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      Lou Donaldson, Soulful Master of the Alto Saxophone, Dies at 98

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      A player of impeccable technique and a mainstay of the Blue Note label, he recorded constantly as both a leader and a sideman beginning in 1952.Lou Donaldson, an alto saxophonist who became part of the bedrock of the jazz scene and whose soulful, blues-steeped presence in the music endured undiminished for three-quarters of a century, died on Saturday. He was 98.His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not say where he died.A mainstay of the Blue Note record label at the height of its influence and power, Mr. Donaldson recorded constantly as both a leader and a sideman beginning in 1952. He was a leading voice of the more elemental style that came to be called “hard bop,” an evolution out of the bebop revolution wrought by his inspiration on the alto sax, Charlie Parker. The National Endowment for the Arts named Mr. Donaldson a Jazz Master in 2012.A player of impeccable technique, plangent tone, taste and refinement, Sweet Poppa Lou, as he was long known, nevertheless prized the raw gospel of Black church music and the gutbucket sound of rhythm and blues in his improvisations. The blues was at the heart of his sound: His album “Blues Walk,” released in 1958, is regarded as a jazz masterwork, and its title tune, which he wrote, became a jazz standard.Mr. Donaldson also proved to be an acute talent scout for Blue Note’s owners, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, bringing to their attention both the young trumpet giant Clifford Brown and, later, the young guitar virtuoso Grant Green.“I went down to Alfred Lion at Blue Note and gave him Clifford’s number,” he recalled in “A Wonderful Life,” his unpublished autobiography. “He brought him to New York and we made this tremendous date — tremendous date.”Mr. Donaldson said he had also persuaded Mr. Lion to hand his close friend Horace Silver — the pianist and composer who would come to epitomize “the Blue Note sound” — his maiden recording date as a leader.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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      Book Review: ‘The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.,’ by Peter Ames Carlin

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      In a new biography, Peter Ames Carlin chronicles the rise of an indispensable band and the evolution of its music.THE NAME OF THIS BAND IS R.E.M.: A Biography, by Peter Ames CarlinIt takes a village to raise a rock band. That’s part of the premise of Peter Ames Carlin’s sensitive and well-made new biography, “The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.” The village was Athens, Ga., in the late 1970s and early ’80s, where an art and music scene thrived in the shadow of University of Georgia football.Michael Stipe (singer) met Peter Buck (guitarist) in a record store. They bonded in part over their love of Patti Smith’s raw LP “Horses.” They began to collaborate in an old church, remade into apartments, where Buck lived. A UGA student named Kathleen O’Brien lived there, too.O’Brien was a connector. She introduced Stipe and Buck to Bill Berry (drums) and Mike Mills (bass). Three of these guys were UGA students, too. Buck had dropped out of Emory. Next, she coaxed the four of them into playing their first public gig in the church’s sanctuary. The occasion was her birthday, April 5, 1980. She worked her large network of friends to ensure turnout. She procured the beer and talked some musicians out of their stage fright.The band, by all accounts, was magic from the start. Others began to pitch in on its behalf. Some volunteered to lug amps or procure gigs or loan them money when they were desperate or work the phones calling DJs, urging them to play the band’s songs. The band was the train, but others laid track. That Carlin pays such close attention to how many people had a hand in the band’s early success gives his book a spirited communal vibe.Athens wasn’t Nowheresville, musically speaking. The city was already home to the party-out-of-bounds art band the B-52s and to Pylon, post-punk regional heroes. Finding a name wasn’t easy. Early options included (oh no!) Third Wives, Slut Bank and Negro Wives. Stipe found “r.e.m.,” an abbreviation of rapid eye movement, while leafing through a dictionary.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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      The Jazz-Metal Trio PainKiller’s Classic Lineup Revs Up Again

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      Mick Harris, Bill Laswell and John Zorn’s new album, “Samsara” — their first in 30 years — arrives as Laswell battles health troubles that “opened up a new direction.”In the spring of 1991, John Zorn, the radically eclectic composer and saxophonist, hopped into a cab outside his East Village apartment. Already inside was Mick Harris, a young drummer visiting from Britain whose band, Napalm Death, had become the leading exemplar of grindcore, a caustic, velocity-crazed blend of punk and metal. Their destination: Greenpoint Studios, the Brooklyn headquarters of the prolific bassist-producer Bill Laswell, Zorn’s friend and collaborator.There, in one day, the three bashed out a fully improvised record. Featuring Zorn’s convulsive alto sax over Laswell and Harris’s alternately blasting and lumbering rhythms — seasoned with vocal shrieks from Zorn and Harris — the album represented a new bridge between the jazz avant-garde and underground rock’s most forbidding extremes.On Friday, Zorn’s Tzadik label will release “Samsara,” the first new studio recording in 30 years to feature the original lineup of the trio, collectively known as PainKiller. While the personnel is the same, much else is different this time around.For one thing, the three musicians were never in the same room during the creation of the record. Harris — who has made electronic music for decades and gave up drumming entirely after PainKiller initially parted ways in 1998 — contributed synthetic beats recorded at home in England. Zorn overdubbed his saxophone parts at Orange Music, the New Jersey studio where Laswell shifted his operations in the late ’90s. And Laswell added bass last, via a makeshift mobile studio that his longtime engineer James Dellatacoma set up at his Upper Manhattan apartment.The distance wasn’t just convenient but necessary during a period of profound personal struggle for Laswell. Since 2022, in addition to diabetes and high blood pressure, he has battled a blood infection, and problems with his heart, kidneys and lungs that have kept him in and out of the hospital, left him unable to walk and led to intense pain in his fingers, severely curtailing his playing. He and his team have also been fighting to stave off a possible eviction from Orange Music.Yet the album’s eight tracks of immersive, richly textured beatscapes layered with volatile sax lines still feel unmistakably like PainKiller, joining the band’s catalog following “Execution Ground” from 1994, where the trio embraced desolate long-form dub and hallucinatory ambience.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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      Ella Jenkins, Musician Who Found an Audience in Children, Dies at 100

