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      Hear How Takeoff and the Migos Flow Changed Atlanta Rap

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      Quick-jabbing triplets had been a staple of rap, but the trio made the style sound fresh, thanks in large part to Takeoff, its master of syncopation. The rapper was shot and killed at 28 on Tuesday.The Atlanta trio Migos’ 2013 breakout hit “Versace” represented a clear demarcation line between the city’s older generation of rappers and its new vanguard. The rapping — much of it delivered in triplets — was a glittery stomp. Tightly clustered syllables that landed like quick jabs.“Versace” was such an immediate sensation that Drake, at the time the genre’s most important ascendant superstar, volunteered his services for a remix, mimicking the group’s peppery flow and, by extension, introducing it to the rest of the world.By all accounts, Takeoff — who was shot and killed in Houston early Tuesday morning — was the primary engine of what came to be dubbed the Migos flow.The rapper, who was 28, was one of three people who were shot around 2:30 a.m. after a private gathering at 810 Billiards & Bowling ended in an argument. (The other two victims are expected to survive. No arrests have been made, the authorities said.)The triplet pattern that became a Migos signature wasn’t new to hip-hop: It was a fixture in Memphis rap for years, in the work of Three 6 Mafia and others, and it was part of the cadence-bending arsenal of the Cleveland sing-rap pioneers Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. But Migos made the style sound fresh, less performative and more glossy. It had a hurried urgency and also the briskness of rough-and-tumble triumph.Such is the nature of hip-hop innovation — sometimes it’s about what is said, but just as often, it’s about how it’s said. And the triplet flow that Migos popularized in the mid-2010s became a standard-bearer for the genre, setting a generation of Atlanta rap afloat.Atlanta was already the center of hip-hop innovation when Migos arrived, but the trio was primed for streaming-era success — pulsing with youthful energy, leaning heavily on catchy choruses, collaborating widely. After the viral success of its 2016 hit “Bad and Boujee,” Migos released a pair of albums, “Culture” and “Culture II,” that each debuted at the top of the Billboard albums chart and spawned several hits, including “MotorSport,” “Stir Fry” and “Walk It Talk It.”The prior wave of Atlanta stars like Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy captured ears with imagistic storytelling and signature vocal texture. By comparison, Migos sounded addled, anxious, pugnacious. They were untethered from earlier rap conventions. As the rest of Atlanta rap leaned toward the psychedelic — beginning with Future, then pivoting to Young Thug, and eventually the more commercially minded Gunna and Lil Baby — Migos, and Takeoff especially, held fast to its mechanistic idiosyncrasies.Takeoff was by far the most reserved figure in Migos, which also featured Quavo and Offset. But he was deeply technically gifted, a master of syncopation, with a deftness that could render even the toughest talk exuberantly.That talent shone on the group’s earliest songs, catching the ear of Pierre Thomas, known to most as P, one of the founders of Quality Control Music, the dominant Atlanta rap label of the past decade. In 2017, Thomas recalled to Rap Radar how Gucci Mane had introduced him to Migos’ music, and how Takeoff stood out.“Gucci sent me the song. He sent me the video. I was like, ‘Man, the dude with the long dreads’ — it was Takeoff — I was like, ‘That dude there is crazy.’ The way he was spitting it reminded me of Bone Thugs, like how they used to be rapping back in the day.”“Versace” appeared on the third Migos mixtape, “Y.R.N.,” which was released in 2013 and remains one of the decade’s defining rap albums. Over the next couple of years, which would see the ascendance of Migos to hip-hop superstardom, the Migos flow expanded past triplets to a broader umbrella that emphasized the staccato.Even as the group moved in a more melodic direction through the 2010s, Takeoff remained resolute in his commitment to innovative rhyme patterns. He set the tempo of “Fight Night,” one of the group’s signature early hits featuring perhaps its most pointedly rhythmic rapping. On “Cross the Country,” from 2014, he opened with a dizzying verse, switching patterns several times. And last year, on a punishing freestyle on the Los Angeles radio station Power 106, Takeoff delivered a verse that took the group’s classic triplet flow as a starting point and thickened it, demonstrating how on top of one novel idea, a whole mansion could be built. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ornette Coleman

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      We asked writers, critics and musicians including Kamasi Washington, Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings to tell us how they connect with Coleman’s fearless artistry.Over the past three months, The New York Times has asked musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with jazz — starting with Duke Ellington, then moving on to Alice Coltrane and bebop.This month, we focus on Ornette Coleman, the iconoclastic saxophonist and bandleader whose style prioritized atonal chords over traditional rhythm and harmony, which helped establish the subgenre of free jazz in the late 1950s. Though the rules of what jazz entailed would soften a decade later, as musicians like Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis began mixing the genre with elements of funk and rock, Coleman’s approach was controversial at first, leading to ridicule or even violence. Davis once said that Coleman was “all screwed up inside.” In 1959, the drummer Max Roach punched him in the mouth after hearing him play. “In New York, I’m telling you, guys literally would say, ‘I’m going to kill you. You can’t play that way,’” Coleman once said.Yet you don’t become legendary by doing the same old thing, and Coleman was confident and fearless in his artistry. Through albums like “Something Else!!!!,” “The Shape of Jazz to Come” and “Free Jazz,” Coleman stuck to his vision and earned respect in the long run. In 2007, his album “Sound Grammar” won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Coleman is now considered a pioneer in avant-garde jazz.Enjoy listening to excerpts from these tracks selected by a range of musicians, writers and critics. You can find a playlist with full-length songs at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own Coleman favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nubya Garcia, musicianI felt a true sense of freedom when I first listened to the album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” This was my first experience with free jazz; the tracks “Peace” and “Lonely Woman” truly resonated with me. The title of the album was also incredibly bold and decisive — this really pulled me in and I was pretty intrigued. I’d never heard anything like it before!What struck me on “Peace” was the clear, incredibly melodic theme. In each listen I kept hearing things I hadn’t before: the hookup between the horns and rhythm section, the intricacies throughout; the rhythmic motifs in Ornette’s solo; the bebop language; his instantly recognizable sound and tone, with melodic lines full of questions and answers. The driving groove and walking bass line keeps you locked in and wondering where it’s going to go. Both Coleman and Don Cherry just soar through the tune.I am so grateful to have seen Ornette play when I was very young, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. It’s pretty crazy to think I’ve been listening to this record on and off for almost 20 years!“Peace”Ornette Coleman (Rhino Atlantic)◆ ◆ ◆James Brandon Lewis, musicianThe first time I listened to Ornette Coleman as a young person I was like, what’s the problem? Like really, what’s the controversy? I honestly don’t get it. Of course this could have been my own nature relating to his vibe or my naïveté according to my own taught understanding concerning the way jazz is “supposed to be played,” but the way he played it sounded natural, organic and of the earth and womb.“Broken Shadows” is a composition of Coleman’s I often play in his memory and that of a fellow jazz great, the bassist Charlie Haden, his dear friend, collaborator and my teacher while I was a student at the California Institute of the Arts. Haden, upon showing us this tune, would describe meeting Ornette at his house and depicting a scene so vividly, saying music literally covered everything — the floors, the walls, the doors. As a young student this was inspiring. Like most Ornette Coleman tunes, “Broken Shadows” is lyrical, speech-like and hymn-like in nature, as well as melodically sophisticated. I would hear “Broken Shadows” not on the record with that name but on the album “The Complete Science Fiction Sessions,” which features a whole host of amazing musicians and another influence of mine, Dewey Redman.