Bill Withers, a onetime Navy aircraft mechanic who, after teaching himself to play the guitar, wrote some of the most memorable and often-covered songs of the 1970s, including “Lean on Me,” “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Use Me,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death, at a hospital, was announced by his family. His son, Todd, said Mr. Withers had had heart problems.Mr. Withers, who had an evocative, gritty R&B voice that could embody loss or hope, was in his 30s when he released his first album, “Just as I Am,” in 1971. It included “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a mournful lament (“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone/And she’s always gone too long/Anytime she goes away”) that cracked the Billboard Top 10.Other hits followed, perhaps none better known than “Lean on Me,” an anthem of friendship and support that hit No. 1 in 1972 and has been repurposed countless times by a variety of artists.There were also “Use Me” (1972), “Lovely Day” (1977) and “Just the Two of Us” (1981), among other hits. But after the 1985 album “Watching You Watching Me,” frustrated with the music business, Mr. Withers stopped recording and performing.“I wouldn’t know a pop chart from a Pop-Tart,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015, when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.“Bill was a mystical man,” Leo Sacks, who supervised the rerelease of Mr. Withers’s catalog for Sony Legacy Recordings, including a 2012 box that won a Grammy for best historical recording, said by email. “Like a Greek oracle. But he let the songs speak for themselves. He sang so conversationally and universally, like he was sitting next to you. His songs made every word count.”William Harrison Withers Jr. was born on July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va., to William and Mattie (Galloway) Withers. His mother was a maid, and his father worked in the coal mines.At 17, eager to avoid a coal-mine career himself, Mr. Withers joined the Navy.“My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I went to aircraft-mechanic school.”He spent nine years in the service, some of it stationed in Guam. He quit the Navy in 1965, while stationed in California, and eventually got a job at an airplane parts factory. A visit to a nightclub to see Lou Rawls perform was a catalyst for changing his life.“I was making $3 an hour, looking for friendly women, but nobody found me interesting,” he said. “Then Rawls walked in, and all these women are talking to him.”He bought a cheap guitar at a pawnshop, started learning to play it and writing songs, and eventually recorded a demo. Clarence Avant, a music executive who had just founded an independent label, Sussex, took note and set him up with the keyboardist Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the MG’s, to produce an album.“Bill came right from the factory and showed up in his old brogans and his old clunk of a car with a notebook full of songs,” Mr. Jones told Rolling Stone. “When he saw everyone in the studio, he asked to speak to me privately and said, ‘Booker, who is going to sing these songs?’ I said, ‘You are, Bill.’ He was expecting some other vocalist to show up.”Mr. Withers was laid off from his factory job a few months before “Just as I Am” came out. After the album’s release, he recalled, he received two letters on the same day. One was from his workplace asking him to return to work. The other was from “The Tonight Show,” where he appeared in November 1971.That “Ain’t No Sunshine” became a hit off that album was unexpected.“‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ was the B-side to ‘Harlem’,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2015, referring to another track from the album, “until the D.J.s turned it over.”The song, he said, had just come to him one day.“I was watching the movie ‘The Days of Wine and Roses,’ looked out the window and it crossed my mind,” he told The Plain Dealer. “Probably some girl had left me, but ego preservation has taught me to avoid inconvenient truths.”“Ain’t No Sunshine” won the Grammy Award for best rhythm and blues song. “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us” (a collaboration with the saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., written with William Salter and Ralph MacDonald) won the same award.Mr. Withers released six other studio albums in the 1970s, for Sussex and then Columbia, and performed across the country and beyond. One memorable appearance was at the music festival in Zaire in 1974 that preceded the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the heavyweight fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.But he also played clubs like the Bottom Line in Manhattan.“Mr. Withers’s lyrics are among the most thoughtful in all of pop music,” Robert Palmer wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a 1976 show there, “but his work also has its physical side. Many of his tunes simmer irresistibly, as if cooking over a low flame.”Mr. Withers chafed at Columbia, clashing with executives, and after the release of “Watching You Watching Me” in 1985, he was done with the music business. Years later he liked to tell stories about not being recognized in public. One such incident occurred at a Los Angeles restaurant.“Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles up on Pico,” he told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2015, “and these ladies looked like they had just come from church or something, and they were talking about this Bill Withers song. So I was going to have some fun with them. I said, ‘I’m Bill Withers,’ and this lady said: ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You too light-skinned to be Bill Withers.’”Mr. Withers’s brief marriage to the actress Denise Nicholas in the 1970s ended in divorce. In 1976 he married Marcia Johnson. She and their son survive him, along with their daughter, Kori, and a sister, Florence Mather.In 2015, in advance of a tribute concert in his honor at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Withers was interviewed at a restaurant by a reporter for The Times. The talk turned to how, with no music training, he had managed to fashion a career in music relatively late in life.“It was just something I decided to do,” he said. “If I decided to build one of these fountains” — he pointed to a decoration on the restaurant’s patio — “I could probably do it.”He could also probably have resumed his career at any time.“Late in life, he would tease us about recording again,” Mr. Sacks said. “But I think he was truly ambivalent. He said he didn’t think anyone was interested in what an ‘old man’ had to say. And that was Bill to a tee: wily, cunning, self-effacing. Utterly disingenuous.”Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting. More

She was best known as half of a comedy team with her husband, Phil Ford, until her hall-filling voice earned her raves in a role made famous by Barbra Streisand.Mimi Hines, a powerful singer and live-wire comedian who etched her name in Broadway lore as the replacement for Barbra Streisand in the original production of “Funny Girl,” died on Oct. 21 at her home in Las Vegas. She was 91.Her death was confirmed by her lawyer and friend Mark Sendroff.A “mischievous sprite,” as The New York Times once called her, the diminutive Ms. Hines brought an outsize energy to her work, whether she was dishing out one-liners in nightclubs as half of a comedy-and-song duo, Ford & Hines, with her husband, Phil Ford, or delivering showstopping numbers to packed houses on Broadway.During her peak in the 1950s and ’60s, journalists often noted her elfin quality and her distinctive facial features — cleft chin, deep dimples and wide, toothy grin — which she was not shy about using as a comic prop.When Mike Wallace interviewed her and Mr. Ford in 1961, he informed her that a newspaper writer had recently described her as “two buck teeth and a carload of talent.”“That’s not true,” she responded. “My whole mouth is buck.”Ms. Hines and Mr. Ford got their first big break in 1958 on “The Tonight Show,” which at the time was hosted by Jack Paar. It was the first of several “Tonight” appearances they would make over the years. Her rendition of the song “Till There Was You” from “The Music Man” moved Mr. Paar to tears.“It was a magic night on TV,” Ms. Hines said in a 1963 interview with The Prince Herald Daily Tribune of Saskatchewan. “They say 12 million people saw it.” They also appeared on several episodes of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” as well as on many other variety and talk shows.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

[embedded content]

The Canadian superstar buys a girl named Bahri, who came to United States to pursue education, a brand new car because he wants to help her commute to school easier.
Feb 7, 2020
AceShowbiz – Justin Bieber’s music video for “Intentions” is all about giving back to the community. Making its way out on Thursday, February 6, the visuals sees the Canadian singer teaming up with Quavo to help out people at the Alexandria House.
It starts off with an introduction to several women in the community that include a girl named Bahri, who came to the United States to pursue education so that she can be the first person in her family to graduate college. In order to help the girl, Justin surprises her with a visit before giving her a car so that she would be able to commute to school easier. Seeing the new car that Justin gives to her, Bahri immediately starts crying.
Besides Bahri, Justin also helps out a foster girl named Marcy, who has to juggle between college and work in order to support her children, and a woman named Angela, who comes to Los Angeles to pursue art even though she risks being homeless.
At the end of the video, Justin announces, “In your honor, an INTENTIONS Fund has been established in the amount of $200,000 to support these women and the dreams of the families you support.”
“Intentions” is one of the tracks that will be included on Justin’s highly-anticipated album “Changes” that is set for a February 14 release. Prior to the release of the music video, the “Baby” singer revealed the full track list for the album. The lineup has a hot list of features, including Post Malone, Travis Scott (II) and Kehlani.
