Music

Ian Whitcomb, who had a rock ’n’ roll hit in 1965 with “You Turn Me On” before becoming a celebrated historian and performer of forms of popular music that peaked decades before rock, died on April 19 in Pasadena, Calif. He was 78.His wife, Regina Whitcomb, said the cause was complications of a stroke he had in 2012 that had left him in declining health.From the time he was a boy in Britain, Mr. Whitcomb was deeply enamored of ragtime and other older styles of music. After playing blues, jazz and skiffle music, he found widespread (if short-lived) fame with “You Turn Me On,” released while he was still a college student.“I was ready to contribute to American popular culture: some finely wrought yet unpretentious work that might appeal to the masses,” Mr. Whitcomb wrote in “Rock Odyssey: A Chronicle of the Sixties” (1983), a memoir laced with history. “And what happened? The American people elevated me to fame with a trifle, a piece of piffle knocked off in a fit of absence of mind.”“You Turn Me On,” an up-tempo number sung in a falsetto voice, complete with panting just risqué enough to appeal to teenagers and scandalize their parents, peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.On the strength of that single’s success, Mr. Whitcomb traveled to the United States and France, appeared on television shows like “American Bandstand,” and was billed alongside the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Kinks and Sonny & Cher. But, as he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle did not suit him.“My heart wasn’t in rock ’n’ roll. It wasn’t my line,” he said. “I didn’t like the drug scene and the attitude. … I wanted to write books and do theatrical things.”So Mr. Whitcomb returned to other musical idioms. His “N-E-R-V-O-U-S!,” a tongue-in-cheek, stuttering blues song, peaked at No. 59; he then recorded a version of “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night?,” a song popularized in 1916 by Al Jolson.Mr. Whitcomb went on to record modern versions of old tunes like Irving Berlin’s “Settle Down in a One-Horse Town,” as well as original material with a similar sound. He also hosted long-running radio shows devoted to dawn-of-the-20th-century music on Los Angeles radio stations and later on satellite radio.He wrote about music and culture for newspapers and magazines. He also wrote two memoirs, “Resident Alien: The Hilarious Adventures of a Public School Man in California” (1990) and “Rock Odyssey,” which Stephen Holden called “the best-written personal chronicle we have of the period” in The New York Times Book Review.Mr. Whitcomb wrote several insightful histories of popular music as well, including “Irving Berlin & Ragtime America” (1987) and “After the Ball: Pop Music From Rag to Rock,” published in 1972 in Britain and a year later in the United States, as well as a novel, “Lotusland: A Story of Southern California” (1979), which he adapted into a jazz and ragtime musical in 1992.Mr. Whitcomb disputed the criticism that performing old-fashioned music was nothing more than a history lesson.“Nobody says to a blues musician, ‘Why are you playing this old style?’” he told The Los Angeles Times that year. “It’s accepted as a legitimate form of music.”Ian Timothy Whitcomb was born on July 10, 1941, in Woking, England, to Patrick and Eilene (Burningham) Whitcomb. His mother was a homemaker and his father served in the Royal Air Force before starting a building materials business.Ian grew up in London and began performing old-fashioned songs a cappella as a boarding school student. His musical experimentation continued at Bryanston School in Dorset and then at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied history.He started recording music in Ireland and released “This Sporting Life” and other singles before “You Turn Me On,” which he first recorded during an impromptu jam at the end of a session with his band, Bluesville.After his flirtation with rock stardom and his graduation from Trinity, Mr. Whitcomb settled in Southern California and released recordings of older forms of music, often accompanying himself on the ukulele or accordion.He produced an album by the 1930s movie star Mae West, “Great Balls of Fire” (1972), a collection of rock classics and new songs. He also recorded “Titanic: Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage” (1997), a collection of songs said to have been played aboard that ship. The album won a Grammy Award for packaging; Mr. Whitcomb’s liner notes were also nominated.In 1989 Mr. Whitcomb married Regina Enzer, with whom he lived in Altadena, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a brother, Robin, and a sister, Suzanne Tyler. He died at a care facility in Pasadena.In the introduction to his book “After the Ball” Mr. Whitcomb, referring to himself in the third person, wrote that he had mused about what attracted him to history while riding on a rowdy tour bus during his brief bout of stardom:“He remembered that once the college postman had asked him: ‘What d’ye want to study history for? It’s all happened and there’s nothing ye can do about it.’ He had puzzled over this for years, but now he realized that there was something he could do about it: He could write it himself and in so doing he could find his place in the scheme!” More

