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      Les McCann, a Jazz Pianist and Singer, Dies at 88

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      He released more than 50 albums but had his greatest commercial success with “Compared to What,” a recording that came together at the last minute in 1969.Les McCann, a jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the bluesy, crowd-pleasing style that came to be known as soul jazz, and who, although he released more than 50 albums, was best known for a happenstance hit from 1969, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His death, at a hospital where he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his longtime manager and a producer of several of his albums. Mr. McCann had lived for the past four years at a skilled nursing facility in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.Mr. McCann’s earthy, uplifting approach to music was a product of his upbringing in a churchgoing family. As he came to emphasize his singing more and play electric keyboards, his albums, released from 1960 to 2018, influenced funk and R&B artists and became a rich vein for hip-hop artists to mine.His greatest commercial success, though, came purely by chance, in June 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Already a recording veteran by then, with albums on Pacific Jazz, Limelight and, most recently, Atlantic, Mr. McCann was appearing at the festival for the first time. After he and the tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, also an Atlantic artist, played separate sets, they gave an unscheduled performance together, with Mr. Harris as well as the expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey joining Mr. McCann’s trio.Neither had played with Mr. McCann before, and there was no time for rehearsal. But the performance was to be recorded and filmed for broadcast.Despite the pressure, or perhaps because of it, as Mr. McCann recalled in the liner notes for the 1996 CD reissue of the concert album, which was released in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before we went onstage, and for the first time in my life, I smoked some hash.”When he got to the bandstand, he wrote, “I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was totally disoriented. The other guys said, ‘OK, play, man!’ Somehow I got myself together, and after that, everything just took off.”The highlight of the concert was Eugene McDaniels’s protest song “Compared to What.” Stretching past eight minutes and featuring Mr. McCann’s churchy vocals, “Compared to What” would be released as a single and peak at No. 35 on the Billboard R&B chart. “Swiss Movement” was nominated for a Grammy Award and went on to sell a half-million copies.Mr. McCann and Mr. Harris reconvened in 1971 for the Atlantic studio album “Second Movement.” They also returned to Montreux for the 1988 festival, where they performed an obligatory reprise of “Compared to What.”Leslie Coleman McCann was born on Sept. 23, 1935, in Lexington, Ky., to James and Anna McCann. His father was a water maintenance engineer.His family was a musical one; he, his four younger brothers and his sister all sang in the Shiloh Baptist Church choir. Mr. McCann began playing piano at age 3 and a few years later had a music teacher, who charged 35 cents a lesson. (Those lessons did not last long: She died only six weeks after he began studying with her.) While attending Dunbar High School in Lexington, he played drums and sousaphone in the marching band.He left Kentucky at 17 when he enlisted in the Navy and was posted to the San Francisco area.Les McCann performing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1974. He had been performing in clubs in Los Angeles when he was first offered a record contract.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesDuring his time in the Navy, he sang on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after winning a talent contest. On his nights off, he would spend time at the Black Hawk, a San Francisco jazz nightclub.After leaving the Navy, Mr. McCann moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music and journalism at Los Angeles City College and hosted a Monday night jam session at the Hillcrest Club. It was during that time that he first connected with Mr. McDaniels.In a 2017 interview for the magazine Oxford American, Mr. McCann was asked about Mr. McDaniels’s composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he said, “I hired him in my band — one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. And I found out he was also a writer. We stayed in touch for years after that, and he would always send me songs. I can’t tell you how many songs he sent me, but that one stuck with me.”Mr. McCann was performing in Los Angeles clubs when a representative of Pacific Jazz Records heard him and asked if he had a record contract. When told no, the representative pulled one from his pocket and offered it to him.Mr. McCann recorded more than a dozen albums for the label from 1960 to 1964, usually leading a trio under the businesslike moniker Les McCann Ltd., but sometimes adding guest horns or orchestral accompaniment and sometimes collaborating with the guitarist Joe Pass. He also took part in Pacific Jazz sessions led by the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, the Jazz Crusaders and others. Les McCann Ltd. backed the singer Lou Rawls on his debut album, “Stormy Monday,” released by Capitol in 1962.Mr. McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Records run by Quincy Jones, for which he made six albums from 1964 to 1966. He signed with Atlantic in 1968; on his first album for the label, “Much Les,” he was accompanied by a string section.He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he played a host of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been inspired to explore after hearing the keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. Those albums have been cited as seminal in popularizing electric keyboards.Later in his Atlantic years, Mr. McCann was featured more as a singer in a slicker, more pop-oriented context. This continued through the 1970s and ’80s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M and Jam labels. But he also remained committed to the piano. In 1989, when he was a guest on the NPR show “Piano Jazz,“ hosted by his fellow pianist Marian McPartland, it was as both a singer and a player. The two closed the broadcast with a duet on “Compared to What.”Mr. McCann had returned to emphasizing his piano playing by 1994, when he released “On the Soul Side,” the first of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. But a stroke later that year forced him to once again focus on singing, which he did through the end of the decade.He later recovered fully and resumed recording. He released albums on a German label in 2002 and on a Japanese label two years later. His last recording was the holiday-themed “A Time Les Christmas,” which he released himself in 2018.In December, Resonance Records released the archival album “Les McCann — Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967),” comprising concert recordings from Seattle and New York.