“Broken Shadows”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Piotr Orlov, writerOrnette Coleman’s influence over the American century is as much philosophic as it is musical — and on occasion his worldview was central to the fabric of a recording. The Double Quartet of “Free Jazz” was one occasion; and “Friends and Neighbors,” a distinctive recording in Ornette’s catalog, is another. It’s a mass singalong (there’s also an instrumental version) performed by a crowd gathered in the building he co-owned at 131 Prince Street in SoHo (soon to become known as Artist House, helping initiate Manhattan’s loft jazz era), accompanied by the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Ed Blackwell leading a funky swing, the tenor Dewey Redman’s sweet melody and Coleman on violin, thrashing about noisily. “Friends and neighbors/that’s where it’s at,” the choir intones, its living intentions represented by the ditty and its lo-fi recording — four minutes of almost punk simplicity. Recorded on Feb. 14, 1970, it was also synchronized with the universal aspirations of two other musical events taking place in Lower Manhattan that night: Six blocks away, at 647 Broadway, David Mancuso was hosting his own initial loft gathering, a dance party called Love Saves the Day, which went on to define the fellowship potential of D.J. culture. And the Grateful Dead, who adapted Ornette’s free jazz lessons for the psychedelic rock crowd, was at the Fillmore East, engaged in a historic New York City stand.“Friends and Neighbors” (Vocal Version)Ornette Coleman (Ace Records)◆ ◆ ◆Idris Ackamoor, musicianThe jazz outlaw dancing, weaving, bopping, singing with alto plastic full of human feeling, full breath-propelled runs: a serenade for “a very pretty girl.” The jazz outsider scorned by the insiders as he blows a change of the century in 4/4 time. When walls come tumbling down, earth-shattering notes explode and blast the unbelievers with his “outsider” gang. Cherry playing barrages of spit-induced embraces, sun-drenched round sounds from the depths of Haden’s repetitive pizzicato — dum did di dum da di dum di dum — announcing “Una Muy Bonita,” as Billy the Kid’s rat-ta-tat-ta drum rolls on the swinging saloon gate announce the change of the century north and south of the border, way down Mexicali way, escaping the jazz establishment — the jazz Ayatollahs who say “no dogs or cats or outlaw music allowed in this cantina.”“Una Muy Bonita”Ornette Coleman (Rhino Atlantic)◆ ◆ ◆Shannon J. Effinger, writer“Lonely Woman” was never one of my favorites among Ornette Coleman’s prolific output. Much to my chagrin, I didn’t give it a real chance. Back in college, I felt its title alone had trivialized and belittled one’s experience based on gender.Then one day, while at a cafe in the Village, I heard this incredible piece of music, brimming with fervor and tension. That moment made me a lifelong fan of the Modern Jazz Quartet and convinced me to give Coleman’s composition a good, honest listen. Having lived with this tune, and its many renditions, for some time now, I am finally beholden to its archetype. The impetus for “Lonely Woman” reportedly came from a portrait of a wealthy white woman. What struck Coleman most was how withdrawn she looked, despite her affluence.As the drummer Billy Higgins maintains a calm, steady ride pattern, Charlie Haden sets the mood with an elegiac bass line, denoting a harrowing turn. More than 60 years later, the lamenting cries of Coleman’s alto sax and Don Cherry’s pocket trumpet, in unison, are an allegory for the disillusionment we all feel.“Lonely Woman”Ornette Coleman (Rhino Atlantic)◆ ◆ ◆David Hajdu, writerYes, there is chaos in this world, and it’s hard to process, this song reminds us. But listen: There is also beauty, and the two things can coexist in exquisitely clashing equilibrium. A rare vocal composition with words and music by Ornette, “What Reason Could I Give” was the first track on “Science Fiction,” the 1972 album that marked its creator’s new phase as an unfettered musical-spiritual hybridist. A quartet of free-jazz virtuosos (Dewey Redman, Carmine Fornarotto, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell, along with Ornette) howls and squeals in deranged fury while Asha Puthli, an Indian vocalist making her jazz debut, sings a languid melody in ethereal tones. “What reason could I give to live,” she asks, answering, “Only that I love you.” And what explanation could Ornette offer for this music? Only that he loves it.“What Reason Could I Give”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Kamasi Washington, musicianThe way the super haunting strings bending their notes interact with Ornette Coleman’s tone on “Sadness” is so beautiful to me. Ornette always creates the most interesting and beautiful colors with his music, and this piece is such an amazing example of that. It feels really sad, but somehow also comforting, like the moment when you learn how to cope with a great loss. He is such a master at creating music that is able to express complex ideas and feelings with sound. It’s like the strings represent the pain that we all experience in life and his alto saxophone is the resilience of the human heart. Because some pains never go away, we just have to become strong enough to carry them.“Sadness”Ornette Coleman (ESP Disk)◆ ◆ ◆Mark Richardson, writerThe magic of Ornette Coleman’s music lies in his mix of the familiar and the strange. He was steeped in music history and his work was fundamentally grounded in blues, but Ornette often put himself in situations where he had to come up with new solutions to thorny problems. In almost all his music, there’s a feeling of risk: This could go wrong. On the title track from the 1966 LP “The Empty Foxhole,” he’s working with two potentially worrying limitations: One, he’s on trumpet, an instrument he’d only started studying in the past few years. And two, the other member of his trio, along with his frequent collaborator, the bassist Charlie Haden, is his 10-year-old son, Denardo. But everything comes together beautifully on this mournful cut, which is drenched in blues and oozes feeling. It’s brief, mysterious and deeply moving, and once again Ornette’s fearless desire to put himself in a tough spot led to brilliance.“The Empty Foxhole”Ornette Coleman (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Stephen Thomas Erlewine, writer“Faces and Places” can be seen as Ornette Coleman’s exploratory mid-1960s in microcosm. Opening the first volume of “At the ‘Golden Circle’ Stockholm,” a live set recorded in December 1965 with the bassist David Izenzon and the drummer Charles Moffett, the song opens tentatively yet hungrily: there’s a yearning growl in Coleman’s tone, a nervous edge that focuses attention. As “Faces and Places” stretches out over the course of 11 minutes, the trio goes further afield, with Coleman and Moffett growing increasingly manic, cramming in notes into a short bar and, in Ornette’s case, pushing his saxophone into amelodic refrains. The momentum of the performance is the key: It’s the sound of the band gaining confidence, simultaneously discovering their shared strengths. Other Ornette music may be further out, but listening to this trio in the process of ascension is exhilarating.“Faces and Places”Ornette Coleman Trio (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Shabaka Hutchings, musicianThe language we decide to use collectively in relation to art can shape how we listen, teach and see its relevance to our culture as a complete cosmological structure. What is “free” jazz? In Ornette Coleman I hear a musician who understands that the musical idea isn’t to be limited by the notion that a song’s structural integrity is sacrosanct; freedom not as a fixed conceptual space, but as a term denoting actions relative to a pre-existing system which is limiting in some capacity. “Compassion” is set upon a somewhat conventional set of chord changes, so we are able to clearly see Ornette’s poetic and harmonic logic guide his melodic intent as it would throughout his career.