Music

With a four-track tape recorder in his Jamaican home studio, he opened surreal sonic vistas and cultivated the image of a mad genius.Lee (Scratch) Perry, the innovative Jamaican producer who mentored Bob Marley and pushed reggae into the sonic avant-garde with his dub productions, died on Sunday in Lucca, Jamaica. He was 85.His death, at a hospital, was reported by Jamaican Observer and other Jamaican media; no cause was given. Prime Minister Andrew Holness of Jamaica tweeted condolences and praised Mr. Perry’s “sterling contribution to the musical fraternity.”Mr. Perry wrote songs, led the studio session band the Upsetters and produced leading Jamaican acts in the 1960s and ’70s. He went on to collaborate internationally with the Clash, Paul and Linda McCartney, the Beastie Boys and many others. George Clinton and Keith Richards were guests on his albums.Mr. Perry recorded dozens of albums under his own name and with the Upsetters; he also produced hundreds of songs for other performers. “All my records are angels,” he told Uncut magazine in 2018. “They are not flesh and blood, they are spirits.”As a singer and frontman, he reveled in the image of a mad genius. He gave himself numerous nicknames — the Upsetter, the Super-Ape, Inspector Gadget, the Firmament Computer — and spoke about blowing marijuana smoke on his master tapes to improve their sound, or dousing them with blood or whiskey. He once boasted, “I am the creator of the alien race globally.”In a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, he said: “Being a madman is good thing! It keeps people away. When they think you are crazy, they don’t come around and take your energy.”Mr. Perry vastly expanded the possibilities of dub reggae in the 1970s, creating radical remixes that stripped songs down to their rhythm tracks and rebuilt them with samples (animal sounds, breaking glass, explosions) along with surreal echo and phasing effects to create hallucinatory aural spaces.Albums like the Upsetters’ “Blackboard Jungle Dub” (1973) and “Super Ape” (1976) were as dizzying as they were danceable. One of Mr. Perry’s most exploratory albums, “Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread,” released in 1978, was rejected by his international distributor at the time, Island Records, leading to a lasting rift.Mr. Perry’s album “Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread,” from 1978, was his most exploratory..Mr. Perry brought his dub techniques to the production of new songs on albums that would become reggae milestones. The recordings he concocted using minimal equipment — a four-track Teac tape recorder — would decisively influence hip-hop, post-punk, electronica and all sorts of other studio-tweaked music.“The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself,” he once explained. “The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves — you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls.”Rainford Hugh Perry was born on March 20, 1936, in Kendal, in rural western Jamaica. His parents, Hugh Perry and Ina Davis, were laborers, and one of Lee’s early jobs was driving a tractor in the building of a road that would bring tourists to the western seaside town of Negril. He moved to Kingston, the capital, and started working for the producer and sound system owner Clement (Coxsone) Dodd in 1961, first as a gofer and record vendor and eventually as a talent scout, engineer and producer for Dodd’s Studio One, a Jamaican hit factory in the early 1960s.Feeling exploited by Mr. Dodd, Mr. Perry joined a competitor, Joe Gibbs, at Amalgamated Records. He released “I Am the Upsetter,” a complaint aimed at Mr. Dodd, and continued to produce Jamaican hits. But he broke away from Mr. Gibbs as well.Mr. Perry started his own label, Upset Records (soon renamed Upsetter), and its first release, in 1968, was a song attacking Mr. Gibbs, “People Funny Boy.” It became a hit in Jamaica and Great Britain. Presaging Mr. Perry’s later productions, it also featured the sound of a crying baby, and it was an early example of the midtempo rhythm that would soon define roots reggae.Bob Marley and the Wailers had recorded with Mr. Dodd but went to work with Upsetter Records and Mr. Perry to make the albums “Soul Rebels” (1970) and “Soul Revolution” (1971). Mr. Perry encouraged Mr. Marley to explore spiritual and political themes, and songs like “Small Axe,” “Kaya” and “Duppy Conqueror” established the direction that would make Mr. Marley an international star.But there were disputes over money. Mr. Perry sold rights to the Wailers albums to an English label, and Mr. Marley and the Wailers accused Mr. Perry of withholding royalties. “I pirated their music to expose them,” Mr. Perry claimed in a 2008 documentary, “The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry.” In 2010, the percussionist and singer-songwriter Bunny Wailer, a member of the band, told Rolling Stone: “He screwed us. We never saw a dime from those albums we did with him.”Mr. Perry in 2001 outside the studio he built in his backyard in Kingston, Jamaica. He called it the Black Ark. Echoes/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Marley hired the Upsetters’ rhythm section, the brothers Aston and Carlton Barrett on bass and drums, and they became the foundation of the Wailers’ live band. Yet Mr. Marley and Mr. Perry didn’t stay estranged; in 1977, Mr. Marley enlisted him to produce the single “Punky Reggae Party.”Living in the Washington Gardens neighborhood of Kingston, Mr. Perry built his own small studio, the Black Ark, in his backyard in 1973. He named it after the Ark of the Covenant and considered it a spiritual place. There he could record at any time and in any way he chose.“Scratch dances with the board while he produces,” Vivien Goldman wrote in 1976 for the magazine Sounds. “Flicking switches with a twist of the hips, after a particularly elaborate movement he might spin round twice and clap his hands and be back in position for the next pull of a slide control. He’s aware of his studio audience, but dances in spite, not because of them.”At the Black Ark, Mr. Perry stacked up layers of sound with multiple overdubs on each track of his four-track recorder; tape hiss only added depth and mystery to his mixes.