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by nearly 300 hip-hop artists, including Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G. and Sean Combs.Mr. McCann performing at the 40th Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006. He also painted and was a photographer.Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto AgencyIn 1975, Mr. McCann became the first artist in residence at Harvard University’s Learning From Performers program. He was also a devoted painter and photographer of jazz culture and Black history, and his images have been included with some of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 in the book “Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”In an interview for the preface to that book, Mr. McCann was asked how he had achieved intimacy with his photographic subjects. He responded: “I trust my intuition, you see,” adding, “I’m better off when I just do what I do on the piano: play.”Rebecca Carballo More

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      The Metropolitan Opera Moves Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ to America

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      Starring a magnetic Aigul Akhmetshina, Carrie Cracknell’s lethargic staging updates Bizet’s opera to present-day America.The Metropolitan Opera says its new production of “Carmen” aims at “reinvigorating the classic story.”To that end, the director Carrie Cracknell has updated Bizet’s tale of a heedless, headstrong woman and her tragic fate from early-19th-century Spain to present-day America. It seems that the action has been placed somewhere along the border with Mexico, where guns are smuggled in long-haul trucks and rodeo riders (rather than the libretto’s toreadors) are local celebrities.But this change — intended “to find the relevance to contemporary concerns” in the piece, as Cracknell says in an interview in the program — ends up being little change at all. The bland, lethargic staging, which opened on New Year’s Eve, falls into the pattern of so many of the Met’s updatings: It is, almost gesture for gesture, the same as any extra-stale traditional “Carmen,” just dressed up in cutoff jeans and trucker hats instead of flamenco skirts and castanets.Don’t be fooled. The only truly impressive aspect of this “Carmen” is its Carmen: the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, in turquoise cowboy boots. Though this icon of the repertory is her first leading role at the Met, she seems unfazed by the pressure, singing with easily penetrating evenness and clarity, never needing to push. Her molten yet agile tone can be confiding one moment and extroverted the next, and she moves with magnetic naturalness onstage.But she suffers from a staging that lacks passion, wit, depth and variety. Cracknell, who is making her Met debut, describes her directorial approach as “looking through a feminist lens.” Perhaps because harshness or darkness in the title character could be perceived as antifeminist — as Carmen somehow provoking her ex-lover to kill her rather than lose her — Akhmetshina’s take on the part is fundamentally sweet and sincere, well-meaning and fun-loving. Even her seductiveness is gently nonthreatening, with the same old hand-on-hip mannerisms as the Carmens of a century ago.The other leading artists are still more at sea. As the opera’s ingénue, the soprano Angel Blue swings up to excitingly free high notes, but her voice pales a bit and wavers with vibrato lower down — and the production can’t decide whether it wants the standard meek Micaëla or a more assertive woman. As Escamillo, here a selfie-taking rodeo star rather than a bullfighter, the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen swaggers just enough to remain sympathetic, his sound compactly resonant.Akhmetshina and the tenor Rafael Davila, who played Don José in the production’s New Year’s Eve opening.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaOn Sunday, the tenor Rafael Davila had the tough assignment of replacing Piotr Beczala, who was announced as ill just a few hours before curtain, as Don José, the soldier whose mania for Carmen drives him from decent country boy to murderous outlaw. Davila’s sturdy voice grew unreliable as it rose, and in a staging seeking to shift as much moral responsibility as possible onto José, he was, oddly, no more violent or volatile than the norm.The conductor Daniele Rustioni kept to moderate, well-judged tempos, and the train always stayed firmly on the tracks, including precise work by the chorus — although that came at the expense of ferocity and sensuality. In the preludes to the third and fourth acts were glimpses of a wilder, more expansive and more beautiful vision of Bizet’s score.Michael Levine’s sets are grandly spare and unevocative. With a high chain-link fence awkwardly shoving much of the action to a thin strip downstage, the first act takes place outside a factory making weapons, rather than the libretto’s cigarettes. Carmen and her merry band make off with a truck that then dominates the second and — crashed and burning on its side — third act. Skeletal, cagelike black bleachers rotate ominously in the fourth.Modern-day touches abound. Ann Yee’s choreography for a little second-act dance party echoes the finger-pumping-in-the-air style of the crowd at a pop show; the rodeo audience does the wave. Tom Scutt’s costumes are plausible Carhartt-ish evocations of today’s border country denizens; Guy Hoare’s lighting veers wildly, naturalistic to stark to frantic.Yet the 21st-century-ness is all on the surface, even if Cracknell’s goal is nothing less than a revolution in the opera’s sexual dynamics. “Ending violence against women and reimagining the depiction of violence against women,” she says, “live at the center of the feminist movement.”But this “Carmen” reimagines nothing. It seems from her interviews that Cracknell wants to emphasize the broader structures of gender and class that make Carmen’s death a societal tragedy instead of an individual crime of passion. But the director struggles to render that distinction legible to the audience.The bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, as the rodeo star Escamillo, takes a selfie with Akhmetshina and a crowd.