Music

With her familial singing group, the Watersons, and later as a solo performer, she helped revitalize traditional music from the north of England.Norma Waterson, a vaunted fixture in British folk music for decades whose familial singing group, the Watersons, helped spur the genre’s revival in the 1960s, died on Jan. 30. She was 82.Her daughter, Eliza Carthy, also a highly regarded singer and musician, announced the death on Facebook but did not say where Ms. Waterson died. She said Ms. Waterson had been in ill health for some time and was recently hospitalized for pneumonia.Ms. Waterson had a dynastic influence in British folk, not only for her work with the Watersons but also through her collaborations with the singer she married in 1972, Martin Carthy, himself a pivotal figure in British acoustic music, as well as through her joint albums and concerts with Eliza, their daughter.She formed the Watersons in 1965 with her younger siblings Mike and Elaine (who performed as Lal), along with their second cousin John Harrison. They were driven by a mission to re-enliven overlooked folk music, particularly from the northern Yorkshire region surrounding their home in Hull, England.“Whereas people in other countries are proud of their traditions, somehow here in England we got left behind,” Ms. Waterson once told the British folk magazine Fatea. “I think that England has as good a tradition as anywhere else, and I think that we should keep it alive.”The Watersons did so without vocal fuss or musical adornment. They largely performed a cappella and always took care to keep their harmonies humble.“To bring the audience in to you, instead of projecting your particular personality out to the audience, that’s the point,” Ms. Waterson said in “Traveling for a Living,” a 1965 BBC documentary about her group.Despite her ardor for traditional sounds and styles, she reached well beyond them. Her debut solo album, released in 1996 and titled simply “Norma Waterson,” featured elaborate arrangements of songs by contemporary writers like Elvis Costello and Ben Harper. On her final album, “Anchor,” a joint recording with Ms. Carthy issued in 2018, she followed a cover of Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s “Lost in the Stars” with “Galaxy Song,” a whimsical hymn to human irrelevance co-written by Eric Idle of Monty Python.To all her performances Ms. Waterson brought unquestioned gravitas, signaled by her deep register and enhanced by a brandy-rich tone and a vibrato that roiled like a surging sea. In an email, Rob Young, the author of “Electric Eden” (2010), a history of British folk, likened her voice to “a hand-thrown clay pot, full of character and texture.”“It never sounded trained,” he added.Ms. Waterson performing in 1999. Her profile rose in the 1990s, when her debut solo album was nominated  for Britain’s prestigious Mercury Prize.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNorma Waterson was born into a working-class family in Hull, East Yorkshire, on Aug. 15, 1939. Her mother died when Norma was 8. Ten days later, her father died of a stroke. Norma and her siblings were immediately taken in by their maternal grandmother, Eliza, who had belonged to the Irish Travelers, an ethnic group sometimes referred to as Irish Gypsies.Their grandmother’s imaginatively superstitious nature encouraged the children to believe in the sort of supernatural phenomena that can haunt English folk songs. Seven generations of the family had gravitated toward music, and she sang to the children, often and eagerly. “It was in the genes,” Ms. Waterson told NPR in 2001.The first group that Ms. Waterson formed with her siblings and Mr. Harrison played skiffle music, a blend of American folk music, blues and jazz that became hugely popular in Britain in the 1950s. But they soon switched to the kinds of English folk songs they had cherished in their youth.In 1965, the Watersons signed with Topic Records, which included them in a compilation titled “New Voices: An Album of First Recordings” before issuing the group’s debut album, “Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs.”The album showcased Ms. Waterson on the song “Seven Virgins or the Leaves of Life,” which she delivered with an authority that seemed almost otherworldly. The British music magazine Melody Maker named “Frost and Fire” folk album of the year.In that same period, the group ran Folk Union One, a club in Hull that contributed to the folk revival by presenting important artists in the genre like Anne Briggs and Mr. Carthy. After releasing their third album, “A Yorkshire Garland,” in 1968, the Watersons split, and Ms. Waterson moved to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where she worked as a radio disc jockey.By 1972, she had returned to England, and the Watersons reunited (without Mr. Harrison.). Soon after, she fell in love with Mr. Carthy, who had been issuing his own respected folk albums since 1965. He then