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Ariana Grande featuring Justin Bieber, ‘Stuck With U’[embedded content]Riskless and beautiful, the first collaboration between Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber is a fluttering prom-core ballad about the resilience of love, even when things get a little messy. Grande and Bieber are radically different singers, but they find common ground here, Bieber’s percussive patterns shimmying in and around Grande’s mountainous howls. For a moment in which every choice feels tenuous, this song exudes a slow, legible certitude. (Proceeds benefit the First Responders Children’s Foundation.) JON CARAMANICABob Dylan, ‘False Prophet’The songs Bob Dylan has been surprise-releasing every few weeks are starting to add up. He has tied “False Prophet,” the latest one, to the announcement of an album due in June: “Rough and Rowdy Ways.” As in his April 16 song, “I Contain Multitudes,” his band sets up a vamp and Dylan talk-sings his way through a proud self-assessment that mixes biblical, mystical and literary allusions with bits of rock ’n’ roll lore. He rasps, “I ain’t no false prophet, I just know what I know/I go where only the lonely can go.” This time, the vamp is a slouchy blues shuffle and the lyrics are pointed. Dylan is a longtime expert in toggling between the apocalyptic and the individual: “I searched the world over for the Holy Grail/I sing songs of love, I sing songs of betrayal.” What’s startling is that after decades of shrugging off that specific role, he’s willing to play the prophet. JON PARELESIan Isiah, ‘N.U.T.S’The self-love strut “N.U.T.S” is a pitch-perfect revisiting of the issues-soul of the 1970s. Isiah has a lithe, poignant, carefully sweet voice, and he sings about how important it is to allow others to see the real you over a Chromeo production full of prideful strings, weepy sax and warm-bath keys. CARAMANICAPeter Manos, ‘Tennessee’Peter Manos is from Texas, but “Tennessee” is no country song. It’s an electronic lament, Auto-Tuned and steeped in James Blake and Frank Ocean; it also hints at the Beatles’ chromatic chord progressions. The singer is bereft that “You don’t answer my calls,” and even as programmed arpeggios swell to support him, he’s left uncomprehending and alone, pure male angst: “How could I understand?” he wonders. PARELESKeith Jarrett, ‘Answer Me’Don’t expect a livestream concert from Keith Jarrett any time soon. If this pre-eminent pianist were of that mind, he’d probably have done one long ago. As Nate Chinen wrote in 2013, “It’s hard to think of a major jazz figure who has been as cloistered as Mr. Jarrett, while remaining a vital force.” He hardly gives interviews and lives on a sprawling property in northwest New Jersey, touring only occasionally. His albums in recent years have consisted of archival recordings from years-old concerts. On the occasion of Jarrett’s 75th birthday on Friday, ECM Records has released a single track from a 2016 performance in Budapest. “Answer Me” originated as a midcentury German pop song before becoming a hit for Nat King Cole. Unlike the version from last year’s live full-length, “Munich 2016,” Jarrett starts this performance with the bridge, a dolorous minor passage that in his hands sounds like lieder; before long he’s fallen into the gentle, ribboning symmetry of the main melody, from which he hardly strays. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBlake Mills, ‘Summer All Over’Blake Mills has been a guitarist and producer for musicians as diverse as John Legend, Fiona Apple and Alabama Shakes. His new album, “Mutable Set,” is deliberately and startlingly restrained, though far from simple. “Summer All Over” has a waltzing pulse and a vocal just above a whisper; most of its backup is chords played on a creaky piano, but they are quietly bolstered by orchestral instruments. He’s sings about global warming with cleareyed, pragmatic details: “Looking for water, looking for shade/And there’s only sunblock and beer.” PARELESRhiannon Giddens featuring Sxip Shirey, ‘Just the Two of Us’Rhiannon Giddens commemorates Bill Withers, who died in April, with a fondly idiosyncratic version of “Just the Two of Us,” backed by the unlikely combination of harmonica, drums and the hoot of low brass (sousaphone and trombone). She hints at New Orleans, reggae and jazzy scat-singing as she proclaims one-on-one affection. PARELESThe Weeknd, ‘I’m a Virgin’The Weeknd co-wrote the most recent episode of “American Dad,” and there’s a plotline that involves him confessing a dark secret to a fan trying to seduce him. He does so in song: “I’m a Virgin” functions well as both songcraft and self-parody. His voice is that familiar shrill exhale, and it’s chilling to hear it applied to such unlikely confessions: “Underneath the lies and the big talk, I’ve been waiting for a wife/Never watched porn, never did drugs, ’cause I’m terrified.” CARAMANICAJamie xx, ‘I Don’t Know’The producer Jamie xx whips up phantom drumlines, laced with sirens and warped vocals, working through beats