Music

“He doesn’t like talking about himself,” Marja Kantola-Panula said, gesturing to her husband, Jorma Panula, across their dining table while he sat silently. He had been asked a question about his sprawling presence in classical music as arguably the world’s most influential conducting teacher. But instead of answering, he took a bite from a pastry.When Panula, 93, does speak, it’s brief and authoritative, at times abrasive and absolutely clear. At his home, a modest yet paradisiacal retreat tucked among trees in the countryside northwest of Helsinki, he explained, “I was in the orchestra, and most musicians, they hate talking.”He is not so different in the classroom, where he is famous for quietly listening, happy to offer advice if students ask for it but otherwise saying little, gruffly, and certainly never lecturing. His approach hasn’t really changed in the half-century he has spent shaping young conductors — at the storied Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and now through master classes and his own school.Think of major Finnish conductors working around the world today — there are a disproportionate number of them — and chances are they studied with Panula. If this country is the world’s top exporter of conducting talents, then he is something like a farmer, cultivating generations of artists: those leading the field, like Susanna Mälkki and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and those emerging in a blaze, like Klaus Mäkelä.“None of us would exist without him,” said Tarmo Peltokoski, the 23-year-old Finn who leads the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. “All the foundation of my conducting comes from him.”Susanna Mälkki, who studied with Panula, conducting the New York Philharmonic.Chris Lee/New York Philharmonic, via Associated PressPeltokoski in particular has a close relationship with Panula because of their shared background: Both grew up in Vaasa, in western Finland, and speak its dialect. It’s there that Panula hosts a conducting competition every three years. But it’s not where he first picked up a baton; he had prepared for a different life, one that led to his graduating, in 1950, from the Sibelius Academy as a student of organ and church music.That school is the namesake of Jean Sibelius, Finland’s most treasured composer, who was still alive, and in his 80s, when Panula moved to Helsinki. One day, a friend told him where the national hero liked to take a walk after lunch. “The next morning, it was rainy, but I took my bicycle to the little bay and waited,” Panula recalled. “It was freezing, and I waited, and waited. He didn’t come, so I went back home.”Later, that afternoon, he ran into a neighbor, who said that Sibelius had arrived right after he left. “Mamma mia!” Panula exclaimed, throwing up his hands in exasperation from a rocking chair in his living room seven decades later. “I was so close.” The two never met.Panula remained at the Sibelius Academy to study conducting, which he decided to focus on as a career, with success: By 1965, he was the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic. His tenure was thoroughly Finnish, with repertoire heavy on homegrown composers, but also pioneering in his commitment to works by, for example, Shostakovich. He composed music as well, for both the concert hall and the opera house.His career as a conductor, however, pales compared with his teaching.Most of Panula’s students begin at a young age, though not always. Dalia Stasevska, 38, the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, didn’t start until her early 20s. She played violin in a Sibelius Academy ensemble that he used in his classes. After seeing Eva Ollikainen (now of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra) at the podium one session, Stasevska told Panula that she was interested in conducting, so he took a receipt out of his pocket, wrote a phone number on it and said, “Call here.” She was so inspired by her first experiences with him, she said, “I couldn’t let go of the baton from my hands.”Express everything with your hands: Klaus Mäkelä, 27, said Panula first taught him to conduct with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.”Miguel Angel Molina/EPA, via ShutterstockMäkelä, 27, and Peltokoski were both adolescents with no conducting experience when they enrolled in Panula’s classes, and they studied with him until adulthood. They got a crash course in his quintessentially Finnish school of thought, which Sakari Oramo, 57, a former student of Panula’s who now teaches at the Sibelius Academy, summarized by saying: “You have to be able to express everything with just your hands. We are a nation of few words.”And so, at least at first, Panula’s students are not allowed to speak while they conduct. They do communicate physically, though. Mäkelä recalled that he was never taught the basic patterns of gesturing time — something easy enough, an actor can pick it up for a role — but that he was immediately made to lead musicians with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.” Once that was accomplished, he added, “we could do whatever we wanted.”“Clarity,” Panula said, “is No. 1, fundamental.”Very quickly, the reasoning behind his lessons becomes clear. To Peltokoski, Panula’s approach to communication set up how to interact with players efficiently, and honestly, to “not suck up to anyone.” And Mäkelä has since noticed how easily conductors develop mannerisms that his education resisted.Panula values close readings of scores, which to him entail more than simply following the notes on the page. “I can see in their faces if they know the music or not,” he said, which means also knowing a composer’s particular style, as well as background. “What kind of literature were they reading?” he added as an example. “What opera did they see? What ballet?”Dalia Stasevska, another Panula student, said, “He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher.”Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesHe often proposes questions without offering answers, Mäkelä said, which makes it “so much more powerful when you find the answer yourself.” If students want more detailed explanations from him, however, he won’t deny them. “They can always ask,” Kantola-Panula said. “The best students will do that.”This method also avoids a pitfall in conducting pedagogy: creating clones. Rather, Oramo said, he “let me make music the way I wanted to do it.” Panula’s students have described him as a close listener, and never a pontificator. (Still, he does get vocal about one bête noire: a conductor who serves audiences instead of orchestra. “Remember who all these gestures are for,” he said. “That is a cardinal fault.”)“He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher,” Stasevska said. “What is so brilliant about his teaching is that it leads to giving space to grow and find your personal style in conducting.”No two Panula alumni look the same onstage. Their similarities emerge during rehearsals: To this day, many of them speak to orchestra players succinctly and purposefully. Like, well, Finns.They do not, however, tend to pick up his personality traits, which are singular and notorious. There is his Finnish directness, and then there is his language — “this old man,” Mäkelä said of the first time he saw him, “swearing like crazy.”Part of his barbed persona was honed in his home region, Ostrobothnia. Oramo’s mother came from there, too, and was, he said, “very much of the same culture as Jorma.” Hearing Panula, he said, “was for me very familiar, almost homelike.”His sense of humor is quite dark, in a way that can be misread; Peltokoski once saw Panula walk out of a master class, then come back after rounding the block, a move that he described as “purely for theatrical effect.”