In support of the album, Justin is set to embark on a North America tour. Billed as “Changes Tour”, the upcoming tour will kick off on May 14 at the CenturyLink Field in Seattle and is currently set to end on September 26 at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford after 45 shows.

You can share this post!

Next article
Prince William and Kate Middleton ‘Offended’ by Royal Family Jokes at BAFTAs

Related Posts More

Hear tracks by Morgan Wallen, Yves Tumor, Lankum and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Karol G and Romeo Santos, ‘X Si Volvemos’Two Latin pop songwriters who thrive on breakup drama — Karol G, from Colombia, and Romeo Santos, a stadium-scale headliner from the Bronx with Dominican and Puerto Rican roots — arrange a last tryst in “X Si Volvemos.” Karol G points out “No funcionamos” — “We don’t work” — and “We’re a disaster in love,” but she admits, “In bed we understand each other.” He tells her their relationship is toxic, but wonders if he’s addicted to their intimacy. The musical turf, a reggaeton beat, is hers, but the temptation is mutual. JON PARELESMorgan Wallen, ‘Last Night’The distance between acoustic-guitar sincerity and electronic artifice is nearing zero. Morgan Wallen, the canny country superstar, has what sounds like a loop of acoustic guitar — three chords — backing him as he sings about a whiskey-fueled reconciliation: “Baby, baby something’s telling this ain’t over yet,” he sings, sounding very smug. PARELESSunny War, ‘No Reason’Sunny War, a songwriter from Nashville born Sydney Lyndella Ward, sings about a flawed but striving character — maybe herself — in “No Reason,” from her new album, “Anarchist Gospel.” She observes, “You’re an angel, you’re a demon/Ain’t got no rhyme, ain’t go no reason,” as folk-rock fingerpicking, a jaunty backbeat and hoedown handclaps carry her through the contradictions. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘Echolalia’There’s a dreamlike quality about “Echolalia,” the breathy, percussive new single from Yves Tumor’s wildly titled upcoming record “Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds).” Basically a three-minute swoon, “Echolalia” finds the 21st-century glam rocker dazed with infatuation and, however briefly, cosplaying conventionality: “Just put me in a house with a dog and a shiny car,” Tumor sings breathlessly. “We can play the part.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJames Brandon Lewis, ‘Someday We’ll All Be Free’When Donny Hathaway sang his “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” it was determinedly encouraging. On his new album, “Eye of I,” the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis makes it both militant and questioning. Chris Hoffman’s electric cello snarls distorted drones and Max Jaffe’s drumming moves between marching-band crispness and rumbling eruptions, while Lewis and Kirk Knuffke, on cornet, share the melody, go very separate ways simultaneously and then reunite, contentious but comradely. PARELESUnknown Mortal Orchestra, ‘Layla’The New Zealander Ruban Nielson, leader of the tuneful lo-fi psych-rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra, is known for being a prolific songwriter, so it makes sense that the band’s forthcoming “V,” its first release in five years, will be a double album. “Layla” is full of warmth, with a soulful vocal melody, Nielson’s nimble guitar playing and the band’s signature fuzzy tones all contributing to an enveloping atmosphere. “Layla, let’s get out of this broken place,” Nielson sings, conjuring an alluring elsewhere. ZOLADZTemps featuring Joana Gomila, Nnamdï, Shamir and Quelle Chris, ‘Bleedthemtoxins’“Do not fear mistakes,” floating voices advise for the first minute of “Bleedthemtoxins,” a bemused miscellany overseen by James Acaster, an English comedian, actor and podcaster turned musical auteur. His debut album as Temps, “Party Gator Purgatory,” is due in May. The studio-built track is loosely held together by a loping beat, but it rambles at will through Beach Boys-like harmonies, free-form raps and small-group jazz, all thoroughly and cleverly whimsical. PARELESDebby Friday featuring Uñas, ‘I Got It’“I Got It,” from the Toronto musician Debby Friday, is an explosive, pounding, relentlessly calisthenic dance-floor banger with attitude to spare. A pulsating beat flickers like a strobe light as Friday and Chris Vargas of the duo Pelada, appearing here as Uñas, trade braggadocious bilingual verses. “Let mama give you what you need,” Friday shrieks before calmly assuring, “I got it.” ZOLADZCaroline Polachek, ‘Blood and Butter’Sheer, euphoric infatuation courses through “Blood and Butter,” the latest single previewing the album Caroline Polachek is releasing on Valentine’s Day: “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.” Polachek and her co-producer, Danny L Harle, constructed a song that starts out in wonderment — “Where did you come