Music

MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she...

“Far-out” is an accurate, but inadequate, descriptor for the high-flying (and often plain high) cultural magus named Harry Smith (1923-91). And the label “polymath,” too, while true, falls short for this innovative...

After a summer of teasing, various delays, dozens of arena concerts and eventually another No. 1 single, the rapper Drake released his fourth album in barely two years on Friday morning, ahead...

When Riccardo Muti stepped down from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last season, after 13 years as its conductor, the ensemble promptly turned around and named him music director emeritus for life.In a...

Like its predecessor, “Jacob’s Ladder” sets biblical text in the original Hebrew — in this case, the verse from Genesis in which Jacob dreams of a ladder to heaven, angels ascending and...

Backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards last month, at the Prudential Center in Newark, the out-of-nowhere Mexican superstar Peso Pluma gathered his band for an inspirational talk. That night, he was...

When Rich Paul considers his life now, he sometimes thinks how far it seems from his childhood, growing up Black in a particularly dangerous part of Cleveland.For the past two decades, Mr....

In the adrenalized aftermath of a Mike Tyson prizefight in 1996, a black BMW carrying the rapper Tupac Shakur pulled up to a red light just off the Las Vegas Strip, thrilling...

Russell Sherman, a pianist admired for his poetic and idiosyncratic interpretations of Schoenberg, Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt and others, died on Sept. 30 at his home in Lexington, Mass. A longtime music educator...

The “Black Radio” series, which Glasper described as a distillation of his brand, made breathing room for those influences. The first album, released in 2012, featured several of his neo-soul compatriots —...