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSure, a security guard walks by during Carmen and José’s final confrontation and doesn’t intervene. And at the end, the women in the bleachers at the rodeo rise in solidarity while the men remain seated. But it’s all too little, too late for anything approaching a structural critique — or even just interesting, vibrant theater.Some of Cracknell’s choices, in fact, make the work less provocative. The children’s chorus mimics the changing of the guard in the opera’s opening act; if you’d like, society is training them for militarism. But rather than doubling down, Cracknell has the kids sing directly to the audience, choosing charm over menace.And it’s wrongheaded to imply, as Cracknell does, that the male chauvinism has been suppressed and the violence romanticized in previous “Carmen” productions. At the Met alone, I remember a performance of an old-fashioned Franco Zeffirelli staging around 2000, a few years after it premiered, in which the deadly final scene really did provide the queasy sensation of spying through a window on a murder, with all the attendant feelings of horror, excitement and shame.Richard Eyre’s production, which replaced the Zeffirelli in 2009 and set the work at the time of the Spanish Civil War, introduced a pervading sense of grimness, of the characters being thrown together by forces beyond their control. That was a show in which you certainly felt Carmen’s brooding fate more than her stereotypical insouciance or sex appeal. It made the stakes of the opera clearer and darker than they were on Sunday.And in removing the opera’s exoticizing of Spain as the playground of bandits and Gypsies, Cracknell, who is British, introduces a more insidious exoticizing. As in the Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the frisson of this “Carmen” is its glib depiction of so-called flyover states — the part of the country that fascinates the operagoing elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.There’s something depressing, even corrosive, in taking such a superficial glance at our fellow Americans, when — especially as an election year dawns — our cultural institutions should be trying to help us understand one another.CarmenThrough Jan. 27, and returning in the spring with a new cast, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Murder Most Unromantic in a New ‘Carmen’ at the Metropolitan Opera

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      A close observer might have noticed the flicker of menace that passed between the man and the woman: how his hand, which had just cupped her cheek, slid down and opened to encircle her throat. But though her body grew still for a moment, it didn’t show fear. Instead, she seemed to give as good as she got during their heated exchange of words that occurs in full view of a crowd — a crowd that appeared to freeze when he grabbed her arm and roughly shoved her, sending her flying to the ground.Domestic abuse is often considered a private problem that happens behind closed doors. On New Year’s Eve, it will take center stage at the Metropolitan Opera in a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” conducted by Daniele Rustioni. The opening run stars the Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role and the tenor Piotr Beczala as José, the soldier whose obsession with Carmen culminates in her murder. The modern-dress production, set near an unspecified border in America, includes scenes like this moment from Act II, rehearsed on a recent afternoon, that aim to shed light on society’s complicity in violence against women.The production’s director, Carrie Cracknell, said she wanted to question the view that Carmen’s death at the hands of José is a crime of passion, the result of her corrupting and discarding an innocent soldier. “We talk about domestic violence as these things which we understand to be a secret between a man and a woman,” she said. In the case of Carmen’s death, she added, “we’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Akhmetshina rehearsing. The production is set not in Andalusia but at an unspecified American border.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe British Cracknell, 43, has made a name for herself in theater with acclaimed productions of works like Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Euripides’ “Medea” — stories, she said, “about women who find themselves caged by patriarchal structures and cause chaos as a way of dealing with it.” With “Carmen,” her Met debut, she takes on a reliable box office hit, one whose title character — with her teasing, chromatic melodies — came to define operatic sex appeal for generations.But these days the opera also leaves many uncomfortable with its French colonialist fantasies played out in an Andalusia peopled by licentious women and lawless smugglers, a place that risks luring a good man away from duty, family and the churchgoing girl his mother wants him to marry. When José stabs Carmen at the same moment that her new lover triumphs inside the bullfighting arena, it feels as if Bizet is not only killing off a character but restoring the hierarchical order of his time.In recent years, productions have put new spins on this ending. In Cologne, the director Lydia Steier had Carmen wrest back enough agency to kill herself. At the Royal Opera House in London, Barrie Kosky’s androgynous Carmen rose up after her death with a shrug. In a 2018 production in Florence, directed by Leo Muscato, Carmen turned the gun on José and shot him. (That drew disapproving tweets from the future prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni.)The musicologist Susan McClary, who has been publishing studies on class, race and sex in classical music since the early 1990s, said in a video interview that while the tensions in “Carmen” lend themselves to modern interpretation, the music makes the audience complicit in craving the destruction of Carmen and what she represents.