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a7xbrazilianfans · 5 months

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Avenged Sevenfold members were interviewed to end-of-year issue of Rock Classic Magazine. Check out the full interview below:

Stranger things: Avenged take metal on a trip. Earlier this year, powered by existentialism and hallucinogens, Avenged Sevenfold crafted the weirdest album by a major heavy metal band in decades. Frontman M Shadows and his wife, Valary, were having a night out at a local bar when the psychedelic mushrooms began to take hold. A new Avenged Sevenfold album was already in the works, but the singer wasn’t seeking chemically enhanced inspiration at that moment – until the feelings of love and happiness got intense.

“Then we got home,” Shadows recalls, “and we just had this connection, being so sure that we had travelled through space and time to be together in every life that we meet up in – the ultimate love story.”

From that experience, Shadows wrote the lyrics to Cosmic, a sweeping ballad with influences ranging from Elton John to Daft Punk and 808s-era Kanye West, and nothing to remind you of metal. It’s also the longest track on 2023’s mind-expanding Avenged Sevenfold album Life Is But A Dream…, with a romantic vocal that promises: ‘As we chase through the stars beyond forever, I’ll follow you.’

The music is fuelled by wild experimentation, balancing heavy riffs with textures and ideas taken from other genres and dimensions. It is the band’s magnum opus, an album of miniepics and pocket symphonies, absorbing sweeping moments of pop, prog, jazz, gypsy folk, hip-hop, Daft Punk-style robotics, classical melody, the Phil Spector ‘Wall Of Sound’, and even some crooning from the Frank Sinatra school. Shadows is excited to watch the fallout.

“I want to make an impact. I want to make bold art,” he says of the album. “I think after people get used to it, it won’t be so crazy. And then it’ll be like: ‘Well, what’s next?’ That’s the journey we’re all on.”

That makes Life Is But A Dream… both a confrontation and an invitation, as the band seek to change the definition of what an Avenged Sevenfold track is supposed to sound like. This time last year, Shadows posted his top five most-played artists on Apple Music, which might have been a clue to his state of mind: The Commodores, Weezer, Kanye West, Queens Of The Stone Age and Billy Joel. And yet just the other day he had Slayer’s Divine Intervention on repeat in the car, happily feeding off its raw power.

“I consider us a metal band,” he says. “We’re definitely influenced by Slayer and Pantera and Metallica and some quirkier things. We’re just trying to put our own twist on it.”

The first public glimpse of the new album was its debut single, the nearly-six-minute Nobody, which mixes ominous guitars with a trap beat and a full orchestra, male harmonies more R&B than metal, and, shortly before an epic guitar solo, a mysterious declaration from Shadows: ‘I’m a god, I’m awake, I’m the one in everything/I’m alive, I’m the dead. I’m a man without a head.’ Initial reactions were mixed – surprised, angry, confused, ecstatic. Some Avenged fans embraced the sound immediately; others didn’t get it at all.

“They’re like: ‘That is fucking shit! These guys forgot how to write a song! Why would you put a solo at the end?’” says Shadows. “We were just laughing. That was more fun to us than someone saying: ‘This is great.’ We always gear towards a little bit of ruffling feathers.”

That song only hints at what the rest of Life Is But A Dream… offers. Working with Joe Barresi, who also produced Avenged’s previous album The Stage, guitarist Synyster Gates calls it “a full U-turn. It’s just like a blast off into outer space”.

Work on Life Is But A Dream… began after Avenged Sevenfold cancelled the final leg of their 2018 tour, due to a viral infection that affected Shadows’s vocal cords. The band returned home to Huntington Beach and started writing new songs. Shadows and Synyster would sit together for hours, hashing out their ideas, usually at the latter’s house. The album took nearly five years to complete.

“It feels like an entire lifetime,” says Gates, whose daughter Monroe was born in the interim. “We needed a break after two decades of doing stuff, but we needed to go to work because there was a creative itch.”