“It’s not the sort of humor all people might like, but it’s very specific to him,” Peltokoski added. “And it’s also essential in understanding him — the sarcasm, the deliberate misleading of people, the wordplay, these sort of ridiculous overexaggerations.”Occasionally, though, Panula’s way of expressing himself has slid into the territory of offensive generalizations. In 2014, he gave an interview in which he glibly said that women were more suited to “feminine” music and were poor interpreters of repertoire like Bruckner symphonies. He was quickly criticized, including by former students.Panula, whose personality quirks are famous, is also known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation.Vesa Laitinen for The New York Times“People, of course, when they get old, become a little bit like characters,” Stasevska said. “There’s some kind of grumpiness. It’s in his personality. But I was surprised by that comment, because I don’t recognize my teacher in that. It was a sad thing for him to say, and I have no idea why he said it.”The Panula that endures in her memory, she said, is the one who nurtured her through artistic and personal struggles. Who took her and others out, almost daily, to lunches that he paid for. Who led “marvelous” discussions about culture and was devoted to his students “beyond anything I ever experienced.”He is known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation, checking in with terse but warmhearted phone calls. Peltokoski’s parents receive a visit when Panula is back in Vaasa. And alumni of his classes make up a far-reaching, still-growing family tree.“I’ve met people in various parts of the world who have been Jorma’s students: architects and pedagogues, people from different walks of life,” Oramo said. “The work he’s done has just been a huge piece of Finnish orchestral life and culture. And the fact that the profession of the conductor is so highly appreciated in Finland is largely the result of his work. He’s irreplaceable.”And Panula doesn’t plan to be replaced any time soon. The morning after the interview at his home, he and his wife were off to Hungary for a master class. In his latest call with Stasevska, she said, she could still hear the “sparkle” with which he discusses new students — who will keep coming as long as he’s alive.Because, asked whether he would ever truly retire, he responded with his trademark concision: “No. Why?” More

The 73-year-old singer’s medical advisers made the decision to postpone the shows, according to the announcement.Bruce Springsteen announced on Wednesday evening that he would postpone performances scheduled with the E Street Band for the rest of September, as he is treated for symptoms of peptic ulcer disease. The 73-year-old singer had been scheduled to perform Thursday in Syracuse, N.Y., and seven more times at various venues in the Northeast and in Ohio over the rest of the month. “We’re heartbroken to have to postpone these shows,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. The post continued: “We’ll be back to pick up these shows and then some. Thank you for your understanding.” Springsteen’s medical advisers made the decision to postpone the shows, according to the announcement. The new slate of postponed concerts comes weeks after Springsteen postponed two August shows because of an illness. Those shows were postponed until next year, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Peptic ulcer disease causes sores to develop on the lining of the stomach and can cause stomach pain, heartburn, bloating and nausea, according to the Mayo Clinic. Springsteen and the E Street Band had just capped a string of three shows at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, his home state. More

He was a pioneer in using synthesizers, and his friendship with George Harrison led to a spiritual awakening that also influenced another hit, “Love Is Alive.”Gary Wright, a spiritually minded singer-songwriter who helped modernize the sound of pop music with his pioneering use of synthesizers while crafting infectious and seemingly inescapable hits of the 1970s like “Dream Weaver” and “Love Is Alive,” died on Monday at his home in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. He was 80.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, his son Justin said.The New Jersey-bred Mr. Wright rose to prominence in the late 1960s after relocating to London and helping to form the bluesy British progressive rock band Spooky Tooth.He soon befriended George Harrison, with whom he would collaborate frequently over the years, including playing keyboards on that former Beatle’s magnum opus triple album, “All Things Must Pass,” released in 1970.Their long friendship would have a lasting impact on both Mr. Wright’s life and his music. Mr. Harrison introduced him to Eastern mysticism, giving him a copy of “Autobiography of a Yogi,” by Paramahansa Yogananda, who helped popularize yoga and meditation in the United States, and Mr. Harrison traveled with him to India.Mr. Wright with George Harrison performing on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971. The two collaborated frequently over the years.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty Images“That was his life path after that,” Justin Wright said in a phone interview. “Deep down inside of him, he was searching for something, and this was the answer for him.”His spiritual awakening helped spawn “Dream Weaver,” a track from his 1975 album, “The Dream Weaver,” which hit No. 7 on the Billboard album chart and rocketed him to fame. The song was inspired by the yogi’s poem “God, God, God,” which includes the line “My mind weaves dreams.”Mr. Wright begins the song with the lyrics “I’ve just closed my eyes again/Climbed aboard the dream weaver train/Driver take away my worries of today/And leave tomorrow behind.”The “Dream Weaver” single, swept along by a wave of lush electronica that bordered on the interstellar, soared to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1976. The song became a soft-rock touchstone, appearing in such movies as “Wayne’s World” (1992) and “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (1996), as well as on a 2010 episode (called “Dream On”) of the musical comedy-drama television series “Glee.”It was not the only smash hit from that album. That July “Love Is Alive,” like “Dream Weaver,” rose to No. 2 conjuring the languid sexuality of the waterbed era. Mr. Wright performed at stadium shows on the same bill as heavyweights like Peter Frampton and Yes, standing out among the guitar gods with his strap-on keyboard, known as a keytar.While his biggest hits became emblematic sounds of the 1970s, Mr. Wright had taken an unconventional musical approach on the album “The Dream Weaver”: He relied almost entirely on keyboard instruments, including a Minimoog synthesizer, as opposed to guitars, foreshadowing the synth-pop boom of the early ’80s.Mr. Wright playing his strap-on keyboard known as a keytar during a performance in 2001. Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty Images“The theme of having only keyboards, drums, voices — and no guitars — came accidentally,” Mr. Wright said in a 2010 interview with Musoscribe, a music website. When he went back and listened to the demos he had recorded, he said, “I thought, ‘Wow. This sounds good. It doesn’t really need guitars.’”Gary Malcolm Wright was born on April 26, 1943, in Cresskill, in northeast New Jersey. He was the middle of three children of Lou Wright, a structural engineer, and Anne (Belvedere) Wright.His mother helped instill in him an interest in music and acting, driving him to piano lessons and eventually to auditions. Their efforts paid off when he made an appearance on the seminal science fiction TV series “Captain Video and His Video Rangers” and later won a role in the 1954 Broadway musical “Fanny,” starring Florence Henderson.“I originally came into the play as an understudy to the main role, and then I picked up the main child role,” Mr. Wright said in a 2014 interview with Smashing Interviews magazine. “I was only 11 and 12 during those years. It was an amazing experience to act and sing every night before sold-out audiences and sing with a full orchestral band.”Within a few years, he abandoned the stage and screen “to be a normal kind of person in school, playing sports and Little League baseball and that kind of thing,” he told Smashing Interviews. While attending Tenafly High School, he played in various rock groups, including a duo called Gary and Billy with his school friend Bill Markle. Their single “Working After School” was played on the TV show “American Bandstand.”After high school, Mr. Wright attended William & Mary in Virginia for a year before transferring to New York University, where he switched his focus to medicine. After graduating in 1965, he briefly enrolled in medical school before moving to Berlin to study psychology.Losing interest in a life in clinical practice, he went back to music, helping to form a band that built a following in Europe; at one point it opened for the rock group Traffic in Oslo. There he caught the attention of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. Mr. Blackwell summoned him to England to join a band called Art, which evolved into Spooky Tooth.Mr. Wright, center, played the organ and sang with the progressive rock group Spooky Tooth in the 1960s. He was flanked by the lead guitarist Luther James Grosvener, left, and the singer and pianist Mike Harrison. Seated were the bassist Greg Ridley, left, and the drummer Mike Kellie. Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix, via Getty ImagesSpooky Tooth temporarily disbanded in 1970, and a year later Mr. Wright released his first solo album, “Footprint.” That album featured Mr. Harrison on guitar on the track “Two Faced Man,” which the two performed with Mr. Wright’s band Wonderwheel on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971.In addition to his son Justin, Mr. Wright is survived by his wife, Rose (Anthony) Wright; another son, Dorian; a sister, Lorna Lee; and two grandchildren. His marriages to Christina Uppstrom, the mother of his sons, and Dori Accordino ended in divorce.Along with his work with Mr. Harrison, Mr. Wright was a session keyboardist for Harry Nilsson, B.B. King and Jerry Lee Lewis, and he continued to record solo albums.In the Musoscribe interview, he discussed his 2010 release, “Connected,” and the album’s hook-laden opening track, “Satisfied,” in terms that could have applied to “Dream Weaver.”“The word ‘hook’ means drawing people into something,” he said. “When I write songs, I always try to make them that way — catchy — so that people will remember them. They’ll be more embedded in people’s consciousness.” More

The trumpeter and composer follows the premiere of two Met operas with an appointment as executive artistic director of SFJazz in San Francisco and a Jazz Masters honor.Two big announcements came down recently about the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard — both monumental, neither one a surprise.In June, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Blanchard, 61, would receive a 2024 Jazz Masters fellowship, the highest lifetime-achievement honor available to a United States-based improviser.Then a month later, as if a reminder that this lifetime still has a few major chapters ahead, the nonprofit organization and performance center SFJazz named Blanchard its executive artistic director. Hardly any other musician has so solid a grasp on the scope of what’s going on in jazz today — and no institution is as committed to reflecting, even goading, its growth.A six-time Grammy winner, Blanchard possesses one of the most commanding and slippery trumpet styles in jazz, and for almost a decade he has led one of its most reliable ensembles, the E-Collective, full of musicians a couple of decades his junior. He has written and recorded over 40 film scores, including for most of Spike Lee’s movies. Despite being a conservatory dropout himself, he has become a leading educator, helping shape programs at U.C.L.A., the University of Miami and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. And in recent years, he has made headlines for the back-to-back Met premieres of his two operas, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “Champion.”All of which makes for relevant job training for the new role. “The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said in a phone interview. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Blanchard is taking the reins directly from SFJazz’s founder, Randall Kline, who has run the organization since it started in 1982, always with a passion for what’s next. “I remember thinking how much I love that dude,” Blanchard said. “He was just a serious music lover who happened to be a promoter.”Blanchard onstage at the SFJazz Gala in June 2022.Drew Altizer PhotographySFJazz began as a jazz festival and traveling presenter around San Francisco. It convened a house ensemble of all-star musicians, the SFJazz Collective, in 2004, and opened the $64 million, state-of-the-art SFJazz Center in 2013. This week, Blanchard and Kline will both be at the kickoff for the center’s 2023-24 season, the last booked by Kline.SFJazz’s board chair, Denise Young, who led the search for Kline’s replacement, said Blanchard stood out because he “had a vision that matched what we believed was important to this music in these times.”Blanchard will relish the chance to pick up on one of Kline’s pet obsessions: bringing new technologies to the SFJazz stage. And as a musician who consistently uses his platform to speak about social issues — recording music with Cornel West, dedicating an album to the memory of Eric Garner, putting narratives of Black queer life into song — he’s also eager to confront questions of unequal access in a city where inequality continues to balloon.He’d like to keep SFJazz high-tech, but low-barrier when it comes to entry. To promote “outreach into the community,” he said, he envisions a matinee concert program directed at students in local high schools, and a series of traveling shows that might bring SFJazz-level talent into some of the Bay Area’s more neglected neighborhoods.Last week Blanchard stole an hour for an interview from his new office there. The building buzzed around him as the team prepared for the season launch, and by the end of the call an assistant was hovering, waiting to whisk him away to a donor meeting.Born and raised in New Orleans, Blanchard broke out on the New York scene in the early 1980s — the so-called Young Lions era, when many were longing for a return to the halcyon sounds of midcentury jazz. In 1982, he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, taking over the trumpet chair from Wynton Marsalis, his childhood friend. Then he followed Marsalis onto the roster of Columbia Records, where he recorded a series of straight-ahead albums with a quintet he and Donald Harrison led.While Marsalis doubled down on Neo-Classicism, founding