“Compassion”Ornette Coleman (Contemporary Records)◆ ◆ ◆Hank Shteamer, writerEven for the listener fully indoctrinated into the revolutionary sounds of the Ornette Coleman Quartet’s early work, the opening seconds of “Street Woman” — a standout of the 1971 studio sessions that reunited the saxophonist with the pocket-trumpeter Don Cherry, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Billy Higgins — still have the power to startle and delight: the supercharged, Spanish-sounding theme that keeps rising to new peaks of urgency; Higgins’ furiously locomotive ride-cymbal barrage; Haden’s huge, elemental bass throb. It’s hardly surprising that when Coleman launches into his solo, with an extended wail that trails off into a series of clipped phrases, it plays like an eruption of joyous laughter. Or that Haden and Cherry sound like they’re swept up in ecstatic trances during their respective features. There’s a high-wire exhilaration that this group achieved in 1959, braiding together virtuosity and utter fearlessness, that was fully intact 12 years later — and again in 1987 when these players reconvened for Coleman’s half-acoustic, half-electric “In All Languages.”“Street Woman”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Phil Freeman, writerThough it wasn’t released until 1982, “Of Human Feelings” was recorded live in the studio in April 1979, on a two-track Sony PCM-1600 with almost no production effects. Sharp-edged and thorny, it was the most clattering, urban-jungle-like album since Miles Davis’s “On the Corner.” The guitarists Charles Ellerbee and Bern Nix were panned hard to left and right, with Denardo Coleman and G. Calvin Weston’s drums rattling along in loose unison; Jamaaladeen Tacuma’s thick, sproingy bass filled up the middle, and Coleman’s alto sax keened the earwormish melodies, his trademark exuberance newly streetwise and deeply funky. “Jump Street” has an almost disco beat at times, and Ornette, Tacuma and the guitarists are on fire throughout.“Jump Street”Ornette Coleman (Island Records)◆ ◆ ◆Camae Ayewa, poet and musicianI cry writing this. Because I am so thankful for Ornette Coleman.Just last week I was championing his masterful work “Science Fiction,” released in 1972, a brilliant expansive experience. Inspiring me to claim intergalactic space within the avant-garde, his symmetrical arrow of time created the conditions for Irreversible Entanglements to continue in his sonic tradition with improv. The art of improvisation laid down the foundation for us to stretch and create our own temporal conditions. A true African futurist, not Hollywood’s futurism or Bank of America corporate futurism. This is a futurism of heart and mind. A futurism that doesn’t rely on sight but only on feeling and knowing. A Black quantum futurism can be shared with your neighbors and friends, and the only requirement is a heart and a brain, and the only question is tomorrow, the shape of jazz to come.“Science Fiction”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Bruno Walter, a Conductor Who Found Truth Through Beauty

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      A survey of Walter’s recorded output is fascinating for the ways in which it reveals him reinventing the traditions he was seen to represent.“Truth can be repulsive,” Bruno Walter, a conductor whose life had taught him that fact all too well, once said. “But Mozart has the power to speak truth with beauty.”If there was one composer that Walter, who was able to make beauty from truth like few others until his death in Beverly Hills in 1962, was most associated with during his career, it was that Viennese master; the story of Walter’s life, the conductor said, could be told as “the history of the development of a love for Mozart.”Listen to any of the famous stereo recordings Walter made in the twilight of his life with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, and it is easy to understand why. Take just the introduction to the E flat symphony, No. 39, from 1960. Stately, mellow, warm, it sings with contentment, backed with a faith strong enough that when troubles darken the scene, you can practically hear Walter transfigure them with an understanding smile. It’s a gesture of benevolence, yet he makes it sound glowingly apt, even characteristic of Mozart. Not for nothing did the critic Neville Cardus once suggest that to witness Walter conduct was to be “visited by an act of grace.”Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E flatColumbia Symphony Orchestra, 1960 (Sony)Writers often dignified Walter with spiritual metaphors — the author Stefan Zweig compared the beam on his face while conducting to “the countenance of the angels when they look upon God” — and it is revealing of his artistry that they were exactly what Walter aspired to achieve. For him, the Germanic music from Bach to Strauss was pure, uplifting, redemptive. It offered an “unchanging message of comfort,” he wrote in his memoir “Theme and Variations”; its “wordless gospel proclaims in a universal language what the thirsting soul of man is seeking beyond this life.”His authority, lightly worn, came not from technique or intellectual heft, but from “his love and his faith,” the New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote after a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1946. “Love, and not merely interpretive comprehension of what he is playing. Abiding faith in the music he represents.”More than that, Walter seemed after World War II to restore the luster of a vanished, even discredited tradition. He spoke like a German Romantic, and he conducted like one, too, tracing his influences back through the Vienna of Gustav Mahler and on to Richard Wagner, whose writings read during secret trips to a Berlin library as a boy.Walter, left, with his fellow conducting luminaries Arturo Toscanini, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler.Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesWilhelm Furtwängler forced that shared heritage through his intense and idiosyncratic style, and his association with Nazism. Walter, though, had the moral stature of an exile from the Third Reich, and he presented his inheritance unsullied, with an irresistible eloquence that made the classics sound “as natural as breathing,” the Virgil Thomson wrote in 1954.Part of the fascination of listening to Walter’s conducting now — coupling an exceptionally worthwhile 77-disc Sony box set, capturing his American career after he took refuge in California in 1939, with older and live material available on labels including Pristine — lies in hearing him reinvent the traditions he was seen to embody.Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, finaleVienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 1937 (Pristine)The same movement with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1953(Sony)And with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1959Sony)There is the antique charm of Walter’s prewar activity, above all in Vienna; the remarkable and somewhat surprising solidity and strength that marked his interpretations during his collaboration with the New York Philharmonic; the radiance of his late, stereo recordings, serene but spry. Yet throughout there is a constant, distinctive search for a simple, singing sense of expression, for a pliancy of line, for a sophistication and sensitivity that lay in more than technical precision.“There is a German verb, musizieren, which means to make music,” Thomson wrote in a review of one of Walter’s Philharmonic concerts in 1941, suggesting that the word applied more to him than to those, like Artur Rodzinski and Dimitri Mitropoulos, who had also conducted that orchestra. “Walter musiziert,” Thomson went on. “And that is a pleasure for those who like music with their concerts.”WALTER WAS NOT ALWAYS the dignified protector of Germanic music that he fashioned himself as after World War II, as his excellent biographers Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky have shown.Born Bruno Schlesinger to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1876 — he changed his name to take an early job in Breslau (modern-day Wroclaw, Poland) and later converted to Christianity — he had youthful success as a pianist, deciding to become a conductor only after seeing Hans von Bülow in the flesh.Much of his career was spent in the opera pit, from his debut in Cologne, Germany, in 1894 through his tenure from 1913 to 1922 as general music director of Munich, where Nazis demanded his ouster, and his expulsion in 1938 from the Vienna State Opera, where he had assisted Mahler at the start of the century and learned that he could never be the tyrant that his mentor had become.Conducting Mahler’s scores with angstless classicism, Walter took them as his own, likely at the expense of creative energies that had once had Viennese critics writing about his own compositions in the same breath as those of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. If his focus in the opera house was on