“One of his phrases was, ‘He had four tracks on the board and eight tracks in his head,’ ” Max Romeo, one of the singers Mr. Perry produced, told Mojo magazine in 2019. Among the enduring reggae albums that Mr. Perry made at the Black Ark were the Congos’ “Heart of the Congos,” Max Romeo’s “War Ina Babylon,” the Heptones’ “Party Time” and Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves”— albums suffused with righteousness, compassion, determination and experimentation.In the early days of English punk-rock, the Clash remade “Police and Thieves,” and when Mr. Perry visited England in 1977, he produced a Clash single, “Complete Control.” Paul and Linda McCartney built two songs on Mr. Perry’s tracks for Linda McCartney’s solo debut album.But under the strains of constant recording, his marijuana and alcohol use, gang violence and political turmoil in Jamaica as well as extortion threats and his divorce from his first wife, Pauline Morrison, in 1979, Mr. Perry’s mental state grew troubled. In 1983, the Black Ark burned down.There were various explanations, including faulty wiring. But to Mr. Perry “the studio had been polluted with unholy spirits,” as he put it in “The Upsetter” documentary.“I was mixing good and evil spirits together in the Ark,” he said, “and then I had to burn it down to get rid of what I created.”Mr. Perry in 2018. Over the years he was nominated for five Grammy Awards for best reggae album and won one for “Jamaican E.T.,” released in 2002.John Palmer, via Associated PressHe moved to London in 1984 and resumed a copious, scattershot recording and performing career. Onstage, leading assorted lineups of the Upsetters and interspersing songs with free-associative speechifying, he stepped forward as a gaudily costumed wizard-jester-sage-extraterrestrial figure, like Sun Ra or George Clinton.In the studio, he collaborated with producers who had been inspired by his 1970s dubs, making albums with Adrian Sherwood, Bill Laswell and, extensively, the British-Guyanese producer Mad Professor. On Sunday, Mad Professor posted on Facebook that they had enough material recorded for 20 more albums together and added: “What a character! Totally ageless! Extremely creative, with a memory as sharp as a tape machine! A brain as accurate as a computer!”In 1989 Mr. Perry married Mireille Rüegg, a record-store owner who became his manager, and moved with her to Switzerland, where they lived until relocating to Jamaica in 2020. In addition to her, his survivors include their two children, Gabriel and Shiva, and four children from his first marriage: Cleopatra, Marsha, Omar and Marvin (Sean) Perry.Recognition continued to grow for Mr. Perry through the decades. In 1998, the Beastie Boys featured him on their album “Hello Nasty,” employing his vocals and lyrics on “Dr. Lee, PhD.”Mr. Perry was nominated five times for a Grammy Award for best reggae album. His album “Jamaican E.T.” (2002) won the award.In 2018, he told Uncut magazine: “The reality is, all that craziness, all that madness, I made it work, because it’s nature. It’s natural grace. In nature we have the big space overhead, the big sky, the orbit. Nature is crazy! I want my records to sound as crazy as nature.” More

He propelled hits by stars in country, folk and pop, including Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle, Ray Charles, Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers and Bela Fleck.NASHVILLE — Kenny Malone, a prolific Nashville session drummer whose skittering snare rhythms haunted Dolly Parton’s No. 1 country hit “Jolene” in 1973 and whose cocktail-jazz groove anchored Crystal Gayle’s crossover smash “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” in 1977, died at a hospital here on Thursday. He was 83.A friend and collaborator, Dave Pomeroy, said the cause was Covid-19.A versatile and imaginative percussionist, Mr. Malone played on recordings by scores of country, folk, pop and rock artists, including John Prine and Charley Pride (both of whom also died of complications of Covid-19 during the pandemic) as well as Alison Krauss, Guy Clark, Kenny Rogers, Ray Charles, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings and Bela Fleck, among many others.His impeccably timed cymbal work and rimshots particularly propelled Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” a Top 10 pop hit in 1973. And the stylistic reach he commanded was impressive, from the down-home atmospherics of Ms. Parton’s “Jolene” to the countrypolitan sophistication of Ms. Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”“I need versatility and the opportunity to play many different styles,” Mr. Malone said in a 1985 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “In recording, if I’m not careful, I start to feel stale, or I feel that there isn’t much room for expansion and growth.”On two occasions, he said, he briefly stopped doing session work and played only live with a jazz quartet. (With Mr. Pomeroy, a bassist, he later established the quintet Tone Patrol, a respected Nashville ensemble that mixed jazz and world music.)To keep his approach fresh when he returned to the studio for good, Mr. Malone immersed himself in painting and began working no more than two recording sessions a day, as opposed to the usual three or four.He also devised a Conga-derived hand-drumming technique and invented a clay drum called an “og” and a hand-held shaker consisting of metal and wood.Something of a mystic, Mr. Malone heard music everywhere, and exulted in it. “Music is in everything, not just the instruments we play,” he told Modern Drummer. “The way that chords, melody and rhythm work together mirrors our emotions. Everything we hear forms a visual image or an attitude of a place, a time or an environment.”In a biography of Mr. Malone for allmusic.com, the musician Eugene Chadbourne elaborated on this philosophy, writing, “He is the drummer who, upon hearing that a song’s lyrics described a woman slitting a man’s throat, told the producer to hang tough a moment while he fetched a different cymbal from his van, one that had just the right ‘scream’ for the job.”Kenneth Morton Malone was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Denver. His parents, Harry and Minnie (Springstun) Malone, owned a flower shop.Mr. Malone started playing the drums at age 5. “The day I decided I wanted to be a drummer was the day I heard Dixieland music,” he said in “Rhythm Makers: The Drumming Legends of Nashville in Their Own Words” (2005), by Tony Artimisi. “I think it was the Firehouse Five back in, like, 1943. My mom and dad got me a drum for Christmas. That started everything.”Four years later he was playing with a marching band sponsored by the police department and becoming conversant in jazz and classical music.