Sport similar to pétanque / FRI 8-21-26 / Leader in a robe called a kasaya / Jazz musician Jamal / Coupling rings? / Losing control emotionally, in slang / First filmmaker to receive the Order of Culture in Japan / One-named pop star with Monkey Puzzle Records / ___ Crosley, author of 2008's "I Was Told There'd Be Cake"

Constructor: Adryel W. Robles Ojeda

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: AHMAD Jamal (33D: Jazz musician Jamal) —

Ahmad Jamal (born Frederick Russell Jones; July 2, 1930 – April 16, 2023) was an American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and educator. For six decades, he was one of the most successful small-group leaders in jazz. He was a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Master and won a Lifetime Achievement Grammy for his contributions to music history. [...] Trained in both traditional jazz ("American classical music", as he preferred to call it) and European classical style, Jamal was praised as one of the greatest jazz innovators over the course of his exceptionally long career. Following bebop greats like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Jamal entered the world of jazz at a time when speed and virtuosic improvisation were central to the success of jazz musicians as artists. Jamal, however, took steps in the direction of a new movement, later coined "cool jazz"—an effort to move jazz in the direction of classical music. He emphasized space between notes in his musical compositions and interpretations instead of focusing on the fast-paced bebop style. // Because of this style, Jamal was "often dismissed by jazz writers as no more than a cocktail pianist, a player so given to fluff that his work shouldn't be considered seriously in any artistic sense".^[48] Stanley Crouch, author of Considering Genius, offered a very different reaction to Jamal's music, claiming that, like the highly influential Thelonious Monk, Jamal was a true innovator of the jazz tradition and is second in importance in the development of jazz after 1945 only to Charlie Parker. (wikipedia)

• • •

There were several delightful parts of this puzzle, but the puzzle really does bury you in names, and that can begin to feel ... wearisome. I am a movie lover and (perhaps excessive) movie watcher—finished two just yesterday: the camp classic Desert Fury (1947) (a rewatch), and a short documentary about Japan's Inland Sea called, fittingly, The Inland Sea (1991). So getting to see both Akira KUROSAWA (artist, titan) and RYAN COOGLER in the same puzzle made me happy. But that's the thing about names. They hit or they miss, and if they miss, you have no way to infer them, no access to them. They feel exclusionary. Doesn't mean there shouldn't be names in puzzles. Just means you should use them somewhat sparingly. Today, we start with three names one on top of the other (EMILE over LAMELO over SIA), which then run into something called OOH AAH POINT (?!). From there, AHMAD Jamal sits right around the corner. RYAN COOGLER comes crashing through the middle, SLOANE and TAO are holding hands over there in the NE, and then KUROSAWA runs down to the bottom of the grid to hang out alongside Julio CESAR Chávez. The SW corner is the only area that manages to stay out of the Name Game. Every other corner's juggling multiple names. I knew ... most of them? But forgot if it was LAMELL or LAMELO, and stalled on AHMAD Jamal—a downstream effect of having (embarrassingly) misspelled ELYSÉES (as ELYSSÉS, which meant that what should've been THEATER GEEK started T-S, and an "H" could not plausibly go between an initial "T" and an "S" and soooooo ... no AHMAD (for a while)). For me, the names became a distraction. I literally said "again?" when I got up into the SLOANE / TAO part. I thought the long answers were pretty solid on this one, with a nice clean stack through the middle and a few other decent longer answers scattered about (WHERE IT'S AT and GETS THE AX were probably my favorite). But the names are an ISSUE. Felt like an overload.

I think I was supposed to find OOH AAH POINT and "SO DARN CUTE" charming, but sadly I didn't. The first seems exceedingly trivial (how would I know about this goofy name?) and the latter ... is fine, I guess, but I liked it better when I had it as SO DAMN CUTE (really gotta check your crosses! HEMS looked very right, until I looked at the actual clue: 52D: Possessive pronoun (HERS). And that wasn't the only mistake I made, by a long shot. We already covered the ELYSÉES misspelling. Then there was the double-wrong disaster to open the puzzle. I wrote in EMIR / REBUS for 1A: Leader in a robe called a kasaya / 4D: Puzzle) (LAMA / ADDLE). Genius! I thought Colo.'s neighbor was NEV (there's a whole damn state between Colo. and NEV! My mom and sister live in Colo., I should know this, but I was operating on instinct). No other mistakes today, though there were a few struggles. Really couldn't make sense of 40D: One might leave you unprotected at night (BED HOG). If you hog the blankets you leave someone "unprotected." A BED HOG just takes over the damn bed, spacewise. Also, the "One" in that clue is ambiguous—it suggests object, not human being, which is what confused me most. 

Bullets:

• 15A: Coupling rings? (BOOTY CALLS) — cute clue, but this expression hasn't been fresh in a good while. So weird (i.e. typical) that the NYTXW only started including BOOTYCALL(S) in the 2020s. The expression was coined in 1993 and became popular enough to be the subject (and title) of a whole-ass movie by 1997. Then, time passed. A lot of time. 24 years! And then it debuted in the NYTXW (2021). And we've had four more appearances since. That's ... quite a time lag. Maybe the term is still current, I have no idea. People mostly text now, though, right? BOOTY CALLS are not to be confused with BUTT DIALS (NYTXW debut: 2013 (as BUTTDIALED)).

[yikes—the '90s were ... something]

• 27A: One-named pop star with Monkey Puzzle Records (SIA) — is "Monkey Puzzle Records" supposed to help? That adds no pertinent information. If you don't know SIA, you damn sure don't know Monkey Puzzle Records. Maybe the idea is that we like puzzles so we'll like knowing this trivia? :/ Also, adding "protocol" to 45A: Focus of a concussion protocol was just confusing. I wanted something more technical, more specifically sportsy, but I just ended up back at the focus of every concussion: the HEAD. Overwritten clue for a basic answer.
• 7D: Sport similar to pétanque (BOCCE) — "Pétanque" sounds like a card game. It is not. You throw balls. At other balls. It's very French.

• 31D: Metal tube in a nuclear reactor (FUEL ROD) — good answer, made better for reminding me of the time Homer didn't win Employee of the Week at the nuclear power plant. 

Also (speaking of The Simpsons), a FUEL ROD implies the existence of a Fuel Todd.  

That's all for today. See you next time. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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