Aurelia Butler

The Scottish trio has been making political, genre-blending songs for a decade. On a new album, the group embraces the elation of community.When the Scottish band Young Fathers were partway through writing their new album, “Heavy Heavy,” Graham Hastings, known as G, played his brother-in-law a song called “Rice.” The track features cascading drums and bouncy, booming bass as the three-piece chant lyrics including “These hands can heal” and “See the turning tide.”“What are you doing?” Hastings, who sings and plays keys, percussion and synths, recalled his brother-in-law asking. “That’s far too happy for Young Fathers.”For years, the group’s music had been labeled abrasive or forbidding. Being told it was too upbeat, Hastings, 35, said, was “another surprise, another sense that we were doing something we hadn’t before.”Over the past decade, Young Fathers — which also includes Alloysious Massaquoi and Kayus Bankole, who both sing, rap and play percussion — have made music that juxtaposes gospel, hip-hop, electronic music and even the swagger of punk. Despite winning the prestigious Mercury Prize in 2014, their songs have a habit, Bankole said, of “falling between the cracks,” and rarely get played on pop radio stations.The director Danny Boyle, who used Young Fathers’ music for his 2017 movie “T2 Trainspotting,” said in an interview that they “are like a boy band, except no other boy band you’ve ever heard in your life before.” Their music, with oblique lyrics that touch on topics including masculinity and attitudes to immigrants, sums up the loneliness of urban Britain, Boyle added, but he said the group sings with such “white and Black soul,” it lifts listeners up.That uplift is the focus of “Heavy Heavy,” Young Fathers’ fourth studio album and first in five years, though not necessarily by design. In a recent interview at its messy studio — a squat building wedged between a graveyard and a furniture upholsterer in a working class district of Edinburgh — the trio said it hadn’t taken an intentional direction on the LP. It was just trying to “expel all we needed to expel,” Massaquoi, 35, said.At the end of 2019, the group started working on “Heavy Heavy” following a rare year off, so when the three men finally met up to write, they could really “appreciate what we have: the arguments, the fallouts, the joy, the happy moments,” Bankole, 35, said.The trio has been having those ups and downs for over 20 years, after meeting when they were 14 at an underage club in Edinburgh. They each had very different backgrounds: Massaquoi arrived in Edinburgh as a refugee from Liberia’s civil war; Hastings grew up in a working class home in the city; and Bankole lived in a Nigerian household where he was expected to become a doctor or a lawyer. But Massaquoi said that on the club’s dance floor, surrounded by tipsy teenagers, their connection was immediate.Soon, they were making tracks in Hastings’s bedroom, crowded around a microphone hanging in a closet. As teenagers, they initially tried to be a “psychedelic boy band,” Hastings said, performing upbeat rap songs, complete with dance routines, at the club where they had met. They secured a manager, but got stuck in limbo, spending a decade writing songs that were never released. Frustrated, their music took a darker turn, which unlocked a new level of their creativity. Once they started putting those new tracks online in 2013, they once again had the industry’s attention.When Young Fathers reconvened for the “Heavy Heavy” sessions in 2019, it was the first time they’d written music alone since those early days in the bedroom. Massaquoi said going back to their childhood connection simply “made the most sense.” Sometimes writing felt like “toil,” Hastings added, but he said the trio were addicted to “the moments of ecstasy” they create together. It was only once the album was finished that they realized many of its songs had a real “communal aspect,” Massaquoi said.The album includes “Ululation,” in which the band hands vocal duties to Tapiwa Mambo, a friend who ululates joyfully in Shona, a southern African language; and “Drum” in which the group urges listeners to “hear the beat of the drums and go numb, have fun.”“Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is create a sense of community,” Hastings said, “to get people together and to dance.”In the past, Young Fathers were known for taking a disruptive approach to their art. In 2015, they released an album titled “White Men Are Black Men Too” hoping to encourage discussion around issues of race and identity (Massaquoi and Bankole are Black, Hastings is white.)At a recent show in Brighton, Young Fathers performed tracks from the new album as well as old favorites. Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesTwo years later, the group made a video for Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery. As Bankole danced in front of the gallery’s paintings of white aristocrats from centuries ago, Massaquoi pointed out that there was no one like him “framed in gold” in the museum.