On the new tracks there are riffs as tough and heavy as anything from the band’s past, but the context is completely different. A frantic beat kicks off the crazed We Love You, shifting into the grinding guitar that accompanies Shadows as he chants a wish list of society’s insatiable appetites: ‘More power! More pace! More money! More taste! More sex! More pills! More skin!’ There are moments of stuttering electronics and Beatles melody, closing with guitarist Zacky Vengeance sounding like George Harrison on a 1920s acoustic and a bit of bottleneck to create a warm sound of gypsy jazz, as the band’s chorus of tattooed dudes hums along.

“Me and Gates get [a lot of] joy out of playing crazy jazz chords that we’ve never, ever incorporated in Avenged Sevenfold,” says Vengeance.

Getting the band there was a long, strange trip that included psychedelic experiences for two of them in the form of mindaltering venom – aka 5-MeO-DMT – from the rare Sonoran Desert toad.

“When we went deep into the 5-MeO-DMT stuff, it was before covid,” Shadows explains. “But you don’t just go into that, right?"

The Stage was already starting to deal with these existential things – like: ‘Gimme all the information of what we know about why we’re here.’”

The Stage, released in 2016, was a concept album about artificial intelligence that closed with a 15-minute meditation on the Big Bang, narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“I want to form my world view based on facts and science, which a lot of times is very nihilistic, then reading philosophy or really great novels about this sort of thing,” says Shadows.

“And then that record dove into the sort of AI element, which we’re dealing with now. And it dove into the Big Bang. This record [Life Is But A Dream…] dove into: ‘Now what do we do with all that information as a human that has emotions, that evolved to this spot where we have our upper brain [wired for reasoning] and lower brain [wired for primitive responses] and they’re battling each other?’”

For the 5-MeO-DMT experimentation, which he hoped would pause that battle, Shadows flew in a shaman, whose skills had previously been employed by engineers at SpaceX and Google. He went through three days of sessions, including one with Gates and another with Valary.

“I don’t promote this,” he’s careful to say. “I don’t want to say that everyone needs that.”

For Shadows, the trips were eye-opening and difficult, resulting in a “pure existential crisis for a year” and loss of ego at one point, but eventually also a feeling of deep connection to the world.

“You come to terms with how important everyone thinks everything is, and how they work themselves up,” he says. “And none of it means anything. You work your fingers to the bones and everyone tells you you’re great your whole life. Then all of a sudden you look back on your life and you go: ‘What the fuck was that?’ Ha ha ha!”

#avenged sevenfold #a7x #m shadows #synyster gates #zacky vengeance #johnny christ #brooks wackerman #life is but a dream

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jasper-pagan-witch · 1 year

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As far as book recs, what books are the least "suspicious"-looking title-wise, like in a won't weird your family out too much way?

This is an interesting question because I'm objectively the least weird person in my immediate family as far as books go. But I'll give this a shot! I'm gonna avoid books with "witch" in the title, but honestly, I have no idea how wary your family may be of books.

The Farmer's Almanac of the year: Once you get past the advertisements, there's a lot of practical growing advice and a surprising amount of magic-related stuff. Well, astronomy/astrology-related stuff, but still. I started using these as of earlier this year and have both the 2022 and 2023 editions. Jasper Category: Regional/Personal Practices.

Roots, Branches & Spirits by H Byron Ballard: My first introduction to the concept of folk magic was this wonderful book on Appalachian folk magic. It inspired me to look a lot more local and eventually led to me finding the Ozark Magic series by Brandon Weston. I'm not sure if it's particularly telling to the casual observer, but it's a fascinating look at someone's personal journey into their local magical tradition. Jasper Category: Regional/Personal Practices.

Badass Ancestors by Patti Wigington: I've gone over this book before, but if you're trying to learn about ancestor work (or even just your ancestors), it has some valuable resources and ideas of where you can look. It's useful enough that it's made it into my reference stacks. Jasper Category: Miscellaneous.

Willow and Sage Homemade Bath and Body: More of a magazine than a book, my May/June/July 2022 edition is a very practical guide for making all kinds of products. I look forward to actually trying out the recipes. It's not magic by any means, but it's helpful. Jasper Category: Miscellaneous.

Pretty much any mythology or history book: We all have those periods of time that we go absolutely batshit over mythology and history, right? Right? Yeah. This is also where my copies of the Homeric Hymns, the King James Bible, and others are located. Jasper Category: History, Religion, and Mythology.

