Popular Music

MUSICAL VARIETY: The Theatre Company of Saugus presents "Twelve Months of Music: A Year in Revue" in several shows through next Sunday. The show features two songs for each month of the year. It includes old and new songs from Broadway musicals, radio, and television. Director is company veteran Amanda Allen. Music direction is by Shawn Gelzleichter. The cast features many theater veterans as well as some newcomers: Yvonne Goulart and Nathan Goulart-Pasco of Brookfield; Sarah Cadarette of Somerville; Kylie, Leslie, and Talia Lemerise of Chelsea; Elissa O'Donnell of Everett;...

Norah Jones, "Little Broken Hearts" (Blue Note) Norah Jones is rich, beautiful and has one of the most gorgeous voices in popular music. None of that makes her immune to a broken heart. Sad for her, good for us. Jones channeled her hurt into a collaboration with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton with 12 reflections on love gone wrong. It's no pick-me-up, obviously. But Jones does more than wallow. She's angry, defiant, wounded, all-too-willing to slip back into a bad thing and even entertains a murder fantasy — in short, the full range of emotions that anyone feels when a...

NEW YORK - Charles Hamm, who helped establish the field of American popular music history with two books that have become standard texts, died Oct. 16 in Lebanon, N.H. He was 86. The cause was pneumonia, his son Stuart said. After beginning his career as a specialist in Renaissance music, Mr. Hamm became frustrated with the condescension of fellow musicologists toward the popular music of their own time. He began to write and lecture on the subject. "There was no literature in my own discipline to guide me," he later recalled in "Putting Popular Music in its Place," a...

Through music, scripture and song, Don Cornelius was remembered Thursday as the man who elevated black culture and entertainment with his "Soul Train," demolishing barriers of race and culture, and changing the nation's history. Hundreds of family, friends, entertainers, sports figures and even some former "Soul Train" dancers gathered to honor Cornelius' legacy and recall their recollections of the baritone-voiced host and entrepreneur. The nearly three-hour memorial service featured plenty of laughter and music, including a rousing performance of "Love's In Need of Love" by...

Norah Jones, "Little Broken Hearts" (Blue Note) Norah Jones is rich, beautiful and has one of the most gorgeous voices in popular music. None of that makes her immune to a broken heart. Sad for her, good for us. Jones channeled her hurt into a collaboration with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton with 12 reflections on love gone wrong. It's no pick-me-up, obviously. But Jones does more than wallow. She's angry, defiant, wounded, all-too-willing to slip back into a bad thing and even entertains a murder fantasy — in short, the full range of emotions that anyone feels when a...

Elijah Wald is a sharp, fair critic eager to right the record on popular music and the idolatry that often shields it from clear analysis. In the sensationally titled “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll,’’ he recasts history to spotlight unjustly overlooked figures like bandleader Paul Whiteman, smooth jazz godfathers Guy Lombardo and Glenn Miller, early crossover megastar Harry Belafonte, and Frankie Laine, a gruff, bluesy singer who...

The Boston Gay Men's Chorus will perform at 3 p.m. Nov. 6, in the Groton-Dunstable Performing Arts Center, part of the regional middle school on Main Street. The First Parish Church of Groton is sponsoring the event, and all proceeds will go to the Gay Straight Alliance chapters at local high schools to address bullying issues. The chorus, in its 30th season, sings a variety of classical and popular music. Tickets range from $12 for students to $27 for adults attending a reception after the concert, and are available at www.mktix.com/fpcg, at the Blackbird Café and...

The ultimate artistic destination of Sam Cooke is one of the all-time might-have-beens in the history of popular music. He was only 33 when he died, in 1964, shot by a motel night clerk under circumstances that remain disputed. Yet Cooke had already proven himself a great gospel singer, a great pop singer, and a great R&B singer. Hit songs don’t come much better than “You Send Me,’’ “Only Sixteen,’’ “Chain Gang,’’ “Wonderful World,’’ “Twistin’ the Night Away,’’ “Bring It on Home to Me,’’ or “Another Saturday Night.’’ Look at those titles and a...

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see a story clearly. Take French documentarian Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir. Though a secular Jew, she had become increasingly interested in her roots, according to an article in The Jewish Week. She heard some songs from the Yiddish theater in Paris and started seeing connections to popular music from the first half of the 20th century. The result is "From Shtetl to Swing" on "Great Performances" tonight, a clear and concise hourlong survey of Jewish music from the pogroms of Eastern Europe in 1881 to Benny Goodman's historic...

Anyone who caught the Ben Folds performance with the Boston Pops last week and was struck by the thinness of the meeting of musical worlds should have been there on Saturday night at Sanders Theatre to hear the Boston Modern Orchestra Project tee off on three bracingly imaginative works infused with rock 'n' roll and other popular styles. The revolution in the idea of what an orchestra can be -- from a collective instrument designed for the traditional symphonic repertoire, into an omnivorous agent of the new -- has been underway for well over a decade now, even if it has not been...