and directing Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York as a beacon of tradition, Blanchard has veered toward the cutting edge. With his E-Collective, he has emulated Blakey in one crucial way: His side-musicians are all significantly younger. On other fronts, Blakey wouldn’t recognize much of that quintet’s tool kit: the electronic effects, the hip-hop backbeats, the swatches of distorted guitar and electric bass.So there’s something poetic about seeing Blanchard — the Young Lion-turned-innovator — land at SFJazz, which has long been positioned as a kind of left-coast alternative to Marsalis’s JALC. “The idea was eclecticism: Don’t fly the flag of one thing,” Kline said in an interview. “San Francisco at the time had all these amazing scenes going: There was an Asian American jazz scene, there was this kind of trad-jazz scene, there was this hard-core avant-garde thing going, there was Brazilian music and Afro Cuban music.”To the extent that SFJazz has developed a winning formula, Kline said, “it’s been a formula around being open.”That conviction came in handy when Blanchard was invited to SFJazz in the mid-2010s for a series of artist residencies. He had recently composed “Champion,” which tells the tragic story of the world champion boxer Emile Griffith, and an opera company in San Francisco was hoping to stage it. The center had never done an opera before, and sure, this wasn’t exactly “jazz,” but it was just the kind of ambitious project that the center was built to handle.“The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Ike Edeani for The New York Times“It fit so perfectly with our programming aesthetic, and also getting creative around the space,” Kline said. “It was just as good as it gets.”When Blanchard had first been approached about an opera commission in the early 2010s, he was thrilled. His father had sung opera, and he had grown up hearing Puccini and Verdi in the house, along with the sounds of jazz and Black popular music. But he wasn’t sure where to begin.So he did what he’d done at so many inflection points throughout his career: He went to his teacher, Roger Dickerson, a now 89-year-old composer and pianist and a New Orleans music giant in his own right, who had helped Blanchard write his first large-scale compositions.“He told me, ‘Stop thinking about writing an opera, just tell a story,’” Blanchard remembered. “That was extremely helpful for me, because then I wasn’t trying to live up to something.”“Tell your story” is, of course, a catchphrase among jazz musicians. But partly thanks to his work with Dickerson, Blanchard has developed a special aptitude for using music to narrate ideas and convictions — which swiftly moves listeners past any fixation on genre. Dickerson also thinks of it as a reminder that complexity, nuance and misdirection don’t have to dilute narrative drive — or even relatability — but can in fact enhance a story line.“He could pick up on little things that I would show him, and very quickly discover the inside meaning of it. That is, make it his own,” Dickerson said in an interview, remembering Blanchard’s interpretive skills even at age 16. That ideal — learn the fundamentals, and then make something undeniably yours — is something that Blanchard has passed on to his own students.Ambrose Akinmusire, who studied with Blanchard in the 2000s, remembered him stopping class whenever he heard students making direct references to old jazz tropes. “We don’t do that here,” he recalled him saying.On the flip side, Blanchard remembers having to convince the cast of “Fire” that they should draw upon their whole musical lexicon. “I’m listening to them warm up, and I’m realizing a lot of those singers grew up in the church, sang gospel, some of them were jazz singers — but they were all taught to throw that away when you sing opera,” he said.“I said, ‘Listen man, bring all of that back to your performance. This is a current story, so hearing gospel in the middle of this is no problem. Hearing you sing a blues phrase, because you’re a jazz musician, is no problem. And, man, I can’t tell you the type of performances we got out of people.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The queer teen horror-comedy “Bottoms,” the second film from Emma Seligman, which stars Ayo Edibiri and Rachell Sennott, and sends up both teen raunch comedies of the 1980s and 2000s as well as conventional coming-of-age stories. Also discussed: the links between “Bottoms” and the summer blockbuster “Barbie,” and also the Netflix Sandler-family vehicle “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.”The summer in reality television, including “Hip Hop Treasures,” “Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the New York Jets,” and the social media storytelling that’s accompanied Deion Sanders’s arrival as coach of the football team at University of Colorado Boulder.Recent books about hip-hop mixtapes and fashionCaroline Calloway’s “Scammer,” which turns several waves of viral infamy into a feisty memoirSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood provided details about their first record of new material in 18 years, which will be released on Oct. 20.When the Rolling Stones released “Beggars Banquet” in 1968, the band had an unusual way of grabbing attention: a surprise food fight.At the end of a feast with journalists in a posh London hotel, Mick Jagger celebrated the record, which includes “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man,” by smashing a cream pie into the face of the guitarist Brian Jones. The event quickly descended from there, with band members and guests throwing food at one another, leaving faces drenched in cream.On Wednesday, Jagger, 80, Keith Richards, 79, and Ronnie Wood, 76 — the band’s three current members — promoted their new album, “Hackney Diamonds,” in somewhat more sedate fashion: with a livestream on YouTube hosted by Jimmy Fallon.Named after old British slang for the shards of glass that are left after a break-in, “Hackney Diamonds” will be released on Oct. 20.Richards, wearing a hat and shades, said that playing live is a “holy grail,” but that recording albums is “where the guys can get together and pass around ideas without any interference.”“When it works, it’s great,” he said.Jagger, wearing a patterned jacket, said he didn’t “want to be bigheaded, but we wouldn’t have put this album out if we hadn’t really liked it.” He then added that he hoped the group’s fans would love it too. “I’ll drink to that,” Wood said, raising a glass.After the 20-minute event ended, the band premiered the video for the album’s first single, “Angry,” featuring Sydney Sweeney. Jagger earlier said that the album had many tracks themed around anger and disgust.The lunchtime event was held at the Hackney Empire, an old theater in the trendy Hackney district of London. Fallon, sitting in front of a broken-up version of the band’s lips logo and near three smashed chandeliers, interviewed the group before an audience of journalists and invited guests, although questions were not allowed from the floor.The anticipated 12-track “Hackney Diamonds” is the group’s first album of original material since the release of “A Bigger Bang” in 2005, and its first since the drummer Charlie Watts died in 2021. Two of the tracks were recorded in 2019 with Watts, Jagger said, including “Live by the Sword,” which he described as “retro.”Richards said the band was obviously different without Watts. “He’s No. 4, he’s missing, he’s up there. Of course he’s missed incredibly.” He said that Watts had recommended the band’s new drummer, Steve Jordan, and