joined the Watersons and began releasing albums with them when not playing with important electric folk bands of the time, including Steeleye Span and the Albion Country Band. All those efforts made Ms. Waterson and Mr. Carthy British folk’s ultimate power couple.Her profile rose further in the 1990s, when her first album, recorded when she was in her mid-50s, was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Mercury Prize, alongside albums by young rock acts at the time like Pulp (which won) and Oasis. She continued to release albums either on her own or with her husband and daughter, together billed as Waterson: Carthy. But she became significantly less active in the last decade, following an illness that at one point left her in a coma, after which she had to learn to walk and talk again.Her sister Elaine died in 1998 and her brother Mike in 2011, both of cancer. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by Mr. Carthy and their granddaughters.Later in life, Ms. Waterson was buoyed by her belief that folk music would last way beyond her, so long as it evolved with the times.“We thought that we’d all get old and gray and there’d be nobody left,” she told The Guardian in 2010. “Then this new generation of young musicians came up and we all said, ‘Thank God.’ If people say traditional music has got to be ‘like that’ or ‘like that,’ you’re going to freeze it. You can’t do that with tradition. You have to hope each generation brings their own thing to it, so it keeps going forever.” More

Gina Duncan, who had been working at the Sundance Institute since 2020, will return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to lead it out of the pandemic.After a turbulent two years that has forced the Brooklyn Academy of Music to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, budget woes and leadership upheaval, the organization said Tuesday that it was turning to a veteran of its film wing to become its next president, filling a position that was left vacant more than 12 months ago.Gina Duncan, who previously served as BAM’s first vice president of film and strategic programming, has been selected as the organization’s new president, the institution announced. She will take over a multifaceted performing arts behemoth with a $50 million operating budget.Ms. Duncan, 41, who has never held the top job at an arts institution, will be tasked with stabilizing and reinvigorating BAM, an important cultural anchor and incubator known for presenting an eclectic array of cutting-edge artists and performers. Her first day as president will be April 11. She returns after a stint at the Sundance Institute, where she worked as its producing director.“Coming back to BAM feels like returning home,” Ms. Duncan said in a telephone interview. “The other day I went down to see Annie-B’s ‘The Mood Room.’ And it was the first time I had been back in BAM since we all fled our offices in March 2020. And I just was overwhelmed.”“I came back for BAM — the artists, the staff, the audience,” she added. “They’re my people.”The selection makes Ms. Duncan the first person of color to lead the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In choosing her, the academy’s board selected a candidate with whom they were familiar, after previously tapping an outsider in Katy Clark — a violinist-turned-arts-executive — who left BAM after less than six years in January 2021. Ms. Clark’s predecessor, Karen Brooks Hopkins, spent 16 years as BAM’s president, and a total of 36 years at the organization.Ms. Duncan joined BAM’s executive team in January 2017 as an associate vice president for film — a newly created role in which she oversaw the organization’s Rose Cinemas and its repertory film program. Under her leadership, BAM’s repertory programming began to focus more on underrepresented voices in cinema.She was promoted in 2019, with her role expanding beyond film to include responsibility for the organization’s archives and its lectures, classes and discussions; she helped integrate programming across the institution. She also helped move programs online during the early months of the pandemic, officials said.She left BAM in September of 2020 for the Sundance Institute, and now will return after roughly 18 months away.The chairwoman of BAM’s board, Nora Ann Wallace, said in an email that Ms. Duncan’s “leadership skills are immediately evident to anyone who works with her.”“Her ability to inspire a group of people — be it staff, audiences, donors, or our board — is vital to this moment in BAM’s history,” Ms. Wallace said. “The board saw those skills when she was at BAM in her previous leadership role.”Ms. Wallace noted that in addition to her background in film, Ms. Duncan has produced theater and arts-centered community programming for many years. “Gina is a gifted strategist who excels at assessing the bigger picture,” Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Duncan said that her vision for BAM involved ensuring it is “vital and visible across Brooklyn and beyond.” During her initial tenure with the institution, she said, she had worked to ensure that its film program both served local audiences and became part of a “larger national conversation.”