“The problem is that final chord, which seems to shout ‘hurrah!’” McClary said. Up until then, she argues, the slippery chromaticism of Carmen’s music has been pitted against the more stable lyricism that characterizes José and Micaëla, the childhood sweetheart sent by his mother to bring him to his senses. At the moment in which the bullfighter triumphs and José moves in for the kill, McClary said, “all of the dissonances that have led up to that in the confrontation between José and Carmen are suddenly resolved in that chord.”Cracknell said of Carmen’s death: “We’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCracknell said that while it is inevitable that audiences feel pulled toward the dramatic resolution of the opera — which here is the death of a woman — she wants to “de-romanticize” Carmen’s death. When women are killed by their intimate partners, “the reality of these things is that they’re chaotic and messy and horrific and that they destroy lives,” she said. “So we’ve tried to replicate that rather than allowing it to feel like a kind of intimate, central moment of transition.”In Akhmetshina, who is making her highly anticipated Met debut, Cracknell has an interpreter who brings deep experience with the work to the stage. At 27, Akhmetshina has already sung the role in so many productions — this is her seventh, and she has plans to star in two more, at London’s Royal Opera House and at Glyndebourne — that she can rattle off a list of different takes on the death scene. In an interview in between rehearsals, she spoke of Carmen as a character who continues to be unsettling.“What is fascinating is that women hate Carmen and men hate Carmen,” Akhmetshina said, still wearing her costume of black leather trousers, a black cutout top and turquoise cowboy boots. “Women because they cannot have the same power, men because they cannot control her.” Even today, she said, “our world is not ready for Carmen. She’s absolutely honest and truthful.”In one production, she said, her character willed José to kill her to put an end to his killing men he was jealous of. In another, she committed suicide in a desperate search for intense feelings. Earlier this season at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, in a staging set among organ traffickers, she joked that she spent so much time “cutting people in pieces” that she was ready to kill Carmen herself. “I was like, ‘just murder her,’” she said, “that’s it. Get rid of her.”Akhmetshina said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom. She grew up in a village in Bashkortostan, the daughter of a single mother of three. “Until I moved to the city, I never thought that we were not OK,” she said. “We had a farm and everything was enough.” When she moved to a city, she encountered a different reality — of steep rents and airfares so high, her mother’s salary could barely cover the cost of a flight to Moscow. “The whole structure is built so that people from the small places stay in their place,” she said.A scene from Cracknell’s “Carmen” with Akhmetshina (in blue cowboy boots), who said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I needed space, I needed freedom,” Akhmetshina said. “I’m half Tatar, half Bashkir. If you look at the history of these small nations, we were constantly traveling around mountains, the forest, living in small communities that constantly moved around.” Her affinity with Carmen runs deeper than music, she said. “It’s kind of in my blood.”Ethnic difference is not a factor in Cracknell’s production, which instead highlights gender and class tensions. For the choreographer Ann Yee, this was an opportunity to develop dances free of castanets and flamenco clichés. She described Carmen’s allure as connecting more to psychological yearnings than to Orientalist fantasy. “We’ve hooked into this idea of liberation and wildness, about what is on the other side of the journey, the border,” she said in an interview. “It’s this wild appetite that exists in Carmen and which radiates through the people that she is a part of.”Yee said that removing “Carmen” from the Andalusian context also helped to sharpen its feminist message. “If you are looking too hard to situate it in one place, it becomes more difficult to realize that this could happen anywhere.” By the time Carmen meets her death, Yee suggested, “we can all hold ourselves accountable.”“Women are still killed by their partners on an enormous scale in most places in the world,” Cracknell said. “And we are obsessed with that narrative.” In her production, she emphasizes the number of witnesses who watch José’s jealousy turn progressively more menacing without intervening.In the Act III confrontation that results in Carmen being pushed to the floor, not one of her fellow smugglers steps in to help. Instead it is Micaëla, the character Bizet created as Carmen’s opposite and rival, sung here by the soprano Angel Blue, who offers a helping hand. Carmen accepts it, reluctantly, but lets go of it so quickly that she comes to her feet in an embarrassed stumble.Cracknell said it was Blue who had come up with the idea in rehearsal. “Angel just instinctively walked over and helped her up,” she said. “It became this incredible, simple moment of solidarity between these two stepping outside of the trope of two women being pitted against each other and fighting at all costs to win the man. And in that moment, Micaëla’s choice was to support another woman and to see her as a victim in her own right.” More

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      Paula Abdul Accuses Nigel Lythgoe of Sexual Assault During ‘American Idol’

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      Ms. Abdul filed a lawsuit against Mr. Lythgoe, a producer of the reality show, that accuses him of assaulting her in an elevator.Paula Abdul filed a lawsuit on Friday against Nigel Lythgoe, a former longtime producer of “American Idol,” accusing him of sexually assaulting her when she was a judge on the reality show in the early 2000s.In the lawsuit, Ms. Abdul says that during one of the early seasons of “American Idol,” Mr. Lythgoe shoved her against the wall of a hotel elevator, grabbed her genitals and breasts and began “shoving his tongue down her throat.” Ms. Abdul said in the lawsuit that she tried to push Mr. Lythgoe away, and that when the elevator doors opened, she ran to her hotel room and called one of her representatives in tears.Mr. Lythgoe helped turn “American Idol” into a phenomenon in the United States in 2002 after developing an earlier iteration of the show in Britain. He was also a creator of “So You Think You Can Dance,” on which he appeared as a judge for 16 seasons.Representatives for Mr. Lythgoe did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.Both Mr. Lythgoe and Ms. Abdul, who rose to fame as a choreographer and pop star in the late 1980s, became fixtures of American reality television as judges with the power to turn promising singers and dancers into stars. Ms. Abdul spent eight seasons on “American Idol,” entertaining viewers with her gushing commentary and playful rivalry with her fellow judge Simon Cowell.After leaving “American Idol,” Ms. Abdul was a judge on “So You Think You Can Dance,” working alongside Mr. Lythgoe in 2015 and 2016. She says in the lawsuit that Mr. Lythgoe again made advances during this time, while she was at his home to discuss work.