing his version of hip-hop’s gangsta boom-bap, reveling in the elephantine and throwing in some Wu Tang-style static. Up above, though, were far prettier sounds: quasi-Baroque figures, cathedral chords in rounded (and Eno-esque) keyboard tones. With the pomp grounded by the crunch, it suggested a classical education sidetracked by the beat, and Mr. Hopkins wasn’t too arty to wind up with more crowd-pleasing trance bangers.

Baths was noisier and more jubilant. His music bashed and lurched, from a laptop full of untamed sounds. His bass drums were swampy, his snares and tom-toms twitched and ran forward and backward, his beats stumbled and caught themselves as they were jolted by joy-buzzer zaps and whoopie-cushion interruptions. Amid the tipsy momentum, he had overdubbed himself into falsetto chorales that he topped, live, with what was left of his voice after many CMJ sets. “It’s a crazy, beautiful day,” he sang, and made it true.


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October 21, 2010, 10:23 am — Updated: 10:33 am -->
Popcast: CMJ, Shakira and Rock Globalism
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

This week on Popcast, The Times’s music podcast, we look at two rock ‘n’ roll globalists and highlight one of the more than 1,000 bands in New York this week for the CMJ Music Marathon.

Discussing his Arts & Leisure feature on Shakira, Jon Pareles, our chief pop critic, says that her multicultural hodgepodge is Shakira’s great strength. “She’s Lebanese-Italian-Colombian, and she’s at her best when all of those aspects are out,” he says in the conversation. “She’s very much an international creature, and it’s nice from a U.S. perspective to see someone who doesn’t want to be an American, doesn’t want to copy everything we do, but who has her own local flavor to add to it.”

And Eugene Hutz, the Ukrainian-born leader of the long-running New York Gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello, talks about the immigrant’s experience, and “combating ignorance with true understanding of the planet.”

A look at globalism in rock, with Jon Pareles and a performance by Tamaryn.(mp3)
Also on Popcast, the New York-San Francisco band Tamaryn plays its song “Haze Interior” live in the studio and explains the CMJ whirlwind from an artist’s perspective. Ben Sisario is the host.

03/11 Popcast: Latin Music Special

November 3, 2010, 1:03 pm — Updated: 10:19 am -->
Popcast: Latin Music Special
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

This week’s Popcast, The Times’s music podcast, takes a look at Latin music with Times critics and reporters on the short history of the Latin Grammys and the long and tangled history of the Cuban-American jazz exchange.

First Jon Pareles, the chief pop critic, previews next week’s Latin Grammy Awards, with some of his favorites in the major categories and a look at the influence of the show in its 11th year. This year’s ceremony will be held in Las Vegas on Nov. 11, and broadcast live by Univision.

And in a special roundtable discussion, Ben Ratliff, a pop and jazz critic, and Larry Rohter, a cultural reporter and longtime Latin America correspondent, talk with Ben Sisario about how jazz has benefited from Washington’s recent loosening of travel restrictions to and from Cuba. Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has played in Havana, and Chucho Valdés, an acclaimed Cuban pianist, recently played in New York for the first time in seven years. But there are still obstacles to open cultural exchange.

Jon Pareles previews next week’s Latin Grammys, and Times music writers discuss the history of Cuban-American jazz relations. (mp3)

“The problem is that there are laws in place that you can try to fudge, but you can only go to certain limits,” Mr. Rohter says in the conversation, excerpts of which can also be read here. “The issue of spending money in Cuba, and Cuban artists coming to the United States and earning money, they’re really sticklers on that. That puts a certain natural limit on how much can be done, until there’s legislative reform here, and until there is a loosening of the travel restrictions that the Cuban government imposes on its citizens.”

More Latin music from the Popcast interview and performance archives: Bebel Gilberto, Camilo Lara of Mexican Institute of Sound, Garotas Suecas.

11/11 At C.M.A. Awards, Nashville Shake-Up Goes On

Music Review
At C.M.A. Awards, Nashville Shake-Up Goes On
By JON CARAMANICA
Published: November 11, 2010

When Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert met in 2005, she was a Nashville reality show survivor with one critically acclaimed album and he was a grinning goofball who even in his best moments had the feel of a country music journeyman made good.