Do I Have To Wear Black? by Mortellus: Likewise, this is an in-depth look at the various religious funerary and mourning practices, especially in modern contexts, brought to us by someone who actually works in that field. Jasper Category: History, Religion, and Mythology.

Regional ghost stories: I happen to have several Missouri-based or Mississippi River-based books on ghosts. These help take a look at folklore, history, and how things evolve and change over time, as well as how they stay in the public consciousness. Jasper Category: History, Religion, and Mythology.

Regional farming/planting guides: Similarly, I'm in Missouri, so a good number of my gardening guides are either about planting indoors, planting edible plants, or planting things that work great here in Missouri. Jasper Category: Gardening and Plants.

Historically- or locally-significant books of folktales, poetry, and fiction: We've got Edgar Allen Poe's complete works, we've got the Brothers Grimm, we have five great Greek tragedies in one book, we've got Horrible Phobias Lovecraft's works (may he rest in the racist squallor box and may he spin in his grave over everyone wanting to kiss his monsters), we've got Dante, we've got the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, we have "Jasper ran out of money but keeps trying to wipe out the book store's shelves of any significantly-old book with a new or fancy cover EVEN IF THEY ALREADY OWN IT." We've got the range. These are great for summoning up specific feelings or memories, for coming up with chants, for pop culture magic, for everything! And if anyone asks, you're just a fan of the classics! Jasper Category: Old Shit.

Unfortunately, most of my beginner-focused books, my tarot books, my spellbooks, and my correspondence-based books are a lot less low-key.

I hope this gives you a few ideas! I'm sorry if this isn't particularly helpful, I'm just not in a place where I have to be worried about people seeing that I practice magic. I mean, I have 62 tarot and oracle decks lined up on my shelves, it would be foolish of my family to NOT notice.

~Jasper

#answered #bruxtia #books

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whileiamdying · 9 months

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Tony Bennett, Jazzy Crooner of the American Songbook, Is Dead at 96

From his initial success at the Paramount in Times Square through his generation-spanning duets, his career was remarkable for both its longevity and its consistency.

By Bruce Weber

July 21, 2023

Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans, died on Friday at his home of many decades in Manhattan. He was 96.

His publicist, Sylvia Weiner, announced his death.

Mr. Bennett learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, his wife, Susan Benedetto, told AARP The Magazine in February 2021. But he continued to perform and record despite his illness; his last public performance was in August 2021, when he appeared with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in a show titled “One Last Time.”

Mr. Bennett’s career of more than 70 years was remarkable not only for its longevity, but also for its consistency. In hundreds of concerts and club dates and more than 150 recordings, he devoted himself to preserving the classic American popular song, as written by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.

From his initial success as a jazzy crooner who wowed audiences at the Paramount in Times Square in the early 1950s, through his late-in-life duets with younger singers gleaned from a range of genres and generations — most notably Lady Gaga, with whom he recorded albums in 2014 and 2021 and toured in 2015 — he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.

Mr. Bennett stubbornly resisted record producers who urged gimmick songs on him, or, in the 1960s and early ’70s, who were sure that rock ’n’ roll had relegated the music he preferred to a dusty bin perused only by a dwindling population of the elderly and nostalgic.

Instead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century — Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra — and carried the torch for them into the 21st. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” And though he saw his popularity wane with the onset of rock and his career went through a trough in the 1970s, when professional difficulties were exacerbated by a failing marriage and drug problems, he was, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgment.

“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.

It’s hard to overstate Mr. Bennett’s lasting appeal. He was still singing “San Francisco” — which led many people to think he was a native of that city, though he was actually a through-and-through New Yorker — more than half a century later. He sang on Ed Sullivan’s show and David Letterman’s. He sang with Rosemary Clooney when she was in her 20s, and Celine Dion when she was in her 20s.

He made his film debut in 1966, in a critically reviled Hollywood story, “The Oscar,” playing a man betrayed by an old friend. And though he did not pursue an acting career, decades later he was playing himself in movies like the Robert De Niro-Billy Crystal gangster comedy “Analyze This” and the Jim Carrey vehicle “Bruce Almighty.” He was 64 when he appeared as a cartoon version of himself on “The Simpsons.” He was 82 when he appeared on the HBO series “Entourage,” performing one of his trademark songs, “The Good Life.”