“Lythgoe forced himself on top of Abdul while she was seated on his couch and attempted to kiss her while proclaiming that the two would make an excellent ‘power couple,’” the lawsuit said. “Abdul pushed Lythgoe off of her, explaining that she was not interested in his advances, and immediately left Lythgoe’s home.”The lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, said Ms. Abdul did not speak publicly about the encounters because she feared retaliation from Mr. Lythgoe.Ms. Abdul is suing under a California law that allows people making sexual assault accusations to file claims outside the statute of limitations for a limited period of time.In her lawsuit, Ms. Abdul, 61, also accused Mr. Lythgoe, 74, of verbal harassment, saying that he called her at one point and told her they should celebrate because “it had been ‘seven years and the statute of limitations had run.’”Ms. Abdul also brought the lawsuit against production companies behind “American Idol” and “So You Think You Can Dance,” accusing them of negligence. Representatives for the shows and the production companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.When Ms. Abdul left “American Idol” in 2009, there was speculation that her exit was the result of disagreements about pay disparities with the show’s male faces.In her lawsuit, Ms. Abdul says that as a judge on “American Idol,” she was “discriminated against in terms of compensation and benefits.” She describes her relationship with the show’s producers and other judges as “strained from the start,” saying that she was the target of “constant taunts” from Mr. Lythgoe and others involved in the show and that selective editing made her appear “inept.”Mr. Lythgoe was a largely behind-the-scenes figure with “American Idol,” leaving as an executive producer of the show about a decade ago, but he has been center stage on “So You Think You Can Dance,” turning himself into a performing arts impresario and advocate for dance education. He is scheduled to return as a judge in the spring. More

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      Willie Ruff, Jazz Missionary and Professor, Dies at 92

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      A master of the French horn, a rarity in jazz, he toured the world with the pianist Dwike Mitchell and taught music at Yale.Willie Ruff, who fashioned an unlikely career in jazz as a French horn player and toured the world as a musical missionary in the acclaimed Mitchell-Ruff Duo while maintaining a parallel career at the Yale School of Music, died on Sunday at his home in Killen, Ala. He was 92.His death was confirmed by his niece Jennifer Green.Mr. Ruff, who was also a bassist, played both bass and French horn in the duo he formed with the pianist Dwike Mitchell in 1955, which lasted until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013. They opened for many jazz luminaries, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan; played countless concerts in schools and colleges; and toured foreign countries where jazz was little known or even taboo.In 1959, they flouted edicts against music that the Soviet Union deemed bourgeois, performing an impromptu set in Moscow while on tour with the Yale Russian Chorus. Their concerts in China in 1981 were considered the first jazz performances there since the Cultural Revolution.A globe-trotting musical career, however, seemed a remote possibility when Mr. Ruff was growing up in a small Southern town during the Great Depression.Mr. Ruff, left, and Dwike Mitchell, right, in November 1959 with the classical pianists Lev Vlassenko, second from left, and Van Cliburn. Mr. Ruff and Mr. Mitchell met in the Army and in 1955 formed the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, which stayed together until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013.Associated PressHe was born on Sept. 1, 1931, in Sheffield, Ala., the sixth of eight children of Willie and Manie Ruff. “We lived in a house — my mother and eight children — that had no electricity, so there was no radio or music,” he said in a 2017 interview with Yale. “But there was always dancing, to silence. The dances made their own rhythm.”He eventually learned to pound out his own rhythms on piano and drums. At 14, he fudged his way into the Army, on the advice of an older cousin who had enlisted at 17 with his parents’ permission and dismissed Mr. Ruff’s concern that he was too young: “For a musician, you sure are dumb,” Mr. Ruff recalled the cousin saying. “Don’t you know how to write your daddy’s name?”He hoped to leverage his skill with the sticks into a spot in a highly regarded all-Black military band, but, seeing a glut of drummers, he took up the French horn instead. It was in that band that he met Mr. Mitchell, who taught him to play the stand-up bass.After leaving the Army, Mr. Ruff applied to the Yale School of Music, hoping to use his financial windfall from the G.I. Bill of Rights to study with the famed composer Paul Hindemith. “I brought my French horn and played an audition, and by some miracle they let me in,” he said in an interview with the quarterly newspaper The Soul of the American Actor. “So, Uncle Sam put me through my schooling!”He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953 and his master’s degree a year later. In 1955, he was weighing an opportunity to join the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra when he turned on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and saw his old friend Mr. Mitchell at the piano, as a member of Lionel Hampton’s band. He called him at the television studio, and Mr. Mitchell soon recruited Mr. Ruff to play in the band.Playing an instrument associated with classical music in a jazz band was unconventional, but it opened doors for Mr. Ruff, as did the broad musical training he had received at Yale.