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      Performing and recording, she transformed what was seen as a marginal genre in the music industry into a celebration of shared humanity. Ella Jenkins, a self-taught musician who defied her industry’s norms by recording and performing solely for children, and in doing so transformed a marginal and moralistic genre into a celebration of a diverse yet common humanity with songs like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” died on Saturday in Chicago. She was 100. Her death was confirmed by John Smith, associate director at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.Ms. Jenkins had no formal musical training, but she had an innate sense of rhythm. “I was always humming or singing and la-la, lu-lu or something,” she once said.She absorbed the everyday melodies of her childhood — the playground clapping games, the high school sports chants, the calls of a sidewalk watermelon vendor hawking his produce. As an adult, she paired such singsong rhythms with original compositions and sought not simply to amuse or distract children but to teach them to respect themselves and others.Against the sound of a kazoo, a harmonica, a variety of hand drums or, later, a baritone ukulele, Ms. Jenkins sang subtly instructive lyrics, as in “A Neighborhood Is a Friendly Place,” a song she wrote in 1976:You can say hiTo friends passing byA neighborhood is a friendly place.You can say helloTo people that you knowA neighborhood is a friendly place.Neighbors to learn to shareNeighbors learn to careA neighborhood is a friendly place.Over children’s steady clapping, she recorded the age-old “A Sailor Went to Sea”:A sailor went to sea, sea, seaTo see what he could see, see, seeAnd all that he could see, see, seeWas down in the bottom of the sea, sea, sea.For many parents and classroom teachers, Ms. Jenkins’s renditions of traditional nursery rhymes like “Miss Mary Mack” and “The Muffin Man” are authoritative.Still, from the beginning of her career in the 1950s, Ms. Jenkins pronounced her signature to be call-and-response, in which she asked her charges to participate directly in the music-making, granting them an equal responsibility in a song’s success. She had seen Cab Calloway employ the technique in “Hi-De-Ho,” and for her, the animating idea, veiled in a playful to-and-fro, was that everything good in the world was born of collaboration.In one of her most popular recordings, Ms. Jenkins sings out, “Did you feed my cow?” “Yes, ma’am!” a group of children trumpet back. The song continues:Could you tell me how?Yes, ma’am!What did you feed her?Corn and hay!What did you feed her?Corn and hay!As Ms. Jenkins repopularized time-honored children’s songs, she also gave the genre global scope. Before Ms. Jenkins, children’s music in the United States consisted primarily of simplified, often cartoonish renditions of classical music.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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      Dwight Yoakam, Country Rebel, Has a New Attitude

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      With the sun setting over the vast expanse of Los Angeles, Dwight Yoakam sighed softly as tears rolled down his cheeks. For a moment, the scene played like one of his own portraits of honky-tonk heartache and regret. But sitting in the country star’s 12th-story offices above the Sunset Strip, it became clear that the emotion gripping him was not sadness, but joy.Forty years ago this month, Yoakam arrived with his debut, the indie EP “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.” The record — later expanded to a full-length — helped shake country music from its mid-1980s doldrums while starting a career filled with more than a dozen Top 10 radio hits and six platinum albums, even as Yoakam took a rebel stance, operating largely outside the Nashville establishment.At 68, as he prepares to release his 18th studio album, and his first on his own label, the ambitious Yoakam has found meaning in something other than his career: his wife, the photographer Emily Joyce, whom he quietly married during the pandemic, and their 4-year-old son, Dalton.“I’ve known the two of them since before I ever met them,” Yoakam said, drying his eyes. “Not to get overly metaphysical, but our connection in the universe, to one another, precedes us and will continue beyond us.”Dwight Yoakam at the Rainbow Room in Los Angeles. He has called the city home since the late 1970s.Wray Sinclair for The New York TimesThe vibe shift is evident on “Brighter Days,” (out Nov. 15), his first album of original material in nearly a decade, where Yoakam’s music takes on a sun-dappled optimism. It features a twangy, pedal-steel-laden track with Post Malone, a fan turned friend and collaborator who likewise made his name outside of country’s embrace.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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      Book Review: ‘Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,’ by Rob Sheffield