A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Bennett also performed for Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, during his state visit to England in 1996. He sang at the White House for John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and at Buckingham Palace at Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th anniversary jubilee.

An ‘Elusive’ Voice

He won his first two Grammy Awards, for “San Francisco,” in 1963, and his last, for the album “Love for Sale,” with Lady Gaga, last year. Altogether there were 20 of them, including, in 2001, a lifetime achievement award. By some estimates, he sold more than 60 million records.

The talent that spawned this success and popularity was not so easy to define. Neither a fluid singer nor an especially powerful one, he did not have the mellifluous timbre of Crosby or the rakish swing of Sinatra. If Armstrong’s tone was distinctively gravelly, Mr. Bennett’s wasn’t quite; “sandy” was more like it. Almost no one denied that his voice was appealing, but critics strove mightily to describe it, and then to justify its appeal.

“The voice that is the basic tool of Mr. Bennett’s trade is small, thin and somewhat hoarse,” John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 1962. “But he uses it shrewdly and with a skillful lack of pretension.”

In a 1974 profile, Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker, called Mr. Bennett “an elusive singer.”

“He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos,” Mr. Balliett wrote. “He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer.” But, he added, “Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together.”

Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”

Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience.

He had a storyteller’s grace with a lyric, a jazzman’s sureness with a melody, and in his finest performances he delivered them with a party giver’s welcome, a palpable and infectious affability. In his presentation, the songs he loved and sang — “Just in Time,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “Rags to Riches” and “I Wanna Be Around,” to name a handful of his emblematic hits — became engaging, life-embracing parables.

Frank Sinatra, whom Mr. Bennett counted as a mentor and friend, once put it another way.

“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” he told Life magazine in 1965. “He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”

Mr. Bennett passed through life with as unscathed a public image as it is possible for a celebrity to have. Finding even mild criticism of him in reviews and interviews is no mean feat, and even his outspoken liberalism generally failed to attract vitriol from the right. (An exception was his call, after the drug-related deaths of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, for the legalization of drugs, a view loudly denounced by William J. Bennett, the former drug czar, among others.)

With the possible exception of his former wives, everyone, it seemed, loved Tony Bennett. Skeptical journalists would occasionally try to pierce what they perceived as his perfect veneer, but they generally discovered that there wasn’t much to pierce.

“Bennett is outrageous,” Simon Hattenstone, a reporter for The Guardian, wrote in 2002. “He mythologizes himself, name-drops every time he opens his mouth, directs you to his altruism, is self-congratulatory to the point of indecency. He should be intolerable, but he’s one of the sweetest, most humble men I’ve ever met.”

Son of Queens

Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born on Aug. 3, 1926, in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, and grew up in that borough in working-class Astoria. His father, Giovanni, had emigrated from Calabria, in southern Italy, at age 11. His mother, Anna (Suraci) Benedetto, was born in New York in 1899, having made the sea journey from Italy in the womb. Their marriage was arranged. Giovanni and Anna were cousins; their mothers were sisters.

In New York, where Giovanni Benedetto became John, he was a grocer, but beleaguered by poor health and often unable to work. Anna was a factory seamstress and took in additional sewing to support the family. Anthony was their third child, their second son, and the first of any Benedetto to be born in a hospital. Giovanni, who sang Italian folk songs to his children — “My father inspired my love for music,” Mr. Bennett wrote in his autobiography — died when Anthony was 10.

Anthony sang from an early age, and drew and painted, too. He would become a creditable painter as an adult, mostly landscapes and still lifes in watercolors and oils and portraits of musicians he admired, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” His first music teacher arranged for him to sing alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the opening of the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in 1936.

For a time he attended the High School for Industrial Arts (now called the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, but he never graduated. He dropped out and found work as a copy boy for The Associated Press, in a laundry and as an elevator operator.

“I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place,” he recalled. “People ended up having to crawl out between floors.”

At night he performed at amateur shows and worked as a singing waiter. He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.

