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The Red Bull Music Academy Festival Still Prizes Energy and Inclusion

Moodymann performing at Space Ibiza.Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

For almost two decades, the energy drink conglomerate Red Bull has been in a deep embrace with the music world — it sponsors lectures from legendary figures; hosts conclaves in which young producers can learn from one another and from elders; and sponsors a robust annual series of live events. The company’s commitment is strong, and also thoughtful: Its concerts tend to double as history lessons, often spotlighting underappreciated artists and scenes. In the music world, it has been, with exceptions, a rare example of corporate largess deployed with aesthetic care, making for one of the most invigorating musical series in the country.

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The Sai Anantam Ashram Singers at the Knockdown Center. Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

This year’s installment of the Red Bull Music Academy Festival brought more than a dozen events to New York beginning in late April, and the lineup was characteristically impressive and diverse: a then-and-now excursion through ambient music history; a live-band tribute to Patrick Adams, a sleeper disco legend; a conversation with the experimental composer Alvin Lucier. I saw an intense night of gqom — aerated, industrial-strength house music from Durban, South Africa; watched the bawdy MC Carol from Brazil play loose-tongued, scrappy music from the country’s funk balls; and listened to Moodymann, an innovator of soulful Detroit techno, play rare Prince songs in a sweatbox of a club, when he wasn’t stopping the music to give impromptu lectures.

The month’s events were notable for their global curiosity — few things slide across borders as easily as music. (Well, not all things slide across borders so easily: MC Bin Laden, a young star of Brazilian baile funk, was unable to secure his visa in time to perform at the opening night party.)

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Douze performing at Tender Trap.Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

This year, though, the festival took place soon after Dietrich Mateschitz, a co-founder of Red Bull and a multibillionaire, gave an interview to an Austrian newspaper in which he slammed European immigration policy and worried that continued embrace of migrants would do damage to Europe’s culture and values.

This is, of course, in clear opposition to the values promoted by Red Bull Music Academy, which prizes cultural exchange and inclusion. It was easy to get lost in the music at these events, but hard not to think about Mr. Mateschitz’s statements every time a Red Bull logo glowed onstage.

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Fans dance to gqom music at Tender Trap.Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

JON CARAMANICA

Disco nostalgia reigned at “The Music of Patrick Adams,” May 11 at the Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem. Mr. Adams largely avoided the spotlight, just as he did in the 1970s when he was a songwriter, producer and arranger for songs like Musique’s “In the Bush,” which can still fill dance floors. The festival convened Musique, Fonda Rae, Black Ivory and other disco-era singers, while a rhythm section and quartets of strings and horns recreated Mr. Adams’s arrangements, reaching back to the days before “electronic” was automatically appended to “dance music.” The grooves were handmade, revisiting the plush, tactile early disco mix of R&B, big bands, Latin percussion and gospel-rooted belting. Singer after singer worked the crowd, promising love and bliss, and Mr. Adams took wriggly, slidey synthesizer solos on songs like Cloud One’s “Atmosphere Strut.” At the end of the concert — after Golden Flamingo Orchestra’s “The Guardian Angel Is Watching Over Us,” which finds faith in a desolate subway — Mr. Adams finally took center stage. In disco’s heyday, he didn’t get to perform with such large forces, and after praising the band, he had an idea: “I want to go back in the studio!” JON PARELES

In the mid-1980s, Teddy Riley invented New Jack Swing — the sound that brought hip-hop’s brashness into R&B — in his Harlem bedroom, going on to make hits for Keith Sweat, Bobby Brown and his own groups, Guy and Blackstreet. On May 5, at Red Bull Arts New York, Mr. Riley told the stories of those hits in detail in an extended interview that was more like a monologue, with Mr. Riley giving enticing insights on his songwriting process, his relationships with certain drug dealers of the era and his work with Michael Jackson on the “Dangerous” album. A couple of hours later, a New Jack Swing-themed event was underway at Louie and Chan, except that it wasn’t: The D.J.s, at least during the early part of the night, appeared to not have gotten the memo and were playing run-of-the-mill club hits, not the hard-snapping classics of the genre. But then Mr. Riley strode into the claustrophobic space and set up a synthesizer with a Vocoder attached, and began a brief but utterly catalytic set, including Guy’s “Goodbye Love,” Blackstreet’s “Don’t Leave Me” and other gems from the days when R&B had a digital swagger.