“Lionel Hampton’s band was the worst-paying, hardest-working band in the world,” he recalled in an interview for Yale’s Oral History of American Music project. “So if a saxophone player quit, I played his part. If a trombone player quit, I played his part, and that would make me valuable because I could transpose all these parts.” With no parts written for the French horn itself, he said, Mr. Hampton “didn’t know what to expect”:“As long as it worked, I was left to invent. It was wonderful training.”From left, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Mr. Ruff in 1972, the year Mr. Ruff founded the Ellington Fellowship program at Yale.Reggie Jackson/Yale University Art GalleryMr. Ruff joined the Yale faculty in 1971 and stayed until he retired in 2017. In 1972 he founded the Ellington Fellowship, which is dedicated to expanding the study of African American music and has honored a long list of jazz notables, some of whom performed concerts in New Haven, Conn., and shared their musical knowledge with hundreds of thousands of local public school students.His immediate survivors include a brother, Nathaniel. His wife, Emma, and daughter, Michelle, died before him.Late in his life, Mr. Ruff recalled that his turn to education seemed almost predestined. When he was in second grade, W.C. Handy, the composer and musician known as “the father of the blues,” who was from nearby Florence, Ala., visited his class. He played trumpet for the students and talked to them about “how important it was to continue our education and hold up our heritage and our culture,” Mr. Ruff told Yale in 2017. “He said that it’s not from royalty or from the highborn that music comes, but it is often from those who are the farthest down in society.”“After he finished,” Mr. Ruff added, “all the children who were musically inclined were permitted to shake the hand of the man who wrote ‘The Saint Louis Blues.’”“I was never the same boy again,” he recalled. “I had to be a teacher.” More

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      Jermaine Jackson Is Accused of Sexual Assault in Lawsuit

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      In a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles, Rita Barrett says the musician raped her at her home in 1988. Mr. Jackson has not yet responded.Jermaine Jackson, one of Michael Jackson’s older brothers and a founding member of the Jackson 5, was accused of sexual assault in a civil suit filed Wednesday in California.In the suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Rita Barrett accuses Mr. Jackson, 69, of sexual abuse, sexual battery, sexual assault, harassment and rape relating to an incident that she says happened at her Los Angeles home in 1988. In the court papers, Ms. Barrett says that Mr. Jackson forcefully entered her home and assaulted her, inflicting “severe emotional, physical and psychological injury, including humiliation, shame, and guilt, economic loss, economic capacity and permanent emotional distress.”The suit lists Mr. Jackson, Jermaine L. Jackson Music Productions and Work Records, a business Mr. Jackson founded, as defendants. Mr. Jackson could not be reached for comment.Ms. Barrett’s court filing says she came into contact with Mr. Jackson through her role as a musician’s contractor and as a member of a union that represents musicians. The complaint says she also knew Mr. Jackson through Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, who had a personal and business relationship with Mr. Barrett’s husband. Mr. Gordy could not be reached for comment.In her suit, Ms. Barrett says that she told Mr. Gordy what happened the following day, but he “withheld and concealed the acts, further perpetuating the coverup and allowing Mr. Gordy, Defendant Jackson and others in the business relationship to continue to reap profits derived from Mr. Jackson’s work and reputation for years to come.”Ms. Barrett is requesting a jury trial.Michael Pellegrino, president of Artists Management Agency, which has represented Mr. Jackson since 2014, said the agency would be parting ways with the musician because of the suit.“We have a zero-tolerance policy concerning these matters,” Mr. Pellegrino wrote in an email to The Times on Friday. “We wish him well but we must feel comfortable about who we represent and unfortunately at this moment we must take in consideration our other clients who do not feel comfortable with the current allegations.”Jeff Anderson, a lawyer for Ms. Barrett, said that his client decided to file the suit after learning that California’s Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act allows certain sexual abuse claims to be revived that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations.“The first thing that she and we want by having brought this case is for it to be known that Jermaine Jackson committed a very serious crime,” Mr. Anderson added. More

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      Jim Ladd, Free-Form Radio Trailblazer, Is Dead at 75

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      An institution of the airwaves in Los Angeles and beyond, he capitalized on the freedom the FM band offered in the 1970s to blaze his own path.Jim Ladd, a maverick Los Angeles disc jockey who helped pioneer free-form FM radio in the 1970s, and who went on to become a rock institution and an inspiration for Tom Petty’s song “The Last DJ,” died on Dec. 17 at his home near Sacramento, Calif. He was 75.The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Helene Hodge Ladd, said.With his laid-back manner and his considerable equestrian skills, Mr. Ladd was known to longtime listeners as the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy, after a 1973 song by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. His expansive musical knowledge, saucy humor and outspoken political views made him a celebrity in rock circles — not only in Los Angeles, where he had storied runs at KLOS and KMET, but also nationally, thanks to his long-running hourlong syndicated series, “Innerview.”“Innerview,” which made its debut in 1974, featured interviews with countless rock luminaries, including the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Elton John. It was heard on some 160 stations around the country.The same class of rock deity could often be found lounging around Mr. Ladd’s treehouse-like home perched on the wooded hillsides of Laurel Canyon. His house drew friends like Stevie Nicks, George Harrison and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who featured Mr. Ladd on his second solo album, “Radio K.A.O.S.” (1987).More interested in challenging listeners with new sounds than spinning the same old chart-toppers, Mr. Ladd was well suited to the early days of free-form radio, which was made possible by a 1964 Federal Communications Commission rule preventing AM stations from repeating more than 50 percent of their formats on commonly owned FM stations in a single market.Mr. Ladd was said to be an inspiration for the Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio.This allowed countless D.J.s like Mr. Ladd, on stations around the country, to shatter the Top 40 format on FM and take control of their own programming in an era when experimentation in rock was ascendant and rock itself was hailed as a force for social change.