“My first idol was Gene Krupa,” he said in “Rhythm Makers.” “I saw Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich do a drum battle in Denver with Jazz at the Philharmonic with Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz and all these wonderful players. I was just hooked forever.”Mr. Malone enlisted in the Navy at 17 and toured with bands there, eventually becoming director of the percussion department of the Naval School of Music in Virginia Beach, Va.He spent 14 years in the Navy before deciding to move to Nashville with his family in 1970 to make a go of it as a studio musician. His first recording session was with the rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins.Mr. Malone married Corena Quillen, who is known as Janie, in 1958. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters, Teresa Rich and Karen Powers; a sister, Jeanette Scarpello; five grandsons; four granddaughters; and many great-grandchildren. (Another daughter, Laura Pugh, died in 2009, and a son, Kenneth Jr., died in 2018.)His musical gifts notwithstanding, Mr. Malone at first had to adjust to Nashville’s recording methods.“I was back there playing away, and the producer said, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’” he told Modern Drummer. “I didn’t know you could overdub, so I was playing all of it at once — tambourines, you name it. I literally had to come down to one hand and one foot. I had to unlearn everything as far as technical stuff. There was a whole different feel in recording.” More

Lorde’s new album “Solar Power” marks a pivot for the New Zealand singer-songwriter, away from the insular and intimate relationship tension captured on her last album, “Melodrama” from 2017, into a brighter palette and songs about embracing wellness and posi vibes.This is something that can happen when you grow up in public — a rejection of the fixed gaze that stardom imposes on you. For Lorde, it’s meant a long retreat from the spotlight, and an insistence on making music that hews to no fixed idea about what a “Lorde sound” should be.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about this sunny phase of Lorde’s career, the ways pop stardom can dull a creative person’s edges and what it means to choose to move away from the expectations of superstardom.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterLindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times and others More

Music from the R&B singer, who died in 2001, started to arrive on streaming services, helping her 1996 album, “One in a Million,” reach No. 10 for the first time.Vinyl helped Olivia Rodrigo reclaim the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart this week, while a long-delayed arrival on streaming brought a 25-year-old album by Aaliyah to the Top 10 for the first time.Rodrigo’s “Sour” notches a fifth week at No. 1 with the equivalent of 133,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking service. It had 70 million streams, very good for a three-month-old album. But it was the album’s release on vinyl that sent “Sour” back to the top. It sold 76,000 copies on LP, the second-best weekly number for a vinyl album in at least 30 years, after Taylor Swift sold 102,000 copies of “Evermore” in June. Just a few weeks ago, Billie Eilish sold 73,000 of her latest, “Happier Than Ever.”The success of these albums reflects the rising popularity of vinyl records, which last year in the United States generated greater retail revenue than CDs for the first time since 1986. But the releases have also benefited from a Billboard chart rule that went into effect last October. Before then, many vinyl sales were counted when fans first placed their order; even if the record wasn’t ready yet, fans often received a downloadable copy while they waited. Now, those sales count once the record is shipped to a customer — allowing many artists to rack up weeks’ or months’ worth of advance sales.Also this week, the rapper Trippie Redd opens at No. 2 with “Trip at Knight,” and Lorde’s new “Solar Power” makes its debut at No. 5. Rod Wave’s five-month-old “SoulFly” lands at No. 3 after a deluxe reissue, and Doja Cat’s recent “Planet Her” is No. 4.“One in a Million,” the second album by the R&B singer Aaliyah, who died in 2001 at age 22, has long been absent from the market. But a recent deal made by the company that controls her catalog — run by a man who happens to be her uncle — brought it back in print and finally began releasing Aaliyah’s music on streaming services.This week, “One in a Million,” which had stalled at No. 18 when released in 1996, lands at No. 10. It was not Aaliyah’s first time ever in the Top 10, however. Her third album, “Aaliyah” (2001), went to No. 1, and a posthumous collection, “I Care 4 U” (2002), reached No. 3. More

While his bandmates hit the Apollo, the reserved, jazz-loving drummer for the Stones could be found at Birdland.In 1960, while working as an artist and graphic designer, and some years before the Rolling Stones were born, Charlie Watts began work on “Ode to a High-Flying Bird,” a captivating children’s book about his hero, the jazz great Charlie Parker. The book featured charming drawings of a bird named Charlie who realized he didn’t sound like most of the other birds, and who left home to fly to New York City, where he played “from his heart” and made a new nest for himself in “Birdland.”Charlie Parker made a 14-year-old Charlie Watts dream the impossible dream of visiting New York and playing at a jazz club. And while he thought at the time that “the only way to get to New York was in a band on a cruise ship,” he would actually get there in 1964 with the Rolling Stones. While Keith Richards and Mick Jagger hung out at the Apollo, where James Brown was doing five — five! — shows a day, Mr. Watts spent his free time haunting the jazz clubs he’d dreamed about as a boy: He saw Charles Mingus at Birdland, Gene Krupa at the Metropole, and Sonny Rollins, Earl Hines and Miles Davis.Many decades later, Mr. Watts would achieve his jazz dreams, when he brought his jazz combo to play at the Blue Note, but his day job for almost six decades, of course, was with the Rolling Stones. He was their indispensable drummer, whose loose, jazz-inflected playing and improvisational ardor were the not-so-secret sauce that helped make the Stones such a singular and enduring band.