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      Phil Lesh Didn’t Hold Songs Down. He Lifted Them Higher.

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      Some rock bassists make it their job to hold down the bottom of a song: to hone parts that crisply but unobtrusively stake out a harmonic and rhythmic foundation, that are felt as much as heard. Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead who died on Friday at 84, wasn’t one of them. Instead, Lesh’s playing carried songs aloft.In the telepathic tangle of the Grateful Dead’s arrangements — never played the same way twice — Lesh’s bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint, almost as if he were thinking aloud. Lesh’s playing was essential to the Dead’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.Jerry Garcia, left, and Phil Lesh rehearse with the Grateful Dead in San Francisco in the 1970s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesLesh wasn’t a rock-and-roller by training or inclination. His 2005 memoir, “Searching for the Sound,” notes that his first instruments were violin and trumpet, that he soaked up classical music and big-band jazz, that he studied music theory and composition and drew life-changing inspirations from John Coltrane and Charles Ives. He and Tom Constanten, the Dead’s early keyboardist, were the band’s avant-garde contingent, a key aspect of the Dead’s ever-evolving improvisational fusion.For all their free-form interludes, the Dead’s songs had clear landmarks and structures — some of them far trickier than the band’s nimble performances would let on. Lesh could stick to a riff, as he dutifully did in the intro to “Touch of Grey,” the Dead’s only Top 10 (and only Top 40) single. But when the verse arrived, he was footloose again: nudging, scurrying, syncopating from below. His bass lines held hints of Bach, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Latin music and far more, as he sought out new interstices each time through a song.Phil Lesh performing with the Dead at Woodstock in 1969. Archive Photos/Getty ImagesWe 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

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      Barbara Dane, Who Fought Injustice Through Song, Dies at 97

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      She was highly regarded as a folk, blues and jazz singer. She was also ardently left-wing and prioritized social change over commercial success.Barbara Dane, an acclaimed folk, jazz and blues singer whose communist leanings and fierce civil rights and antiwar activism earned her both critical plaudits and a thick Federal Bureau of Investigation file, died on Sunday at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.Her daughter, Nina Menendez, said that after suffering shortness of breath for several years because of heart failure, Ms. Dane chose to terminate her life under California’s End of Life Option Act.Over the course of her long career, Ms. Dane, with her rich, woody contralto, built a reputation in a variety of musical genres.She established her bona fides as a folky of the first order while still in her teens, performing with Pete Seeger. “I knew I was a singer for life,” she recalled in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, “but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then. I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Ms. Dane wore her convictions proudly, belting out worker anthems like “I Hate the Capitalist System” and “Solidarity Forever.” She performed at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan would often sit in with her when she was performing at Gerdes Folk City, the Greenwich Village club.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

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      Phil Lesh Made Organ Donation His Personal Cause

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      For the past 25 years, the founding member of the Grateful Dead made a nightly speech about a topic that helped him stay performing into his 80s.The Grateful Dead and its various successors and offshoots were famous for making sure no two concerts were the same, changing their set lists with each performance. But since the late 1990s, at most every show featuring the original bassist Phil Lesh, who died Friday at 84, there was one thing that kicked off each encore.It was not a song, exactly, but a brief monologue from Lesh urging everyone in the audience to declare themselves organ donors. The subject was personal to him: In 1998, at the age of 58 and suffering from chronic hepatitis C, he received a liver transplant.“I’m only alive today,” he said before a 2015 concert featuring the three other original living members of the Grateful Dead, “because a man named Cody decided he wanted to be an organ donor. And he did it in the simplest way possible: He turned to someone who loved him and he loved, and said, ‘Hey, if anything happens to me, I’d like to be an organ donor.’”As he told the music magazine Relix in 2002, “If you need an organ, or someone you love needed an organ and one was available, would you accept it? Of course you would. Well, fair is fair. If you’re willing to accept it, then you should be willing to be a donor, as well.”Lesh’s transplant came just three years after the death of Jerry Garcia, his fellow founding Grateful Dead member. Lesh insisted the transplant saved his life and enabled him to undertake a formidable touring schedule for the next few decades with Dead successors such as Furthur and his own band, Phil Lesh and Friends.The pre-encore speech became such a concert mainstay that fans and websites that track set lists for Lesh’s bands would often include it: “Donor Rap” or “Phil’s Donor Rap.”Six years ago, Phil Lesh and Friends played a benefit for the American Transplant Foundation at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver in honor of the 20th anniversary of Lesh’s transplant.“We didn’t need to sell him on anything,” the foundation’s executive director, Anastasia Henry, recalled in a brief interview Friday. “He had zero requirements — very simple.”At the encore, before renditions of “Fire on the Mountain” and perhaps the most notable Lesh-penned Grateful Dead song, “Box of Rain,” Lesh gave his donor rap. Referring to his liver donor solely by his first name, Lesh said that he wasn’t the only beneficiary of Cody’s decision, and that he helped half a dozen people live after his death. “Me and Cody,” he added, “have had a great relationship for 20 years.” More