“Am I meant to admire the brushwork and the colors and the historical context without considering how you came to be here, and the people who look like me aren’t?” Massaquoi intones in the track. “Am I meant to just accept this?”Today, discussions about Britain’s legacy of colonialism are commonplace, even in the country’s museums. But in 2017, some social media users posted racist responses to the video.“Sometimes we’re consciously subverting things,” Hastings said. But as a multiracial group working across genres, “we’re accidentally subverting things by just being.”At a recent album release show, a handful of fans in the 900-strong crowd said the group’s racial mix and politics were a vital part of its appeal. Greg Shaw, 40, a personal trainer who’d driven two hours to the gig at Chalk, a club in Brighton, southern England, said he loved that the band “sing about Black issues, about working class issues, about being together as one.”For most of the 40-minute set, the band seemed lost in its own experience of the music: Bankole prowled and danced around the stage, dreadlocks flying; Massaquoi crooned soulfully into a mic with his eyes closed; and Hastings glared intensely at the crowd as he sung gruffly.But just before Young Fathers began a final number, an old fan favorite called “Toy,” Bankole beamed at the crowd.“What a beautiful family we have here,” he said. Soon, much of the audience was dancing and jittering just like him. As the track ended, Hastings twisted knobs and hit buttons on a bank of electronic equipment to fill the venue with noise. Then he turned and grinned at everyone.There’s nothing wrong with happiness, Hastings had said in Edinburgh: “There is a lot of power in joy.” More

A 20th anniversary edition of the band’s blockbuster second album will include a handful of previously unreleased demos and the completed track “Lost.”Enough time has passed since his band’s first record that the Linkin Park singer Mike Shinoda has reached the stage of his career where his children’s friends are shocked to learn he was in one of the biggest bands of the 2000s. “The reactions are hysterical,” the musician, 45, said in a video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles.He offered a knowing smile about what it meant that it had taken so long. “I think we gradually got comfortable with being elder statesmen,” he said about being discovered by the next generation. “But I’m really grateful for the respect that the band is enjoying from younger people, whether it’s fans or people who are making music.”Linkin Park has not released a new album since May 2017, two months before its other frontman, Chester Bennington, died by suicide at 41. But while assembling material for a 20th anniversary reissue of the band’s second album, “Meteora,” Shinoda came upon something fans haven’t heard before: a handful of unreleased, close-to-complete songs that have sat in the band’s archives for two decades.The first of those tracks, “Lost” — built around Bennington’s passionate vocals, and out on Friday — was pulled from one of Shinoda’s dormant hard drives. “Everything came back,” he said, about rediscovering the track. “That was that day. That was that thing. I remembered us having this conversation about which songs should make the cut.”The song, which was fully recorded and mixed in 2003, was ultimately left off “Meteora” because it was similar to “Numb,” an album single that reached No. 11 on the Billboard chart and has 1.9 billion YouTube views. Today, it serves as an example of Bennington’s potent talents during the band’s commercial peak. (“Meteora” went seven-times platinum; the band’s 2000 debut, “Hybrid Theory,” has an RIAA diamond certification for sales over 10 million.)“He could take that thing he was singing, and just sledgehammer it through somebody’s heart,” Shinoda said with reverence. “I’ve grown to appreciate what we had even more, because it’s hard to get that. I work with people where I go, ‘Oh, can you sing it this way?’ And they just can’t.”Brad Delson, the band’s guitarist, called “Lost” a “surprise gift” from Bennington. “The performance is so beautiful, delicate and clear,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of great Chester vocals, and this is among the best.”The band also revived two nearly completed songs: “Fighting Myself,” which Shinoda finished mixing last year and called “a definitive Linkin Park track,” and “More the Victim,” released in a version that’s “basically the furthest we got with it, in terms of a demo.” Shinoda said “Fighting Myself” received a light touch during the mixing process to preserve its period authenticity.“I really wanted to keep it true to the initial intention, because I didn’t want to taint this time warp,” he said. “What I love about the three new songs is that all of them represent a different facet of the band, as it was in 2003.”“He could take that thing he was singing, and just sledgehammer it through somebody’s heart,” Mike Shinoda said.