“Everybody thinks Mick and Keith are the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Richards once observed. “If Charlie wasn’t doing what he’s doing on drums, that wouldn’t be true at all. You’d find out that Charlie Watts is the Stones.” Charlie Watts, Mr. Richards added in his 2010 memoir, “Life,” “has always been the bed that I lie on musically.”Charlie Watts during a rehearsal in New York, in 1978. Michael Putland/Getty Images“The engine” was a favorite phrase musicians used to describe Mr. Watts’s role in the band. Also: its motor, its backbone, its heartbeat, its scaffolding, its glue. The soft-spoken Mr. Watts, who died last Tuesday, was more modest, saying he was “brought up under the theory the drummer was an accompanist.” His job, he said, was “to keep the time and help everyone else do what they do,” to lend the music a little “swing and bounce” that would make people get up and dance.When other drummers started going for bigger and fancier kits, adorned with all sorts of chimes and gongs, Mr. Watts stuck with a small four-piece drum set from 1957 and, unlike Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, he never went in for flash pyrotechnics or showy solos. He loved playing onstage with his mates, but he hated life on the road, hated leaving home, hated the cringe-making trappings of rock ’n’ roll — the parties, the press, the screaming girls. While his bandmates were out late at night, getting into trouble, Mr. Watts was often in his hotel room, sketching pictures of the bed: He told interviewers that he’d drawn every bed he’d slept in on tour since 1967; by 2001, he said, he’d filled 12 to 15 diaries.For that matter, Mr. Watts said he felt out of place in the whole rock ’n’ roll scene — “I live in TCM world, Turner Classic Movies,” he told a BBC radio show, explaining that he’d inherited his father’s love for 1940s-style tailor-made suits, and regarded Fred Astaire as “the ultimate in what you should be if you’re a professional.”Indeed, Mr. Watts was a man of contradictions — a jazzman in the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, an old-fashioned gentleman among pirates and bad boys, a homebody who spent much of his work life on the road. It was also his contradictions — his loose, swinging style combined with his love of precision; his idiosyncratic technique combined with his remarkable versatility — that made him such an exceptional drummer, and the perfect musical partner for Keith Richards in forging the Stones’s signature sound.As the band’s former bass player Bill Wyman recalled: “Every band follows the drummer. We don’t follow Charlie. Charlie follows Keith. So the drums are very slightly behind Keith. It’s only fractional. Seconds. Minuscule.” But it makes the Stones impossible to copy.The propulsive drive of “Get Off My Cloud”; the manic, percussive beat of “19th Nervous Breakdown”; the gathering sense of menace in “Gimme Shelter”; the jazzy syncopation of “Start Me Up”; the lovely, laconic swing of “Beast of Burden” — all were testaments to Mr. Watts’s gift for modulating the mood of a track to create a musical conversation with Mr. Richards’s galvanic guitar and punctuate Mr. Jagger’s vocals and performance. The drummer had a minimalist’s instinct for how to make the most emotional impact with the most economical of licks, when to withhold and when to step on the gas, and how to effortlessly shift gears between the languid and the urgent, between savage immediacy and elegant formality.The Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesI became a die-hard Stones fan the moment I saw them perform “Time Is on My Side” (in black and white) on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. They all wore suits or vests, I recall, except for Mr. Jagger, who wore a preppy crew-neck sweater. That weekend, I persuaded my father to drive me down to Cutler’s record shop in New Haven, Conn., where I bought “England’s Newest Hitmakers.” It was followed, not long after, by “Out of Our Heads” and “Between the Buttons” (which featured an enigmatic comic strip by Mr. Watts), and, in time, every other album the band released, even as vinyl gave way to CDs and CDs to digital downloads.I made mix tapes of my favorite Stones tracks, and over the years, waited in lines in New York and Chicago and Paris to buy Stones tickets. The Stones were — and remain — a great live band, and no show (or song) was ever the same: “Midnight Rambler” not only waxed and waned in length — from nine to 15 minutes or so — but sometimes felt like old-school Chicago blues, sometimes more like a rock opera or improvisatory jazz. Some renditions of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” seemed to set new land speed records, while versions of “Slipping Away” and “Wild Horses” took on affecting new layers of emotional nuance.This is why the Rolling Stones have endured — why Charlie Watts, who initially thought the band might last three months, gave up counting after three years. They endured because of the depth and complexity of their music, which wasn’t just about “love and hope and sex and dreams,” but also about loss and time and mortality. They endured because of their connection with their audiences, and because, like the blues and jazz greats they grew up idolizing, they continually made their music new.In his 2019 book “Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters,” the writer and musician Mike Edison wrote: “In many ways, the Rolling Stones at their best were a more intense jazz band than Charlie’s actual jazz bands — when the Stones were cooking, not a lot got played the same way twice. There was more group improvisation.”“Charlie played more aggressive, out-there jazz in the first four bars of ‘All Down the Line’ and the breakdowns of ‘Rip This Joint’ than with any of his jazz combos. There was more improvising and flashing of chops in ‘Midnight Rambler,’ when things were going right and Keith and Charlie were doing that thing, changing tempos and mashing up crazy shuffle stops, than there were on any quintet session.”In such moments, Mr. Watts’s usually stoic onstage demeanor — focused, intense, in the zone — would crack into a radiant, boyish grin. “Charlie Watts playing the drums,” his biographer wrote, “is the sound of happiness, the aural equivalent of Snoopy doing his dance of joy.”Michiko Kakutani is the author of the book “Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Re-Read.”Follow her on Twitter: @michikokakutani and on Instagram: michi_kakutani More