“I see an opportunity to do that with BAM across all the different art and rich cultural programming that we present,” she said.When Ms. Duncan’s predecessor, Ms. Clark, left BAM, questions were raised about the housing bonus she had received to purchase an apartment in Brooklyn, which she was allowed to keep when she left the position.Ms. Wallace did not disclose Ms. Duncan’s salary, saying only that her pay is “in line with other performing arts organizations of similar size.” Ms. Duncan’s compensation does not include an apartment or housing allowance, Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Clark’s departure created something of a leadership vacuum at BAM; the board’s previous chairman, Adam Max, died in 2020 and an internal team was appointed to lead the institution temporarily as the pandemic created a crisis for the performing arts. With live performances impossible, BAM was forced to slash its operating budget, lay off some employees and furlough dozens more, cut the pay of top executives and dip into its $100 million endowment for special distributions.Ms. Duncan will have the advantage of taking over at a time when cultural institutions, including BAM, are starting to find their footing again. The academy’s first full season since the start of the pandemic focuses on the artists of New York City.“The industry remains really tenuous,” Ms. Duncan said. But at BAM, she said, she has a “strong foundation to start from.”“An institution is its people,” she said. More

Listen to five works that Hollywood’s reigning composer has written for symphony orchestras and star soloists like Yo-Yo Ma.John Williams has been Hollywood’s leading composer for over half a century. A keeper of the Golden Age flame of soaring grandeur and indelible melodies, he is the musical mind behind the two-note terror of “Jaws,” the operatic fanfare of “Star Wars” and the mischievous charm of “Harry Potter” — along with the sounds of some 50 other Academy Award-nominated scores.Over the years, Williams has also maintained a robust career in the concert hall. But while his soundtracks are the stuff of cultural immortality, his symphonic works have never found a foothold in the repertory. Even now, as his music is programmed by the storied ensembles of Vienna and Berlin, it’s more likely to be “E.T.” than his “Essay for Strings.”Williams’s concert works tend to be skillful but less imaginative than his film scores. And some — particularly pièces d’occasion like the larky “Soundings,” written for the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003 — are understandably obscure. At his best, though, he is a vivid tone painter with a masterly command of orchestration and form. Here are five examples.Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1976)Reminiscent at times of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto and, like it, written in the wake of loss — for Williams, the sudden death of his wife — this entry into the genre moves fluidly, and often unpredictably, in and out of lyricism, volatility and breathlessness. Premiered in 1981 by Mark Peskanov, it found a broader audience when recorded three decades later by Gil Shaham and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with which Williams has a long association.‘The Five Sacred Trees’ (1993)More or less a bassoon concerto, this commission for the New York Philharmonic’s 150th anniversary opens with a long solo that conjures the first (and wisest) of five trees from Celtic mythology. The movements that follow are arboreal portraits in music: a puckish, dancing duet for the bassoon and a violin; a mysterious nocturne; curlicue phrases choked into fragments; and patient brooding.Cello Concerto (1994)Williams composed this for Yo-Yo Ma to inaugurate Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. (Among Williams’s works for the instrument, it has aged better than Three Pieces for Solo Cello, a 2001 meditation on Black history with titles like “Pickin’.”) Tailored to its soloist like a film score to its scenes, the concerto is designed to reflect different angles of Ma’s artistry: as a heroic virtuoso, a nimble genre-hopper and, in the ruminative finale, an expressive communicator.Horn Concerto (2003)Dale Clevenger — the Chicago Symphony Orchestra horn master for whom this was written, and who died last month — once told an interviewer that he had requested an “audience-friendly” concerto from Williams. The result is difficult to play yet often warm, while also being nearly programmatic in its succession of tone poems that verge on the Coplandesque in the third-movement Pastorale.‘Markings’ (2017)If this atmospheric and discursive work seems like the start of something larger, it kind of is. Written at the urging of the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and leaning into her trademark eloquence, it was the first in a series of collaborations that have since included an album of Williams’s film music arranged for her and orchestra, as well as his Second Violin Concerto, which premiered last year and comes to Carnegie Hall in April. More