that moving on “would have been a lot harder without Charlie’s blessing.”Jagger joked about the long delay before this album, saying that the band — known for its extensive tours — had been a bit “lazy,” and that the group needed a deadline. They forced themselves to hit the studio in December, he said. “We cut 23 tracks very quickly and finished them off in January, and mixed them in February.”Fans of the Stones, which formed in 1962 and went on to become one of rock’s most enduring acts, have been awaiting a new album since “Blue & Lonesome” in 2016, which featured a dozen blues covers. Jagger told The Los Angeles Times in October 2021 that “Hackney Diamonds” would have been finished long ago if not for the coronavirus pandemic.Last month, the Stones teased the album via an advertisement for a fake glass repair company, called Hackney Diamonds, that appeared in a London newspaper. The ad’s text referred to several of the band’s well-known songs: “Our friendly team promises you satisfaction. When you say gimme shelter we’ll fix your shattered windows.”In the interview with Fallon, the band said other album titles it considered were “Hit and Run” and “Smash and Grab.”Philip Norman, who wrote “The Stones,” a major biography of the group, said in an interview that the release event was far from the band’s raucous 1960s and ’70s image but still managed to give its members an air of being “tearaways” by being held in London’s trendiest district. That was “typical Stones’s fakery,” Norman said, because the band had no previous association with Hackney.Although the Stones have said “Hackney Diamonds” marks a “new era,” Norman said he was anticipating a classic Stones sound. “This is the Stones we know and some of us have loved for the past six decades,” he said.The livestream generated interest online (at points 53,000 people watched live), but there was less hype on Hackney’s streets on Wednesday. Before the unannounced event, a few dozen fans waited outside the theater to catch a glimpse of the band walking the red carpet.Sam Poullain, 42, a marketing director, said that two months after he watched a school play on the Empire’s stage, he was back to see “the original rock ’n’ roll band.”The enthusiasm was not unanimous. As the huddle to see the band grew, three schoolgirls walking past asked what was happening. Told it was the Rolling Stones, Anya Morrison, 16, said, “I’ve heard of them, I think.” Then she got on a bus home. 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The country musician has sung about racial violence and made a video depicting a queer love story. His new album, “Rustin’ in the Rain,” was inspired by his roots — and Elvis Presley.There are parts of Kentucky where the ground is pruned and prettied, and there are parts where the grass just grows. During the early days of his career, Tyler Childers had one foot in both — as a kid from rural Lawrence County doing landscape work for a Lexington mill while he played country music for whoever would listen. One night, his worlds converged. Asked to perform at the office Christmas party, he dressed up in a tie and good shoes. He thought he looked sharp until an older man stopped to crack a joke.“He told me, ‘You look like a mule looking over a picket fence,’” Childers, 32, said last month, having returned from playing a festival, powered on nicotine and caffeine. It was midday in a borrowed Nashville living room; Childers, despite his growing success, has resisted a move to Music City in favor of staying anchored in Kentucky. “I thought, ‘I’m a mule.’ I’m a poor working man’s animal, and I’m looking over the fence in somebody else’s yard. Do I even belong here?”Childers proudly poses with a mule on the cover of his new album, “Rustin’ in the Rain,” out Friday. It’s a flip on that fateful moment, turning the animal (and the people who rely on it) into something powerful and graceful. Childers’s music, from his 2017 debut “Purgatory” and beyond, has always done this work: rewriting and recontextualizing rural and Appalachian America and the folks within it, and spreading their stories wide.In the past few years, he’s sung about racial inequality (“Long Violent History”), made a music video telling a queer love story (“In Your Love”) and explored the possibilities of an inclusive faith on “Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?” His songs with roots in bluegrass, Southern rock and Appalachian tradition have pushed the boundaries of country music and even his own fan base, while cementing him as one of the most successful touring and streaming artists in his field — without the aid of radio. Last month, he played two sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York. In December, he has a pair booked at Lexington’s Rupp Arena.Childers grew up in East Kentucky in the shadow of the Baptist Church. His father had a job in the coal industry, and his mother worked at the health department. While the family had a double-wide trailer with running water and electricity, the neighbors didn’t, so he and his sibling were acutely aware that they were “one bad decision” away from disaster. At 15, Childers moved to a new school, where he coped with being the new kid by spending his lunch playing guitar. Eventually, his classmates took notice. They invited him to sing at parties, and introduced him to some new music.“Drive-By Truckers became the soundtrack to my teenage angst,” he said, wearing dark jeans and a button-up despite the 100-degree weather. He started writing his own music, and quickly built a following across Kentucky and West Virginia — country fans were eager to hear fiddle and steel guitar, and his voice carried that lonesome sound of someone who’d studied both Ricky Skaggs and Kurt Cobain. When he sings live, his eyes burn with the ferocity of a preacher, and fans hang on to every word.When “Purgatory,” co-produced by another Nashville boundary-pusher, Sturgill Simpson, was released, things happened fast. Childers went from opening shows with his band, the Food Stamps, to headlining the same venues in a little over a year. In 2020, he made his first overtly political statement with “Long Violent History,” an album fueled by his rage over the police killing of Breonna Taylor, a fellow Kentuckian. He wanted to be explicit, releasing the title track with a video statement in which he spoke directly to his white rural fans, telling them, “We can stop being so taken aback by Black Lives Matter.”“I felt compelled,” he said, leaning forward in his chair and stiffening up as he talked. “I started looking at the people listening to me, and I was listening to them. I wasn’t stretching out in some weird, forced way — I wrote that song in 10 minutes.” Now he sees it as a responsibility not just to speak for his people, but to grow with them. “There are a lot of artists out there trying to do the work,” Childers said. “Every little effort to give someone a glimpse into that light helps put water on this fire before it boils over into white-hot rage.”The video for “In Your Love,” the new album’s first single, features a love story between two male coal miners in 1950s Appalachia. The inspiration was personal. When Childers asked a gay cousin to be the best man at his wedding to the singer-songwriter Senora May, he started to hear rumblings about “what kind of man Senora might be marrying.” Childers welled up recounting the story, never once trying to wipe a tear or hide his watery eyes — he’s sober now, free of alcohol since 2020, and emotions come fast and easy.To create the treatment for “In Your Love,” he turned over control to the Kentucky poet laureate, his friend Silas House. “That’s unheard of,” House said in a phone interview. “The very first thing Tyler said to me was, ‘I want to make a video for people who have never seen themselves in a country love story.” He added, “It was only ever about telling another rural story.”After his 2017 debut arrived, Childers went from opening shows with his band the Food Stamps to headlining the same venues in a little over a year. Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesChilders has long told rural stories: about people trying to get by with poisoned water or blackened lungs, about drug addiction and the impact of corporate greed on the people who tend the land — but also about the sheer beauty of these places, too, and the love within them. His allyship, especially for marginalized people out in the country, is a natural progression. He stays deeply connected to place where he was raised: hunting, gardening, tanning the hide after he cans the meat. “I’m a dial-up man,” he said, “in a 5G world.”“Rustin’ in the Rain” is not just about love, or Appalachian life. It’s also about Elvis Presley — songs Childers could have pitched to Elvis, to be exact, a conceit he came up with while cleaning his house, a little accidentally high on some metal polish fumes. The family had just gotten a dog, a Malinois he’d taken to calling his “velvet Elvis.” “I don’t know if it was me saying that,” he said, “or the algorithm thought I was the guy to send it to, but all of the sudden there was all of this Elvis stuff around me. So I played it like a Nashville songwriter, trying to come up with songs to pitch.”“Phone Calls and Emails” is a modern-day lonely lament, while he considers “Luke 2:8-19” his “Christmas song,” with Margo Price as the angel bearing news of a messiah. “In my Christmas play, the angel is this strong woman,” Childers said. “I was like, that’s Margo.” Said Price in an email, “As a woman in country music, just having any opinion at all is considered controversial. I’m beyond grateful he has always stood by me.”One track, “Percheron Mules,” is for Childers’s beloved animals, and “Space and Time,” the album’s closer, is a cover by S.G. Goodman, a fellow Kentucky musician. “Tyler is writing out of a region, and he is putting back good into that region,” Goodman said in a phone interview. “For him, it extends outside of art, as a vehicle for positive change in our communities.”“Rustin’ in the Rain” is a succinct seven songs, which is very intentional. Childers’s albums “are getting shorter as they go,” he said. “A countdown.” What happens when he gets to one? “I go home,” he said — to his mules, his wife and their baby boy, and to his farm. To his own rural story.Just don’t tell him that his videos and country songs about racial inequality and queer love are “courageous.”“People are like, ‘Oh, you are so brave,’” Childers said before gathering his chore coat and heading to a bookstore on his way out of town. “I think it’s sad that’s a brave thing. To me, it’s just about love. And that’s all it ought to be.” More

The drummer helped pioneer bebop in the 1940s and delivered a message of resistance and liberation from the 1960s on. Listen to 13 selections from musicians, writers and critics.For the past year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz. Now we’re focusing on Max Roach, who, alongside the drummers Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey, helped pioneer bebop in the 1940s.A Brooklyn native, Roach started playing drums at age 10, and was eventually influenced by the personality that Clarke brought to the instrument. He graduated from high school in 1942 and became the house drummer for Clark Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, then played with Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Pettiford, Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker. By the time he played with Miles Davis in the late ’40s, Roach had shifted his style to a more propulsive rhythm that emphasized the ride cymbal.But while history has credited him with de-emphasizing the bass drum in bebop, Roach himself debunked such thinking. “We played the bass drum, but the engineers would cover it up because it would cause distortion due to the technology at the time,” he once said in “The Drummer’s Time,” a book about jazz drumming. “There were never any mics near our feet; they would have one mic above the drum set, and that was all.”In 1960, Roach turned his attention to racial and political issues, releasing the album “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” as a response to injustices in the United States. Featuring the activist and singer Abbey Lincoln (to whom Roach was married for eight years), the LP used equal amounts of rage and silence to convey the angst of Black Americans. “He was not trying to be slick and have a message,” his son Raoul said in the 2021 documentary “Summer of Soul.” Instead, “that is the message. It’s our time. Do it now. We want liberation.”Roach carried that declaration through the rest of his career. Long considered a cornerstone in the world of jazz, his rapid-fire rhythms have influenced scores of like-minded percussionists to explore themes and textures. Below, we asked 13 musicians, writers and critics to share their favorite Max Roach songs. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nate Smith, drummer and bandleaderMax Roach, “Driva’ Man (Live)”The momentum in Roach’s playing here is captivating: He’s chasing the time, but not pushing it. He hardly deviates from the skeletal pattern he’s playing, even during Clifford Jordan’s mournful solo. The crispness with which the band converges on the downbeat of every bar evokes the sound of James Brown, signifying the undeniable power and impact of a unified Black band. Further, the crackle of the snare (along with Abbey Lincoln’s tambourine) realizes the terrifying snap of the “driva man’s” whip, used to shock and startle the slave into silence and submission.The last minute and twelve seconds of the video are the most compelling, as Roach, unaccompanied, meditatively plays the same 5/4 pattern over and over. A few bars in, he introduces a slightly more complex ride cymbal pattern, using the drumstick’s shank on the crown of the cymbal. Roach dials up the intensity of the drum solo masterfully, choosing dynamics over density, allowing the cadence he’s playing to reveal more and more about itself. A player of Roach’s facility and imagination must deploy a great deal of restraint in order not to play. This, to me, is the most important lesson — what he chooses to leave out is what draws the listener in. When he hits the last note on the cymbal, he leans in as the crash fades to silence, ending a six-minute master class in the power of musical intention.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Patricia (Twink) Little, drummer, producer and songwriterMax Roach, “Ghost Dance”This song takes me on so many different journeys because there are so many different movements within the piece. It feels a lot like life’s highs and lows giving you 12 minutes of emotions, ranging from happiness, melancholy, chill, groovy and peaceful. There’s even an element that feels almost warlike. The way Max uses his toms while accompanying the horn player from about 6:50-9:00 reminds me of African drums. The toms are tuned to perfection and Max’s rhythmic pattern — along with the melodic pattern of the horns — just puts me in a trance.