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      Nicki Minaj Returns Ready to Rumble, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis and Summer Walker, Arlo Parks, 6lack and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Nicki Minaj, ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’Calm arrogance is Nicki Minaj’s gift. There’s no need to decipher all her allusions because her delivery and production say it all. The track of “Red Ruby Da Sleeze,” based on Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh),” juggles near-flamenco handclaps, trap drums and choral vocals going “Uh-oh.” Her percussive rhymes are competitive in every realm — linguistic, sexual, financial, culinary (“guacamole with the taco”) — and their utter confidence is still convincing. JON PARELESKali Uchis and Summer Walker, ‘Deserve Me’“Red Moon in Venus,” the third studio album by the cheerfully bilingual Colombian American songwriter Kali Uchis, moves between sensual romance and fierce recriminations. “Deserve Me” is blunt: “I like it better when you’re gone/I feel a little less alone.” Uchis and Summer Walker take turns bad-mouthing the thoughtless lover who’s getting dumped, and harmonize sweetly to remind him, “You don’t deserve me.” The track starts out light and tinkly but keeps adding bassy layers, literally showing the depth of their contempt. PARELESboygenius, ‘Not Strong Enough’The indie-rock trio boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — formed in 2018, under a cheeky moniker that, Dacus said in an interview, was meant to harness some macho overconfidence: “We were just talking about boys and men we know who’ve been told that they are geniuses since they could hear, basically, and what type of creative work comes out of that upbringing.” The group’s stirring, acoustic-guitar-driven new single “Not Strong Enough” once again finds the women in provocative but poetic drag, as they harmonize on a chorus that answers Sheryl Crow: “I don’t know why I am the way I am, not strong enough to be your man.” On a steadily galloping bridge, Dacus leads the trio in a chant that expresses frustration at being “always an angel, never a god.” But by the end of the candid “Not Strong Enough,” boygenius has generated its own kind of strength in vulnerability — and in numbers. LINDSAY ZOLADZArlo Parks, ‘Impurities’The English songwriter Arlo Parks has absorbed Joni Mitchell, hip-hop and much more; it’s no wonder she is willing to enjoy her “Impurities.” Her new track revolves around echoey loops and samples, but she has a paradoxical lesson to impart: “When you embrace all my impurities, then I feel clean again.” PARELESMandy, Indiana, ‘Pinking Shears’On the echoey, percussion-forward “Pinking Shears,” the Manchester art-rockers Mandy, Indiana forcefully and exhaustedly reject an increasingly mechanized world: “J’suis fatiguée” (“I’m tired”) becomes a kind of mantra when chanted by the band’s vocalist Valentine Caulfield. But there’s catharsis and resistance in the industrial abrasion of the sound they create, like a rogue machine created from cobbled-together parts suddenly learning how to talk back. ZOLADZWater From Your Eyes, ‘Barley’The hypnotic “Barley,” from the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes, sounds a bit like a playground chant reimagined by Sonic Youth: “One, two, three, counter, you’re a cool thing, count mountains,” Rachel Brown drones in a charismatic deadpan. The song — and first single from the forthcoming album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26 — is full of loopy left-turns and unexpected riffs that jut out at odd angles, but Brown and bandmate Nate Amos are, at all times, utterly in command of their strange and alluring sonic universe. ZOLADZ6lack, ‘Since I Have a Lover’6lack positions himself between singer and rapper on “Since I Have a Lover,” which has a looped feeling. He barely projects his voice, but he rides the rhythm of a loping, two-chord guitar track as he promises more than a passing attraction. Will it last? The song suggests a woozy maybe. PARELESPrincess Nokia, ‘Lo Siento’Steady, wistful piano chords carry Princess Nokia through “Lo Siento” (“I’m Sorry”) from her EP due March 14, “I Love You But This Is Goodbye.” It’s not really an apology; as the production blooms into lush, pillowy harmonies, she switches from singing in English to calmly rapping in Spanish, cursing her lover for betrayal and noting, “Thanks for the pain, the pain in my song.” PARELESyMusic, ‘Zebras’A seven-beat rhythm percolates through “Zebras,” a minimalistic but eventful romp by the chamber sextet yMusic. The rhythm hops from key clicks on a bass clarinet to pizzicato strings; it’s juxtaposed with sighing melody lines and hints of a circus band, making the most of its three-and-a-half minutes. PARELES More

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      My Father’s Death, an Envelope of Cash, a Legacy in Music

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      The first time a photo of me appeared in The New York Times, my father sent a thumbs-up emoji. So my sister told me a month later at his burial.She’d sent him an article over Facebook. I didn’t know he saw it, or that he knew about the piano recital the article covered. At the time of his death, we saw each other in person maybe once a year, during the holidays, and talked three times over the phone — his birthday, my birthday, Father’s Day — though there had been times in recent years when I didn’t know his phone number or email address. Both changed unpredictably. Still, our interactions were always warm, if brief. We weren’t estranged but seemed to lack the impulse to stay in touch; I often wondered if that was the one thing we had in common. I found it comforting.So, when I received a call at home in Brooklyn from my stepmother, telling me he’d died in their living room in New Hampshire, I felt mostly confused, as if there had been some mistake. It was as if he’d decided to move to another planet without telling me. I spent my whole life with him absent in some sense, even if in my childhood, particularly the decade after my parents’ divorce, he was still sporadically present. But now, my access to him was gone.In the days surrounding his funeral, I felt like a stage manager, helping with logistics and family mediations. I wandered my hometown in Vermont, visiting our old haunts: a waterfall where we fished, the Burger King where my family had gone for special Sunday dinners, our old house, with blueberry bushes that he planted, still there. The day of his burial, I returned to Brooklyn. That night, I cried in the kitchen, partly for my dad, but mostly because I didn’t want that terrible day to end. It would mean moving forward and leaving behind an event that I wasn’t even sure I had experienced.Tendler as a child, right, with his father. Later, they weren’t estranged but seemed to lack the impulse to stay in touch.via Adam TendlerAn inheritance was the last thing on my mind. My dad was financially ambiguous and notoriously frugal, so I thought that if there even was one, it would be weird. I was right. Around Christmas, my stepmother told me that, along with provisions like bottled water, my father had stored and hidden three wads of cash for my two sisters and me as our inheritance.On New Year’s Day, while in Vermont, I arranged to meet her and my half-brother at a Denny’s on the New Hampshire border, just a few steps from the McDonald’s where I was transferred between parents as a kid. I was handed a manila envelope full of cash. Even if I’d never held that amount of cash before, it was a sum that could disappear easily into a couple months of rent and bills in New York City.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Would that be my father’s legacy?A few weeks later, I attended a show at Roulette in Brooklyn. While I was sitting alone in the balcony, my usual perch, something happened. The music just hit me. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. I thought to myself, This is why I’m alive. Music. Alive. It was an epiphany. The ideas collided and a whole project manifested in an instant: I would use my inheritance to commission a program of new piano works about inheritance itself — a project that arrives at the 92nd Street Y, New York, on March 11.I drafted an email to some of my dearest friends, who also happen to be brilliant composers. Admitting I had very little idea what I was doing, I wrote a message that read in part:In October my father died. It was unexpected and the circumstances aren’t entirely clear. … We had a close relationship in my childhood which grew more distant, or perhaps just quieter, for a number of reasons, loss of love not among them. … I know [this] is more a favor than a commission. … If you do accept, I trust your instincts [to take] the piece in any direction you choose. … The only thing I ask is that you let me live with these works until I find them a home, together — somewhere.Everyone said yes, among them Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Cerrone, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Timo Andres and John Glover. It was 2020, and I began to dig into the task of finding a presenter just as face coverings began appearing throughout New York. Within a couple weeks, the pandemic had shut down much of the city and any semblance of the performing arts that I knew. All around, there was now a staggering backlog of performances to reschedule, often from much more established artists than me.I wondered whether I had made a mistake sending that email. Maybe I could’ve used the money after all. Only toward the end of that first Covid summer, as livestreaming seemed to hit its saturation point and my future as a concert pianist seemed especially uncertain, did I start thinking pragmatically about my still-unnamed project.Darian Donovan Thomas’s “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers” incorporates family photos and is designed as a kind of therapy session.via Adam TendlerThe first thing I abandoned was the idea that it had to debut in New York. For years, I’d sent unsolicited pitches to Kate Nordstrum, the founder and director of the Minneapolis-based new music presenter Liquid Music, but this project felt different. It was promising that Kate replied to my email saying she wanted to talk, but I‌ remember‌ ‌pacing‌ my bedroom during our call. The project had still seemed somewhat hypothetical to me, but in one phone conversation it was being ushered into reality: She said yes, and thought we should bring in more composers.I wanted to invite more, too, but had already promised away my entire inheritance to those already onboard. This meant finding more money. I hesitated at first, but finally asked for support from Anthony Creamer, a friend and arts patron in Philadelphia whom I’d never asked for anything. He said yes; and we had a show. I had a presenter, a premiere date of spring 2022, and even a name for the project: Inheritances.Those additional composers joined, including Devonté Hynes, Laurie Anderson, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta and Mary Prescott. In all, the Inheritances program would feature 16 new solo works by 16 composers.The pieces started trickling in. One of the composers, Scott Wollschleger, wrote to me with a series of questions about my father. “Who was he as a person?” “What about him do you feel is still with you now?” “What was your relationship like and did it evolve over time?” I had always emphasized that I didn’t want these pieces to be about my dad, nor for the program to be necessarily about death. Still, if answering Scott’s questions would give him an entry point, I’d do it. I wrote sprawling responses and reluctantly shared the document with the rest of the composers. Many of them, to my surprise, used it as a catalyst for their own pieces; it triggered their own memories, their own sense of inheritance and place. Several titles come from the depths of that confessional.More and more works came in, all of them surprising to me in some way. Each composer seemed to stretch for this project — or, as Andres once put it, “let their freak flag fly.” Marcos Balter, in the program note for his piece, “False Memories,” wrote, “You’ll see that the musical idiom I’ve chosen to explore is not my ‘usual,’ per se.”Often, the composers would share their inspiration with me, and ask that I keep that information between us. Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine,” to be played “mechanical and heartbreaking,” grinds in the extreme registers of the piano. She declined to provide a program note, telling me the piece spoke for itself.Tendler writes that Inheritances has became a kind of sacred space and gathering.Lila Barth for The New York TimesLaurie Anderson’s “Remember, I Created You” used text from an artificial intelligence program she developed, creating an eerily accurate narrative of my entire project. Hynes’s “Morning Piece” enters such a space of stillness that I could barely move while listening to his demo on my headphones, riding the B46 bus home. Cerrone wrote “Area of Refuge,” an understated echo chamber of a piece, in the wake of his own father’s sudden passing, and dedicated it to his memory.Nico Muhly adapted John Wycliffe’s translation of Proverbs 13:22 — about inheritance between fathers and sons, and the balance between righteousness and sin — weaving a melodic line with that text on a middle staff “not to be sung, but to be played in as cantabile a fashion as possible.” Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much” has the piano playfully mimicking audio from interviews she found of me speaking about John Cage, but the words could easily have been about my dad, toying with a question I had often asked myself: Did I care to know more about the composers I played than about my own father?“I had some fun,” she wrote, “with intermingling and blurring the lines between those relationships.”In Darian Donovan Thomas’s piece, “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers,” designed as a kind of on‌stage therapy session, I would finally speak about my dad for the first and only time in the program. Through a series of instructions, personal questions and tonal shifts, interspersed with family photos, the score probes the psychological terrain of my relationship with my father, and what it felt like to lose him. I feared at first that this all might be too literal for a program that I intended to be largely symbolic, but the result has become a necessary release for me, an emotional climax and an acknowledgment of the person and event that brought this whole program together.Inheritances became a kind of sacred space, a gathering, a ritual. I might have been Venmo-ing away my inheritance, but these pieces felt like bereavement gifts sent from friends.I don’t remember much from that Minneapolis premiere, aside from the feeling afterward of fulfillment — a rarity for me. The theater seats remained occupied long after the recital ended. People stayed and talked, to one another and to me. Different pieces touched different people in different ways.The goal for Inheritances, from the start, had been to provide a vessel through which I could connect to my elusive father, process my grief and reconcile with my past. But I also hoped that writing these pieces would provide a similar vessel for the composers, and ultimately that this shared experience would extend to our listeners. When audiences responded so powerfully, in Minneapolis and then a Los Angeles performance co-presented by Liquid Music and the new-music collective Wild Up, I felt like the long road that had begun with a manila envelope in a Denny’s parking lot over two years earlier had all been worthwhile.Now Inheritances is having its New York premiere at the 92nd Street Y in a co-presentation with Liquid Music. Many of the composers will hear their works live for the first time, and although I’ve performed in this city for over a decade, it feels like something of a debut: the most personal, and most important, program I’ve ever played. I like to think that my dad would be proud. I’d settle for a thumbs-up emoji. More

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      Wayne Shorter: 9 Essential Songs

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      The saxophonist, who died on Thursday at 89, redefined jazz composition by embracing the unknown. Listen to nine of his recordings with Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Esperanza Spalding and more.In the last decade or so of his life, it had become a commonplace to call Wayne Shorter jazz’s greatest living composer. There was simply no ambiguity about it, he was the one.Now that the saxophonist has left the earthly realm, at the age of 89, does that distinction become eternal? It’s hard to think of another musician whose writing style worked its way so indelibly into the DNA of jazz: how the music is composed, how it’s played, how we think about it.Shorter wrote melodies at a slant, doing a lot with a little. He packed harmonies with so much tension, they relieved a lot of the pressure that had been put on the rhythm section in the bebop era — allowing it to loosen its grip on the groove without sacrificing suspense. When he joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, after a lengthy stint as Art Blakey’s musical director, Shorter’s impact was succinct and immediate: The group stayed cool and steady, even as Shorter’s compositions lured its five members into a state of constant combustion.Like John Coltrane, his mentor and predecessor in Davis’s previous quintet, Shorter wasn’t flashy or spotlight-hungry. But his presence was commanding. Davis sometimes started concerts without him onstage; when Shorter came on, playing his way up to the microphone, it was an event.In the early ’70s, partly