The soundtrack to Disney’s latest animated film holds at the top of Billboard’s album chart in its 10th week out.Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, tops the Billboard album chart for a fourth time this week, with no major new releases to challenge it.The “Encanto” soundtrack, which has been out since November, had the equivalent of 113,000 sales in the United States in its 10th week on the chart, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. That total — down only 2 percent from the previous week — included nearly 140 million streams and 16,000 copies sold as a complete package.Last week, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the film’s breakout hit, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, displacing Adele’s “Easy on Me” after its 10th week at the top.The last soundtrack album to notch four weeks at No. 1 was “A Star Is Born,” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, in late 2018 and early 2019.Also this week, the Weeknd’s “Dawn FM” rises two spots to No. 2 in its fourth week out, after the album was released on CD. Gunna’s “DS4Ever” is No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Colors” fell three spots to No. 5 in its second week out. More

Spotify is not canceling Joe Rogan.Two weeks into an evolving and far-reaching controversy over its star podcaster, who has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus, and condemned for his past use of a racial slur, Spotify has faced growing pressure to take a stronger stance about the podcasts it hosts.But in a memo to employees over the weekend, Daniel Ek, the company’s chief executive, discussed the recent removal of a number of episodes and made it clear that it would not drop Rogan’s show, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” That show has been exclusive to Spotify since 2020, when the company made a licensing deal with Rogan that has been reported to be worth $100 million or more.“I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer,” Ek wrote in the memo, which Spotify provided to The New York Times. “We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope.”Ek also confirmed that Spotify recently removed dozens of episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” after a compilation video was shared online by the singer India.Arie showing Rogan repeatedly using a racial slur on his show. In a video over the weekend, Rogan apologized and called it “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly,” though he also said that at the times he made those comments — over 12 years of his podcast, Rogan said — he had believed that they were acceptable in context. Many commentators found that apology insufficient.In his memo, Ek said that Rogan made the decision to remove the episodes, which appear to number about 70, after meetings with Spotify executives and after “his own reflections.”Ek also said that Spotify would invest $100 million for the “licensing, development and marketing” of music and other forms of audio “from historically marginalized groups.” What that would entail was not immediately clear. Spotify licenses most of its music from record labels and music distributors, and music from Black artists and other minorities are among the most popular on the platform; Spotify has also promoted minority podcasters with its “Sound Up” program, for example. Representatives of the company did not respond to a request for clarification.Since Jan. 24, when Neil Young demanded that his music be removed from Spotify, citing complaints from health professionals about Covid-19 misinformation on Rogan’s show, the company has faced a mini boycott from musicians, and constant criticism online. Joni Mitchell, Arie and Young’s sometime bandmates in Crosby, Stills and Nash, have all pulled their music. A handful of other artists, like the alternative band Failure, have followed suit, while others have staged protests of various kinds. The band Belly, for example, added a “Delete Spotify” banner to its own Spotify profile page, and explained on social media that for many artists, removing their music from the service is easier said than done.In media circles, Spotify’s stance over Rogan has also raised questions about the responsibility of online companies to police the content on their platforms. In recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others have come under frequent attack for the content they host, usually about politics or the pandemic. They have responded with a variety of measures, but tended to avoid labeling themselves as publishers.That stance has been more difficult for Spotify, given its exclusive deal with Rogan. In his memo, Ek doubled down on recent comments denying that Spotify is Rogan’s publisher. In a company town hall last week, he told employees that despite its exclusive arrangement with Rogan, Spotify did not have advance approval of his shows, and could remove his episodes only if they ran afoul of Spotify’s content guidelines. (Spotify released those platform rules for the first time last week; it was not clear whether the episodes that were removed last week violated them.)In his letter, Ek alluded to growing employee discontent about that position, and said he was “wrestling with how this perception squares with our values.”