“Free-form radio was an approach to the music, and the show itself, which resulted in a highly personal and completely spontaneous new art form,” he wrote in his 1991 memoir, “Radio Waves: Life and Revolution on the FM Dial.”“Most of us never thought of it as a job,” he wrote. “A job was something ‘straight people’ did to earn ulcers. For us, it was more of a calling. We were guerrilla fighters for a generation of creative explorers, inmates who took over the asylum for just one purpose — to play with the public address system.”Mr. Ladd got his first access to this public address system in the late 1960s at KNAC in Long Beach, Calif., where he challenged listeners’ ears by playing the latest underground tunes and challenged authorities with his political passions, for example by stacking songs like “Universal Soldier” by Donovan, “The Unknown Soldier” by the Doors and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die” by John Lennon as a musical protest against the Vietnam War.“The music at that time was filled with radical new ideas and a unique generational perspective,” Mr. Ladd wrote. “Alternative points of view not heard on the six o’clock news came through the music loud and clear. Songs about the peace movement, civil rights, Vietnam, drugs and the generation gap — and massive quantities of sex.”James William Ladd was born on Jan. 17, 1948, in Lynwood, Calif., the oldest of three children of Obie and Betty Ladd. His father was a bank loan manager who won three bronze stars as a medic in World War II; his mother was a banker.Mr. Ladd was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005.Lucy Nicholson/ReutersHis family moved to Vacaville, Calif., near Sacramento, when he was a child. After graduating from Vacaville High School, he returned to Southern California to study at Long Beach City College before joining KNAC.Mr. Ladd spent the early 1970s at the powerhouse Los Angeles rock station KLOS before moving to a rival station, KMET, where he remained until 1987, when the station changed its format and began showcasing smooth jazz. In his book, he derided the new sound as “a computer-programmed Valium tablet, dentist-office music for yuppies.”Even as FM rock stations moved toward more rigid playlists in the 1980s, Mr. Ladd fought to maintain his independence, in both music and message, often running afoul of station management. With his outspoken ways, he was said to be an inspiration for the 2002 Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio that featured lyrics like “Well, the top brass don’t like him talking so much/And he won’t play what they say to play.”In the liner notes for the album of the same name, Mr. Petty thanked Mr. Ladd for “his inspiration and courage.” “Let’s say it may have been partially inspired by me,” Mr. Ladd said in a 2015 video interview.“I don’t want to say it’s about me,” he added, “but I am very, very honored, obviously.”Mr. Ladd made stops at multiple stations over the years. In 2011 he joined SiriusXM satellite radio, where he was a host on the Deep Tracks channel. He remained there until his death.In addition to his wife, Mr. Ladd is survived by a brother, Jon, and a sister, Veronna Ladd.In a 2000 interview with The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Ladd was back at KLOS, he broke out a handful of papers: the station’s playlist schedule, which mapped out the songs to be played over the course of the day — until his slot at 10 p.m., which remained blank. As in the old days, he could play what he chose. The only thing listeners could count on was Mr. Ladd serving up his trademark catchphrase, “Lord have mercy.”When asked why he was allowed to follow his own muse when other D.J.s at the station were not, Mr. Ladd responded, “Stubbornness, stupidity, doggedness.”The station’s program director, Rita Wilde, quoted in the article, offered a different take: “Not that many people, if you gave them the freedom, would know what to do with it.” More

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      The Beatles, Taylor Swift and More Pop Stars Mess With the Past

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      Who says hindsight is 20/20?Musicians keep getting tempted to revisit recordings they made long ago, and in 2023, flashbacks from the Beatles and Taylor Swift drew worldwide attention. Some temptations are technological; others have business imperatives. Wielding the latest digital tools, some powered by artificial intelligence, musicians and labels have been busily exploring their vaults and hard drives, many of them thoroughly convinced that they now have a better idea of how their older music is supposed to sound. Do they?Recorded music is many things: an expression, a structure, a physical performance, a series of decisions large and small, an artifact of memory and emotion, a souvenir of a particular time. But all of those aspects end up as a waveform, which can then be treated like any other information. The digital era and its computer-engineering paradigms have made that information infinitely malleable: just a starting point for version 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. A.I. is only going to make things more complicated as it reconfigures all the information available online.But with music, an update isn’t necessarily an improvement. It might be an anachronism or a betrayal instead.One of the hardest decisions for any artist is knowing when something is finished. That choice might be made after endless deliberation, on a deadline, on a whim, under the influence — who knows? In the vinyl era, that decision was usually final, give or take alternate mixes for singles, radio and clubs. Listeners reacted to, and bonded with, the music in its fixed form.Digital loosened things up — at first out of necessity, as vast analog catalogs were transferred to new formats, and then more innovatively, as musicians reveled in the possibilities of vastly expanded multitracking, sampling, editing and even