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      Phil Lesh, Bassist Who Anchored the Grateful Dead, Dies at 84

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      One of the first rock bassists whose instrument regularly took a lead role, he also had a hand in writing some of the band’s best-known songs.Phil Lesh, whose expansive approach to the bass as a charter member of the Grateful Dead made him one of the first performers on that instrument in a rock band to play a lead role rather than a supporting one, died on Friday. He was 84.His death was announced on his Instagram account. No further information was provided.In addition to providing explorative bass work, Mr. Lesh sang high harmonies for the band and provided the occasional lead vocal. He also co-wrote some of the band’s most noteworthy songs, including ones that inspired adventurous jams, like “St. Stephen” and “Dark Star,” as well as more conventional pieces, like “Cumberland Blues,” “Truckin’” and “Box of Rain.”Key to the dynamic of The Dead was the way Mr. Lesh used the bass to provide ever-shifting counterpoints to the dancing lines of the lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, the curt riffs of the rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the bold rhythms of the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and, in the band’s first eight years, the warm organ work of Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen.A source of particular excitement was the relationship between Mr. Lesh’s instrument and Mr. Garcia’s. At times they mirrored each other. At other times they contrasted, in the process widening the music’s melodic nuances while helping to create the kind of variety and tension that allowed the band to improvise at length without losing the listener.Mr. Lesh’s bass work could be thundering or tender, focused or abstract. On the Grateful Dead’s studio albums, his lines held so much melody that one could listen to a song for his playing alone. At the same time, he shared his bandmates’ love for unusual chord structures and uncommon time signatures. In constructing his bass parts, he drew from many sources, including free jazz, classical music and the avant-garde.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

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      Lady Gaga’s Dance-Floor Antidote, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear Sade’s first new track since 2018, plus songs from Soccer Mommy, Tyler, the Creator and more.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lady Gaga, ‘Disease’Lady Gaga sets aside her forays into analog-era styles — which included duets on pop standards with Tony Bennett and an Oscar for best original song, from “A Star Is Born” — and returns to electronic dance-pop with “Disease,” a sequel to her career-making hits like “Bad Romance” and “Judas.” It’s a four-on-the-floor thumper, with wordless vocal hooks, bulldozing bass and promises to turn around the most dire situations. “Screaming for me baby like you’re gonna die,” she belts. “Poison on the inside / I could be your antidote tonight.” It harks back to her hits from the 2000s, but she sets aside her gimmick from back then: There’s no consonant-repeating stutter.Sade Adu, ‘Young Lion’Sade’s first song since 2018 is dedicated to her transgender son, Izaak, and appears on the compilation “Transa” from the Red Hot Organization. Set to minor chords, the song is an apology from a parent who didn’t understand her child’s needs at first: “You must have felt so alone / The anguish and pain, I should have known,” she sings. “Forgive me, son.” Strings swell behind her as she affirms, “You shine like a sun” and “See how far you’ve come.” But the final tolling piano chords suggest irreparable regrets.Soccer Mommy, ‘Abigail’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

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      Review: A Standard Rushes Back to the Philharmonic

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      The New York Philharmonic has played Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony twice in two years. Rafael Payare led its latest outing.Earlier this month, the New York Philharmonic brought back two standards by Beethoven and Brahms after just a couple of years. And this week, under the conductor Rafael Payare, the orchestra did it again, playing Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony at David Geffen Hall not even two years after its last outing.Programming like this may be driven by fear. With two seasons to fill before Gustavo Dudamel arrives as music director, the Philharmonic could be nervous about losing audiences and is juicing the programs with classics. It’s unfortunate: Even though these works are beloved for a reason, there is just too much great music that goes unheard to justify endless repetitions of a tiny core repertoire.But there was also something new this week: the Philharmonic’s first performances of “Fairytale Poem” by Sofia Gubaidulina — just five months after the ensemble played this 93-year-old Soviet-born composer’s Viola Concerto. (That is the kind of repetition I can get behind.)Gubaidulina’s music manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident, that it’s irresistible.“Fairytale Poem” (1971) shows that this was true from her earliest works. The 14-minute piece was inspired by a Czech children’s story; the main character is a piece of chalk that wants to draw gardens and castles but is stuck doing dry work at the classroom blackboard until a boy takes it home and finally gives it free imaginative rein.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