“I also want to be transparent,” he added, “in setting the expectation that in order to achieve our goal of becoming the global audio platform, these kinds of disputes will be inevitable.” More

Mr. Crumb wrote startling works, sometimes with political themes, and challenged musicians to employ new techniques, vocalize and move about the stage.George Crumb, a composer who filled his works with a magpie array of instrumental and human sounds and drew on the traditions of Asia and his native Appalachia to create music of startling effect, died on Sunday at his home in Media, Pa. He was 92.His death was announced by Bridge Records, his record label.While rejecting the sometimes arid 12-tone technique of Modernists, Mr. Crumb beguiled audiences with his own musical language, composing colorful and concise works that range in mood from peaceful to nightmarish. Mr. Crumb looking over one of his compositions in 2019.  “I love sounds that seem to hang in the air, and you can’t tell exactly where they’re coming from,” he once said. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesHe continued to compose late in life. His 90th birthday was celebrated by organizations including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which presented the premiere of a new piece for percussion quintet. “The apocalypse itself seemed to be evoked in the new Kronos-Kryptos piece, whose third movement has four bass drums going full tilt at the same time,” the critic David Patrick Stearns wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer.“Black Angels” (1970), one of Mr. Crumb’s best-known works and a reaction to the Vietnam War, was an early example of his imaginative eclecticism. It is scored for an amplified string quartet and features techniques such as tapping the strings with thimbles. A mournful fragment from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is interrupted by fierce bow strokes and human shouts.The grimly claustrophobic music of the first movement, “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects,” was deemed sufficiently scary to be used on the soundtrack for the horror film “The Exorcist.”Mr. Crumb described the piece as “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world.”The members of the Stanley Quartet, which premiered the work in 1970, were baffled by some of the unusual requirements and not necessarily happy to play them. Nevertheless, they went along.In 2014 Mr. Crumb, who guided their first performance, said: “They hadn’t played much contemporary music, so they were willing to do anything I wanted. And I ended up conducting, can you imagine? I felt like a fool conducting a string quartet, but it helped them keep it all together.”The piece has since entered the repertory and been championed by prominent ensembles like the Kronos Quartet.Other pieces were equally theatrical and sometimes featured ritualistic elements. A recording of whale songs made by a marine scientist inspired his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” for electric flute, cello and amplified piano (1971). The performers wear black half-masks; Mr. Crumb also specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting. He used various extended techniques, like strumming the piano strings with a paper clip, to create eerie sonorities.Each movement of his orchestral piece “Echoes of Time and the River” (awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968) features processionals in which small groups of musicians move around the stage in patterns and directions specified in the score — requirements Mr. Crumb later acknowledged were rather impractical.Practicality usually wasn’t one of his primary concerns, however. As in Charles Ives’s massive Symphony No. 4, multiple conductors preside over Mr. Crumb’s “Star-Child” (1977), a major work set to Latin texts for soprano, solo trombone, children’s choir and large orchestra. A recording of the work, one of his few forays into orchestral repertory, won a Grammy in 2001.Mr. Crumb’s fascination with Federico García Lorca led to other major works. Lorca’s poetry “somehow reconciled the joyous and the tragic,” the composer said, and he set Lorca’s verse to music in four books of madrigals for soprano and various instruments