glitching. Remixes, remasters, mash-ups, ghost duets — all kinds of second-guessing ensued, including among musicians themselves who were older but not necessarily wiser as artists. In the streaming era, even an official release date doesn’t make things final; Kanye West, now Ye, kept revising his 2016 LP “The Life of Pablo” — making previous iterations vanish online — well after its initial release.There are obvious commercial incentives for looking back. For many artists, as well as their marketers, it’s easier creative work to revisit sure things than to forge brand-new material. And there’s hardly a more time-tested selling point than claiming that a well-loved product is new and improved.Pop has been busily plumbing its archives since the dawn of the digital era, but 2023 brought some high-profile time-warping. The Beatles empire heralded the release of “Now and Then,” which is billed as the last song that all four members worked on, even asynchronously. It’s built from a John Lennon demo from the late 1970s that the other three Beatles started rearranging in the 1990s. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr did recording sessions to complete the track in 2022, using recent software that could cleanly separate out Lennon’s vocal.The surviving Beatles tidied up the song, strengthening the beat and jettisoning some of Lennon’s more self-doubting lyrics and lacing it with elements (like vocal harmonies) lifted from other Beatles songs. They were deliberately looking back where the Beatles of the 1960s had determinedly pushed ahead. It’s a 21st-century song, as much “now” as “then.”“Now and Then” arrived as part of the latest Beatles reissues: new, expanded, remixed versions of the anthologies known as the Red and Blue albums, “The Beatles/1962-1966” and “The Beatles/1966-1970” (now also designated “The 2023 Edition”). They are the continuation of the Beatles’ longtime efforts to wring every possible product out of their catalog: concept compilations (“Love Songs,” No. 1 hits on “1”), expanded — and illuminating — reissues that include unreleased session tapes, a “naked” mix of “Let It Be,” a megamix for Cirque du Soleil (“Love”).The Red and Blue albums, originally released in 1973, were many young listeners’ primers on the Beatles: a whirlwind career ruthlessly pared down to what two LPs could hold. The 2023 editions have more songs; they’re now three-LP sets, diluting the canon established by the original compilations. And as with the other painstakingly reworked 21st-century Beatles releases, they fidget with countless sonic details: panning instruments to different places or moving them into the center, separating parts that had been blurred or blended, bringing out new details, crisping things up.The new mixes offer a contemporary mixture of analytical clarity and arbitrary tweaks. But they don’t entirely trust that the groundbreaking 1960s Beatles already knew what they were doing in the first place — and that their artistic achievement was shaped by how the Beatles dealt with the era’s studio technology, limitations and all. People encountering the songs on streaming services may not notice which version they’re getting: the ones all the Beatles chose to release, or the new ones.A different kind of reclamation project continued when Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” her remake and expansion of her breakthrough pop album from 2014: nearly note-for-note reconstructions of the previously released songs, plus five other songs “from the vault” that she has said didn’t fit the original album. Swift has impeccable personal reasons for the do-over; she does not own the master recordings she made for the Big Machine label, even though the songs are hers. Meanwhile, her latest fans get a chance to experience a “new” Swift album as though it were being released for the first time.Yet an unimpeachable business statement is different from an artistic one. On “1989” — with the Swedish pop master Max Martin as executive producer — Swift was boldly and indelibly redefining herself. She left behind the country radio format, cranked up the beats and loops and honed her pop concision. The album has a spirit of both discipline and discovery, of kicking old expectations to the curb while flexing new skills.And that’s something the remake can’t recapture. Instead of a breakthrough, it’s more like an assignment or an exercise, diligently revisiting every instrumental layer and vocal inflection. It’s thoroughly, unblinkingly professional, but the stakes are lower. Time-warp paradoxes start with the first track, “Welcome to New York.” Swift sings, “Everybody here wanted something more/Searching for a sound they hadn’t heard before” — as she rebuilds a sound the entire world has now heard before.Of course, there’s an outlier and counterexample — as always in music — to leaving the past alone. In 2023, the Replacements released “Tim: Let It Bleed Edition,” a boxed set including a full-length remix of the band’s 1985 album “Tim” by the longtime producer and engineer Ed Stasium.“Tim” was the Replacements’ fourth album but its first on a major label, at a time when “indie credibility” seemed to matter. That identity crisis was central to the songs Paul Westerberg wrote: “God what a mess/On the ladder of success,” he sang in “Bastards of Young.”“Tim” was produced by Tom Erdelyi of the Ramones, who made it unfriendly to radio play; it’s distant, muted and unnecessarily murky, perhaps to resist any accusations that the Replacements were selling out. Stasium’s remix brings out all kinds of things that were recorded but downplayed in the original production: snappy but untamed drumming, guitars that wrangle and cackle, Westerberg’s heartfelt and rowdy vocals.Even with this mix, “Tim” probably wouldn’t have been an album-radio hit; the band was still too scrappy for mid-1980s gatekeepers. But the remixed “Tim” is the rare case where second thoughts can change things for the better. On streaming services and in the box, the Replacements don’t hide their earlier choices; the past and present versions of the album are both included. At least we can still know which is which.Digital possibilities are only going to scramble things further, untethering artistic products from their original inspirations and proportions. Oil paintings are being remarketed as environments. Albums are getting a new round of spatialized Dolby Atmos remixes. A.I. will be generating countless variations, pastiches and fakes. But amid the flood of new versions, let’s not forget to identify, recognize and celebrate the originals. More