responding to the direction Davis’s music was taking, jazz steered toward a marriage with rock and funk. Shorter and the pianist Joe Zawinul teamed up to start Weather Report, arguably the quintessential band of the fusion era, and kept it going for 15 solid years. In that time, Shorter also made it into the studio with rock and Brazilian popular musicians, like Joni Mitchell, Santana and Milton Nascimento. Maybe Shorter’s mind took to fusion not just out of aesthetic affinity, but because he was always a high-tech thinker and an alchemist; electronics never scared him, and authenticity felt relative. Synths? Amp stacks? Jaco Pastorius’s flanged-up electric bass taking the melody out of your hands? What was the harm?Growing up in downtown Newark, Shorter read and wrote comics about superheroes confronting threats from the cosmos, and he and his brother Alan, also a musician, caught every movie they could at the local theater. He listened on the radio to the newest sounds in bebop, Western classical and popular music. “As weird as Wayne” became a saying in the neighborhood, as the poet and critic Amiri Baraka famously remembered, and Shorter turned it into an honorific, dubbing himself “Mr. Weird.”Throughout his life, Shorter was a fierce and articulate defender of the right to stand alone — or better yet, to take risks in reliable company. Speaking in 2018 about his approach to playing with his quartet, Shorter was (as usual) both metaphorical and direct. “It’s a little thing we call trust and faith,” he said. “To me, the definition of faith is to fear nothing.”If there is one immortal distinction Shorter can certainly claim, it’s that of being jazz’s all-time greatest aphorist. That’s not an easily earned title, in a music community full of philosophers. Blakey, for one, famously said that jazz “washes away the dust of everyday life.” Davis reminded us that it’s about “the notes you don’t play.”But as he grew older, Shorter was a seemingly bottomless font of mystic wisdom. One of his favorite lines was: “Jazz means, I dare you.” The title of his longtime quartet’s 2013 album, “Without a Net,” was a reference to his description of how the band improvised. That band operated for close to 20 years without, he said, ever holding a rehearsal. “How do you rehearse the unknown?” he asked.Late in his career, Shorter developed a creative partnership with one of his biggest admirers, Esperanza Spalding. They performed often together, and over a period of years they took on his last herculean goal: composing a full-length opera, “Iphigenia,” which turned Euripides’s classic Greek tragedy upside-down and adorned it with a wildly expansive score. Frank Gehry, a longtime friend of Shorter’s, designed the set, with a looming, shimmery backdrop that seemed to harmonize with the saxophonist’s vaulted arrangements.“Iphigenia” premiered in late 2021, to a mix of rapturous raves and quizzical responses — both of which must have delighted Shorter. But the enormity of his achievements as a composer were just as apparent at a completely different opera, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which had its debut at the Metropolitan Opera around the same time. With Shorter’s passing, Blanchard becomes a candidate to assume that mantle of “greatest living jazz composer.” But at “Fire,” it was clearer than ever that he wouldn’t have gotten there without the influence of Shorter; it was in the way his harmonies spread their wings out wide, hang gliding from beginning to end, asking you to ride along — daring you.Here are nine tracks that showcase the sly invention and dark poetics of Shorter’s compositions and saxophone sound.Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, “Sakeena’s Vision” (1960)“Sakeena’s Vision” is one of many tunes that Shorter wrote for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the group from which he launched his career. His later work was never as straightforwardly propulsive and blues-driven as the charts he gave to Blakey, but on “Sakeena’s Vision” you’ll hear some of his soon-to-be signatures. At the end of the melody, Shorter introduces a catchy fillip of a phrase, repeats it, then turns it over in a few different harmonic contexts. It’ll get stuck in your head — the melody, the rhythm of it, the bounce of it — but then it’ll slip away from you.Wayne Shorter, “House of Jade” (1965)For “Juju,” arguably the most indispensable album from Shorter’s golden period with Blue Note Records in the 1960s, he was joined by a rhythm section of Coltrane quartet veterans: McCoy Tyner on piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. “House of Jade” is the gentlest of the LP’s six Shorter originals, but Jones’s ever-propulsive beat and Workman’s staunch bass playing vest Shorter’s slow, elliptical melody with heavy, grinding force.Miles Davis Quintet, “Fall” (1968)Miles Davis’s so-called second great quintet — for which Shorter was the primary composer — quite distinctly falls into this composition, with the trumpeter acting as if he’s just remembered the melody as he goes along. The emotion of this piece, as in so many of Shorter’s tunes, is both stark and shrouded: Is it mournful? Longing? Simply dazed? Whatever that feeling is — nameable or not — you’ll find it exerts a pull.Wayne Shorter, “Beauty and the Beast” (1975)Somewhere between funk, jazz, MPB and a slow jam, “Beauty and the Beast” comes from “Native Dancer,” Shorter’s first album-length collaboration with the star Brazilian vocalist Milton Nascimento, and an undisputed classic in both musicians’ catalogs.Weather Report, “Palladium” (1977)In Weather Report, Shorter was actually the group’s secondary composer, after Joe Zawinul, but he still got in some good licks. “Palladium” is one of the group’s most fun tunes; just when you think it’s resolving, it keeps flying on, transposing up a key and ultimately finishing on a cliffhanger.Steely Dan, “Aja” (1977)Steely Dan was a rock band with jazzy aspirations — until the group made “Aja,” a milestone of the fusion years and their first encounter with Shorter’s slippery saxophone playing. After an impressive guitar solo by Denny Dias, Shorter’s unmistakable tenor sound comes barreling out of the darkness, like a black car emerging from a tunnel at night with its lights turned off; less than a minute later he’s finished, and the track is in a new ZIP code.Joni Mitchell, “Paprika Plains” (1977)Shorter joined up with Joni Mitchell for the first time in the late 1970s, and they remained lifelong friends and collaborators. On many tracks, he offers color and complement, but on “Paprika Plains” — Mitchell’s epic tribute to the Indigenous community near her Saskatchewan hometown — he doesn’t appear till almost 14 minutes in, ready to carry the song skyward to its close.Wayne Shorter Quartet, “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean (live)” (2005)The quartet that Shorter assembled around the turn of the new millennium was his first attempt as a bandleader to revisit and expand upon the all-things-must-explode m.o. of Davis’s 1960s quintet. Alongside the drummer Brian Blade, the bassist John Patitucci and the pianist Danilo Pérez, Shorter leans heavily on the soprano saxophone (another nod to Coltrane’s influence), and on “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean” he uses the band at once like a meditative space and a wild loom, spinning small, motif-like themes until they are frayed and stretched and fully unspooled.Wayne Shorter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Leo Genovese and Esperanza Spalding, “Endangered Species (live)” (2022)Esperanza Spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington have been among the most prominent advocates for Shorter’s legacy, and in 2017 they teamed up with him — and the pianist Leo Genovese — for a major performance at the Detroit Jazz Festival. “Endangered Species” is an ’80s-era gem from Shorter’s fusion catalog, written at the tail end of his time with Weather Report, built on the tonal toggling and crooked-angle grooves that he’d often worked out with Weather Report, but released on his 1985 solo album, “Atlantis.” In 2012 Spalding set it to words and did her own version. Their performance together in Detroit was released last year, and Shorter’s gusty, restrained solo on “Endangered Species” won him the 12th — and final — Grammy in an immortal career. More

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      Wayne Shorter, Innovator During an Era of Change in Jazz, Dies at 89