He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines, an experience he described as “a front-row seat in hell,” and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.

After Germany surrendered, Mr. Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands and for a time was featured in a ragtag version of the musical “On the Town” — directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct “Bonnie and Clyde” and other notable movies — in the opera house in Wiesbaden.

He returned to New York in August 1946 and set about beginning a career as a musician. On the G.I. Bill, he took classes at the American Theater Wing, which he later said helped teach him how to tell a story in song. He sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.

A series of breaks followed. He appeared on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the “American Idol” of its day. (The competition was won by Rosemary Clooney.) There are different versions of the biggest break in Mr. Bennett’s early career, but as he told it in “The Good Life,” he had been singing occasionally at a club in Greenwich Village where the owner had offered Pearl Bailey a gig as the headliner; she agreed, but only on the condition that Joe Bari stayed on the bill.

When Bob Hope came down to take in Ms. Bailey’s act, he liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. Hope had a condition, however: He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, and insisted it be changed. Dismissing the name Anthony Benedetto as too long to fit on a marquee, Hope christened the young singer Tony Bennett.

The Hits Roll In

The producer Mitch Miller signed Mr. Bennett to Columbia Records in 1950; “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was his first single. Miller was known for his hit-making prowess, a gift that often involved matching talented singers with novelty songs or having them cover hits by others, for which he was criticized by more serious music fans and sometimes by the singers themselves.

He and Mr. Bennett had a contentious relationship. Mr. Bennett resisted his attempts at gimmickry; Miller, who believed that the producer and not the singer was in charge of a recording, applied his authority. Still, together they achieved grand success.

By mid-1951, Mr. Bennett had his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” That same year, his version of the Hank Williams ballad “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit No. 1; three years after Williams died in 1953, Mr. Bennett performed it in his honor at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

Other trademark songs followed: “Rags to Riches” in 1953; “Stranger in Paradise,” from the Broadway show “Kismet,” also in 1953; Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s “Just in Time,” from the show “Bells Are Ringing,” in 1956. That same year, Mr. Bennett was host of his own television variety show, a summer replacement for a similar show that starred another popular Italian American crooner, Perry Como. In 1958, he recorded two albums with the Count Basie band, introducing him to the jazz audience.

In the 1950s, Mr. Bennett toured for the first time, played Las Vegas for the first time and got married for the first time, to Patricia Beech, a fan who had seen him perform in Cleveland. The marriage would flounder in the 1960s, overwhelmed by Mr. Bennett’s perpetual touring, but their two sons would end up playing roles in Mr. Bennett’s career: the older one, D’Andrea, known as Danny, became his father’s manager, and Daegal, known as Dae, became a music producer and recording engineer.

In July 1961, Mr. Bennett was performing in Hot Springs, Ark., and about to head to the West Coast when Ralph Sharon, his longtime pianist, played him a song written by George Cory and Douglass Cross that had been moldering in a drawer for two years. Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bennett decided that it would be perfect for their next date, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and it was.

They recorded the song — of course it was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — six months later, in January 1962. It won Mr. Bennett his first two Grammys, for best male solo performance and record of the year, and worldwide fame. In “The Good Life,” he wrote that he was often asked if he ever tired of singing it.

“I answer, ‘Do you ever get tired of making love?’” he wrote.

Just five months later, Mr. Bennett performed at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Sharon and a small orchestra. He got sensational reviews — though The Times’s was measured — and the recording of the concert is now considered a classic.

But as the 1960s proceeded and rock ’n’ roll became dominant, Mr. Bennett’s popularity began to slip. In 1969, he succumbed to the pressure of the new president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to record his versions of contemporary songs, and the result, “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!” — including the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Something” — was a musical calamity, a record that Mr. Bennett would later tell an interviewer made him vomit.

His relationship with Columbia soured further and finally ended, and by the middle of the 1970s Mr. Bennett had formed his own company, Improv Records, on which he recorded the first of two of his most critically admired albums, duets with the jazz pianist Bill Evans. (The second one was released on Evans’s label, Fantasy.) Together the two opened the Newport Jazz Festival, which had moved to New York, at Carnegie Hall in 1976.