in the 1960s, and later in several song cycles including “Ancient Voices of Children” (1970).Given its premiere by the mezzo soprano Jan DeGaetani, Mr. Crumb’s frequent collaborator and muse, “Ancient Voices” features a range of haunting vocal effects, sinewy oboe lines and spare sounds coaxed from Japanese temple bells, Tibetan prayer stones, mandolin, harp and toy piano.He was less prolific in the 1980s and 1990s, when he suffered a creative block, but found renewed energy after 2000. He created a series of American Songbooks, collections of arrangements of hymns, popular tunes and African American spirituals. The gentle melody of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example, is punctuated by uneasy percussive interjections and an array of shimmering sonorities.Mr. Crumb’s repertory for piano includes four books called “Makrokosmos,” the title inspired by Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos,” an influential series of student works of varying difficulty. The pianist is instructed to sing, shout and moan at various points in the series by Mr. Crumb.He wrote many of his works in an elaborately creative and nontraditional format. The score of “Makrokosmos II” (1973), for example, is notated in the shape of a peace sign.Mr. Crumb eschewed computer notation and even drew his own staves. The flutist Tara Helen O’Connor described Crumb’s idiosyncratic scores as “his way of expressing how the music flows through space,” adding that it “also leaves some of the magic and creativity up to the performer.”Detractors sometimes called him New Age-y or beholden to sound effects.The New York Times critic John Rockwell found fault with Mr. Crumb for at times failing to put his borrowings from other composers into a natural-sounding context, or to integrate them into his own style, or for not expressing more clearly his higher meanings.“What makes all this so frustrating is the sheer beauty and originality of so much of Mr. Crumb’s music,” he wrote in a 1983 review. “Hearing it is like trying to bask outdoors on a partially cloudy day: the sun feels wonderful when it breaks through, but it is too often obscured.”One of Mr. Crumb’s works was inspired by a recording of whale songs. The performers wore black half-masks, and he specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting.Oscar White/Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesGeorge Henry Crumb Jr. was born on Oct. 24, 1929, in Charleston, W.Va., to George Henry Crumb, a clarinetist, and Vivian (Reed) Crumb, a cellist. Both were professional musicians who played in a local orchestra; his father taught him the clarinet.Like Ives, Mr. Crumb, who began composing around age 10, was exposed to eclectic musical styles growing up, including gospel, country, folk and pop. He was also fascinated by the sounds of the forest near his home. “I love sounds that seem to hang in the air, and you can’t tell exactly where they’re coming from,” he told The London Telegraph in 2009.He received his bachelor’s degree in 1950 from the Mason College of Music in Charleston and a master’s degree two years later from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mr. Crumb received his doctorate in composition in 1959 from the University of Michigan, where he studied with the composer Ross Lee Finney. Mr. Crumb’s student works reflected his burgeoning interests in combining unusual sounds: he meshed Appalachian folk songs and instruments like the harmonica and musical saw with Asian influences. Mahler, Bartok and Debussy — whose use of color and timbre fascinated Mr. Crumb — were other important compositional influences.Mr. Crumb, a prominent teacher whose students included Christopher Rouse, Osvaldo Golijov and Jennifer Higdon, all successful composers, taught early in his career at the University of Colorado and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1995. His works have been performed alongside those of his son David Crumb, a composer who teaches at the University of Oregon.Besides his son David, Mr. Crumb is survived by his wife, Elizabeth May (Brown) Crumb, a violinist; another son, Peter; and a sister, Ruth Crumb. His daughter, the actress and singer Ann Crumb, died of cancer in 2019.When asked in 1988 if he liked his own music, Mr. Crumb responded: “I think most composers like their own music. But I’m aware at the same time that in my opinion I haven’t fully realized a piece. In other words, I haven’t yet written the kind of music I would like to write in my heart of hearts. I sense that maybe that’s the human condition; maybe one never does, in fact.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