MUSICAL VARIETY: The Theatre Company of Saugus presents "Twelve Months of Music: A Year in Revue" in several shows through next Sunday. The show features two songs for each month of the year. It includes old and new songs from Broadway musicals, radio, and television. Director is company veteran Amanda Allen. Music direction is by Shawn Gelzleichter. The cast features many theater veterans as well as some newcomers: Yvonne Goulart and Nathan Goulart-Pasco of Brookfield; Sarah Cadarette of Somerville; Kylie, Leslie, and Talia Lemerise of Chelsea; Elissa O'Donnell of Everett;...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MA — The Tufts University Department of Music presents "İki Cihan Arasında/Between Two Worlds—Turkey's West, Within," a concert by DÜNYA Ensemble in the Distler Performance Hall at the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center on Friday, February 24 at 8 p.m. The program features folk, classical, religious, and popular music of the Ottoman/Turkish tradition, interwoven with classical Ottoman music recently transcribed from 19th...

FROM GRIEF TO JOY: In June, just after her mother died, artist Lynne Schulte of Georgetown visited Maine to paint. During a break, she was sitting in a pink plastic Adirondack chair enjoying the view from the backyard of the cottage where she was staying. She thought of her mother, Carolyn, who had died of heart failure at age 91 and whose favorite color was "bright, knock-your-socks-off pink. " Schulte added a rendering of the chair into a small piece she was painting.

WARSAW - She was a coloratura soprano who spurned opera for popular music, a Polish singer who became a cabaret star in Las Vegas, an artist trapped for years behind the Iron Curtain when she flew home to tend to her dying mother. Singer Violetta Villas died late Monday at her home in Lewin Klodzki, a village in southern Poland, police spokesman Pawel Petrykowski said. She was 73. Prosecutors have ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death, he said Tuesday. Ms. Villas was born Czeslawa Cieslak in 1938 to a Polish coal miner's...

NEW YORK - Charles Hamm, who helped establish the field of American popular music history with two books that have become standard texts, died Oct. 16 in Lebanon, N.H. He was 86. The cause was pneumonia, his son Stuart said. After beginning his career as a specialist in Renaissance music, Mr. Hamm became frustrated with the condescension of fellow musicologists toward the popular music of their own time. He began to write and lecture on the subject. "There was no literature in my own discipline to guide me," he later recalled in...

As impressive as the Music Room was, in the end, "Mrs. Jack" simply needed more space to hang pictures. Isabella Stewart Gardner loved music - she cultivated musicians, she was a fixture in her balcony seat at Boston Symphony concerts, and she made no fewer than five pilgrimages to Bayreuth, the Mecca of Wagnerian opera. And, after Jack Gardner's death, constructing her Fenway Court palazzo, she included a clean, white-plastered, two-story Music Room. The Boston Evening Transcript's critic, William Foster Apthorp, wrote that there was no space "at once more...

WARSAW - She was a coloratura soprano who spurned opera for popular music, a Polish singer who became a cabaret star in Las Vegas, an artist trapped for years behind the Iron Curtain when she flew home to tend to her dying mother. Singer Violetta Villas died late Monday at her home in Lewin Klodzki, a village in southern Poland, police spokesman Pawel Petrykowski said. She was 73. Prosecutors have ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death, he said Tuesday. Ms. Villas was born Czeslawa Cieslak in 1938 to a Polish coal miner's family in Belgium.

Having devoted previous albums to modern jazz interpretations of the jibaro and plena folk-music forms of his native Puerto Rico, the brilliant alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón is now doing the same for the island's popular music. On "Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook," Zenón's longstanding quartet - including pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig, and drummer Henry Cole, augmented by a 10-piece wind ensemble - offers boldly virtuosic reworkings of two tunes apiece from five of Puerto Rico's most beloved songwriters.

The Boston Gay Men's Chorus will perform at 3 p.m. Nov. 6, in the Groton-Dunstable Performing Arts Center, part of the regional middle school on Main Street. The First Parish Church of Groton is sponsoring the event, and all proceeds will go to the Gay Straight Alliance chapters at local high schools to address bullying issues. The chorus, in its 30th season, sings a variety of classical and popular music. Tickets range from $12 for students to $27 for adults attending a reception after the concert, and are available at www.mktix.com/fpcg, at the Blackbird Café and Main Street Café in Groton, and...

EVENTS Ipswich: Bring a picnic lunch and explore Choate Island in Essex Bay. The island, part of the Crane Wildlife Refuge, is the site of the Choate family homestead, the Proctor Barn, and the White Cottage, and is the final resting place of Miné and Cornelius Crane. Sunday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Crane Beach, 290 Argilla Rd. $15; Children $10. www.thetrustees.org. Newburyport: A Newburyport tradition for more than 35 years, the Fall Harvest Festival features handmade crafts and artwork, food vendors, live music in Market Square, the annual Scarecrow Contest, and Kids' Korner.