Improv went out of business in 1977, and without a recording contract Mr. Bennett relied more and more on Las Vegas, then in decline, for regular work. His mother died that year, and the profligate life he had been living in Beverly Hills caught up with him; the Internal Revenue Service was threatening to take his house. His second marriage, a tumultuous one to the actress Sandra Grant, collapsed — she would later say that she would have been better off if she had married her previous boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio — and he had begun using marijuana and cocaine heavily.

One day in 1979, high and in a panic, he took a bath to calm down and nearly died in the tub. In later years he would play down the seriousness of the event, but he wrote about it in “The Good Life,” describing what he called a near-death experience: “A golden light enveloped me in a warm glow. It was quite peaceful; in fact, I had the sense that I was about to embark on a very compelling journey. But suddenly I was jolted out of the vision. The tub was overflowing and Sandra was standing above me. She’d heard the water running for too long, and when she came in I wasn’t breathing. She pounded on my chest and literally brought me back to life.”

Mr. Bennett turned to his older son for help. Danny Bennett took over the management of his career, aiming to have the American musical standards that were his strength, and his handling of them, perceived as hip by a new generation.

Somewhat surprisingly, the strategy took hold. An article in Spin magazine, which was founded in 1985, declared Mr. Bennett and James Brown as the two foremost influences on rock ’n’ roll, and the magazine followed up with a long, admiring profile.

A Career Revival

Encouraged by executive changes at Columbia Records, Mr. Bennett returned to the Columbia fold in 1985. The next year he released the album “The Art of Excellence.” WBCN in Boston became the first rock station to give it regular airplay. Released in the emerging CD format, it spurred the sales of Mr. Bennett’s back catalog as music fans began replacing their vinyl records with CDs.

In 1993, Mr. Bennett was a presenter, along with two members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at MTV’s Video Music Awards. The next year he gave an hourlong performance for MTV’s “Unplugged” series, which included duets with K.D. Lang (with whom he would later tour) and Elvis Costello. The recording of the show won the Grammy for album of the year.

The revival of Mr. Bennett’s career was complete. Not only had he returned to the kind of popularity he had enjoyed 40 years earlier, but he had also been accepted by an entirely new audience.

He recorded albums that honored musicians he admired — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday — and he collaborated on standards with singers half, or less than half, his age. On the 2006 album “Duets: An American Classic,” he sang “If I Ruled the World” with Ms. Dion, “Smile” with Barbra Streisand and “For Once in My Life” with Stevie Wonder, and revisited his first Columbia single, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with Sting. Five years later, on “Duets II,” his collaborators included Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Ms. Winehouse.

As the century changed, he was once again touring, giving up to 200 performances a year, and recording prolifically.

In 2007 Mr. Bennett married a third time, to his longtime companion, Susan Crow, a teacher four decades his junior whom he had met in the late 1980s. Together they started a foundation, Exploring the Arts, that supports arts education in schools, and financed the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school in Queens.

Mr. Bennett had lived in the same Manhattan apartment, where he died, for most of his adult life, except for a few years in Los Angeles and London, Ms. Weiner, his publicist, said. He is survived by his wife; his sons, Danny and Dae; his daughters, Johanna and Antonia Bennett; and 9 grandchildren.

If there was a magical quality to Mr. Bennett’s life, as suggested by David Evanier in a glowing 2011 biography, “All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett,” it is encapsulated by a story Mr. Bennett told to Whitney Balliett in 1974.

“I like the funny things in life that could only happen to me now,” he said. “Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head and everyone was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said, ‘Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?’ and hung up.”

#Anthony Dominick Benedetto #Tony Bennett #New York Times #Obituary

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beijingbrown · 1 year

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January 2023: 1 of 12 mixtapes connecting the music of my childhood (Tamil pop) and the music that influenced me (sinophone indie) to the music of my new home (The Netherlands). This month: Ilaiyaraaja to Space Fruity Records, via Charlotte Adigéry and boba dream pop.

Track-by-track notes: 1. Ilaiyaraaja - Raaja Rajathi (1988) (from 'Agni Natchathiram') This song - from a 1988 Mani Ratnam film - was a childhood favourite, and maybe even seeded my future love for minimal post-punk?