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty Images“Meteora” was made at a critical moment in Linkin Park’s career. “Hybrid Theory” was the best-selling album of 2001, outpacing LPs from established superstars like ’N Sync, Jay-Z and Destiny’s Child. This seemingly instant success placed more attention and pressure on the band, which began writing the songs that would make up “Meteora” while on tour.“Our attitude, going into the sessions, was that we had everything to prove,” Shinoda said. The fusion of sounds from “Hybrid Theory” — emotive singing alongside nimble rapping, hip-hop rhythms underneath distorted guitars — was already being mimicked across the industry, and the band was eager to prove its creative versatility. “We said, ‘We wrote this formula, so we got to rewrite it, and let people know we’re bigger than that,’” he explained. “‘Because if we don’t start to pivot, we’re going to get stuck forever.’”The super deluxe version of the “Meteora” reissue, due April 7, features “Work in Progress,” a collection of edited tour footage shot by the band’s in-house videographer, Mark Fiore, who captured what Shinoda called “weird, fly-on-the-wall stuff.” The boxed set also includes five previously unreleased full-length concert recordings, taken from a period when the band was constantly on tour at stadiums and arenas around the world.Shinoda said that assembling the “Meteora” set inspired different feelings than the “Hybrid Theory” anniversary, which the band marked in 2020 with a similar boxed set. “We were still processing Chester’s passing at the time we were putting that stuff together,” he said. “Now, the tone for me was much more celebratory.”As Linkin Park matured and its members started families and pursued other commitments, the band inevitably began to shift. The new collection offers a portrait of a group that was still ascending, and working as a unit to achieve all its goals. “When we made ‘Meteora,’ the band was everything,” Shinoda said. “We had so much dedication to what we were building at the time, but there was also that wonderful naïveté. We were just flying by the seat of our pants.”No version of Linkin Park has played live since a 2017 tribute concert to Bennington, where his vocals were sung by a committee of guest musicians including Jonathan Davis of Korn, Machine Gun Kelly and Alanis Morissette. Currently, there are no plans for the band to stage a similar performance, or record without Bennington. “I don’t think we can predict that,” Shinoda said. “You have to let things travel in whatever direction. If and when it’s the right time, that’ll occur to us.”But the process of assembling the reissue has provided another means of considering how Bennington may have wanted the band to proceed without him. In particular, Shinoda said he “felt confident” that the singer would have endorsed these expanded editions. “Historically, he was always way more bullish about putting out stuff,” he said. “A typical Chester reaction would have been, ‘Why not just make the album 15 songs?’ When I thought about that, it was very reassuring.” More

His sophisticated collaborations with the lyricist Hal David — “The Look of Love,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie” and many more hits — evoked a sleek era of airy romance.Burt Bacharach, the debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His publicist Tina Brausam confirmed the death. No specific cause was given.A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.Bacharach-David songs like “The Look of Love” (Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the movie “Casino Royale”), “This Guy’s in Love With You” (a No. 1 hit in 1968 for Herb Alpert), and “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters) evoked an upscale world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Mr. Bacharach appeared as himself and performed his 1965 song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in the 1997 movie “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which spoofed the swinging ’60s ambience of the early James Bond films. He also made cameo appearances in its two sequels.Mr. Bacharach with Hal David, his most frequent collaborator, and Dionne Warwick, the pair’s definitive interpreter. Together they turned out a steady stream of pop hits.Frank Driggs Collection/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists over the years, and even wrote some of his own words. But his primary collaborator was Mr. David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music publisher’s office in 1957. The team’s artistic chemistry solidified in 1962, beginning with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, N.J.Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.The artistic synergy of Mr. Bacharach, Mr. David and Ms. Warwick defined the voice of a young, passionate, on-the-go Everywoman bursting with romantic eagerness and vulnerability. Their urbane style was the immediate forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the middle and late 1960s.Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David worked in the Brill Building, the Midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they are frequently lumped together with the younger writers in the so-called Brill Building school of teenage pop, like the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they rarely wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their more sophisticated songs were closer in style to Cole Porter, and Mr. Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter standards like “Begin the Beguine.”Hits and a MissBeginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in 1962, the team turned out a steady stream of hits for Ms. Warwick, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” Accepting the Academy Award for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1970. Mr. Bacharach also won the Oscar for best song that year, for the film’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”Associated PressMr. Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He won two Academy Awards for best song: for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” written with Mr. David, in 1970, and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His original score for the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which included “Raindrops” (a No. 1 hit for B.J. Thomas), won an Oscar for best original score for a nonmusical motion picture. And the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway in December 1968 with “Promises, Promises.”Adapted by Neil Simon from “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s 1960 film about erotic hanky-panky at a Manhattan corporation, “Promises, Promises” was one of the first Broadway shows to use backup singers in the orchestra pit and pop-style amplification. Along with “Hair,” which opened on Broadway that same year, it presaged the era of the pop musical.“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances, yielded hits for Ms. Warwick in the catchy but fiendishly difficult title song and the folk-pop ballad “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and was nominated for seven Tony Awards. (Two of its cast members won, but the show itself did not. Both “Promises, Promises” and “Hair” lost in the best-musical category to the much more traditional “1776.”) It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2010.At the piano in 1968 with the “Promises, Promises” team, from left: the actor Jerry Orbach, who won the Tony for his role; the actress Jill O’Hara; the director Robert Moore; the playwright Neil Simon, who adapted the musical from Billy Wilder’s 1960 film “The Apartment”; the producer David Merrick; and the actor Edward Winter.Bob Wands/Associated PressWith success both in Hollywood and on Broadway, as well as a high-profile movie-star wife, Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, Mr. Bacharach entered the 1970s not just a hit songwriter but a glamorous star in his own right. It seemed as if he could do no wrong. But that soon changed.In 1973, Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David wrote the score for the movie musical “Lost Horizon,” adapted from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy film of the same name. The movie was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to grow stale, split up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.Reflecting on his split with Mr. David in 2013 in his autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music,” written with Robert Greenfield, Mr. Bacharach acknowledged that “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart.”A New PartnershipMr. Bacharach endured several fallow years, personal as well as professional — his marriage to Ms. Dickinson was over long before they divorced in 1981 — but experienced a commercial resurgence in the 1980s through his collaboration with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982.Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Sager hit their commercial peak in 1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” and the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For,” which went on to win the Grammy for song of the year. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 movie “Night Shift,” and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends (Ms. Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John), “That’s What Friends Are For” was Mr. Bacharach’s last major hit. He and Ms. Sager divorced in 1991.Mr. Bacharach married the actress Angie Dickinson in 1965; they divorced in 1981. At the time of their marriage, he was not just a composer but a debonair, glamorous star in his own right. Associated PressBurt Freeman Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 12, 1928. His father, Bert Bacharach, was a nationally syndicated columnist and men’s fashion journalist who moved his family to Forest Hills, Queens, in 1932. His mother, Irma (Freeman) Bacharach, was an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged him to study music. He learned cello, drums and piano.While still underage, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs and became smitten with the modern harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which would exert a huge influence on