His distinctive double-shuffle groove, which he likened to “three different drummers playing the same beat,” enlivened records by Howlin’ Wolf and many others.Sam Lay, a powerful and virtuosic drummer who played and recorded with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, was a founding member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and backed Bob Dylan when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died on Jan. 29 at a nursing facility in Chicago. He was 86.His daughter, Debbie Lay, confirmed the death but said she did not know the cause.Mr. Lay’s exuberant, idiosyncratic drumming was known for its double-shuffle groove, which he adapted from the rhythms of the hand claps and tambourine beats he heard in the Pentecostal church he attended while growing up in Birmingham, Ala.“The only way I can describe it is, you’ve got three different drummers playing the same beat but they’re not hitting it at the same time,” Mr. Lay said in “Sam Lay in Bluesland,” a 2015 documentary directed by John Anderson that took its name from an album Mr. Lay released in 1968.The harmonica player Corky Siegel, a longtime collaborator, said the double-shuffle groove was part of Mr. Lay’s broader ability to do more than keep the beat.“He just made you fly,” Mr. Siegel said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t held back by the concept of groove and time.” He added: “People think he played loud. No, he played delicate, but he used the full dynamic range, and when you do that, and you get to a crescendo, it’s powerful, like a locomotive coming toward you. But with Sam, it was like five locomotives.”After arriving in Chicago in early 1960, Mr. Lay played in bands led by the harmonica player and singer Little Walter and the singer Howlin’ Wolf, with whom he recorded songs that became blues standards like “Killing Floor,” “The Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious.”Once, after being fined by Howlin’ Wolf for wearing pants without a black stripe on them, Mr. Lay argued that no one could see his pants behind his drum kit. When their dispute persisted, Mr. Lay pulled a Smith & Wesson gun and held it to Howlin’ Wolf’s face.Mr. Lay left Howlin’ Wolf to join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1963, lured by the prospect of making $20 a gig, nearly three times what he had been earning. Led by Mr. Butterfield on harmonica and vocals, the band — which also included the guitarists Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, the bassist Jerome Arnold and the keyboardist Mark Naftalin — was racially integrated, a rarity at the time, and bought the blues to a white audience during an intense period in the civil rights movement.Bob Dylan rehearsing for his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with, from left, Mike Bloomfield, Mr. Lay, Jerome Arnold and Al Kooper.David Gahr/Getty ImagesThe band played at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. Hours after their set, Mr. Lay, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bloomfield were part of Mr. Dylan’s backup band when he stunned the audience by performing an electric set, which began with a bracing version of his song “Maggie’s Farm.”Soon after that, Mr. Dylan asked Mr. Lay to back him on the title track of his album “Highway 61 Revisited.” In addition to playing drums, Mr. Lay played a toy whistle on the song’s memorable opening. (The organist Al Kooper has said he was the one who brought the whistle to the studio).“I blew it and it sounded like a siren,” Mr. Lay told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “Bob said, ‘Do that again.’ So I did it again.”Later in 1965, the Butterfield band’s first album, called simply “The Paul Butterfield Blues Band,” was released. One track, “I Got My Mojo Working,” featured Mr. Lay on lead vocal.An illness caused Mr. Lay to leave the band in late 1965.Samuel Julian Lay was born on March 20, 1935, in Birmingham. His father, Foster, a Pullman train porter who played banjo in a country band, died when Sam was 17 months old. His mother, Elsie (Favors) Lay, cleaned Pullman cars.Growing up, he listened to country music; as a teenager, he took drumming lessons from W.C. Handy Jr., the son of the composer. He dropped out of high school (which ended his dream of trying to run faster than the Olympic champion Jesse Owens) and in 1954 moved to Cleveland, where he worked in a steel mill and started to discover his musical path.One day, he stopped into a wine bar after hearing the sound of a harmonica being played by Little Walter, who asked him to sit in when he learned that he played drums. In the late 1950s Mr. Lay joined the Thunderbirds, a blues and R&B group.When Little Walter was shot, Mr. Lay helped nurse him back to health. Once in Chicago, he joined Little Walter’s band. But he didn’t stay long; he was soon hired by Howlin’ Wolf.Mr. Lay was a slick dresser who wore elaborate capes and hats and carried a walking stick. He styled his hair for a while after Little Richard’s. And he brought his windup eight-millimeter camera to clubs in the 1960s. It didn’t have sound, but he captured images of Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Buddy Guy and others onstage.