2. 昏鴉 The Murky Crows - 我們如此超群絕倫怎能居於世俗所見 (2015) One of the first Taiwanese bands I adored, and my introduction to the branch of twee sinophone indie that would define my life between 2015 and 2020. 3. Ilaiyaraaja - Vikram Vikram (1986) I only discovered this classic thanks to the recent remake of the cult 80s Kamal Hasan spy film Vikram, but I was familiar with the writer Sujatha, whose works were serialized in magazines like Kumutham. My literary magazine of choice between ages 7 and 13 was Gokulam, where I submitted many terrible sci-fi short stories that were thankfully never published. Does anyone remember the Undir family stories? 4. Stereolab - Metronomic Underground (1996) Stereolab was the first band that got me into live bootlegs, rarities, B-sides, and "sessions" recordings, now a standard part of how I consume music. 5. METZ - Wet Blanket (2012) METZ was the first band I did a tour poster for! 6. Charlotte Adigery and Bolis Pupul - Ceci N'est Pas un Cliche (2022) Belgian duo. The best, most joyous, and most exciting concert I saw in the Netherlands since moving to Amsterdam in 2022. 7. Gino Cochise - Fo Woa (2022) Amsterdam hip-hop artist. The artist I most want to see live in the Netherlands in 2023. 8. Chaar Diwaari - Kaun Mera? (2022) I get excited by an average of 1 (one) Indian hip-hop song every year. This was the one for 2022. 9. Naujawanan Baidar - Khyber Sound (from Kabul to Peshawar in Fullmoon) (2020) From an incredible album of anti-imperialist Afghan-rooted experimental music, from the now Netherlands-based N.R. Safi. 10. bed - WET (2022) I saw bed play at the back of the Foo Concepts milk tea shop in Rotterdam, the crowd sipping boba and swaying to dream pop. A perfect gig. Normalize milk tea at shows! Normalize shows at milk tea shops!

11. Ts Bayandalai - 灰色公马 (2020) Seeing Bayandalai play live was always a transcendent experience, and this is the album that makes me miss Beijing the most.

#beijing #rotterdam #madras #mixtape

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poshgarmentsltd · 5 days

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What Clothes Will Be Trending in 2024? Top Picks for Styles

We are already through the first month of the new year, and fashion is also changing. The new year means new fashion trends, and there has been a lot of talk about how they have changed. Many people have made many different predictions, and it’s time we checked in on them.

Today we will be looking at some of the predictions people have made and seeing if they have come true or not. We have gone through the predictions of the top fashion magazines and fashion experts. After all our research, we have found the top trending style picks for 2024.

Trending Style Picks of 2024

There are many different trending style picks you can choose from, but only a few are really worth checking out. We have gone through all the suggested trends since the end of 2023 and found the best ones for you.

If you are interested in creating clothing based on these styles, we suggest you work with the best clothing manufacturers in Bangladesh. Let’s now see what people are looking to wear this year.

Classic, Crisp Aesthetic

The classic, crisp aesthetic focuses on timeless pieces like tailored blazers, button-down shirts, and well-fitted trousers. It’s all about clean lines, simple silhouettes, and quality fabrics. This style is popular because it’s versatile and can be dressed up or down for various occasions. Whether you’re going to work or on a casual outing, a classic, crisp look always exudes sophistication and elegance.

Quiet Luxury

Luxury is all about making your outfit seem expensive without making it gaudy. It’s all about the material of your clothing and not the design. It emphasizes high-quality fabrics like silk, cashmere, and fine wool in minimalist designs. This style is favored for its subtle sophistication and effortless chic. With quiet luxury, less is more, and the focus is on impeccable tailoring and luxurious materials. It’s perfect for those who appreciate the finer things in life and prefer a more understated approach to fashion.

Hyper Feminine

Hyper Feminine styles celebrate femininity with soft, flowing fabrics, delicate lace, and romantic floral prints. Think fluttery dresses, ruffled blouses, and lace-trimmed skirts. This style is loved for its whimsical charm and girlish appeal. It allows women to embrace their femininity and feel confident and beautiful. Whether it’s a date night or a brunch with friends, hyper-feminine outfits always make a statement and turn heads.

