Make the bear aware of your presence by speaking in an assertive voice, singing, clapping your hands, or making other noises.
Singing in an assertive yet girlish coo with a fluidity that attested to lessons in Indian devotional music, Ms. Holter effectively pared down songs that converse knowingly with Virginia Woolf and Frank O'Hara, preserving their lyrical integrity and structural whimsy.
But at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday evening, Mr. Nakamatsu, who won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1997, played works that demand both a graceful, singing quality and assertive muscularity, and he delivered as fully in the virtuosic passages as in the lyrical ones.
LENY ANDRADE (Wednesday and Thursday) Ms. Andrade, from Rio de Janeiro, specializes in the assertive buoyancy of samba jazz, singing in a deep cry over crisp accompaniment, in this case courtesy of the pianist Dario Eskenazi, the bassist Kip Reed and the drummer Helio Schiavo.
It has everything: gracefully singing string lines, richly harmonized woodwind choirs, assertive brass writing and plenty of rolling thunder in the percussion.
Reviews for Why Should the Fire Die? also included praise of the album's vocals, particularly Sara Watkins' "snippy", "beautifully sung" and "assertive" vocals on various tracks, and the trio's vocal harmonization was also complimented.
MiWi la Lupa sings an assertive interlude complete with rap, while bandleader Sunny Jain provides the central focus, emceeing and playing dhol, the two headed drum most associated with Punjabi bhangra.
The violin writing, played with equal measures of energy and velvety richness by Jennifer Koh, is sometimes assertive and rhythmically sharp-edged, but those moments virtually always resolve into a sweetly singing line.
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After a catchy opening featuring Bruce Thomas's hypnotic bass line and Pete Thomas's assertive drumming, the song is propelled forward by Steve Nieves's cunningly cheesy organ work and that peculiarly declarative way of singing Costello perfected as a young man.