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      His career as an influential tenor saxophonist and composer reached across more than half a century, tracking jazz’s complex evolution during that span.Wayne Shorter, the enigmatic, intrepid saxophonist who shaped the color and contour of modern jazz as one of its most intensely admired composers, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 89.His publicist, Alisse Kingsley, confirmed his death, at a hospital. There was no immediate information on the cause.Mr. Shorter had a sly, confiding style on the tenor saxophone, instantly identifiable by his low-gloss tone and elliptical sense of phrase. His sound was brighter on soprano, an instrument on which he left an incalculable influence; he could be inquisitive, teasing or elusive, but always with a pinpoint intonation and clarity of attack.His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. He emerged in the 1960s as a tenor saxophonist and in-house composer for pace-setting editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, two of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history.He then helped pioneer fusion, with Davis and as a leader of Weather Report, which amassed a legion of fans. He also forged a bond with popular music in marquee collaborations with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, the guitarist Carlos Santana and the band Steely Dan, whose 1977 song “Aja” reaches a dynamic climax with his hide-and-seek tenor solo.Mr. Shorter wrote his share of compositions that became jazz standards, like “Footprints,” a coolly ethereal waltz, and “Black Nile,” a driving anthem. Beyond his book of tunes, he was revered for developing and endlessly refining a modern harmonic language. His compositions, sleek and insinuating, can convey elegant ambiguities of mood. They adhere to an internal logic even when they break the rules.His recorded output as a leader, especially during a feverishly productive stretch on Blue Note Records in the mid-1960s — when he made “Night Dreamer,” “JuJu,” “Speak No Evil” and several others, all post-bop classics — compares favorably to the best winning streaks in jazz.Mr. Shorter produced “Night Dreamer,” “JuJu,” “Speak No Evil” and several other post-bop classics in the mid-1960s.James Nieves/The New York TimesSince the turn of the 21st century, the Wayne Shorter Quartet — by far Mr. Shorter’s longest-running band, and the one most garlanded with acclaim — set an imposing standard for formal elasticity and cohesive volatility, bringing avant-garde practice into the heart of the jazz mainstream.Mr. Shorter often said he was drawn to music because it has “velocity and mystery.” A lifelong fan of comic books and science fiction, he kept a shelf crowded with action figures and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the Superman “S” logo. In his later years, he cut the figure of a sage with a twinkle in his eye, issuing cryptic or elliptical statements that inevitably came back to a sense of play.“Don’t throw away your childish dreams,” he said in 2012. “You have to be strong enough to protect them.”Throughout his career he refused to hew too closely to any tradition except that of fearless expedition. “The word ‘jazz,’ to me,” he liked to say, “only means ‘I dare you.’”‘The Newark Flash’Wayne Shorter was born in Newark on Aug. 25, 1933. His father, Joseph, worked as a welder for the Singer sewing machine company, and his mother, Louise, sewed for a furrier.Growing up in Newark’s industrial Ironbound district, Wayne and his older brother, Alan, devoured comic books, science fiction, radio serials and movie matinees at the Adams Theater. Wayne won a citywide art contest at age 12, which led to his attending Newark Arts High School, the first public high school in the country specializing in the visual and performing arts.There he encountered several teachers who cultivated his interest in music theory and composition. At the same time, bebop — an insurgent, often frenetic strain of modern jazz, typified by virtuosos like the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the pianist Bud Powell — was a source of endless fascination for him.Bebop had a strong foothold in Newark: Savoy Records, the label most committed to the young movement, was based there, and local radio carried live broadcasts across the Hudson River from clubs like Birdland and the Royal Roost. Mr. Shorter, who had been taking private lessons on clarinet, switched to the tenor saxophone. Along with his brother, a trumpeter, he joined a local bebop group led by a flashy singer named Jackie Bland.Onstage and off, the Shorter brothers took as much pride in bebop’s stance of iconoclastic rebellion as in the swerving intricacies of the music; they would perform in intentionally rumpled suits and rubber galoshes, propping newspapers on their stands instead of sheet music. The poet Amiri Baraka, a classmate, famously recalled that such outré behavior sparked a local shorthand: “as weird as Wayne.” Mr. Shorter wore that slight as a badge of honor, at one point painting the words “Mr. Weird” on his saxophone case.He acquired a more heroic nickname, the Newark Flash, around the jazz scene of the 1950s, while earning a degree in music education at New York University. After serving two years in the Army — at Fort Dix in New Jersey, where he distinguished himself as a sharpshooter — he re-entered the scene, making a strong impression as a member of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the shining exemplar for the down-to-earth yet combustible style known as hard bop.Mr. Shorter shared the band’s front line with a bravura young trumpeter, Lee Morgan, forming a musical kinship that soon extended to his own albums, and eventually to Morgan’s. But in addition to his saxophone playing, Mr. Shorter brought to the Jazz Messengers a new degree of compositional sophistication, writing tunes, like “Ping Pong” and “Children of the Night,” that spiked a familiar hard-bop formula with dark harmonic elixirs.Mr. Shorter performing with Miles Davis in London in 1967. Davis, in his autobiography, called Mr. Shorter “the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did.”David Redfern/Getty ImagesMr. Shorter joined the second Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, after deflecting Davis’s overtures for several years out of loyalty to Blakey. His arrival cinched a brilliant new edition of the band, with the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams. Davis, in his autobiography, called Mr. Shorter “the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did.”Once he joined, Mr. Shorter contributed new compositions to every studio album made by the Miles Davis Quintet, beginning with the title track of “E.S.P.” in 1965. During an engagement at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago later that year, his tenor solos were marvels of invention, turning even a songbook standard like “On Green Dolphin Street” into a portal for shadowy intrigue.But on the scale of intrigue, there could be no topping “Nefertiti,” the title track of a Davis quintet album released in 1968. A 16-bar composition with a slithery melody and a shrewdly indeterminate harmonic path, it was so holistic in its effect that Davis decided to record it with no solos, just the melody line played over and over. In Michelle Mercer’s 2004 book “Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter,” Mr. Shorter described “Nefertiti” as “my most sprung-from-me-all-in-one-piece experience of music writing,” like someone recalling a trance.Most of Mr. Shorter’s storied output on Blue Note unfolded while he was working with Davis, often with some of the same musical partners. He chronicled some aspects of his life on these albums: “Speak No Evil,” recorded in 1964, featured his wife, Teruko Nakagami, known as Irene, on the cover, and contained a song (“Infant Eyes”) dedicated to their daughter, Miyako. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966; “Miyako” would be the name of another composition the next year.The Mysterious TravelerUnlike the other members of the Miles Davis Quintet, Mr. Shorter remained through Davis’s push into rock and funk — on the terse 1969 album “In A Silent Way,” featuring the Austrian keyboardist and composer Josef Zawinul, and on the epochal sprawl of “Bitches Brew.”Together with Mr. Zawinul and the Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous, Mr. Shorter then formed Weather Report, which released its debut album, called simply “Weather Report,” in 1971. Over the next 15 years, the band changed personnel several times, with Mr. Zawinul and Mr. Shorter as the only constants. Weather Report also changed styles, tacking away from chamberesque abstraction and toward danceable rhythms. Its most commercially successful edition, featuring the electric bass phenom Jaco Pastorius, became an arena attraction, and one of its albums, “Heavy Weather,” was certified gold (and later platinum).Mr. Shorter was the instrumental voice out front in Weather Report, and second only to Mr. Zawinul as an engine of original material. Among the enduring tunes he wrote for the band are “Tears,” a color-shifting tone poem; “Palladium,” a funk tune with Caribbean flair; and “Mysterious Traveler,” a rhythmic saga named after a popular radio show from his youth.Mr. Shorter and Josef Zawinul, the