Pops of color

Pops of color are all about injecting vibrancy and energy into your wardrobe. It’s about adding bold, eye-catching hues like electric blue, fiery red, or sunny yellow to your outfits. Whether it’s a colorful statement coat or a bold colored dress, pops of color instantly elevate your look and add personality. This style is popular because it’s fun, playful, and allows you to express yourself through color.

Jazz-Inspired Outfits

Jazz-inspired outfits pay homage to the glamorous fashion of the 1920s with fringe and metallics. Think flapper dresses, feathered headbands, and Art Deco-inspired accessories. This style is loved for its vintage charm and retro glamor. It’s perfect for special occasions like parties, weddings, or themed events. Jazz-inspired outfits transport you back to the roaring twenties, where style was synonymous with extravagance and opulence.

Sustainable Clothing

Sustainable clothing focuses on eco-friendly materials and ethical production practices. It’s about making conscious choices that minimize harm to the environment and promote social responsibility. This style is gaining popularity as people become more aware of the environmental and social impacts of fast fashion. Sustainable clothing includes organic cotton, recycled polyester, and cruelty-free alternatives. It’s about investing in quality pieces that last longer and have a positive impact on the planet.

Sporty Staples

Sporty staples blend comfort and style with athletic-inspired pieces like joggers, hoodies, and sweatpants. This style is all about casual coolness and effortless streetwear vibes. It’s perfect for running errands, hanging out with friends, or lounging at home. Sporty staples prioritize comfort without compromising on style, making them a go-to choice for everyday wear. Whether you’re into athleisure or just love a laid-back look, sporty staples have got you covered.

Bows in Clothing

Bows in clothing add a touch of whimsy and femininity to any outfit. Whether it’s a bow-tie blouse, a ribbon belt, or a bow-detail dress, bows instantly elevate your look and add a playful charm. This style is loved for its romantic appeal and girlish sweetness. Bows are versatile and can be incorporated into various garments and accessories, adding a delightful finishing touch. Whether you’re dressing up for a date night or adding a feminine flair to your workwear, bows in clothing are a fun and stylish choice.

Sequins

Sequins bring sparkle and shine to any ensemble, adding a touch of glamor and sophistication. Whether it’s a sequined dress or a sequined top, sequins instantly make a statement and command attention. This style is loved for its festive vibe and celebratory feel. Sequins are perfect for special occasions like parties, weddings, or holiday festivities. They add a dose of excitement and dazzle to your look, making you feel like a true fashion star.

Let’s See the: The Journey of Bangladesh’s Garment Industry in the Global Fashion Scene

Conclusion

And those were the top trending style picks of 2024 that you should consider if you want to keep your fashion on point. Each of these trends blends functionality with fashion in ways that we haven’t seen much of in the last few years.

From bringing back some classics to environmentally friendly designs, the 2024 trending style picks had it all. If you are interested in following these picks and manufacturing clothing like it in Bangladesh, you should consider us. With our years of experience in making clothes for foreign brands, we are more than qualified to produce these styles of clothing.

FAQs

How do fashion trends impact consumer behavior?

Fashion trends influence consumer behavior by guiding their purchasing decisions and shaping their perception of style and identity.

What role does sustainability play in shaping fashion trends?

Sustainability drives demand for eco-friendly clothing, leading brands to adopt more responsible practices and shaping trends towards environmentally conscious options.

Who are some influential fashion icons to follow for style inspiration?

Influential fashion icons like Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Harry Styles, along with bloggers and designers such as Chiara Ferragni and Virgil Abloh, inspire style trends with their innovative fashion choices.

How can individuals incorporate current fashion trends into their wardrobe?

Individuals can stay fashion-forward by updating wardrobe staples with trendier pieces, experimenting with colors and textures, and accessorizing with statement pieces from brands offering versatile options.

What are some emerging fashion brands focused on sustainability?

Emerging brands like Reformation, Everlane, and Patagonia prioritize sustainability through eco-friendly fabrics, ethical manufacturing, and transparent practices, offering stylish and responsible clothing choices.

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