Mozart, Wagner and Strauss, he nevertheless did his part for contemporaries, including Schreker, Korngold, Pfitzner and Smyth. His essentially conservative tastes — atonality for him was close to immorality — had freer rein over time; the Sony box contains just one work, Barber’s First Symphony, that was written after Mahler’s death in 1911.If anything, Walter’s fate at the hands of Nazism encouraged him still more strongly to shine the light of the canon against “the dark powers of hell,” as he called them. He had become the music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1929, but was forced to leave because of threats against his concerts early in 1933. He went to Austria, where he was greeted as a hero.Wagner: ‘Die Walküre’Lotte Lehmann, soprano; Lauritz Melchior, tenor; Vienna Philharmonic, 1935 (Pristine)The recordings he made with the Vienna Philharmonic then, with their portamento and their way of easing lyrically into the beat, have a tragic quality, and some of them — a mournful Brahms First; the turbulent Mahler Ninth captured live weeks before the Anschluss in 1938 — seem understandably burdened with the outside world. But rarely has there been such repose as in the slow movement of his “Jupiter” Symphony, such drama as in his excerpts from “Die Walküre,” such delight as in his Beethoven Sixth.VIENNA FELL, and, after a year or so in Paris, Walter settled in Los Angeles. The prospect of working in the United States had been attractive since at least World War I, and he had made his New York debut in 1923, when The Times admired “a sensitive musician, forceful without violence.” Over time, he became deeply respected, seen as the grand old man of the Germanic canon, though he was never a box office draw.Having declined the leadership of the New York Philharmonic in 1942, he agreed to it for two seasons in 1947, serving humbly as the musical adviser rather than music director of the orchestra Mahler had once headed. Although he played his part in postwar reconciliation in Europe after 1946 — taping “Das Lied von der Erde,” definitively, with Kathleen Ferrier in Vienna in 1952 — his musical home would remain New York, and his family home, Hollywood.There is an absorbing collision of traditions in the recordings that Walter made after 1941 with the Philharmonic, an ensemble whose manner could be as mighty as his was mild; it is a testament to his powers that the compound was alchemical rather than destructive.Reared on the perfectionism of Arturo Toscanini, New York critics habitually accused Walter of a carelessness with details that was fundamental to his style.“This idea of precision in orchestral playing is very recent,” Walter told an interviewer in 1960. “It was a necessary reaction to a certain lackadaisical way of attacking tasks, and Toscanini in forwarding it did a wonderful service. But now precision has become an ideal, which is wrong.”Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in DNew York Philharmonic, 1954 (Sony)The hours of politely insistent rehearsal tapes in Sony’s box go some way to refuting the charge, and if some of the recordings do the opposite, many nevertheless reveal the happy confluence of Walter’s elegance and the Philharmonic’s thrust, albeit in a repertoire narrower than he presented in concert. His most dramatic liberties were reined in; tempo fluctuations became slighter. The warmth remained, as a wartime Beethoven “Eroica” and Fifth demonstrate, but there could also be a firmness in attack, even in Haydn and Mozart; a sensational Brahms cycle from the early 1950s studio is shockingly fiery, and still more so in live accounts from the same time that are preserved on Pristine.Fiery is not a word one could use to describe Walter’s last recordings, made after a heart attack in March 1957 all but ended his concert career. He had worked with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in New York, a freelance group that was cheaper for his record company, Columbia, to hire than the full Philharmonic; the ensemble’s Californian namesake was formed specifically for him to reprise the standard repertoire in stereo, despite his fears (for a while proven correct) that to do so “condemned our whole former work to obsolescence,” as he wrote to his producer.The results, which perhaps betray the inexperience of the ensemble too often, represent less a reversion to Walter’s prewar type than a rarefied era of their own; they exude luminosity. He remade his Beethoven and Brahms in majestic fashion, dwelled admiringly on Bruckner, and added to his earlier Mahler, not least with a touching Ninth and a vast First that astounded Leonard Bernstein. His final session, in March 1961, preserved Mozart overtures that bubble with vitality; that of “Der Schauspieldirektor” positively bursts with the joy of a man of the theater, rejoicing, once again, in finding truth through beauty.Mozart: ‘Der Schauspieldirektor’Columbia Symphony Orchestra, 1961 (Sony)“What I want from music is happiness,” Walter had said in an interview with The Times in 1956 that celebrated his 80th birthday and his 63rd year on the podium. “People want happiness — why should we give them unhappiness? When the pursuit of happiness finds its satisfaction in music it is the highest possible satisfaction in man.” More

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      Christine Farnon, ‘Guiding Light’ of the Grammys, Dies at 97

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      Present at the creation, she guarded the awards’ independence and integrity but “never received the recognition she deserves,” one record producer wrote.Christine Farnon, a quiet force behind the Grammy Awards who was credited with shepherding the event from a private black-tie affair to a telecast seen by tens of millions, died on Oct. 24 in Los Angeles. She was 97.The death was confirmed by her daughter, Joanna Shipley.The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which hosts the Grammys, was conceived partly in Ms. Farnon’s kitchen in Hollywood Hills. That was one place where her husband, Dennis Farnon, a musician who became a music producer and record executive at Capitol and RCA Records, met with other musicians and music executives in founding the Recording Academy. While they deliberated, Ms. Farnon took notes.She was eventually promoted from unpaid volunteer to paid staff member, the first, and from local to national executive. She organized the first Grammy ceremony, on May 4, 1959, which included a black-tie dinner with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin at the Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. She remained with the organization until 1992.The Recording Academy is the music industry equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts on the Oscars, and it similarly performs a number of professional functions. But it’s best known for its annual awards ceremony.Bill Ivey, who held high-level positions with the Recording Academy, including president, for more than 20 years, and who later ran the National Endowment for the Arts, said in a phone interview that the Recording Academy’s history could be defined by a division into “two eras.” There was Ms. Farnon’s tenure, when the Grammys were a fledgling event, and there was everything that came afterward, with the Grammys now the music industry standard for achievement.In the early years, “Chris was the person who internalized the values of an artist-driven academy and created a set of rules that were applied vigorously,” Mr. Ivey said.She ensured that voting privileges for Grammy Awards were restricted to those who had substantial credits as musicians, and that the same criteria were applied to presenters of the awards on TV. To honor all nominees, she fought successfully for the presenters to say, “The Grammy goes to…,” and not, “The winner is…,” arguing that the former phrase better captured excellence among equals.Ms. Farnon was just as watchful about how Grammys were used outside the ceremony itself. She scrutinized the backgrounds of movie scenes for any unauthorized appearances of Grammy trophies. When she heard that Willie Nelson was in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, she made sure that he knew that his Grammy trophies were technically owned by the Recording Academy and thus could not be seized as his. Mr. Nelson kept his trophies, Mr. Ivey said.As the Grammys became more prominent, record companies and television producers sought to exert greater influence on the awards show, but Ms. Farnon stood firm in trying to protect the Grammys’ independence.