him.After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he studied music at several schools, including McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York. Among his teachers were the composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. While serving in the Army in the early ’50s, he played piano, worked as a dance-band arranger and met the singer Vic Damone, with whom he later toured as an accompanist.He became the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich’s musical director in 1958 and toured with her for two years in the United States and Europe. Other performers he accompanied in the 1950s included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart, who in 1953 became his first wife. (They divorced in 1958.)Mr. Bacharach spent the 1950s accompanying famous performers, including the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, pictured with him in 1960.Werner Kreusch/Associated PressThe Bacharach-David songwriting team enjoyed immediate success in 1957 with Marty Robbins’s “The Story of My Life” and Perry Como’s “Magic Moments.” Mr. Bacharach’s emerging melodic signature was discernible in early 1960s hits like Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now” (lyrics by Mr. Hilliard) and “Make It Easy on Yourself” (lyrics by Mr. David), a success for Jerry Butler in the United States and the Walker Brothers in Britain. In their Gene Pitney hits “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” and “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa,” the team adopted a swaggering quasi-western sound.All the elements of Mr. Bacharach’s style coalesced in Ms. Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with Mr. David and arranged himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the arrangements emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the influence of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.Among the other artists who had hits with the team’s songs were Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”), Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Tom Jones (“What’s New Pussycat?”) and the 5th Dimension (“One Less Bell to Answer”). But Ms. Warwick was their definitive interpreter.A ReunionAfter the “Lost Horizon” debacle, Mr. Bacharach worked predominantly as a concert performer, conducting his own instrumental suites and singing his own songs in an easygoing voice with a narrow range. He periodically released solo albums, of which the most ambitious was “Woman” (1979), a primarily instrumental song cycle recorded with the Houston Symphony. But these records had a negligible commercial impact.Time eventually healed the wounds from Mr. Bacharach’s split with Mr. David and Ms. Warwick, and he reunited first with Ms. Warwick (most notably for “That’s What Friends Are For”) and later with Mr. David (for “Sunny Weather Lover,” recorded by Ms. Warwick in the early 1990s). He found his greatest interpreter since Ms. Warwick in the pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross, whose lush 1980s remakes of “A House Is Not a Home” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” transformed them into dreamy quasi-operatic arias decorated with florid gospel melismas.He married Jane Hansen, his fourth wife, in 1993. She survives him, along with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Ms. Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Angie Dickinson, committed suicide in 2007.Mr. Bacharach accompanied the singer-songwriter Elvis Costello at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1998.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn his 60s, Mr. Bacharach found himself regarded with awe by a younger generation of musicians. Bands like Oasis and Stereolab included his songs in their repertoire. The British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer, collaborated with him on the ballad “God Give Me Strength” for the 1996 film “Grace of My Heart,” loosely based on the life of Carole King. That led them to collaborate on an entire album, “Painted From Memory” (1998), arranged and conducted by Mr. Bacharach, for which they shared music and lyric credits.A track from that album, “I Still Have That Other Girl,” won a Grammy for best pop vocal collaboration. It was the sixth Grammy of Mr. Bacharach’s career; he would win one more, in 2006, when his “At This Time” was named best pop instrumental album, as well as a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2008. The Bacharach-David team was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Forty years later, shortly before Mr. David died at age 91, the two received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.Mr. Bacharach in 2007. “Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I get to make a direct connection with people.”Lisa Maree Williams/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach remained in the public eye until the end. In December 2011, “Some Lovers,” a musical for which he wrote the music and Steven Sater wrote the lyrics, opened at the Old Globe in San Diego. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined,” a New York Theater Workshop production built on his songs, opened Off Broadway in December 2013. (An earlier revue based on the Bacharach-David catalog, “The Look of Love,” had a brief Broadway run in 2003.) As recently as 2020, Mr. Bacharach was still writing new music, releasing a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Melody Federer.In 2013, Mr. Bacharach began collaborating with Mr. Costello, Mr. Sater and the television writer and producer Chuck Lorre on a stage musical based on the “Painted From Memory” album but also including new songs. That project never came to fruition, although some of the new material ended up on Mr. Costello’s recent albums. All the music from the “Painted From Memory” project is included in “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a boxed set that also includes Mr. Costello’s recordings of Bacharach songs, which is scheduled for release next month.Looking back on his career in his autobiography, Mr. Bacharach suggested that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most.”“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was also a performer, he noted, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Mr. Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”Alex Traub More

The pioneer of ambient music, now 79, rediscovered some of his earliest recordings for a new four-disc set.Laraaji, a pioneer of ambient music, barely remembers recording most of “Segue to Infinity,” a four-disc trove of his early studio sessions. In the decades since he started recording, Laraaji has made dozens of albums and cassettes, both solo and collaborative. He has played concerts, festivals, webcasts, collaborations with musicians and dancers, yoga classes, meditation gatherings and more.The collection, due Friday, reissues “Celestial Vibrations,” the small-label 1978 debut album that Laraaji made under his birth name, Edward Larry Gordon, and adds six extended tracks — each the length of an LP side — from the same era. Its recordings were rediscovered by Jake Fischer, a college student who bought them on eBay in 2021 for $114.01; they were acetate recordings that had been found in a storage locker. Many tracks on “Segue to Infinity” begin with the voice of the recording engineer announcing the take, sounding fairly jaded. Then the music scintillates, dances and reverberates on its own long time frames.“I just vaguely remember doing the recordings, and I forget who was doing the business dealings with the record at the time,” Laraaji, 79, said via video chat from his apartment in Harlem. He was dressed in orange, the color he has been wearing for decades, with an orange tapestry on the wall behind him. It’s the hue, he has said, of fire and transformation, of sunrise and sunset, which “drives the energy toward creativity and self-realization.”What Laraaji does remember is that the sessions were performed live in real time: “I was using loops at the time, but it was all straight in the moment.” He recorded most of the music solo, but the title track is a duet with a jazz flute player, Richard Cooper, whom Laraaji has been unable to find now that their music is being released.At the time, Laraaji was playing for passers-by in parks and on sidewalks, performing hypnotic, billowing, open-ended improvisations with mallets on an electrified zither, an autoharp without its chord bar. He discovered the instrument in a Queens pawnshop when “a mystically intimate voice” advised, “‘Don’t take money for the guitar,’ which I was trying to pawn,” he recalled. “It said, ‘Swap it for that autoharp in the window.’”It was ideal for a musician drawn to bell-like, consonant sounds. “I explored the autoharp and was surprised where it took me,” he said. “It gave me an instrument that I could perform from meditative states. It was exotic and it was like a miniature keyboard. It was quality controllable. It was portable. It was new. It was different.”In 1979, the British musician Brian Eno heard Laraaji in Washington Square Park, where he often performed, “sitting on the ground with his little autoharp and two little speakers,” Eno recalled in a video chat from England.Eno left Laraaji a note inviting him to record. “People are very nonchalant about something they see every day,” he said. But he saw something special in the man busking in orange robes. “I thought, ‘There’s probably nobody in this crowd who is going to think there should be an album of this guy except me, because I’m a foreigner and I’m a stranger and it looks exotic and interesting to me.’”The album Eno produced, “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance,” was Laraaji’s first international release, in 1980. It is now considered a milestone of ambient and new-age music. Eno said his own role in the music was minimal. “I had a little bit of influence on some of those pieces, in that I added something to the processing of the sound,” he said. “But the music was all his.”Another early Laraaji fan was Vernon Reid, the guitarist who formed the socially conscious hard-rock band Living Colour. He bought the “Celestial Vibrations” album on the street from Laraaji after hearing him play in Park Slope, and they went on to become friends.