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      A New Set of Gits Releases Gives Mia Zapata Her Voice Back

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      The Seattle frontwoman was killed in 1993, as her punk band was on the cusp of a breakthrough. Remastered recordings provide a chance to rewrite her story.Here’s how I wish the story of the Gits could be told: Four hardworking musicians finally escaped the grind of underpaid gigs and indie recordings and followed such compadres as Nirvana to global fame, led by the poetic howls of Mia Zapata, heiress apparent to Janis Joplin and Patti Smith.Here’s the story you may already know, as told by shows including “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Forensic Files,” and the documentary “The Gits”: Talented singer found raped and murdered on a Seattle street just as her band was on the cusp of success.In an attempt to bring what might have been to life, the seminal Seattle label Sub Pop is releasing remastered recordings by the Gits on Nov. 13. While the band was together, Zapata, the bassist Matt Dresdner, the guitarist Andy Kessler (a.k.a. Joe Spleen) and the drummer Steve Moriarty released only one album of their complex thrash rock (Kessler calls it “five-chord punk”): “Frenching the Bully” (1992). Sub Pop’s digital releases will also include three LPs of unfinished recordings, early work and live tracks. In December a concert album, “Live at the X-Ray,” will arrive for the first time.“It’s been a long, long road to get to where we are,” Dresdner, 57, said in a video interview from Seattle with Kessler. “There were decades through which I didn’t have the bandwidth or emotional strength to attack a project like this.” As the group worked to finally make its music available, a “secondary motivation” arose, he said. “Mia’s talent as a singer — the music we were able to make together — we hope will be the first sentence, moving forward.”By 1993 the Gits had paid their dues and honed their sound. But their ascent was cut short by Zapata’s killing.David HawkesThe Gits formed after Dresdner saw Zapata perform at an open mic at Antioch College, a small liberal arts school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1986. “When we started the band, it was because I fell in love with Mia’s voice,” he said. “It was so beautiful and so powerful, and so intimate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Curious Case of Nora Holt, a Pioneer of Black Classical Music and Jazz

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      “Fabulous is the word for Mrs. Nora Douglas Holt,” read the 1974 obituary in The Amsterdam News.And fabulous she was: A pioneer of the Black classical music scene in Chicago, Holt also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in Paris. Born into the middle-class, she moved back and forth between worlds: concert artist and blues singer, newspaper columnist and club hostess, erudite scholar and scandalous socialite.This fluidity led to friendships with two women who represented distinct versions of fame for Black women in the early 20th century: Josephine Baker, the working-class dancer from St. Louis, who became the toast of Paris; and the composer Florence Price, who transformed Chicago’s classical music scene, rising to national fame with her symphonies.Holt’s life didn’t follow familiar narratives. Hers was not a rags-to-riches story, like Baker’s; nor was it, like Price’s, a cathartic breakthrough for Black musicians in the white world of classical music. Instead, she had a kind of mutability, frequently changing her name and her place in culture, collapsing ideas about respectability and sexual liberation.Music was the through line in Holt’s life. She first made her name in classical music. For young, middle-class Black women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical music could open doors to salon culture, church leadership, jobs teaching music and civic engagement.In 1918, Holt, a pianist, became the first Black person in the United States, female or male, to earn a master’s degree in music, from Chicago Musical College. She also worked in the male-dominated fields of music criticism, scholarship and composition. Her music journalism, public lectures, recitals and community organizing became a blueprint for other Black women seeking to become leaders in Chicago’s classical musical scene.“Of course, men are supposed to have better business minds than women,” she wrote to a male colleague after founding a magazine, Music and Poetry, in 1921. “But I have made this thing go and the opportunities are yet unlimited.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Remembering Quincy Jones, a Bridge Between Genres and Generations

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicEarly this month, Quincy Jones, one of the most influential and creative forces in American pop music history, died at 91. The scope of his success almost defies comprehension — his work began in the 1950s and continued all the way up through recent years. He produced the most important Michael Jackson albums, and also Frank Sinatra, and also “We Are the World.” He won 28 Grammys. Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Usher, the Weeknd, Lionel Hampton, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,”: He crossed paths with all of them, and more.His broad reach was a byproduct of his musical facilities, as well as his social adeptness and ability to bridge worlds, scenes and audiences with a combination of the two. It’s a scale of influence unlikely to be matched by anyone else.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Jones’s long and unique career, how he bridged musical styles and generations, his willingness to share stories and the role of long-form journalism in the social media age.Guest:David Marchese, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and co-host of The Interview podcastConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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

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      A player of impeccable technique and a mainstay of the Blue Note label, he recorded constantly as both a leader and a sideman beginning in 1952.Lou Donaldson, an alto saxophonist who became part of the bedrock of the jazz scene and whose soulful, blues-steeped presence in the music endured undiminished for three-quarters of a century, died on Saturday. He was 98.His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not say where he died.A mainstay of the Blue Note record label at the height of its influence and power, Mr. Donaldson recorded constantly as both a leader and a sideman beginning in 1952. He was a leading voice of the more elemental style that came to be called “hard bop,” an evolution out of the bebop revolution wrought by his inspiration on the alto sax, Charlie Parker. The National Endowment for the Arts named Mr. Donaldson a Jazz Master in 2012.A player of impeccable technique, plangent tone, taste and refinement, Sweet Poppa Lou, as he was long known, nevertheless prized the raw gospel of Black church music and the gutbucket sound of rhythm and blues in his improvisations. The blues was at the heart of his sound: His album “Blues Walk,” released in 1958, is regarded as a jazz masterwork, and its title tune, which he wrote, became a jazz standard.Mr. Donaldson also proved to be an acute talent scout for Blue Note’s owners, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, bringing to their attention both the young trumpet giant Clifford Brown and, later, the young guitar virtuoso Grant Green.“I went down to Alfred Lion at Blue Note and gave him Clifford’s number,” he recalled in “A Wonderful Life,” his unpublished autobiography. “He brought him to New York and we made this tremendous date — tremendous date.”Mr. Donaldson said he had also persuaded Mr. Lion to hand his close friend Horace Silver — the pianist and composer who would come to epitomize “the Blue Note sound” — his maiden recording date as a leader.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.,’ by Peter Ames Carlin

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

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      The Jazz-Metal Trio PainKiller’s Classic Lineup Revs Up Again

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

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      Ella Jenkins, Musician Who Found an Audience in Children, Dies at 100

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

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      Dwight Yoakam, Country Rebel, Has a New Attitude

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