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      HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob SheffieldIt’s possible that I know too much about Taylor Swift. I know the words to all her singles and every name on her long list of ex-lovers. Thanks to her current relationship with Travis Kelce, I know details about the various social entanglements of his Kansas City Chiefs teammates that I would prefer not to. I listen to her music about as much as the median American, which is to say: all of the time. Swift has become America’s Muzak, her songs the soundtrack to our Starbucks lines and her life the fodder for our tabloid stories.In “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” Rob Sheffield charts how Swift, who rose to fame writing songs for teenage girls (when she was still one herself), became ubiquitous — and he makes the case that even as her cultural dominance can work to obscure her skill, everything always leads back to her virtuosic writing.Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he publishes consistently glowing reviews of Swift’s seemingly limitless offerings. Here he steps back to consider the roots of her appeal. Swift has “always had a unique flair for writing songs in which people hear themselves — her music keeps crossing generational and cultural boundaries, in ways that are often mystifying,” he writes. She makes her “experiences public property, to the point where she makes the world think of her as a character.”Swift’s self-mythologizing stretches beyond her music to become a collaborative storytelling prompt, one that manages to absorb even her critics. As her superfans brand themselves as “Swifties” and build an extended Taylorverse of analysis and intrigue on social media, they recruit her haters into their project, using them to cast their billionaire idol as a complex and scrappy protagonist.A character becomes more interesting when she has challengers and flaws. “Taylor’s hubris, her way-too-muchness, her narcissism disguised as even more narcissism, her inability to Not Be Taylor for a microsecond — it’s a lot,” Sheffield writes. “You can’t fully appreciate her without appreciating the wide range of visceral reactions she brings out in people.”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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      St. Thomas Church Will Outsource Choir School in Bid to Save It

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      The Manhattan church said it would turn over administration of its boarding school for choristers, one of only a few of its kind remaining, because of financial woes.St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, which has been grappling with serious financial problems in recent years, said on Friday that it would outsource the administration of its renowned boarding school for choristers in a bid to preserve the 105-year-old program.Starting in 2025, the Professional Children’s School, an independent day school in New York, will manage St. Thomas Choir School’s academic program. St. Thomas, an Episcopal church, will continue to provide housing for the school’s 26 students, as well as offering music and religious instruction. Some of the school’s 24 faculty and staff members are expected to lose their jobs, the church’s leaders said.The Rev. Canon Carl F. Turner, the church’s rector, said, “We’ve found a way to preserve our school in a different form through collaboration, which will not only deepen the music making but also help us make it more sustainable financially.”St. Thomas Choir School has had financial problems for decades, balancing its budget with the help of donations and bequests, and by dipping into investment funds. Tuition, at $20,570 per year, is heavily subsidized, and many students receive scholarships.St. Thomas’s leaders warned earlier this year that the church was considering closing the choir school, one of only a few remaining boarding schools for young choristers in the world. The church said at the time that its endowment, annual fund-raising and tuition fees were no longer sufficient to cover the roughly $4 million a year it costs to operate the school, about 30 percent of the church’s $14 million annual budget.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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      André 3000 on 3 Grammy Nods for ‘New Blue Sun’: ‘Super Duper Cool’

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      He was half of Outkast, the last rap act to win album of the year — 20 years ago. His latest nominations are for “New Blue Sun,” an expression of ultimate freedom.An album of the year nomination at the Grammys? André 3000 has been here before.Two decades ago, he and his Outkast partner Big Boi won the prize for “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” their multifaceted hip-hop opus that became a crossover pop breakout. This year, though, André has been recognized for something quite different: “New Blue Sun,” the improvisational flute-led album he released last November, which on Friday was honored with nods in three categories: best alternative jazz album, best instrumental composition and, perhaps most shocking, album of the year, competing against Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift and pop’s heaviest hitters.The album is a thoughtful musical excursion and also a statement of creative purpose — a demonstration that even one of the most storied figures in pop music can rewrite their own script in real time. André 3000 has spent the bulk of this year touring with the band who recorded the album, putting jazz-influenced experimental music on grand stages around the world. But he’s still working far from the pop and hip-hop forms that formed the foundation for his success. Relative anonymity is a trade-off he was willing to make for creative freedom, but the reception to the album has also shown that fans — and now Grammy voters — are interested in welcoming him back to the spotlight.After gathering his thoughts early Friday afternoon, André 3000 spoke about how the seed for his current adventure was planted back in the Outkast era, using the audience as an instrument, and what it’s like to make it all up as you go. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Big day. Where were you when you heard?I’m in Virginia today, we’re playing tonight. I was just waking up and I heard that the nominations came in. We were trying to be nominated in some type of way for alternative jazz or ambient, possibly. But I was totally surprised by this. So yeah, it was super, super, super duper cool.We’re 20 years past “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” winning album of the year, and it’s the last rap album to take that top prize. Do you think that’s still on voters’ minds? That they’re seeing your creative evolution?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