“She built an asset that was incredibly valued because it was very legitimate,” Mr. Ivey said. “It was the kind of leadership that succeeded by tapping the brakes more than by pushing on the throttle.”Pierre Cossette, the producer who first persuaded television executives to broadcast the Grammys, described Ms. Farnon similarly in a 2003 memoir, “Another Day in Showbiz,” writing, “Christine has never received the recognition she deserves for everything she did to make the Grammy Awards show the huge success that it has become.”Toward the end of her tenure, in 1984, the Grammys attracted its largest-ever audience, more than 51 million viewers, according to Billboard.When she retired, Ms. Farnon became the first woman to receive a Trustees Award, the highest honor the ceremony bestowed on non-performers. A tribute to her in the program book for that year’s ceremony was titled “The Recording Academy’s Guiding Light.”Christine Helen Miller was born on June 24, 1925, in Chicago. Her father, John, was a businessman, and her mother, Caroline (Caspar) Miller, was a homemaker.The family moved to Los Angeles when Christine was a teenager. She graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1941 and attended a public business school in the city.She and Mr. Farnon divorced in 1960. Her daughter is her sole survivor.When she received the Trustees Award, Ms. Farnon retained her characteristic modesty.“I thank God for staying so close to this wonderful organization through the years,” she said, “and for being such a good listener.” More

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      Taylor Swift to Bring Eras Tour to Stadiums Next Year

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      The singer-songwriter described her planned concerts as “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career.”For the first time in five years, Taylor Swift is going on tour.Following the blockbuster success of her latest album, “Midnights,” which sold over a million copies in its first week out and took over the entire Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, Swift said on Tuesday that she would be going on the road, starting in March.The Eras Tour will play stadiums across the United States through next August, with international dates to be announced. The opening acts on the American leg include Paramore, beabadoobee, Phoebe Bridgers, girl in red, Muna, Haim, Gayle, Gracie Abrams and Owenn.The “eras” theme — which she described in a taped appearance on “Good Morning America” as “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career” — solves one potential problem that had been facing Swift: picking what parts of her rapidly growing catalog to focus on. “Midnights” is her 10th studio album, and the last couple of years have been extraordinarily productive for her, with two indie-folk-style LPs recorded in the early stages of the pandemic (“Folklore” and “Evermore”) and two rerecorded versions of old albums (“Fearless” and “Red”).The last tour that Swift completed was in 2018, for her album “Reputation,” released the year before. She had planned a series of stadium shows and international festival dates in 2020, connected to her album “Lover,” but those were canceled amid the pandemic.“Midnights,” which broke streaming records on Spotify and Apple Music, opened on the latest Billboard album chart with the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, including 549 million streams and a whopping 1,140,000 copies sold as a complete package — the biggest total for a new album in seven years, and the first time any album has sold more than a million copies since “Reputation.” More

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      One More Project for David Geffen: Building His Legacy

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      In Los Angeles, you can wander through Judy Baca murals at the cavernous Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, view “Beetlejuice” at the sphere-like David Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum, watch “The Inheritance” at the Geffen Playhouse, and follow the progress of the new David Geffen Galleries, a striking work of architecture that will span Wilshire Boulevard, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.New York now has not one but two David Geffen Halls: an academic building at Columbia Business School and the remake of the Lincoln Center home of the New York Philharmonic, which reopened this month after a $550 million renovation that he jump-started with a $100 million gift.At 79, Geffen, the entertainment magnate, has planted himself into the pantheon of leading American philanthropists. He has handed out $1.2 billion over the past 25 years to museums, theaters, concert halls, universities and medical centers, according to the Geffen Foundation, and pledged to “give every nickel away” of a fortune estimated to be $7.7 billion. As a result, Geffen has become avidly sought by culture and education leaders looking to finance a wave of new construction that is enlivening cities as the nation emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.“When you need a gift of this scale, there aren’t many people who are doing what David is doing, which is investing big-time in the cultural infrastructure of major cities — New York, Los Angeles,” said Michael Govan, the head of LACMA, who spent a year convincing Geffen to give $150 million toward the galleries there that will bear his name.Geffen’s gifts are often contingent upon naming rights. When Avery Fisher Hall was renamed for him in 2015, 61 signs and maps around Lincoln Center were changed. Brian Harkin for The New York TimesGeffen is hardly some modern-day version of Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune from steel and financed one of the great waves of philanthropy in the nation’s history. He is an openly gay entertainment mogul whose life, romances, yacht, mansions, art acquisitions, business deals, celebrity adventures and political engagement with, in particular, the Clintons and Barack Obama make him as engrossing a character as anyone in Hollywood.It’s hard to imagine, for instance, Carnegie dating Cher or Marlo Thomas when he was young, which Geffen did; comforting Yoko Ono at the hospital the night that John Lennon was assassinated, which Geffen did; watching Joni Mitchell in his apartment when she wrote “Woodstock,” which Geffen did; or working with Janis Joplin, the Doors and Peter, Paul and Mary, which Geffen did.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.Who Is David Geffen?: The entertainment magnate, who jump-started the renovation, has become avidly sought by culture and education leaders looking to finance a wave of new construction.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Expert Assessment: Right after the reopening our critic wrote that the renovation had a mightily improved sound. In the weeks that followed his feelings became more complicated.His skill at spotting up-and-coming musical talent (Jackson Browne; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Guns N’ Roses), producing hit movies (“Risky Business” and “Beetlejuice”) and backing Broadway shows (“Dreamgirls” and “Cats”), and his work building record labels and movie studios has made him one of the wealthiest people in America. He has homes in New York, Los Angeles and East Hampton for when he is not entertaining boldfaced friends (think Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey) on his yacht, the Rising Sun. He once startled a dinner of journalists in Washington by disclosing that he had not flown on a commercial airplane since the late 1970s; that night he took a private jet back to Beverly Hills.Geffen is hardly shy about his philanthropy, as can be seen by the growing list of institutions bearing his name, including the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, which his gift made tuition-free. (“I don’t agree that the best giving is anonymous,” Geffen once told Fortune. “We should be examples to our friends and communities. I should be an example to young, gay kids.”) But he is, in his own way, low key about it — he declined an invitation to speak at the gala celebrating the opening of Geffen Hall this past week, and seemed reluctant to stand when he was acknowledged from the stage.The lobby of the revamped hall.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesAnd he is not like other wealthy donors, who can range from hands-on to micromanaging when it comes to projects bearing their names. “They want to check the carpet designs,” said Deborah Borda, the head of the New York Philharmonic. By contrast, the gala was the first time Geffen saw the redone hall bearing his name; he never joined the hard-hat construction tours that Lincoln Center gave to dignitaries over these past two years.