Austrian keyboardist and a central member of Weather Report, played at a jazz festival in France in 1984.Eric Gaillard/Agence France-PresseWhile in Weather Report, Mr. Shorter made precious few solo albums — but “Native Dancer,” a 1974 collaboration with the Brazilian troubadour Milton Nascimento, inspired more than one generation of admirers, notably the guitarist and composer Pat Metheny and the bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding, who in 2008 recorded a version of the album’s opening track, “Ponta de Areia.”The idea of working with Mr. Nascimento had come from Mr. Shorter’s second wife, Ana Maria (Patricio) Shorter, who spent her childhood in Angola under Portuguese rule. (Mr. Shorter noted her influence in the album notes, and included a wistful ballad called “Ana Maria.”)It took more than a decade for Mr. Shorter to release his next album, “Atlantis,” a complex sonic canvas that met with a tepid response, critically and commercially. One of its most vocal champions at the time was the critic Robert Palmer, who praised it in The New York Times as “an album of tunes in which everything — texture, color, mood, meter, tempo, instrumentation, density, you name it — seems to be in perpetual transformation.”Mr. Shorter held to a similar ideal after Weather Report disbanded in 1986. His next few albums featured a broad range of collaborators and a heavy quotient of synthetic timbres. The ambitious culmination was “High Life,” which met with scathing criticism on its release in 1995, notoriously from Peter Watrous in The Times, who declared it “a pastel failure.”Personal tragedy visited Mr. Shorter soon after, and not for the first time. Iska, his daughter with Ana Maria, had lived with brain damage before dying of a grand mal seizure in 1985 at age 14. The loss had led Wayne and Ana Maria to delve into Nichiren Buddhism. Then, in 1996, Ana Maria and the Shorters’ niece Dalila Lucien were among the 230 people killed when TWA Flight 800 crashed shortly after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport in New York.“We practice in Buddhism that we’re able to have an eternal dialogue with the ones we lose temporarily,” Mr. Shorter told The Guardian several years later. “When my wife left, she was in a state of enlightenment.”In 1999 he married Carolina Dos Santos, a Brazilian dancer and actor whom he had met through Ana Maria. She survives him, along with his daughters, Miyako and Mariana Shorter, and a grandson. Alan Shorter died in 1987.The Rogue PhilosopherAs he entered a phase of late eminence, Mr. Shorter deepened his bond with Mr. Hancock, with whom he shared not only several decades of musical history but also a common foundation in Buddhist practice. Both artists served on the board of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, a nonprofit educational organization (now called the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) that administers a series of programs, including a long-running international competition.Mr. Shorter and Mr. Hancock released an introspective duo album, “1+1,” in 1997; it won Mr. Shorter a Grammy for best instrumental composition for “Aung San Suu Kyi,” a heraldic theme dedicated to the activist and future leader of Myanmar, who was under house arrest at the time.In total, Mr. Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, the last bestowed this year for best improvised jazz solo, for “Endangered Species,” a track, written with Ms. Spalding, from the album “Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival,” where he performed in a quartet with her, Terri Lyne Carrington and Leo Genovese.He also received a lifetime achievement honor from the Recording Academy in 2015. He was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He received the Polar Music Prize, an international honor recognizing both pop and classical music, in 2017. And he was among the recipients of the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors, in a class that also included the composer Philip Glass.Mr. Shorter ushered in a profound new stage of his career in 2000, when he formed an acoustic quartet with the pianist Danilo Pérez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade. These were broad-minded musicians capable of following his every twitch and prompt, and they came from the generation that had grown up with his tunes.The new Wayne Shorter Quartet started out playing versions of those tunes, like “Footprints” and “JuJu,” often modified or abstracted to the point of near unrecognizability. Jon Pareles, reviewing a concert for The Times in 2013, observed that Mr. Shorter “treats bass lines or single phrases as clues and implications, toying on the spot with tempo, crosscurrents, inflection and attack; anything can be up for grabs, yet the composition retains an identity.”Mr. Shorter’s own quartet started off playing versions of his old tunes before he eventually composed new music for the group, including “Scout” and “Pegasus.”Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Shorter eventually composed new music for the group, like “Scout,” which had its premiere in 2017, and “Pegasus,” for which he also orchestrated parts for the quintet Imani Winds. The Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned his “Gaia,” a symphonic tone poem that doubles as a concerto for Ms. Spalding and suggests a classical tradition deftly redrawn in Mr. Shorter’s hand.Together, Mr. Shorter and Ms. Spalding boldly expanded on this promise in “Iphigenia,” an opera loosely based on the Greek myth, featuring his music and her libretto, with set designs by the architect Frank Gehry. It had a series of performances in 2021 and 2022, notably at the Kennedy Center in Washington, with Mr. Shorter in the audience.He was still straining against preconceptions and aesthetic prescriptions when, at 85, he released “Emanon,” a suite that he recorded in two separate versions: one with his quartet and the other also featuring the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with his soprano saxophone darting through. The album received broad critical acclaim, topping year-end lists in The Times and JazzTimes.Mr. Shorter, who created a hand-drawn 58-page comic book called Other Worlds as a teenager, also fulfilled a lifelong ambition with “Emanon.” The albums came with a comic that he wrote with Monica Sly, illustrated by Randy DuBurke. Set in a sci-fi dystopia, it hinges on the actions of Emanon, a “rogue philosopher” urging resistance to fear and oppression.“There are a myriad of realities in the multiverse,” reads the first panel, setting a familiar theme in a bold new key.Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Yo-Yo Ma Makes His Encore a Call for Peace, With a Nod to Casals

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      The celebrated cellist capped a concert with the New York Philharmonic with a work that Pablo Casals often played to protest war and oppression.Listen to This ArticleAfter a rousing performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to the stage for an encore.But rather than rush into a familiar crowd-pleaser, Ma began speaking from the stage of David Geffen Hall to the sold-out crowd. He explained the work he would play: “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song that was a favorite of the eminent cellist Pablo Casals, who performed it as a call for peace and to evoke his native Catalonia, which he had fled when he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Elgar Cello Concerto was written in 1919, right after the Great War — the Great War that we said would never happen again,” Ma told the audience of about 2,200 people, speaking without a microphone.Then he spoke of Casals who, after World War II, suspended his concert career to protest the decision of the Allies not to try to topple Franco in Spain. “And the only times he would play would be to play this piece,” Ma noted, “which is from his native Catalonia, a folk song that he thought symbolized freedom.”In a telephone interview, Ma said his aim was to remind people of their shared humanity at a time when there is so much strife and suffering in the world, including in Ukraine.“The question is, why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” he said.Ma said that music was a way of coping “in a world where we have both empathy deficit and empathy fatigue.”“How many of us think about World War I or World War II?” he said. “How many of us think about Rwanda or about the Rohingya? These all become distant very quickly in our first world. But for people in other parts of the world, it’s constant, it doesn’t go away.”“I don’t have an answer,” he added. “I’m trying to find a way of coping myself. And maybe at some level playing music is a way of engaging people in the common search of who we are, and who we want to be.”Ma has long been fond of “Song of the Birds,” which he has often performed in the past.In the interview, he said the piece was powerful in part because it highlighted the special abilities of birds.