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Chelsey Green, violinist and bandleaderMax Roach, “Abstrutions”Max Roach made yet another indelible mark with his “Members, Don’t Git Weary” album. Released in 1968, the album is an aural representation of avant-garde jazz at its core while serving as musical commentary to the social and political conflicts of the time.The opening track, “Abstrutions,” subtly invites the listener to explore Roach’s innovative approach to rhythm, form, timbre and improvisation. “Abstrutions” arguably challenges the traditional idea of the blues form, extending the final four-bar phrase with a captivating unison horn call met with a powerful drumroll to carry us back to the top. With support from Roach’s increasingly robust playing, the horn lines intensify as they answer the pianist Stanley Cowell’s commanding improvisation. Roach’s rhythmic agility is felt as the phrase restarts with a seemingly displaced downbeat that keeps listeners on their toes. “Abstrutions” has the full essence of avant-garde jazz but feels inherently soulful and funky at the same time. Roach’s intentional play on tension and release speaks to his distinctive compositional style and meaningful inclusion of the sentiment of protest and activism.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Joseph Patel, producer of ‘Summer of Soul’Max Roach, “Drums Unlimited”I discovered and fell in love with jazz while in college. For almost four years, I spent my Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in the listening room of the campus radio station — KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis, Calif. — diving deep into its immaculate record collection. My understanding of the jazz genre came from this place, from playing records, finding something I liked, looking at the personnel and then burrowing through that artist’s discography (this was pre-internet, mind you) in the stacks of vinyl. From this study, I could put my finger on the records, musicians and lineups at the forefront of change in the genre — and at every step of the way, there was Max Roach. “Drums Unlimited” was the first time I heard compositions for the drum and only the drum. Roach seemed to regularly dislodge convention, for decades, but here, on the title track, he is nothing short of a master of the craft — musically, socially, culturally. There he is, with mesmerizing rhythm and beat; a circular thrust that feels like the beginning of revolution. He gives musical voice to what he would later, forcefully, verbally articulate in the Black struggle for liberation. When we were making “Summer of Soul,” Roach’s set at the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 (with his then-wife, Abbey Lincoln) began with a similar drum solo (sorry, it didn’t make the final film!), and all I could think about was this track — a persistent genius, armed with will and intellect, in his element, reaching desperately for freedom.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Nicole Sweeney, radio hostMax Roach, “Freedom Day”Often, the drum is a song’s heartbeat. It brings it life and guides it along until the last note. On “Freedom Day,” Max’s drum playing represents a heart dealing with the emotions of becoming a free human being. You feel the anticipation, the anxiety, the strength, and even the uncertainty. Abbey Lincoln’s vocals, while not perfectly in line with the melody, are still perfectly placed as she represents the honesty of not being sure what is to come, and the power that comes with knowing you are ready to face it.Max himself said, “we don’t really understand what it is to be free,” yet you hear him feeling free enough to let out a range of emotions in each lick and snare, which allows other musicians like the trumpeter Booker Little to follow suit. The “We Insist!” album was an especially important one, in that after its release, Max vowed to never play music that was not socially relevant. I would be remiss to not also mention the album cover, which is a staged lunch counter sit-in mirrored from the 1960 Greensboro Four sit-in, which took place months before the recording of this album.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Brandi Waller-Pace, musician, educator and scholar-activistClifford Brown and Max Roach, “Joy Spring”Few drummers have reached the level of innovation and influence Max Roach did throughout his long and prolific career. During the bebop era he, along with Kenny Clarke, transformed the way drummers approached their sets. This approach was part of the foundation of sounds my ears embraced when I first found jazz. “Joy Spring,” recorded with the legendary and tragically short-lived Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet, is a jazz classic and a personal favorite. From the moment the drum hits start, I feel a buoyancy that carries me throughout the tune. Roach’s brushes lay down a steady swing that’s punctuated by deep in-the-pocket hits — he manages to maintain a delicate balance between high energy and smoothness. He gets an attack from those brushes as he flows and accentuates the variations within the melody, the agile soloing filled with his signature triplet motifs. His drumming sings to me as much as Clifford’s trumpet or Harold Land’s sax. I can’t listen to this recording without a smile forming on my face. I’m transported to the days when so much of this music was new. “Joy Spring” remains fresh in my ears at every listening.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elena Bergeron, Times editorCharles Mingus and Max Roach, “Percussion Discussion”I had, for a little while, been fascinated by the gossip around the recording of “Money Jungle.” The album from the trio of Roach, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington was a generational bridge between a swinging idol and progenitors of bop, but Mingus is said to have stormed out of the session in 1962 because of something Roach played, or said, and had to be cajoled to return by Ellington himself.What could go that badly between Mingus and Roach? The pair had by then held down so many bandstands as parts of extraordinary groupings, and had even joined to launch a record company together a decade before the session with Ellington. Listening to “Money Jungle” didn’t clear it up. Mingus opens by scratching out a harsh-sounding challenge; Ellington parries with hard phrasing to jerk the steering wheel the other way. Roach rides it out in the back seat as the song exhausts itself to a stop.I still don’t have an answer for the walkout, but I care less about the speculation because of “Percussion Discussion.” Mingus and Roach did versions of their own push-pull live during the “Mingus at the Bohemia” sets in 1955 and after — sometimes alongside the pianist Bud Powell or with a horn involved, other times as a duet. The version released on 1965’s “The Charles Mingus Quintet Plus Max Roach” (under the title “Drums”) finishes with Mingus sweeping an operatic bow before Roach thumps out a tip of the cap like a matador honored by his provocateur.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Kokayi, M.C., vocalist and producerMax Roach, “Garvey’s Ghost”On “Garvey’s Ghost,” we hear nearly eight minutes of sacred shouts and vibrations, as Roach leads us further into his lexicon of musical language. It’s what I imagine Roach thinking about when writing the work; it’s his concept of sounds that would emanate from the decks of ships on the Black Star Line, a return to the motherland, a going home. It’s Max dropping pins throughout the African diaspora guiding the listener, it’s the call and response of Abbey Lincoln’s haunting vocal standing proxy as the voice of the ancestors, it’s the foundational Bembé drum chant that moves us from West Africa in origin to Cuba thanks to the additions of “Patato” and “Totico” (Carlos Valdés and Eugenio Arango, respectively). It’s Booker Little and Clifford Jordan as street bishops on their soapboxes shouting down Babylon through an aggressive series of solos, it’s Art Davis’s bass sending up kettle prayers, with Max batting cleanup, exhibiting mastery within the spaces of his solo that leads us back to the chorus. “Garvey’s Ghost” is Max’s lead single for the soundtrack of this imagined trans-Atlantic voyage. I would suggest that you add this to your playlist, and get yourself a ticket, so to speak.