“David said, ‘I want to leave this in your hands: I don’t need any input on the selection of the architect and driving the design,’” said Katherine G. Farley, the chair of the board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, recounting her conversation with Geffen when she asked him for money to rebuild what was then called Avery Fisher Hall. “He kept repeating, ‘Make sure you do something great.’”Geffen, who declined a request for an interview, looks for transformative cultural projects that are struggling for credibility and financing, according to friends and associates. His contributions cover just a portion of the total cost — $100 million toward the $550 million Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center; $150 million toward the $750 million Geffen Galleries at LACMA — and are designed to goad other donors, while establishing Geffen as the primary patron.“He’s making big bets,” said Marie-Josée Kravis, the chairwoman of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to which he donated $100 million toward a three-floor David Geffen Wing in 2016. “They’re transformative. It’s not incremental.”His gifts are usually contingent on naming rights. Lincoln Center agreed to a $15 million payment to the Fisher family to relinquish its naming rights so the center could promise Geffen that his name would remain on the hall in perpetuity. Although some argued that the naming rights should have commanded a higher price, Farley said, “Without his gift, there is no question that would not have happened.”By contrast, when David H. Koch, the oil-and-gas billionaire, gave $100 million in 2008 to renovate what had been called the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, it came with the provision that the theater could be renamed for a new donor after 50 years.Arianna Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post and a longtime friend of Geffen’s, said that “the arts have basically dominated his life,” and that they are what motivated his philanthropy.“I personally have very little patience for people who question why anybody gives — as long as they give,” she said.Geffen took a hands-off approach to the renovation, and never stopped by for a hard-hat tour when it was a construction site.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesGeffen has become more reclusive in recent years, first visiting the Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles this month — a year after its red-carpet opening. He temporarily shut down his Instagram account at the start of the pandemic after he came under fire for posting a photo of his yacht floating in safe seclusion. “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” he wrote. “I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.”Geffen is a college dropout who grew up in Brooklyn, where he attended New Utrecht High School. After creating Asylum Records — where he signed Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan — in 1971, he sold it two years later to Warner Communications for $7 million. He founded Geffen Records in 1980; he would sell that a decade later to MCA for $550 million in stock, which increased in value significantly when Matsushita then bought MCA. He co-founded, with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks SKG in 1994, and left the company in 2008.Geffen can be combative in his business dealings, and he lamented the “shameful” lack of support by New York donors in 2017 when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic went back to the drawing board with plans to rebuild the hall, in part because it was growing too costly. Just after the move to rethink the New York project was announced, LACMA announced Geffen’s $150 million gift — timing that appeared to send a message, though officials said the gift had long been in the works.Associates said that Geffen’s background in business and culture, and particularly music, drives his philanthropic choices.“He comes from the music business,” said David Bohnett, another philanthropist based in New York and Los Angeles. “You grow up around music, you grow up around entertainment, it just seems logical that you are going to put your name on theaters and music halls and museums.”Some say it helps explain his hands-off approach to the projects he supports. “He’s made a career out of respecting artists and understanding what artists need,” said Henry Timms, the president of Lincoln Center. “And I think that’s the same context for this — he’s not assuming he can do this job better than the architects.”Geffen is intimately involved in deciding what projects to support. “He is a very engaged philanthropist and is involved in every funding decision made at the foundation,” said Dallas Dishman, the executive director of the Geffen Foundation, to which Geffen is the sole contributor.As he approaches his 80th birthday, and with over $7 billion left, Geffen is contemplating his mortality and his legacy, his friends say. Yet on Wednesday night in New York, when he finally rose from his chair at the gala marking the opening of the latest building bearing his name, he seemed taken aback by the intensity of the applause. He just smiled slightly and sat down, without saying a word.“He doesn’t reveal himself very much,” said Kravis, of the Museum of Modern Art. “He just gives. I respect his search for privacy and I’ve never pushed him on it.” More

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      Taylor Swift’s Smash ‘Midnights’ Sells More Than 1 Million in a Week

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      The singer-songwriter’s latest album is a blockbuster, debuting with the biggest weekly total for any LP since Adele’s “25” in 2015.Taylor Swift’s latest album was always going to be a hit.She’s Taylor Swift, first of all. And “Midnights,” which was released on Oct. 21, is her first new pop album since 2019, after an extremely productive couple of years in which she released two indie-folk-style LPs and two rerecorded versions of old records.Yet even for a superstar like Swift, the scale of her latest success has stunned the music industry.In its first week out, “Midnights” had the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate — the biggest weekly take for any album in seven years, since Adele’s “25” arrived with a boom of nearly 3.5 million (and with the full album then absent from streaming).On the Hot 100 chart for songs, Swift benefits from her strong streaming numbers, currently occupying every spot in the Top 10, a Billboard first.Streaming has so rewritten the math of the music business that in recent years it had become practically an article of faith that no record would ever again cross a time-honored threshold of blockbuster sales: moving more than a million copies in a single week, as artists like ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Eminem did multiple times in the old days. The last record to hit this mark was Swift’s “Reputation,” in 2017. Since then, both Swift’s “Lover” (2019) and Adele’s “30” (2021) failed to reach the magic seven digits.But “Midnights” has easily crossed that line, and not only in “equivalent sales,” a composite number used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways fans consume music now, counting streaming, sales and track downloads. Of the 1,578,000 “equivalents” for “Midnights,” 1,140,000 were copies sold as a complete package — in other words, purchases of the album as a whole. It is Swift’s fifth album to sell at least a million copies in a single week, and no album by any artist has had better weekly sales since “Reputation” opened with 1,216,000.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicNew LP: “Midnight,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it.Millennial Anti-Hero: On her latest album, Swift probes the realizations and reckonings of many 30-something women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun.Pandemic Records: In 2020, Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music.How did she do it?That is always the question for Swift, who is not only one of the most vital creative forces in 21st-century pop but also perhaps its greatest marketer. In a year of many disappointing releases, with albums by Drake, Post Malone, Kendrick Lamar and other big names posting surprisingly low numbers, Swift promoted her release cleverly online, with cheeky TikTok videos and drip-drip revelations, and advertised an array of product variations that got fans reaching for their credit cards.