Fans of her early trip-hop-like songs included John Peel and Boy George. A new compilation puts her innovations in a fresh context.Leslie Winer seemed poised for stardom in 1990. The face of Valentino and Christian Dior the decade before — “the first androgynous model,” as Jean Paul Gaultier called her — had turned to music. Her first single, “Skin,” featured a club-ready backbeat and a hook about love and acceptance perfect for the United Colors of Benetton era. John Maybury, the director of Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” video, made the track’s clip. But Winer’s chiseled visage didn’t appear in the abstract video, and “Skin” simply disappeared.The mosaic of samples, hip-hop drums and slow Jamaican-styled bass lines that defined what would have been Winer’s album “Witch” (recorded under the hard-to-file name of ©) was shelved until 1993. By then, Madonna had adopted that sultry sound for “Justify My Love” and trip-hop had been defined by bigger groups like Massive Attack and Portishead. And Winer herself had moved on.“I’m like a crazy lady at the edge of the village,” Winer said of her willingness to pioneer what became a new sound. “Never thought of any of it like that. Just the fun of making new tracks.”Winer, 62, was chatting via video call for a rare interview from her home in France, sporting a black beanie visor pulled low under a blue hoodie, her brown hair now long and curling out at the neckline. A handful of old jazz albums and a copy of Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind” were visible on a shelf behind her. For the past 20 years, she’s lived about an hour outside of Paris on the way to Normandy, maintaining a monkish existence that suits her.This month, the label Light in the Attic offered listeners a broad view of Winer’s musical legacy with the digital release of “When I Hit You — You’ll Feel It,” a decade-in-the-making compilation covering 1989 to 2018 that includes many tracks from “Witch” and the scattered songs she’s made in the years since. (It will arrive on vinyl in September.) The set includes ethereal electronics, booming breakbeats, dusty blues and a song with her daughter Mari, with Winer’s growled delivery holding it all together.Winer’s life intersects with an array of icons and stars, yet to hear her tell it, musical stardom was never a goal. “It can be difficult to talk about making music with people because they conflate ‘making music’ with ‘popular success’ and image and brand and all these other frightening, soul-destroying late-stage-capitalist concerns,” she said. But the few people who heard her music at the time raved, including the BBC Radio 1 D.J. John Peel and Boy George.Winer was born in Boston to a teenage mother of a prominent New England family and then was adopted. (She said she later learned the arrangement was an illegal transaction that took place in a hospital parking lot for a lump sum.) She was raised primarily by her adoptive grandmother, who instilled in Winer a love of words and poetry. Winer’s voracious reading habit continues to this day, though she now requires a magnifying glass to see the fine print.By 17, Winer moved to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts, though an encounter with the Beat legend William S. Burroughs soon altered that trajectory. He gave her books — “‘The Egyptian Book of the Dead,’ everything Denton Welch, Marguerite Duras,” she said — and encouraged her writing. But she also picked up one of his habits: heroin.Winer’s S.V.A. studies were left unfinished as she took a different path, and began modeling. She worked with Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Vivienne Westwood. She hung out downtown at the Roxy and uptown in the Bronx, taking in early hip-hop acts and bands like ESG. Her boyfriend was Jean-Michel Basquiat, though she’s quick to clarify: “Jean was not famous at this time. At all. He was just like everybody else. Making stuff.”Modeling took her to London, where she soon fell in with a loose-knit group of musicians and artists. “What struck me about Leslie — once you get past appearance — was she’s one of the funniest people I know,” said the singer Helen Terry, a longtime friend. “She’s also one of the most polymathic. Leslie reads like other people breathe: constantly.”Music was increasingly a part of Winer’s world. “Leslie was the first person I know who had an Akai 1000 sampler,” Terry added. “I went down with a pile of records and we ran them through it. The idea was to get some beats down and then see where they went.”With collaborators including Terry, Karl Bonnie of the electro group Renegade Soundwave, the bassist Jah Wobble from Public Image Ltd., Kevin Mooney and Matthew Ashman of Adam and the Ants, Winer set about making her own tracks, drawing on the hip-hop she absorbed in New York and the dancehall she heard on All Saints Road in London, setting her own lancing, precise words atop it all. “The beat has to be right — or just the right amount of wrong — to be interesting,” Winer said. “Don’t have a problem with the words. Got a million of them.”