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      Philip Glass Quartet to Be Performed at AIDS Memorial as Tribute to Brian Buczak

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      Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, written after the death of the artist Brian Buczak, will be performed at the New York City AIDS Memorial.The night Brian Buczak died, fireworks lit up the sky.It was July 4, 1987, and his bed at New York University’s hospital on the East River overlooked the holiday celebrations. Buczak’s partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, a prolific painter of clouds, was struck by the beauty of what he saw outside the window: bursts of color, brightening a dark expanse.Buczak was just 32, but he had already made more than 400 paintings, founded a small printing press for artists and settled down with Hendricks, the love of his life, with whom he had restored a Federal-style house on Greenwich Street. But all that was cut off when Buczak, like many thousands of New Yorkers before and since, died of complications from AIDS.As Hendricks grieved, he turned to a friend, the composer Philip Glass, to write a tribute to Buczak. The result was Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, nicknamed Buczak, which he has described as “a musical impression.” It premiered on the second anniversary of Buczak’s death at the Hauser Gallery; now it is returning with a free performance by the Mivos Quartet on Sunday at the New York City AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village.This weekend’s concert is the latest event in a resurgence of Buczak’s story and work. Last winter, there was a solo exhibition of his art, “Man Looks at the World,” at the Gordon Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects galleries, his first since 1989, the year Glass’s quartet premiered. Hendricks, who died in 2018, has a show opening on Friday at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.“It’s such a relief,” Bracken Hendricks, Hendricks’s son and something like a stepson to Buczak, said of the fresh attention on Buczak. “It feels really earned by Brian’s just really deep and thoughtful work. His creative output was well conceived and conceptualized, and beautifully realized, but it was also forged by the grief of knowing he was dying.”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

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      On ‘The Great Impersonator,’ Halsey Channels Pop’s Past

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      The singer and songwriter’s fifth album processes intense pain through a high-concept homage to role models including Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen and Britney Spears.Pop stars start out as pop fans. Like countless other listeners, they find songs that move them, sounds they enjoy and public personas they identify with. Then, if they are talented and determined and lucky enough, they forge their own artistic identities and inspire new fans.“The Great Impersonator,” the high-concept new album from Halsey (who uses she/they pronouns), openly pays homage to her role models. On her Instagram, she specifies an influence for each song, among them Kate Bush, David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Björk and Aaliyah. She poses in photos like each one, with wigs and costumes, somewhere between Cindy Sherman and a songwriter’s mood board. And in one song, “Lucky,” she adapts both the title and the chorus of Britney Spears’s “Lucky” to apply to her own time as a pop celebrity. “I told everybody I was fine for a whole damn year,” she sings. “And that’s the biggest lie of my career.”“The Great Impersonator” lets Halsey, who is 30, try on vintage styles, largely acoustic and hand-played. It’s a sharp turn away from the fearsome, exploratory studio arsenal of “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” her 2021 album that was produced by Nine Inch Nails. The explicit concept makes a pre-emptive strike against accusations of derivativeness. Yet even as the album underlines what Halsey has learned from others, it shows what sets her apart: her insistence on channeling intense pain through her songs. In “Only Living Girl in LA,” which opens the new album, Halsey sings, “I wake up every day in some new kind of suffering / I’ve never known a day of peace.”From the beginning — her first EP, “Room 93,” was released in 2014 — Halsey has sung about fierce inner conflicts. On her 2015 album, “Badlands,” she sang, in “Gasoline,” “Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me?” Her songs juggle traumas, insecurities, obsessions, self-destructive impulses, the imperatives of stardom and the inevitability of death.Songs on “The Great Impersonator” reflect Halsey’s more recent life changes: the birth in 2021 of her son, Ender Ridley Aydin — whose voice appears in a few songs — and her serious health problems. In June, Halsey revealed that she has been under treatment for chronic autoimmune conditions: lupus erythematosus and T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. And in September, she stated, “I made this record in the space between life and death.”Halsey’s “The Great Impersonator” is full of medical encounters, recognizing the fragility and centrality of the body. “The End” — a Joni Mitchell tribute set to fingerpicked acoustic guitar and high vocal harmonies — sets doctor visits against the solace of love. “I Never Loved You,” with stately piano chords à la Kate Bush, envisions futile surgery after a lovers’ quarrel and a car crash. In “Letter to God (1983),” which hints at the ticking beat and sustained keyboard lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” Halsey recalls an addicted boyfriend who had “track marks on his arms,” then notes, “Now I’m the one with needles in my arms and in my legs / I’m making jokes about the blood tests and I’m planning my estate.”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