“She can create an event record,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s senior director of charts. “She’s done that with ‘Midnights.’”The biggest factor ended up being physical media. Those formats, like CD, vinyl and cassette, now make up just 10 percent of all recorded music revenue in the United States — streaming is 84 percent — but they are often embraced by fans eager to own something tangible by their favorite artists, and can play an important role in a new record’s chart position.The standard CD and LP versions of “Midnights” came in four forms, with variant artwork, and Target sold additional variations, with lavender-colored vinyl or three extra tracks on its CD. Swift also sold autographed versions through her website, and three hours after “Midnights” came out she released an expanded “3am Edition,” with seven extra tracks. In the most commented-upon gimmick, the back covers of the four vinyl versions, when arranged in a grid, form the numbers of a clock, and, for $49, Swift’s website even sold the parts of a wall clock to bring it all together. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website said when promoting the releases.It worked. “Midnights” sold 575,000 copies on vinyl, along with 395,000 on CD and even 10,000 on cassette. There were also 161,000 copies of the album sold as a digital download.Collectible CD and vinyl versions are nothing new. K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink have been releasing new albums with elaborate CD packaging for years. Two weeks ago, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released a new album, “Return of the Dream Canteen,” in 10 vinyl variations.Yet Swift’s success with the strategy is as extraordinary as you might expect. Her 575,000 vinyl sales are the most any album has sold on that format since at least 1991, when SoundScan, a predecessor of Luminate, began keeping reliable data on music sales. It is more than three times as many as the previous record, when Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” notched 182,000 vinyl copies in May.The success of “Midnights” is not just a vinyl or CD phenomenon. It also had 549 million streams, the third-best weekly total for any album. Drake has the two best showings in that metric, with “Scorpion” (746 million in 2018) and “Certified Lover Boy” (744 million, 2021). So far this year, the only other album to come close was Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which opened with 357 million streams back in May. (For now, “Un Verano” is still the year’s biggest album, with the equivalent of 2.9 million sales, largely from streaming.)“Midnights,” of course, opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest album chart. It is Swift’s 11th album to reach the peak, tying her with Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Drake. Only Jay-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (with 19) have had more titles at No. 1.Also this week, Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2, and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano” slips to No. 3 in its 25th week out — its first time dipping lower than second place, including 13 times at No. 1.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” now in its 94th week out — all but one in the Top 10 — holds at No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is No. 5. More

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      Jerry Lee Lewis, a Rock ’n’ Roll Original, Dies at 87

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      With his pounding piano, his impassioned vocals and his incendiary performing style, Mr. Lewis lived up to his nickname, the Killer.Jerry Lee Lewis, the hard-driving rockabilly artist whose pounding boogie-woogie piano and bluesy, country-influenced vocals helped define the sound of rock ’n’ roll on hits like “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” and whose incendiary performing style expressed the essence of rock rebellion, died on Friday at his home in DeSoto County, Miss., south of Memphis. He was 87. His death was announced by his publicist, Zach Farnum. No cause was given, but Mr. Lewis had been in poor health for some time.Mr. Lewis was 21 in November 1956 when he walked into Sun Studio in Memphis and, presenting himself as a country singer who could play a mean piano, demanded an audition.His timing was impeccable. Sun Records had sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA Records a year earlier and badly needed a new star to headline a roster that included Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison.Mr. Lewis more than filled the bill. His first record, a juiced-up rendition of the Ray Price hit “Crazy Arms,” was a regional success. With “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” released in April 1957, he gave Sun the breakout hit it was looking for.Although initially banned by many radio stations for being too suggestive, “Whole Lotta Shakin’” reached a nationwide audience after Mr. Lewis performed it on “The Steve Allen Show.” It rose to No. 3 on the pop charts and sold some six million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest hits of the early rock ’n’ roll era.Overnight, Mr. Lewis entered into direct competition with Presley. As Mr. Lewis saw it, there was no contest.“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist,” he told the record-collector magazine Goldmine in 1981. “I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”Mr. Lewis was a country singer who played a mean piano. Sun Records needed a new star to replace Elvis Presley.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn November 1957, Sun released “Great Balls of Fire,” a high-octane sexual anthem written by Otis Blackwell, whose other songs included the Presley hits “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”The song again featured Mr. Lewis’s distinctive barrelhouse piano style, with the left hand insistently beating the keys and the right executing rippling glissandos, while he gave a leering swoop to lines like “Kiss me, baby — mmmm, feels good.” The record reached No. 2 on the pop charts, selling more than five million copies in the United States alone.His scorching performing style suited his material. Mr. Lewis, sometimes called by his childhood nickname the Killer, discovered that audiences loved it when he kicked his piano bench aside and attacked the keyboard standing up. Possessed by “the Devil’s music,” as he called it, he writhed and howled, raked the keyboard with his right foot and tossed his wavy blond hair until it looked like a fright wig.“Nobody had a more creative approach to the music or a more incendiary approach to performing it,” Peter Guralnick, the author of the definitive two-volume Presley biography, said in an interview for this obituary. “He had the ability to put his stamp on every kind of material he recorded.”Mr. Lewis in performance in New York in 1958.Bettmann/Getty ImagesBut Mr. Lewis fell as quickly as he had risen. In 1958, as his third hit, “Breathless,” rose to No. 2, he embarked on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of Britain. Reporters discovered that the young girl traveling with him, Myra Gale Brown, was his 13-year-old bride — and his cousin — and that Mr. Lewis had still been married to his second wife when he recited the vows for his third marriage.Asked by reporters if 13 wasn’t a little young to be married, Mr. Lewis’s wife said: “Oh, no, not at all. Age doesn’t matter back home. You can marry at 10 if you can find a husband.”The revelations caused a scandal on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Lewis cut his tour short and returned to the United States, where he quickly discovered that his career as a rock star was over. His recording of “High School Confidential,” from the movie of the same name, eventually came out — Sun feared to release it after the scandal broke — and reached No. 21. But his subsequent records failed miserably.Sun, which Mr. Lewis would leave in 1963, was reluctant to promote him. Many radio stations refused to play his music. Concert dates dried up. Mr. Lewis seemed mystified by the response. “I plumb married the girl, didn’t I?” he said to one reporter.A New PathReduced to performing in small clubs for a few hundred dollars a night, Mr. Lewis found redemption in country music. At Smash Records, which signed him in 1963, a string of failures led producers to suggest that he return to his roots and record some purely country songs.It was a natural fit. Both of his biggest rock ’n’ roll hits had topped the country charts, and his soaring, resonant voice, in the vein of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, lent itself equally to up-tempo honky-tonk numbers and cry-in-your beer laments.His first country release, “Another Place, Another Time,” reached No. 4 on the Billboard country chart in 1968, and he scored Top 10 country hits that year with “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me),” “She Still Comes Around (to