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Gucci Mane performing at the Box.Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

JON CARAMANICA

Elza Soares, the eminent Brazilian vocalist and activist, sat atop a throne in the center of the Town Hall stage on Friday, her seat about six feet off the ground, wearing a vast and shimmering dress and looking as if she were ready for the audience to come and entertain her. Ms. Soares is about 80, though no one knows for sure. Before last week, she hadn’t played in the United States for more than 25 years. But in Brazil she’s immortal. At Town Hall, she mostly performed songs from her 2016 album, “A Woman at the End of the World,” a late-career highlight, recorded with a crew of younger musicians, that mixes new wave, forró, M.P.B. and math-rock. Ms. Soares coasts through it all with her rolling purr (or is it a growl?), meeting the music head-on and suggesting the physicality of classic samba rhythm. On Friday, from the first strains of the a cappella “Coração Do Mar,” Ms. Soares’s power was remarkably uncompromised. So was her ethic: When she finished a cover of Seu Jorge’s “A Carne,” a protest against Brazil’s ingrained racial hierarchy, Ms. Soares declared: “Eu sou negra. Negra. Negra.” She probably said it two dozen times, moving the word through cycles of impact. By the time the audience came to its feet, hollering, the word had gone from provocation to simple truth, a marker of certainty and power.

GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

In just 10 years, Sacred Bones Records has become something uncommon: an independent label with the coherent vision of a Blue Note or Motown or Stones Throw, but not the genre identity. Sacred Bones defines itself by a disposition. Basically it’s a label for dramatized contemporary laments: dislocation, spiritual anonymity, a dulled and dying relationship to the physical world. On Saturday at the cavernous Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, nine acts from across the Sacred Bones spectrum celebrated the label’s 10th anniversary, playing alternating sets on opposite stages. You had the clear-seeing, absurdist poetics of Genesis P-Orridge; Marissa Nadler’s sighing gothic folk laments; the white-knuckled thrash of the Men. Nearing the end of the evening, the electronic musician Blanck Mass finished a set of blistering, multihued scuzz, the strobe lights clicked off, and Zola Jesus strode onto the other stage. A singer and electronic musician born Nika Roza Danilova, she performed over stout but muted beats, her voice almost operatic, but also querying and non-definitive. Singing “Nail,” from her latest album, she demanded, “Set me free/Pull the nail out with your teeth.” Judy Garland, Grace Jones and Fiona Apple all flickered up as Ms. Danilova sent out a cry of controlled bewilderment, then quickly turned things back inward as she returned to the song’s verse. She was dancing between the two faces of performance, public and private; you could watch, and sing along, but you couldn’t hold it in place.

GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Red Bull Music Academy has a legacy of smart bookings and exacting demands, often asking artists to revisit classic eras of their work, or arranging deep dives into underappreciated genres. The demands of such shows differ from the needs of an ordinary concert for a touring artist — they require preparation and flexibility, and a bit of concession to a higher vision. From a distance, the performance by Gucci Mane and his longtime producer, Zaytoven — billed as “a throwback piano bar show” — had promise. Inspired by the Tiny Desk concert recorded by the two for NPR Music late last year, it promised to show Gucci Mane in a calm, intimate light, and to underscore the sturdy melodic underpinnings of his best songs, But onstage May 16 at the Box (Café Carlyle was, presumably, unavailable) he was a little shy, rapping tentatively over prerecorded vocals, which in a chaotic club setting is fair game, but in this hushed environment felt awkward. Not that it mattered much: The real star here was Zaytoven, playing barrelhouse blues and cheery soul on the piano, flamboyant while his partner tiptoed.

JON CARAMANICA

The Red Bull festival closed with a two-part concert celebrating the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, centered on the release this month of “World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda,” which collects recordings she made at the ashram she ran after leaving behind her public jazz career in the mid-1970s. The first half of the event was a rare public performance from the Sai Anantam Ashram Singers, playing some of that music accompanied by a piano-bass-drums trio (the bassist was Reggie Workman, a Coltrane collaborator). Audience members were asked to take off their shoes, and they listened while seated on pillows on the floor. The group sang harmonized chants over beats that were thick and bass-heavy, but full of lift. It was missing Coltrane’s magnanimous voice and her transporting synthesizer playing, but the collective work onstage filled the vast room at the Knockdown Center. (It couldn’t entirely make up for the acoustics; Mr. Workman’s bass especially got lost in the rafters.) After an intermission, the harpist Brandee Younger and Coltrane’s son Ravi, a saxophonist, led a scattershot jazz dream team — featuring David Virelles, Mr. Workman, Courtney Bryan and Jeff Watts — in a selection of her compositions. At the end, the ashram singers came onstage for a joint performance (you knew they would), the horns and voices meeting in a fluid convocation, stitching together two sides of an artist that were never so far removed to begin with. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Invigorating? An Understatement. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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