“They literally can have altitude and perspective on our world and have the freedom to cross all our boundaries and borders,” he said. “There is something just wondrous about that. And we’re part of the same world. Can we learn from that and hopefully not make the same sort of mistakes over and over again?”Since the Russian invasion last year, Ma has used music to show solidarity with Ukraine. He performed the Ukrainian national anthem last year with the pianist Emanuel Ax and the violinist Leonidas Kavakos before a concert at the Kennedy Center. He also played a Bach cello suite on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.Casals, regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time, fled Spain in the late 1930s, saying he would not return until democracy was restored. Living in the French border town of Prades, he worked to raise money for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, writing letters to officials, charities, journalists and others seeking support.He would perform “Song of the Birds,” or “El Cant dels Ocells,” at the end of his music festivals in Prades and the scattered concerts he played in exile. He played it in 1961 at the White House for President John F. Kennedy. And he performed it again when he visited the United Nations in 1971, two years before he died, to deliver an antiwar message.“The birds in the sky, in the space, in the space, sing ‘peace, peace, peace,’” Casals said. “The music is a music that Bach and Beethoven and all the greats would have loved and admired. It is so beautiful and it is also the soul of my country, Catalonia.”Ma has often paid tribute to Casals, calling him a hero. He played for the eminent cellist in 1962, when he was 7 and Casals was 85. Casals helped launch Ma’s career when he brought the prodigy to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who introduced Ma at a performance at the White House that same year before an audience that included President Kennedy.In the interview, Ma recalled visiting Casals’s summer home in Spain in 2019, which now houses a museum, where he saw his letters of protest and pleas to help refugees.“Casals showed me, even as a young boy, that he had his priorities,” he said. “He was a human being first, a musician second and a cellist third.”Audio produced by More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Jazz Piano

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      We asked Samara Joy, Hanif Abdurraqib, Vijay Iyer and others to share their favorite tracks showcasing what might be the most nuanced instrument in jazz.Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked all kinds of experts to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with Duke Ellington? How about Alice Coltrane? We’ve covered bebop, vocal jazz, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra and the music of the 21st century.This month, we’re focused on the piano, perhaps the most nuanced instrument in jazz. At the hands of an artist like Thelonious Monk or Shirley Scott, Herbie Hancock or Geri Allen, the piano captures a vast range of emotions — some easily identified; others more textured — while blurring the lines between jazz, ambient and classical. It’s an instrument so equally subtle and pronounced that even one of the most celebrated pianists in jazz still has trouble assessing it.“I’m trying to figure out what the black and white keys do after 86 years!” Ahmad Jamal said in a 2020 interview. “I first sat down at the piano when I was 3 years old, and I’m still trying to figure out what they do!” Indeed, there’s no other instrument that heightens and soothes like the piano, its melodic chords a worthy complement to stronger-sounding drums and horns.Below, we asked writers, critics, musicians and D.J.s to recommend their favorite jazz recordings that put the piano in the spotlight. Enjoy reading their commentary and listening to the excerpts, and find a playlist at the bottom of the article with full tracks. As always, be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Dan Tepfer, pianist and composerSome people are attracted to what they know, others to what they don’t know. If you’re the second kind of person, I think you’ll find the deep mystery of this track fascinating. There’s something about the exquisite density of the harmonies, about Thelonious Monk’s subtle variations in phrasing, about his overall attitude, that transforms the simple melody of the original song into a whole universe, one you could lose yourself in. Then, at 1:49, he does something seemingly impossible: He bends a piano note. Even though I know the trick to doing this, I’m always amazed at how effective it is in his hands. But what’s even more remarkable is Monk’s ability, throughout the track, to extract a sound out of the piano that’s like nothing else. It’s at once angular and approachable, bold and vulnerable, complex and childlike. Perhaps more than anyone, Monk embodied jazz’s highest calling: to sound radically like yourself.“Just a Gigolo”Thelonious Monk◆ ◆ ◆Samara Joy, vocalist“Father Flanagan,” a song composed and played by the great Barry Harris, is one of my favorite songs highlighting the piano. Although George Duvivier and Leroy Williams play on this tune as well, Barry starts the song in a rubato fashion with his deeply lyrical interpretation of the melody before bringing the band into time for the top of his solo on this beautiful walking ballad. A special element of this particular track that proves his superior sense of melodic playing is the fact that Barry sings as he’s soloing, which can be heard if you listen closely. He played with so much soul and melody, everything cohesive yet free flowing. From intro to ending, solo to comping, Barry Harris on this recording showcases an incredible command of the instrument and details exactly how the piano should be played.◆ ◆ ◆Hanif Abdurraqib, writerThe title track to “Money Jungle” is one of my favorite jazz piano moments. I love “Money Jungle” as an album, because it sounds, in a way, how it felt to make. Duke Ellington tossed Charles Mingus and Max Roach in a room for a day, and committed to making a recording, clashes of style be damned, the generational gap between he and the other two be damned. Mingus and Roach got into it constantly; at one point Mingus stormed out and had to be coaxed back into the session by Ellington. The title track works to me as a great piano song because of how unwavering Ellington’s playing is, even — or perhaps especially — in the moment in the middle of the song, where it seems Mingus grows impatient, his bass attempting to push its way into the brief silences between Ellington’s bursts of piano. I like players who aren’t afraid to live out the tensions of a session, of a day, of a life, within the music. Ellington was always, but especially by that point, a consummate professional. He steers the song into a perfect landing, even as Mingus’s bass fades, sounding entirely exhausted.“Money Jungle”Duke Ellington◆ ◆ ◆Vijay Iyer, pianist and composerGeri Allen showed up in the 1980s with powerful grooves, exuberant melodies and astonishing polyphonies between her anchoring left hand and her wry, fluidly inventive right. This composition, named for her friend Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo, feels like a sturdy, splendid palace built entirely from the peculiar details of her musical language: the splayed intervals proliferating and surrounding you as ostinati; the asymmetric rhythms stacked in contrapuntal towers; the jagged, exploratory right-hand lines weaving around and across these patterns; all of her mercurial tendencies solidified and given full force. This was the music of Geri Allen: clear, ebullient, and resoundingly complete. Her premature passing in 2017 broke our hearts, and we are all still catching up to her artistry.“When Kabuya Dances”Geri Allen◆ ◆ ◆Keanna Faircloth, writer and podcast hostHip-hop is a half-century old this year and one artist that has provided a treasure trove of sample material for some of the most significant tracks in the rap canon is Ahmad Jamal. His compositions are a pot of gold. With the recent passing of David Jolicoeur (a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove or Plug Two) of De La Soul, I am reminded of how the title track from that group’s 1996 album, “Stakes Is High,” is anchored on a segment derived from Jamal’s “Swahililand,” composed over 20 years prior and released on the album “Jamal Plays Jamal.” The track’s haunting and percussive chord progressions provide a perfectly ominous backdrop for De La Soul’s reality-rooted lyrics. The song’s co-producer, J Dilla, was heavily influenced by jazz — not unlike his contemporaries Pete Rock, Q-Tip and others — and his contributions further solidified the genre as the mother of hip-hop.