from, you?” — on its way to declarations like “What I want is to walk beside you, needing nothing.” Springy hand percussion, a bagpipe solo and multilayered la-las sustain the bliss. PARELESRaye, ‘Environmental Anxiety.’Most of the songs on “My 21st Century Blues,” the impressive new album by the English songwriter Raye, are about personal struggles: with romance, with the music business, with drugs, with exploitation. But “Environmental Activity” views the generational big picture: a poisoned planet, a toxic online culture, a rigged economy. The song is elegant in its bitterness, opening with a sweetly sung indictment — “How did you ever think it wasn’t bound to happen?” — leading to a snappy dance beat, a matter-of-fact, half-rapped list of dire situations and a poised chorale sung over church bells and sirens: “We’re all gonna die/What do we do before it happens?” PARELESYuniverse, ‘L8 Nite Txts’Yuniverse, an Indonesian-Australian songwriter, collaborated with the producer Corin Roddick, of Purity Ring, to make a familiar situation shimmery and surreal: “You’re smiling through your lies again/You’re telling me she’s just a friend,” she sings. Her voice is high and breathy, with hyperpop computer tweaks; it floats amid harplike plinks and fragments of deep, twitchy, drill-like beats. Even in the synthetic soundscape, heartache comes through. PARELESJana Horn, ‘After All This Time’The Texas folk singer Jana Horn makes music of arresting delicacy; her songs take shape like intricately woven spider webs. “After All This Time,” from a new album due in April, is a hushed, gently off-kilter meditation full of Horn’s peculiar koans: “Looking out the window,” she sings in a wispy voice, “is not the same as opening the door.” ZOLADZLankum, ‘Go Dig My Grave’The Irish band Lankum amplifies the bleakest tidings of Celtic traditional songs, leaning into minor modes and unswerving drones, harnessing traditional instruments and studio technology. “Go Dig My Grave,” an old song that traveled from the British Isles to Appalachia, is death-haunted and implacable. It begins with Radie Peat singing a cappella, insisting “tell this world that I died for love.” The band joins her with somber vocal harmonies, tolling drone tones, clanking percussion and baleful fiddle slides, a crescendo of dread. PARELES More

He was known for his laid-back style and for his influence on, among others, Miles Davis, who once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal, whose measured, spare piano style was an inspiration to generations of jazz musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Ashley Falls, Mass. He was 92.The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter, Sumayah Jamal, said.In a career that would bring him a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters, Mr. Jamal made his mark with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music. That approach stood in marked contrast to the challengingly complex music known as bebop, which was sweeping the jazz world when Mr. Jamal began his career as a teenager in the mid-1940s. Bebop pianists, following the lead of Bud Powell, became known for their virtuosic flurries of notes. Mr. Jamal chose a different path, which proved equally influential.The critic Stanley Crouch wrote that bebop’s founding father, Charlie Parker, was the only musician “more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal.”A young Mr. Jamal at the piano, circa 1942. He was only 14 when he joined the musicians’ union.Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art, via Getty ImagesIn his early years, Mr. Jamal listened not just to jazz, which he preferred to call “American classical music,” but also to classical music of the non-American variety. “We didn’t separate the two schools,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things.”Mr. Jamal’s laid-back, accessible style, with its dense chords, its wide dynamic range and above all its judicious use of silence, led to more than his share of dismissive reviews in the jazz press early in his career; Martin Williams’s canonical history “The Jazz Tradition” described his music as “chic and shallow.”But it soon became an integral part of the jazz landscape. Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett are among the prominent jazz pianists who looked to Mr. Jamal as an exemplar.Probably the best-known musician to cite Mr. Jamal as an influence was not a pianist but a trumpeter and bandleader: Miles Davis, who became close friends with Mr. Jamal, recorded his compositions and arrangements and would bring his sidemen to see Mr. Jamal perform. He once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930. Fritz, as he was called, began playing piano at age 3 and began studying with Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, a few years later. By the time he joined the musicians’ union at age 14, the celebrated jazz piano virtuoso Art Tatum had hailed him as “a coming great,” and he began touring with George Hudson’s big band after graduating from high school.In 1950 he moved to Chicago, where he converted to Islam, changed his name to Ahmad Jamal and assembled a piano-guitar-bass trio known as the Three Strings. During an extended stay at the Manhattan nightclub the Embers in 1951, the trio came to the attention of the noted record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who signed them to the Okeh label.Mr. Jamal performing in San Francisco in 1976. He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1955 Mr. Jamal recorded his first full-length album, “Ahmad Jamal Plays,” with the guitarist Ray Crawford and the bassist Israel Crosby, for the small Parrot label. Tellingly, when the album was acquired and rereleased the next year by Argo, a subsidiary of the seminal blues label Chess, it was retitled “Chamber Music of the New Jazz.”Mr. Jamal received his first major national exposure with the Argo album “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” recorded at a Chicago nightclub in 1958 with Mr. Crosby and the drummer Vernel Fournier. It spent more than two years on the Billboard album chart, an all but unheard-of stretch for a jazz album.The success of “At the Pershing” stemmed in part from Mr. Jamal’s ambling yet propulsive interpretation of the standard “Poinciana,” still his best-known recording. But he received some criticism for not including any original compositions on the album, which he later said spurred him to focus on writing his own music.Mr. Jamal’s output was as prodigious as his light-fingered style was economical: He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and more than 60 in his career. He also founded a handful of record labels, a management company and a Chicago nightclub and restaurant called the Alhambra, although that venture lasted less than a year. In keeping with his religious beliefs, the Alhambra did not serve alcohol, which presumably hastened its demise.The Alhambra’s financial difficulties marked the beginning of a dark period of Mr. Jamal’s life, in which he walked away from performing for almost three years. The club closed in December 1961; three months later, he filed for divorce from Maryam Jamal, formerly named Virginia Wilkins, whom he had married when he was 17. Five years of court action followed, during which Mr. Jamal was arrested and charged with nonpayment of child support for their daughter. (He was later cleared.) He was hospitalized in 1963 after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Not until 1964 did he begin touring and recording again.He married first as a teenager, and that marriage ended in divorce. He married Sharifah Frazier, the mother of Sumayah, in the early 1960s, and they divorced in 1982. He married Laura Hess-Hay, his manager, the same year, and they divorced in 1984, though she continued to represent him until his death. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.Live recordings often captured Mr. Jamal at his nimblest, and many jazz connoisseurs rank such albums as “Freeflight” (1971), recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and “Chicago Revisited: Live at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase” (1993) among his best. In 2011, Mosaic Records released a nine-CD boxed set consisting of the 12 albums he recorded for Argo between 1956 and 1962. His album “Blue Moon,” a well-received collection of originals and standards, was released in 2012 and nominated for a Grammy Award. His album “Marseille” was released in 2017 and “Ballades” in 2019.Last year Mr. Jamal released two separate double-disc collections: “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1963-64)” and “(1965-66),” consisting of previously unreleased live recordings made in Seattle. A third set, “(1966-68),” is planned. Mr. Jamal in 2011 at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Rob Verhorst/RedfernsThe reverence with which Mr. Jamal was held stretched well beyond the jazz world. Clint Eastwood used two tracks from “But Not for Me” on the soundtrack of his film of “The Bridges of Madison County.” But the more extensive tributes have come from the world of hip-hop. Tracks like De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” and Nas’s “The World Is Yours,” along with dozens of other rap songs, have sampled Mr. Jamal’s piano riffs.As infectious as those riffs were, it was ballads that held the strongest appeal to Mr. Jamal. Like many other interpreters of the standard repertoire, he made a point of learning the lyrics to the songs he played. He spoke approvingly to The Times in 2001 about a conversation he once had with a great jazz saxophonist who was also known for his way with a ballad.“I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad,” he said. “All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, ‘Why did you stop, Ben?’ He said, ‘I forgot the lyrics.’”Alex Traub More