“The beat has to be right — or just the right amount of wrong — to be interesting,” Winer said. Jean-Baptiste MondinoThe new collection emphasizes how effectively Winer mashed up genres and approaches: the slow trip-hop of the era, breakbeats, the New Orleans’ funk band the Meters, samples of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and the words of the poet Charles Bernstein. “Tree” samples a jaunty Irish jig, chopped and layered so it buzzes like an Indian drone. Winer’s delivery — drawled yet quick, with a smoker’s rasp and acerbic tone — was nothing like the fast-talking slam poets of the era, instead hewing closer to the dry delivery of her mentor, Burroughs.Winer often lifted passages from other writers, quoted other songs and applied her own dreamlike logic to it all, making something at once eloquent, blunt and cryptic. The monologue at the heart of “N 1 Ear,” for example, draws on a famous Gil Scott-Heron line and a women’s liberation broadsheet she found in London, ending on a powerful statement all her own: “I didn’t hit you, baby/When I hit you, you’ll feel it.”Jah Wobble, who played on the songs destined for “Witch,” said it was clear the music wasn’t geared for the masses. “It was obviously more an art record than a commercial type release,” he said. “Once I finished the session, that was the last I heard about it. I assumed it was shelved.”Winer kept making music in the years after “Witch,” working with the trumpeter Jon Hassell, the early sampler adopter Holger Hiller and another model turned musician, Grace Jones, before relocating to rural France and focusing on raising her five daughters. Over the years, a new generation slowly came to her music.“It was at once familiar and completely new to me, a rarity to find,” the electronic producer Maxwell Sterling, who recently worked with Winer on a track for his latest album and an upcoming Tim Buckley cover, wrote in an email. “Each of her words hang in the air and react to rhythmic and harmonic information within the music, which never ceases to move me.”Recently, Winer has collaborated with a new generation of producers, her low growl of a voice deepened and weathered with time. “I like doing vocals on other people’s tracks,” she said. “They’re like puzzles.”Asked how to describe her writing style later via email, Winer wrote back: “I don’t see myself having to describe it.” She added, “It carries information that we don’t exactly have words for.” More

Spurned by institutions in America, artists were sometimes given more opportunities across the Atlantic.In early September 1945, amid the rubble of a bombed-out Berlin, the Afro-Caribbean conductor Rudolph Dunbar stepped onto a podium and bowed to an enthusiastic audience of German citizens and American military personnel.The orchestra had gathered in an old movie theater functioning as a makeshift concert hall in the newly designated American zone of the city. First on the program was “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then came a fairly standard set of orchestral pieces, with Carl Maria von Weber’s “Oberon” Overture followed by Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony. But one piece stood out from the rest: William Grant Still’s “Afro-American Symphony.” When it premiered in 1931 in Rochester, N.Y., it was the first symphony by a Black American to be performed by a major orchestra.Still’s symphony received a robust round of performances in the United States in the 1930s. That decade was a watershed for Black composers like him, who finally managed to convince powerful American ensembles to perform their music. The “Afro-American Symphony” was quickly followed by Florence Price’s Symphony in E Minor, in 1933, and William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony,” in 1934. These works appeared frequently on concert programs in America at the time — and then disappeared.Still’s symphony received a robust round of performances in the United States in the 1930s.The Vicksburg Post/Associated PressIt was Dunbar, a clarinetist who had studied at the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School), who brought back Still’s music. In New York, the two had struck up a friendship before Dunbar set off in 1924 for Europe, where he studied and performed for over a decade. A student of renowned musicians like the conductor Felix Weingartner and the clarinetist Louis Cahuzac, he was steeped in the world of European art music.But he was also a committed Black activist. Running in the same circles as Black Marxists and Pan-Africanists like George Padmore, Dunbar had long made plain his loathing of white supremacy, whether in the form of Nazism or British imperialism. In fact, he’d already performed Still’s “Afro-American Symphony” for its European debut a few years earlier, on a concert with the London Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall to raise funds for Black soldiers fighting the Nazis.Dunbar was invited to perform in Berlin by Leo Borchard, whom the victorious Allies had appointed the Philharmonic’s conductor, and was also an anti-Nazi dissident and resistance fighter who aided German Jews fleeing the Third Reich. The message of Dunbar’s debut could not be clearer: Classical music could not be divorced from a global fight against racism.In the 1980s, the pianist Althea Waites brought the music of Florence Price (shown here) to German audiences — who eagerly applauded.University of Arkansas Libraries Special CollectionsThe work of racial justice in the arts has always been a global effort. Europe’s role in this fight, however, deserves closer inspection. Spurned by the barriers white-dominated institutions placed on them in the United States, Black American composers and musicians have long perpetuated the idea that European audiences were more welcoming. Writing to The New York Age newspaper while studying abroad in London in 1908, the Black American composer Clarence Cameron White said as much: “On every side you find the European musician and music-lover as well realizes that music is too broad and too universal to be circumscribed by the complexion of the skin or texture of the hair.”There is some truth to White’s claim. Some of the earliest performances of William Grant Still’s music had taken place in Paris. At the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in February 1933, the Pasdeloup Orchestra performed his symphonic poem “Africa,” led by the Austrian conductor Richard Lert, who later fled to the United States after the rise of the Nazis. Safely exiled in Los Angeles, in 1944, Lert invited Black American bass Kenneth Spencer to join him in a performance of Nathaniel Dett’s oratorio “The Ordering of Moses,” another work by a Black composer that would soon disappear for decades.In June, one of the largest