“Swahililand”Ahmad Jamal◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerIn 1964, one year into his post as the lead pianist in Miles Davis’s band, Herbie Hancock released the concept album “Empyrean Isles,” a tribute to an imagined world in the Great Eastern Sea. On “The Egg,” the LP’s improvised centerpiece, Hancock and the drummer Tony Williams open with a mesmerizing loop of keys and percussion, over which the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard blows triumphant wails, giving the song a pronounced majesty. But it isn’t until the midway point that Hancock’s genius shines through: A classical pianist, his notes pivot between light and dark, joy and melancholy, setting up the second half’s more traditional fare. Such ingenuity would typify Hancock throughout his career. To this day, he’s still a wandering soul embracing the youth movement, still bending genres while expanding the idea of what jazz can entail.“The Egg”Herbie Hancock◆ ◆ ◆Cosmo Baker, D.J.On “Maimoun,” Stanley Cowell (a jazz giant who hasn’t gotten his props) accompanies the great Clifford Jordan on his tour de force album, “Glass Bead Games,” released in 1973 on the Strata-East label. While this version isn’t a “piano song,” one cannot overlook the power and pulse of the instrument here. There’s an almost solemn feeling to the introduction, which quickly transforms to a melody filled with immense joy and restraint against Jordan’s towering sax. Though Cowell’s piano helps construct the magnificent cathedral Jordan is building, the true possibilities unfold once his role shifts. It’s leading Jordan’s tenor, then sparring with it, feigning, teasing, until the 2:16 mark when Cowell takes the reins and leads the listener to the very soul of the composition — that feeling of peace and nostalgia. With some art, the aim is to invite one into a place. On “Maimoun,” Cowell is letting the listener into a very magical place — tender, vulnerable and exquisitely gorgeous — through his keys. And keys open doors.“Maimoun”Clifford Jordan◆ ◆ ◆Atiyyah Khan, D.J. and arts journalistI first heard this track by Abdullah Ibrahim, formerly known as Dollar Brand, only a few months ago but was immediately hooked. What drew me to it was the title “Sathima,” a dedication to Ibrahim’s former partner, the late singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, who was an incredible artist in her own right. Funk is not the first association with Ibrahim, and yet this tune is incredibly funky, one that would work easily on dance floors. The groove chugs rhythmically and steadily forward toward freedom, but there is enough space left for those striking horn solos to come in, and Ibrahim’s piano flourishes situate it in the spiritual realm. It’s head music that moves the body, too.The tune appears on the 1975 album “African Herbs,” one year after Ibrahim’s hit “Mannenberg” was released; this composition follows with a similar sound — 11 minutes of uplifting joy. Though Ibrahim was predominantly based in the United States, this album was recorded in South Africa, giving it that signature sound thanks to the incredible musicians he gathered for this session.“Sathima”Dollar Brand◆ ◆ ◆Jacqueline Schneider, writerIf music were a meal, “Lonely Woman” would have Michelin stars. Despite its name, Horace Silver’s seven-minute composition leaves me feeling the opposite: quite attended to, emotionally full — even sentimental. The kind of song that transports you into a meditative state, its melodic chord pairings recall possibility, self-reflection and optimism. The piece progresses as a conversation in the language of piano — each key enunciated as its vibrations pan soulfully to distribute the sound. When I want to pay homage to an entire genre, I play this song. Silver, who started as a saxophonist, reinvented himself as a pianist with Stan Getz and went on to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers collective, representing, to me, legacy, hope and potential.“Lonely Woman”Horace Silver◆ ◆ ◆Ashley Kahn, writerThink soft, languid splashes on the mirrored surface of a pond at twilight. Minimal gesture, maximum effect: nearly seven minutes of lyrical serenity and hushed, harmonic stillness. It’s a deep cut — you won’t hear it played onstage — but also a landmark of modern jazz, one that defied the typical form and flow of chord changes, while echoing the guileless air of a Satie “Gnossienne,” or the insouciance of Chopin’s “Berceuse.” Bill Evans considered “Peace Piece” a one-time, impromptu moment, never revisiting it after recording it in 1958. Intending to deliver a take of “Some Other Time” from “On the Town,” he found himself entranced by the opening chords, which he looped into a meditative ostinato, layering sharp statements that grew in density and weight, the moody effect morphing into profound emotion. It still feels pristine and stands as a stellar example of at least three ideas: Evans’s brilliance at weaving together jazz piano with Romanticism and various 20th-century classical sources. The ascent of modal jazz — slow-moving harmony, pedal-point bass lines — that crystallized a year later with Evans’s participation on Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” (“Peace Piece” provided the foundation for “Flamenco Sketches”). And the covalent nature of jazz, eager to bond with worthy musical elements from all corners, edges, paths.“Peace Piece”Bill Evans◆ ◆ ◆Nduduzo Makhathini, pianist and improviser“Vukani, vukani madoda ilanga liphumile” — opening chantThrough the sun, as a metaphor, Bheki Mseleku invites the listener to awaken to a new consciousness. Symbolically, this record marked the dawn of democracy in South Africa, and its inherent rhetorics. The song title “Sulyman Salud” refers to the African American jazz pianist McCoy Tyner’s Islamic devotion name. Given Mseleku’s connection to modal music, one could read this offering as an expression of the continuities in the spiritual pursuits in Black arts across the Atlantic. It is also a nod to one of Mseleku’s greatest piano heroes.“You are the sun of the soil, Sulyman Salud” — chant before piano solo“Sulyman Salud” enables us to hear the sonic affinities over the Atlantic Ocean. It says to us: “The erasure project did not entirely succeed; some parts of our collective memory still hold intact.” Here, the listener is invited to hear how jazz, as a memory, reverberated back in the continent. In this sense, jazz not only inspired Africans here at home, it also reminded them of the inherent “jazziness” — it invoked community. Traces of such claims are found in this piece as it indexes a long lineage of pianism in Africa and its diasporas.“Sulyman Salud”Bheki Mseleku◆ ◆ ◆Martin Johnson, writerIn a jazz world that passionately reveres its pantheon, the great pianist Mal Waldron (1925-2002) is often overlooked. He has a compelling back story: tenure with Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Max Roach, an onstage nervous breakdown, and a series of magical collaborations with the saxophonist Steve Lacy. He’s a premiere interpreter of Thelonious Monk, and like that jazz great, he’s among the artists hailed in Matthew Shipp’s iconic essay on the Black Mystery School Pianists. Mal had a unique and compelling style. His left-hand playing was insistent and brooding; his tempo might best be described as unhurried. His approach suggested a man who had something profound to say and a disrupting urgency to say it. “Snake Out,” one of his signature compositions, showcases this intensity beautifully. It goes beyond the traditional tension and release and becomes incantation and ecstasy.“Snake Out”Mal Waldron◆ ◆ ◆Michael J. West, jazz writerYou can’t really bend notes on an acoustic piano; that’s just the physics of the instrument. Andrew Hill instead bends the principles of harmony and rhythm around the piano. On “East 9th Street,” from his 1975 album “Divine Revelation,” he starts while comping Jimmy Vass’s soprano saxophone solo. Hill falls out of key and so far behind the beat that he displaces it — as if he were on tape, being played back at slow speed. When it’s his turn to solo, he veers in wide curves around the harmony and seems to be fighting with the bassist Chris White and the drummer Art Lewis over where the syncopation should be. But he’s always in control: bending the music, but to his will. To top it off, Hill’s ebullient, Afro-Latin composition is terrific.“East 9th Street”Andrew Hill◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticStanding at the interchange between the stride piano he’d learned growing up in Pittsburgh, and the hot pot of bebop he landed in after moving to New York, Erroll Garner felt his way into a playing style that was as sharply subversive as it was irresistible. All that, without ever learning to read music. The mid-20th century was a good time for visionary subterfuge in American music; just because Garner conducted his revolutions gently doesn’t mean he wasn’t on the front lines. His left hand thrummed guitarlike chords, chased bass lines into the mud, leaped through harmonies like a stride pianist’s would. His right hand could zip and add bright dashes of color, or join the left in thick rhythmic smudges of harmony. Recording the old popular tune “I Don’t Know Why” in 1950, for his outstanding Columbia Records debut, Garner’s fingers lick at the keys and he drags the melody along, dandling it, relishing it. The song itself is unremarkable, but the playing amounts to unmitigated pleasure. White journalists liked to portray him as a simple-minded savant, but the real Garner was a fighter as well as a genius: He and his manager, Martha Glaser, would later sue Columbia for releasing an album without his permission, winning a first-of-its-kind decision and drawing a hard line for musicians’ rights.“I Don’t Know Why”Erroll Garner◆ ◆ ◆◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Simeon ten Holt: The Minimalist Composer Who Keeps Getting Left Out