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Brad Paisley accepted the Entertainer of the
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Miranda Lambert won three music awards,
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In May, they were engaged, and Wednesday night, at the 44th edition of the Country Music Association Awards, which were broadcast on ABC from the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, they became country music’s unlikely new first couple.

Ms. Lambert, a pleasantly unvarnished singer in the 1970s mold, won three awards, including Female Vocalist of the Year and Album of the Year (for “Revolution”), and one of her singles, “The House That Built Me,” won Song of the Year. Mr. Shelton, an ambassador of country music’s emergent frat wing, won a pair of awards, including Male Vocalist of the Year. His other win, for Musical Event of the Year, was for “Hillbilly Bone,” his rural-pride duet with Trace Adkins.

Their victories continued, in a smaller way, the disruption to the Nashville pecking order that was so blatant at last year’s CMAs, when the teenage star Taylor Swift won four awards, including Album of the Year, and Darius Rucker won New Artist of the Year, the first black artist so honored.

Those victories — upsets, really — were only some of the signs that Nashville was coming to terms with a new establishment. The rise of Mr. Shelton and Ms. Lambert, who was nominated nine times in seven categories, and who has had to survive in the long shadows of Ms. Swift and Carrie Underwood in recent years, is a repudiation of some of the bigness that came to define country music in the late 1980s and 1990s and that spilled over into the last decade in the form of stars like George Strait, Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire and more. The same is true for Lady Antebellum, whose soft-rock take on country harmonies earned a pair of awards, for Single of the Year (the sublime “Need You Now”) and Vocal Group of the Year.

As ever, the show was efficient, with only nine televised award presentations (three more were handed out before the show) squeezed in between more than twice as many performances. There were strong turns by Sugarland, which won Vocal Duo of the Year for the fourth year running — the closest this year’s awards came to predictability — Kenny Chesney on his football memoir “The Boys of Fall,” and Ms. Swift, with a purposefully low-key rendition of “Back to December,” during which she never got up from behind her piano. Ms. McEntire’s cover of Beyoncé’s “If I Were A Boy” was forceful, but Mr. Strait, the night’s other representative of the old guard, sounded noticeably frail and tentative in his performance of “The Breath You Take.”
The show also featured several pairings of younger artists with more established singers — there is new blood in Nashville, though many of those singers are less seasoned, and less gifted, than the veterans they’re unseating.

The Zac Brown Band, which won New Artist of the Year, was joined by Alan Jackson on their duet “As She’s Walking Away,” with Mr. Jackson achieving more with the barest of effort than Mr. Brown, whose huffing and puffing had real limitations. “Don’t You Wanna Say,” a duet by Jason Aldean and Kelly Clarkson, one of the most powerful singers in any genre, initially appeared like a mismatch, but Mr. Aldean made the most of his insistent, grizzled tone.
That Gwyneth Paltrow was joined by Vince Gill for the live premiere of “Country Strong,” the title track of the forthcoming film in which she plays a country star bouncing back from addiction, wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was that she didn’t need his steadying hand nearly as much as some of the night’s other performers.

“It takes a lot to come to our town and get up here and sing on our stage,” Ms. Underwood said to Ms. Paltrow at the beginning of the night, a compliment that sounded somehow sinister.
As it was last year, the ceremony was hosted by Brad Paisley and Ms. Underwood, who may prove to be a durable pair. In the spirit of Billy Crystal, but in tune, they opened with a mildly jabbing musical number, referring to the BP oil spill and the sexual peccadilloes of Tiger Woods and Brett Favre, and noting, “Nashville had a flood, and we barely made the news.”

Mr. Paisley won Entertainer of the Year, the night’s top prize, but by the time it was announced it was something of an afterthought, his tearful speech notwithstanding. He also used the show to unveil a new song, “This Is Country Music,” a savvy advertisement for the genre that nodded to hits of yesteryear.

But while Mr. Paisley is preparing for his spot as a part of the next old guard, he’s not afraid of a little mischief. He didn’t shy away from working blue — albeit very, very light blue. “After the night that Blake and Miranda are having,” he said, “I think we can expect a baby in about nine months.”

A version of this review appeared in print on November 11, 2010, on page A24 of the New York edition.