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Tanya Rahme, jazz radio hostMax Roach, “The Profit”Revolutionary of bebop, guru of time keeping, an O.G. of cool jazz.Max Roach held so many titles, but it was his 1962 recording of “The Profit,” the second track on the B-side of the album “It’s Time,” that paved the way for a young me to fall in love with a sound that would surpass any previous definition I had known for the genre of “jazz.”The seven-minute track encapsulates the very essence of the 1960s Black movement, exploding with skill and expression from start ’til end. I eventually understood this to be one form of the many conversations Max had regarding his stance on civil rights, and the politics surrounding Black American history.The solos by the trumpeter Richard Williams, the tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan and the bassist Art Davis add such rich texture to Roach’s continuous ride cymbal technique. But what is most compelling was his perfected undertone beat — soft yet unmistakably strong and constant — while delivering a killer drum solo throughout.Enter Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s vocal choir, erupting into what sounds like a song of profound protest from the very intro; a deeply moving spiritual chant depicting the ’60s and all its intensities. Through Roach’s “The Profit” began my devotion to the astral jazz of that era and beyond.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Martin Johnson, writerMax Roach, “Effi”So much of Max Roach’s extraordinary discography is canonical and progressive that it’s easy to overlook his work for Atlantic Records from 1964 to 1971. Yet, this phase bristles with fury and offers the cool melodicism of his classic earlier recordings with Clifford Brown. No recording bridges these objectives better than his 1968 masterwork, “Members, Don’t Git Weary.” The title tells you that, landmark legislation notwithstanding, there was still much work to be done toward liberation and equality — but the music here shines a light on the paradise for the victors. “Effi,” an elegant six-minute paragon by the pianist Stanley Cowell, one of six greats in the band, is the highlight. The saxophonist Gary Bartz and the trumpeter Charles Tolliver take pointed solos, but Roach drives the sound, rumbling with volcanic force beneath and beside them. There’s beauty, power and catharsis all in one. Roach was not tired, not weary at all, and his music was an energy potion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆aja monet, surrealist blues poet and activistMax Roach, “Tears for Johannesburg”Amiri Baraka sitting shotgun as the Jersey tunnel lights slide through the car window. We were on our way to a poetry reading. In the back seat I bathed in classic and legendary Baraka banter. Max Roach was the star of the ride. I learned about Roach in the firsthand sway and swag of Baraka’s enthused tone. “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” was the album of discussion. I didn’t know what I was listening to until many years later. And as I revisit this album, “Tears for Johannesburg” never fails to amaze. Shhhh. The cymbals slowly weep into Abbey Lincoln’s moan, and the cross stick signals the build. It’s the orchestra of solidarity for me. What I love most about the song is the wordless conversation. Jazz disrupts traditional song structure as a protest against established conventions, and this song declares the sentiment. Max Roach’s heart beats at the time signature of 5/4. The bass keeps the pulse and the horns haunt. The song begs the ear to listen and take heed of our mourning as well as our resistance. The political message crescendos in the rim of Roach’s drum. We feel for the struggle of our comrades in Johannesburg because Roach makes sure of it. There is no need for words.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆John Murph, writer and D.J.Max Roach, “The Dream/It’s Time”I discovered Max Roach’s 1981 LP, “Chattahoochee Red,” in the early ’90s just from casual crate-digging and being semi-autodidactic in learning jazz history to buttress my music journalism career. I was immediately taken by the opening cut “The Dream/It’s Time,” a blistering modern bop composition on which Roach interjected snippets from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Roach’s rhythmic ingenuity, King’s heroic voice, and later the impassioned solos from the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, the tenor saxophonist Odean Pope and the bassist Calvin Hill made me a die-hard Roach fan, even though at the time I knew more of his eminence as a bebop pioneer and influential drummer than I did of his actual discography.I’ve always said that crate digging is the unsung hero in music education. After repeated listening to “The Dream/It’s Time,” my continued investigation into Roach’s music led me to the 1962 incarnation of “It’s Time” that fused strident hard bop with doleful choral singing conducted by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Nevertheless, it’s “The Dream/It’s Time” that became my favorite Roach composition. It was always in heavy rotation during my radio shows on Washington, D.C.’s Pacifica station, WPFW-FM, during the mid-to-late ’90s. And it resurfaced again, this year, in some of my vinyl-only D.J. sets as we mark the 60th anniversary of King’s 1963 March on Washington.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Sam Pollard, film directorClifford Brown and Max Roach, “Parisian Thoroughfare”I remember being around 16 years old and my friend Glenn Laurie would play the Art Blakey Quintet at Birdland, and back then I was confounded at what those musicians were playing. It took a while but finally my ears opened, and I could hear what these great musicians were doing on their instruments. That began my immersion into the world of jazz and learning and listening to everyone from Thelonious Monk to the one of the greatest drummers of this idiom called jazz, Max Roach.It would be a few years later that I would be introduced to a seminal 1954 Max Roach recording with the impressive and ever inventive trumpeter Clifford Brown. It was a phenomenal album with the tenor saxophonist Harold Land, bassist George Morrow and pianist Richie Powell supporting Brown and Roach. The one tune that particularly stands out is their rendition of Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare” that starts with the band replicating the traffic jam of a Parisian street before taking off with the compelling melody of triplets performed by Brown and Harold Land. It is an infectious melody in the key of G major. Brown makes every note swing with joy and sass accompanied by Max’s elegant rhythmic support. Max’s solo, where it is all Max beautifully modulated and direct, is what people are talking about when they say Max is such a musical drummer. And then it finally goes back to the cacophony of Paris streets and then a reprise of the wonderful melody.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More