“Laraaji was really a complete outsider,” Reid recalled in a video interview. “He played this mesmerizing music and he didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. He’s extraordinarily consistent in all the years I’ve known him. He showed me that there was a way to be in the world with music that wasn’t predicated on rage and wasn’t predicated on material things.”“When Brian Eno encountered him, he wasn’t looking for Brian Eno,” Reid added. “He wasn’t the one trying to impress Brian Eno. There was no construct. He’s a person who was following this impulse. He just is what he is.”But that identity has evolved. Edward Larry Gordon was born in 1943 in Philadelphia and grew up in New Jersey, attending a Baptist church. (The name Laraaji has echoes of “Larry G.”) “Bethlehem” — the first track of his debut album — was titled to commemorate the experience of being baptized when he was 12. “It was semi-traumatic and transformational. It was a very, very deep moment,” Laraaji said. “You’re in the water, so the best friend to you at that point is your next breath. I wanted to emulate that experience in life — to treat others to a nonverbal baptism experience by sound.”“My music turns into a wafting sound or a wall of sound,” Laraaji said. “The idea is to move faster than the mind can track. And so the mind gives up and goes to a relaxed place and gives up its thinking function for awhile.”Balarama Heller for The New York TimesHe played violin as a child and majored in piano and composition at Howard University, but also explored acting and stand-up comedy. After college he moved to New York City, where he appeared in Greenwich Village clubs as a comedian and hosted shows at the Apollo Theater. He also had a role in the groundbreaking 1969 film “Putney Swope.”“The idea of invoking laughter has always been second nature to me,” he said. “But at some point when I began exploring consciousness, cause and effect, I realized that the material I was using for comedy wasn’t the most mindfully healthy thing for me to be sharing with audiences or to be conditioning myself with. So around 1970, I faded out of comedy.”He grew increasingly interested in meditation and in exploring the healing properties of sound. Then and now, he said, his music grows out of “improvisation, experimenting with electric zither and exotic open tunings, and performing from contemplative, meditative states.”Through the decades, his music has embraced advancing technology: guitar pedals, synthesizers, apps, all in the service of “adventurous sound painting,” he said.“The texture of the music is like embracing a warm, immersive, friendly, welcoming, inviting soul with a warm, fuzzy hug. Or like a nice, soothing, safe place to be vulnerable. And I think of music as inspiring movement, inspiring a body movement, inspiring a positive movement of thought and social behavior.”Laraaji has also returned to invoking laughter, but without telling jokes. Along with his concert schedule, he presents “laughter meditation” workshops, an idea he was introduced to at an ashram in New York. “The idea was to get people relaxed, chanting into their bodies and then get them to laugh for 15 minutes lying down,” he said. “The workshop evolved into a play-shop, where I direct people how to laugh using the voice, into the body, into the head, to massage the head, the thyroid, the thymus in the chest, the heart, the abdominal organs, and then releasing air from the alveoli in the lungs. So it becomes a total inner workout.”The recordings that have resurfaced on “Segue to Infinity” can be simultaneously enveloping and propulsive. Some are simply named after the instruments they use: “Koto” (Japanese zither) and “Kalimba” (African thumb piano). And some derive their soothing tone, paradoxically, from nonstop motion: “Kalimba 2” is a 23-minute tour de force of sheer concentration and stamina.“His innovation was to bring a rhythmic intensity at the same time as creating this shimmering kind of cloud,” Reid said. “There’s a kind of dance that’s inherent in what he does, and at the same time, the celestial vibration.”Laraaji enjoys the paradox of hyperactivity bringing relaxation. “My music turns into a wafting sound or a wall of sound,” he said. “I think of dance movement or Brownian motion. The idea is to move faster than the mind can track. And so the mind gives up and goes to a relaxed place and gives up its thinking function for awhile.”Hearing his old recordings may change the course of Laraaji’s performances. “People come to the concerts expecting a variety of Laraaji-isms, and I tend to go to a medley of things in my live performances,” he said. “I haven’t done really a thing in a long form for 15 minutes’ duration for a live performance, which is now something I will get back to. I respect long form. As James Brown said, ‘Stay on the scene.’”Note: The photographer used a lens filter to create a starburst effect on these images. More