“As soon as Howlin’ Wolf knew that a camera was watching him, you’d think he was possessed in some kind of way,” Mr. Lay said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.Footage he shot was used in Mr. Anderson’s film and in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 public television series, “The Blues.”In 1966, after he had begun to play with the harmonica player and singer James Cotton, Mr. Lay heard from Muddy Waters that an enemy of Mr. Cotton’s, who had shot him years before, had just been released from jail and was going after him. Mr. Lay rushed to his house, got his Colt .45, drove to the club and prepared to defend Mr. Cotton.But while Mr. Lay waited for the gunman (who never came), his gun went off, he told Phoenix New Times in 1999. He shot himself in the groin.“I’m still recuperating,” he said in the interview.Mr. Lay recording at Blue Heaven Studios in Salina, Kan., a former church, in 2000.Cliff Schiappa/Associated PressIn 1969, Mr. Lay was part of the all-star band, which also included Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield, that recorded the album “Fathers and Sons.” It reached No. 70 on the Billboard chart.Over the next 50 years, he performed with Mr. Siegel’s ensembles the Siegel-Schwall Band, Chamber Blues and Chicago Blues Reunion, as well as leading his own blues band.But the blues did not pay all of Mr. Lay’s bills. For many years, he moonlighted as a security guard.Mr. Lay was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, as part of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and into the Blues Hall of Fame three years later.In addition to his daughter, he is survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Elizabeth (Buirts) Lay, died in 2017. His son Bobby died inn 2019, and his son Michael died last month.Mr. Lay did not lack self-confidence.“I don’t know nobody in the world who can follow a band as good as I can, specifically if it comes to blues and that old-time rock ‘n’ roll,” he said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.“The secret,” he added, “is paying attention to what everyone else is playing and keeping your eyes open, and your mind.” More

His apology came as listeners said that as many as 70 episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast had been quietly taken off Spotify; the company has yet to comment on the reported removals.As pressure has intensified on Spotify and its star podcaster Joe Rogan, listeners reported that the company had quietly removed dozens of episodes of his show, while Rogan apologized early Saturday for his use of a racial slur in past episodes.In an Instagram video, Rogan — whose talk show, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” is Spotify’s most popular podcast, and has been available there exclusively for more than a year — addressed what he called “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.” A compilation video showed Rogan using the slur numerous times in past episodes of his show; it had been shared by the singer India.Arie, who has removed her catalog from Spotify in protest of what she called Rogan’s “language around race.”Rogan said the compilation was drawn from “12 years of conversations” on his show, and that it looked “horrible, even to me.” The clips, he said, had been taken out of context, which he said included discussions about how it had been used by comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, who were Black, and Lenny Bruce, who was white.When posting the clip compilation, Arie said that Rogan “shouldn’t even be uttering the word. Don’t say it, under any context.” In his video, Rogan said that he had come to agree with that view. “It’s not my word to use,” he said. “I’m well aware of that now.” He added that he had not spoken the slur “in years.”This week, Arie joined a small but influential boycott of Spotify led by the musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, who cited complaints by health professionals that guests on Rogan’s show had spread misinformation about the coronavirus.In his latest video, Rogan also discussed a clip from another podcast episode, which he said he had deleted, in which he described seeing “Planet of the Apes” at a theater in a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. “I was trying to make the story entertaining and I said it was like we got out and we were in Africa. It’s like we were in ‘Planet of the Apes,’” he said, adding that it was an “idiotic” thing to say that “looks terrible even in context.”Listeners noticed that as many as 70 episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” had been quietly removed in recent days by Spotify. Neither Rogan nor Spotify has given an explanation, and representatives of the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. Commenters on Reddit speculated that some of the missing episodes may have contained the slur, although that was unclear.Understand the Joe Rogan-Spotify ControversyCard 1 of 5A brash personality. More