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      As centenary events celebrate Simeon ten Holt’s work, music historians have questioned his omission from histories of Minimalism, and its focus on American greats.“Canto Ostinato,” a keyboard piece by the Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt made of overlapping layers and repeated patterns, has amassed a cult following — in the Netherlands, at least.In “About Canto,” a 2011 documentary directed by Ramón Gieling, people talk about the piece’s impact on their lives: a former D.J. who has some of the score tattooed on his shoulder, a woman who gave birth to her second child while “Canto” played and the brother of a man whose suicide note said that “his life was fulfilled” after hearing the piece in concert.“Canto Ostinato” is the most famous piece by ten Holt, who died in 2012, and it is still extremely popular in the Netherlands. But established histories and concert programs of Minimalism beyond that country tend to congregate around a core group of important American figures — like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and La Monte Young — and ten Holt’s name is routinely missing.There are clear similarities between ten Holt’s work and compositions by these more well-known figures. At the same time as celebrations mark ten Holt’s centenary —including a Dutch lecture-performance tour exploring his biography and important influences and many performances of “Canto” in the Netherlands and abroad — music historians have been asking if more (and more international) names need to be added to the canon of great Minimalist composers.“It really obscures the history — and the pervasiveness of attraction to the music — when we just think of Minimalism as a handful of figures,” said Kerry O’Brien, the co-editor of the forthcoming book “On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement,” which coincides with the release of Patrick Nickleson’s “Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music and Historiography in Dispute.” Both books seek to dispute the written histories of Minimalism by widening its cast of characters.Simeon ten Holt’s birth 100 years ago is being marked by numerous celebrations in the Netherlands.Friso KeurisAfter hearing Glass perform in the Netherlands, ten Holt began writing “Canto” in 1976. That same year in New York, Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” sold out two nights at the Metropolitan Opera, and Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” premiered. Both are widely considered seminal Minimalist projects.While the term Minimalism has often been contested by the musicians it’s been used to describe, by the early 1970s the term had gathered momentum as a shortcut for describing music made with long tones or drones, apparent stasis masking gradual change and an emphasis on repetition. The genre subsequently dispersed, feeding into other genres like pop, noise and ambient.“Canto” shares a lot of traits with Minimalism’s canonic multi-piano works — such as Reich’s “Piano Phase” or “Six Pianos” — and invites structural comparisons with the overlapping parts and type of group improvisation in Riley’s landmark composition “In C.”“Between a piece like ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ and ‘Canto Ostinato,’ I find there to be a through-thread of gratifying harmonic development,” said Erik Hall, a Michigan-based musician who followed his solo, multi-tracked Reich album with a similarly constructed “Canto” recording. He added that he found further comparisons in “the pacing, duration and endurance it takes to really sit with it and take it in.”The pianist Erik Hall in his home studio in Michigan.Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesHall has made a solo recording of ten Holt’s Minimalist piece “Canto Ostinato.”Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesTen Holt’s route to a Minimalist style was far removed from developments in America. He was born in Bergen, in the north of the Netherlands, into a family of artists, and ideas from visual art informed his particular route in minimal music.Before studying in Paris in 1949, ten Holt studied composition with Jakob van Domselaer, an associate of the painter Piet Mondrian and one of the first to transfer the principles of minimal abstraction and strict geometry of the art movement de Stijl into music, in his piece “Proeven van Stijlkunst” (Experiments in Artistic Style). “It’s from the 1910s, and it sounds like Minimalism, it’s absolutely fascinating,” said Maarten Beirens, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.Like many other European composers in his broad age group, by the late 1950s, ten Holt was incorporating serial procedures into his compositions, prioritizing dissonance over tonality and consonance. Later pieces like “Canto” saw ten Holt abandoning serialism, in a move he called “tonality after the death of tonality.”“There is no Minimalistic composer who has so much freedom” as ten Holt, said the pianist Jeroen van Veen, adding that ten Holt’s fluid compositions “gave back what had been lost in the classical tradition: being flexible onstage.” But in the wider historical schemes — of Minimalism, and of European classical music too — those characteristics do make him “an outsider,” van Veen said.The Dutch string quartet Matangi performing ten Holt’s “Canto Ostinato” in January 2020. Performers around the world have arranged the keyboard work for saxophone ensemble, cello octet, symphony orchestra and string quartet.Tessa Veldhorst/De SchaapjesfabriekAs does the lyrical Romantic pianism of “Canto,” which brings to mind Chopin or Rachmaninoff — and which connects to a longer history of European art music tradition.But ten Holt’s exclusion from the canon was because of more than just this traditional turn. He “wasn’t a composer with the kind of connections that many composers had,” Beirens said. Unlike his compatriot Louis Andriessen, Beirens added, “he did not have steady relationships with certain performers, with orchestras or with the music business until a later point in his career.”That change came with van Veen, who started the Simeon ten Holt Foundation in 2015 to promote his music to an international audience. Still, today the vast majority of ten Holt recordings and performances remain in the Netherlands.Language and location played a part in ten Holt being overlooked, too. “The history of Minimalism depends on where you are in the world,” O’Brien said, adding: “If you read a Dutch language history of Minimalism, a Minimalist classic like ‘Canto Ostinato’ would be, I think, front and center.” But such stories have yet to break into Anglophone-focused discussions of Minimalism.When it comes to understanding Minimalism, “we know how things ended up,” O’Brien said, “and then we look back to history to reinforce the lead-up to that.” And a composer like ten Holt — who bridged musical worlds without ever truly settling in any camp — quietly disrupts those narratives. More

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      36 Hours in Rio de Janeiro: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Lunch, then more samba
      There are two excellent lunch options on Rua do Senado, both from the same owner, that offer very different experiences. On the high end is Lilia, a suave two-floor lunch spot with a changing prix-fixe menu that is eclectic and focused on fresh ingredients (lunch for two, about 300 reais). If you prefer snacks at streetside tables, head a few doors down to Labuta Bar for torresmo (fried pork belly), croquettes, oysters and sandwiches, washed down with house-made iced mate or a cold beer (lunch for two, about 90 reais). A few steps away, catch live samba at one of the city’s oldest bars, Armazém Senado, founded in 1907. The business, which was once a market, still has its high shelves stocked with toilet paper and bleach — along with plenty of bottles of cachaça. More