Love What’s Left of Me)” and “To Make Love Sweeter for You.”His hot streak continued into the 1970s. He would eventually record nearly two dozen Top 10 country singles, ending with “39 and Holding” in 1981, and nearly as many Top 10 country albums. He even managed to creep onto the pop charts in 1972 with a recording of the Kris Kristofferson song “Me and Bobby McGee” and a cover version of the Big Bopper hit “Chantilly Lace.”Years of heavy drinking and drug abuse began to take their toll, however, and his life for much of the 1970s and ’80s was a sad catalog of family catastrophes, health crises and run-ins with the I.R.S. and the police.His troubled son Jerry Lee Jr. died in a car crash in 1973.In September 1976, while watching television at his wife’s house, Mr. Lewis accidentally shot his bass player, Norman Owens, in the chest with a .357 Magnum handgun after announcing, “I’m going to shoot that Coca-Cola bottle over there or my name ain’t Jerry Lee Lewis.” Mr. Owens survived and filed a lawsuit.Two months later, Mr. Lewis drove his Lincoln Continental into the front gates of Graceland, Presley’s mansion in Memphis, just hours after being arrested and jailed on a drunken-driving charge. A guard later told the police that Mr. Lewis, waving a pistol, had demanded to see Presley and refused to leave.Repeat visits to hospitals and rehabilitation centers ensued. Internal bleeding from a tear in his stomach lining almost killed him in 1981.His fourth wife, Jaren Pate, drowned in a friend’s swimming pool in 1982. His fifth wife, Shawn Michelle Stephens, died after taking an overdose of methadone in 1983.In 1985, after doctors removed half his stomach to correct a bleeding ulcer, Mr. Lewis slowly began to settle down.His marriage to Kerrie McCarver ended in divorce in 2004. He is survived by his wife, Judith Coghlan Lewis; his children, Jerry Lee Lewis III, Ronnie Lewis, Phoebe Lewis and Lori Lancaster; his sister, Linda Gail Lewis, who is also a singer and pianist; and many grandchildren.Myra Lewis’s book “Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis,” published in 1982, inspired the 1989 film “Great Balls of Fire!,” with Dennis Quaid playing Mr. Lewis. The film and book, as well as Nick Tosches’s biography “Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story,” also published in 1982, contributed to a renewed interest in the singer. (“Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story,” by Rick Bragg, was published in 2014.)His recordings were repackaged by Rhino Records in “Jerry Lee Lewis: 18 Original Sun Greatest Hits” and “The Jerry Lewis Anthology: All Killer No Filler!,” a compilation of 42 of his rock and country hits. The German company Bear Family reissued virtually every note he ever recorded for Sun and Smash in the boxed sets “Classic Jerry Lee Lewis: The Definitive Edition of His Sun Recordings” and “Jerry Lee Lewis: The Locust Years.”Mr. Lewis performing in 1989 at a party for the opening of the movie “Great Balls of Fire!,” which starred Dennis Quaid as Mr. Lewis. He found that audiences loved it when he played standing up or raked the keyboard with his shoe.Todd Lillard, via Associated PressSure Yet WildJerry Lee Lewis was born on Sept. 29, 1935, in Ferriday, La., to Elmo Lewis, a carpenter, and Mamie (Herron) Lewis. When he was a boy, he and two of his cousins, the future evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and the future country singer Mickey Gilley (who died this year), liked to sneak into a local dance hall, Haney’s Big House, to hear top blues acts perform.He showed an aptitude for the piano, and his father borrowed money to buy him one. “The more he practiced, the surer the left hand and wilder the right hand became,” Mr. Tosches wrote in “Hellfire.”At 14, he was invited to sit in with a band performing at a local Ford dealership, which was celebrating the arrival of the 1950 models. He played “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” — the tune, a hit for Sticks McGhee in 1949, would be a minor pop hit for Mr. Lewis in 1973 — and took home nearly $15 when someone passed the hat.He soon became a regular at clubs in Natchez, just across the Mississippi River, and on the radio station KWKH in Shreveport, La. His deeply worried mother, a Pentecostal Christian, enrolled him in the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas.“I didn’t graduate,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “I was kind of quit-uated. I was asked to leave for playing ‘My God Is Real’ boogie-woogie style, rock ’n’ roll style. I figured that’s the way it needed to be played.”After selling sewing machines door to door, Mr. Lewis tried his luck in Nashville, without success. “I remember it very well,” he told Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins, the authors of “Sun Records: The Brief History of the Legendary Record Label” (1980). “I was turned down by every label in town.”A hardscrabble life on the road ensued. “My father would load that old piano onto the back of his truck, we’d drive somewhere, unload it, I’d give a show, we’d pass the hat, he’d load it back on again, and we’d go home and see what we’d got,” he said.In desperation, he and his father sold 33 dozen eggs and, with the proceeds, headed for the studios of Sun Records. Initially he planned to sing country music, but the producer Jack Clement urged him to try rock ’n’ roll. The label on his first single billed him as “Jerry Lee Lewis With His Pumping Piano.”Mr. Lewis performing in New York in 2010. Late in his career he often recorded with younger artists eager to work with one of rock ’n’ roll’s founding fathers.Chad Batka for The New York TimesThe Sun period was brief but eventful. After cutting his first record, Mr. Lewis worked as a studio musician for the label.He was in the studio on Dec. 4, 1956, when Presley dropped by for a friendly visit, sat down at the piano and began singing rhythm-and-blues songs and hymns with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Mr. Lewis in an informal session later released as the album “Million Dollar Quartet.” The session inspired a popular musical of the same name, by Floyd Mutrux and Mr. Escott, which opened on Broadway in 2010, ran for a year, and then played Off Broadway for another year.With the success of “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” Mr. Lewis’s performance fee rose from $50 to $10,000 in a matter of months. He was invited on “American Bandstand” and appeared in “Jamboree,” a 1957 rock ’n’ roll film that also featured performances by Frankie Avalon, Fats Domino, Mr. Perkins and others.From left, Mr. Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash in the Sun Records studio in Memphis on Dec. 4, 1956. Their informal session was later released as the album “Million Dollar Quartet.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesLater in his career, despite his success as a country singer, Mr. Lewis sometimes confessed to hankering after the old rock ’n’ roll days. “You know, if I could just find another like ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’,’” he told Mr. Guralnick in a 1971 interview. “Some records just got that certain something. But I ain’t gonna find another. Just like I was born once into this world and I ain’t gonna be born again.”In 2019 he suffered a serious stroke that left him unable to play the piano. A year later, however, he recorded an album of gospel songs in Nashville and, during the session, found that his right hand had begun moving, allowing him to pound the keys. (That album has yet to be released.)Before then he had been recording sporadically, often with younger artists eager to work with one of rock ’n’ roll’s founding fathers. On albums like “Last Man Standing” (2006), “Mean Old Man” (2010) and “Rock & Roll Time” (2014), he performed with the likes of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Kid Rock.The idea that the greatest names in rock should come to him struck him as perfectly natural. “I’m the only one left who’s worth a damn,” he told Goldmine in 1981. “Everyone else is dead or gone. Only the Killer rocks on.”In 2022 — 36 years after he was one of the first inductees in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — Mr. Lewis was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was too ill to attend the ceremony; Mr. Kristofferson accepted his award in his stead and presented it to him at his home.In a statement the day his induction was announced, Mr. Lewis said, “To be recognized by country music with their highest honor is a humbling experience.” He added, “I am appreciative of all those who have recognized that Jerry Lee Lewis music is country music and to our almighty God for his never-ending redeeming grace.” More