festivals outside the United States to celebrate the music of Black composers took place in Hamburg, Germany. Daniel Dittus/ElbphilharmonieIn Torino, Italy, in 1952, the Black American conductor Dean Dixon introduced the music of Ulysses Kay — who was residing at the American Academy in Rome as a winner of the prestigious Rome Prize — to Italian audiences. “Once you secure the allied interest of Europeans according to the highest standards available, you will be heard,” Dixon said.Later, during the Cold War, Kay toured Soviet Russia on behalf of the State Department. In the 1980s, the pianist Althea Waites brought the music of Florence Price to German audiences — who eagerly applauded. “There they listen to my music instead of looking at me,” Waites said. In recent years, composers such as Tania León and George Lewis have also received premieres in Europe.In June, one of the largest festivals outside the United States to celebrate the music of Black composers took place in Hamburg, Germany. Initiated and led by the Hampsong Foundation and the performer and scholar Louise Toppin, the three-day festival at the Elbphilharmonie showcased an array of contemporary pieces and historical works. (Full disclosure: I wrote program notes for the festival and supervised the translations for it.)“The whole experience ended up being a real celebration of Black excellence, but on a continent that I have called home for the past eight years,” said the composer Anthony R. Green, an American based in the Netherlands, whose pieces “Three Quotes from Shakespeare” and “Sojourner Truth” appeared in the festival.William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” was played at the festival.via W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst LibrariesStaging the festival was no easy feat. It involved translating dozens of Black American art songs from English into German. Moreover, historical negligence shaped what scores and parts the orchestra and singers could find. “This music was forgotten about,” the conductor Roderick Cox said of William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony.” “It was neglected; you couldn’t get access to this music through the publishers; the parts were in shambles.”Indeed, Dawson’s symphony — once heralded as a brilliant success — had been dormant in the United States for decades. Perhaps unsurprising, the only recent recording of it was made in Vienna.But praising Europe for offering a platform for the music of Black American composers omits an important part of the story. White European support of and advocacy for Black American musicians has often come at the expense of their own Black populations. As many Black European intellectuals and activists have pointed out, Europeans know the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin, but do they know those of Oury Jalloh, Stephen Lawrence, and Jerry Masslo?Prestigious music institutes such as Darmstadt, in Germany, have rarely invited Black composers to join their international communities, or given Germany-based Black composers such as Robert Owens and Benjamin Patterson their due. In the city of Hamburg, which has a Black population dating back to the 19th century and was the birthplace of Marie Nejar, an Afro-German woman who survived the Nazis performing as a child actress, the performers and audience at the Elbphilharmonie’s music festival this summer were almost entirely white.Europe has been lax about promoting its own historical Black composers and musicians, such as George Bridgetower, Amanda Aldridge, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Avril Coleridge-Taylor. Many recent high-profile performances of Black European performers and composers can be attributed to the Chineke Orchestra in England — Europe’s first ensemble to have a majority of musicians of color — rather than to white European musical institutions. Other Black European composers, such as Werner Jaegerhuber, a Haitian-German composer who lived in Germany from 1915 until he was forced to flee the Nazis in 1937, have yet to receive significant European attention.The recognition of Black composers on any stage puts pressure on institutions to contend with their racist pasts and to imagine a better future. Rudolph Dunbar’s performance of Still’s “Afro-American Symphony” and Roderick Cox’s of Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony,” nearly a century apart, suggest that efforts to advance racial justice go hand in hand with a commitment to embracing music’s power. Performing the music of Black composers is not simply or only an opportunity to correct historical wrongs. Nor should it be considered the equivalent to eating your proverbial broccoli. Rather, it is an invitation to dine on the most exquisite meals. To fight for the music of Black composers is to fight for a better world. More

Hear tracks by SZA, Fantastic Negrito, Mary Lattimore and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.John Coltrane, ‘A Love Supreme, Pt. IV — Psalm (Live in Seattle)’When John Coltrane recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” in late 1964, he was demanding an escape from the confines of modern jazz. He was improvising on the level of sound, as much as notes, and he’d already started bringing in new, more freewheeling collaborators to join his quartet. Partly because of that shift, and partly because of how intimate the piece felt to him, he barely played “A Love Supreme” live. But this week, Impulse! Records revealed the existence a 56-year-old tape of him performing the suite in Seattle, in fall 1965, with an expanded version of the quartet. It’s the only known recording of Coltrane playing it for a club audience, and it will be out as a full album on Oct. 8. “Psalm,” the suite’s serene finale and the only publicly released track so far, is the most personal part: Coltrane had set “Psalm’s” melody to the cadence of a praise poem he wrote, and in Seattle he played it without either of the two other saxophonists in that evening’s band. More than an hour in, with the energy of the set suffusing the stage, he turns pieces of the melody into little incantations, coaxing a deep-bellied cry from his horn. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSZA, ‘Nightbird’SZA released a trio of intimate songs on SoundCloud this week, perhaps as a place holder before her next album. On “Nightbird,” the mood is toxic and the singing is limber. SZA has a way of frankly and unflashily relating profoundly complex emotional experiences, building on the melodic structures of 1990s R&B, but also adding some of the sonic distance that’s been built into the genre over the last decade. “Nightbird,” both offhand and devastating, is among her best. JON CARAMANICAFantastic Negrito featuring Miko Marks, ‘Rolling Through California’“Rolling Through California” has a twangy, country-soul groove that harks back to the late-1960s San Francisco of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, all affable and gleaming. But Fantastic Negrito, with Miko Marks harmonizing above his bluesy cackle, sings about how the old California dream has given way to wildfires and pandemic; the foot-stomping chorus goes, “Can you hear the sound/It’s burning to the ground.” JON PARELESThe Felice Brothers, ‘To-Do List’This “To-Do List” starts with everyday chores — “Go to the bank and deposit checks” — but escalates quickly, casually and magnificently to greater goals: “Defy all natural laws,” “Proclaim a lasting peace,” “Discover a miracle drug.” True to the band’s upstate New York location, the Felice Brothers hark back to the Band, with hand-played instruments and a chugging beat; it’s romping honky-tonk existentialism. PARELESRandy Travis, ‘Ain’t No Use’Listen to the mechanical beat of the drums and the ultraprecise mesh of the twin guitars in “Ain’t No Use,” an unrequited love song complaining, “It ain’t no use to talk to you about love.” It’s a track that was shelved from Randy Travis’s 1986 album “Storms of Life,” and even with Travis’s conversational vocal, it’s also a harbinger of the computerized country to come. PARELESDeerhoof, ‘Plant Thief’“Someone’s cooking with my spices!” Satomi Matsuzaki complains in “Plant Thief”: just one reason for the song’s pummeling drums and bass and guitar that wrangle in stereo with staggered, constantly shifting jabs. The song starts out frenetic and builds from there, assembling and discarding dissonant patterns, switching meters and coming to a fiercely open-ended conclusion: “They never weren’t!” she sings. PARELESTerence Blanchard, ‘Diana’No influence looms larger over the Grammy-winning pen of Terence Blanchard — an esteemed jazz trumpeter known for his Spike Lee film scores — than the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, with his terse yet seemingly horizon-less compositions. On “Absence,” a new album paying homage to Shorter, the trumpeter visits with a few rarely covered Shorter gems. Blanchard’s version of the cloud-dwelling ballad “Diana” opens with the strings of the Turtle Island Quartet (featured throughout “Absence”), entering one by one; eventually his quintet, the E-Collective, takes over. Swaddled in synthesizers and trumpet effects, avoiding a firm tempo, Blanchard savors each unorthodox harmonic payoff, feeling no need to take a solo. RUSSONELLOSelena Gomez and Camilo, ‘999’In “999,” Selena Gomez vies with Camilo for who can whisper-sing more quietly. Their voices, harmonizing and dialoguing, share a duet about infatuation, distance and anticipation: “I don’t have photos with you, but I have a space on the wall.” It’s set to a skulking bass line and percussion that wouldn’t wake the neighbors, enjoying the tease, the buildup and a nearly vanished 21st-century experience: privacy. PARELESIcewear Vezzo featuring Lil Baby, ‘Know The Difference’For Lil Baby, it’s new day, new flow on this collaboration with the Detroit favorite Icewear Vezzo. Rapping first, Lil Baby leans in on terse bars, tightening his flow until it’s taut: “I wasn’t ’posed to make it out/I stay by the governor house/I done found another route.” When Icewear Vezzo arrives, the fog lifts ever so slightly — his subject matter is the same, but his flow dances and shimmies. CARAMANICA​​Umu Obiligbo, ‘Zambololo’A duo of brothers from Nigeria, Umu Obiligbo shares close harmonies over their band’s dizzying six-beat, two-chord electroacoustic groove — Nigerian highlife — with constantly evolving tandem guitars and choral harmonies teasing and extending each other. Most of the lyrics are in the Nigerian language Igbo, but the glimpses of English are sharp: “What a man can do, a woman can do it better.” PARELESEsperanza Spalding: ‘Formwela 10’The bassist, singer and songwriter Esperanza Spalding convened not just musicians but also experts — in neuroscience and psychology, among other fields — as she wrote the therapeutic-minded songs for her album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” due Sept. 24. That that didn’t impair the virtuosic playfulness of her music. “Formwela 10” is an apology for mistreating a lover: “I put you through a living hell/This is a way to make the damages clear so I won’t do another that way”; it’s also a leaping, twisting, syncopated melody, a chromatic ramble, and a meter-shifting arrangement that dissolves and realigns around her as she makes peace with her regrets. PARELESMary Lattimore, ‘We Wave From Our Boats’Mary Lattimore’s music holds potent simplicity. The delicate plucks of a harp and the hum of a synth are all she employs on “We Wave from Our Boats,” a four-minute meditation with an arrangement that reflects the aquatic quality of its title: ripples of plucked strings stream over each other, like waves lapping on the shore. But there is also a kind of congenial intimacy to the song. Underneath its marine textures is the glow of closeness: maybe an after-dinner drink shared among friends, a tender embrace, a laugh that fills the belly with warmth. ISABELIA HERRERANite Jewel, ‘Anymore’There are breakup songs that express the profound heartache of a relationship’s end. And then there are songs that probe at the trickier feelings of its denouement, like Nite Jewel’s “Anymore,” from her new album, “No Sun.” Its bright synths and divine harmonies belie the song’s true content: “I can’t describe anything that I want,” sings the producer and vocalist Ramona Gonzalez. “I can’t rely on my desire anymore.” This is a song about the uncertainty and estrangement of a separation: the feeling of no longer recognizing yourself, of no longer trusting your own desires to find a way forward. HERRERA More