that shift and accelerate but still haven’t peak before the track plays out. PARELESFolie, ‘Cortisol’Nerves not jangled enough lately? Try Folie, which shares the razor-wired bubble gum aesthetic of last year’s blitz-pop sensation, 100 gecs. “Cortisol” is full of concise, catchy little pop devices, from its bits of singsong melody to the thumping beat that arrives about midway through. But every one of those devices is tweaked to maximize irritation: pitched up, distorted, perforated with silences or followed by chemtrails of dissonance. And every so often the whole thing comes unsprung, only to regroup and leap ahead again. It’s not aggressive; it’s just having noisy fun. PARELESAaron Parks, ‘Solace’What Aaron Parks has in common with Keith Jarrett — in addition to onetime status as a child prodigy, and a clarion touch at the piano — is his sometimes-dangerous belief in the primacy of precision. “Solace” starts with 70 seconds of quizzical, disarming solo piano, the occasional discolored harmony catching your ear. Then the members of his band Little Big arrive, and the music fastens down tightly around the shared melody. The querying feeling is basically gone: In its stead is a polished cohesion, the reassurance of something executed crisply and masterfully, almost without encumbrance. RUSSONELLO More

“Second chances, they don’t ever matter, people never change,” Hayley Williams sang, decisively, at the wizened age of 18. Since “Misery Business” propelled her power-emo band Paramore to stardom, the ever-evolving singer and songwriter has proved that maxim wrong over and over again. Case in point: Though it remains a much-requested fan favorite, the band no longer performs the song live. As Williams wrote on her Tumblr five years ago, “I haven’t related to it in a very long time.”The decision by Williams, now 31, to release the searing, knotty “Petals for Armor” — her first album under her own name — also represents a change, a kind of long-deferred second chance. When she was a teen vocal powerhouse and major labels wanted to mold her into the next Avril Lavigne, Williams insisted that she and her band were a package deal. After her parents divorced, she’d longed to be a part of something; her band was more than a collection of musicians.But “Cinnamon,” a skittering single off “Petals for Armor,” is an attempt to make peace — and maybe even have some fun — with Williams’s recurring fears of isolation and loneliness. She has called the song an ode to her current home, the first she’s ever lived in alone. (Between “Cinnamon” and Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” female artists making challenging but therapeutic music that reimagines domestic space as a place of creative experimentation are certainly having a moment!) The song’s chorus is a wordless primal yowl, the kind of noise you’d make only when home alone. As she sings with a convincing bravura, “I’m not lonely, baby — I am free.”[embedded content]“Petals for Armor” comes from a period of intense questioning, when Williams’s short marriage to her longtime partner Chad Gilbert was ending, and she found herself wondering if her solo itch would jeopardize the future of Paramore. (“I came close to stifling my creative process because I didn’t want to live up to those expectations of what it looks like when a female leaves a band and makes a project on her own,” Williams — a descendant of ’90s alt-rock who’s certainly seen No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” video — said recently.)In therapy and bouts of free-writing, Williams dug deep and unearthed demons. And so, like the striking music videos accompanying the record, “Petals for Armor” conjures the atmosphere of a psychological horror movie in which the call is coming from inside the house. In the video for “Simmer,” Williams sprints through a sunless forest; the monster pursuing her is an amorphous red light that the song suggests is her long-repressed “rage.”“Simmer” is the operative word here. Though Paramore’s most beloved songs feature firework choruses that showcase the pyrotechnic heights of Williams’s voice, many of the songs on “Petals for Armor” snake instead, like a long, slow-burning fuse. Some of them eventually provide the relief of catharsis — as in the Björk-like cries that enliven “Sudden Desire” — while others, among them “Leave It Alone” and “My Friend,” get stuck in droning, monochrome loops that evoke late-period Radiohead.Williams divided the 15-song “Petals for Armor” into three EPs that she has released in installments. Each has its own mood and thematic focus: The brooding, hypnotic Part I is focused on past trauma; the slightly more propulsive Part II confronts the work of self-care and rebuilding (she released a playful “workout video” set to the buoyant “Over Yet”); and the sultry, R&B-tinged Part III embraces the promise of a new, healthier romantic relationship.The lyrics are often vivid and sometimes startlingly candid: “I got what I deserved,” she sings on the bouncy “Dead Horse,” “I was the other woman first.” Elsewhere, on the mournful “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris,” which features backing vocals from the indie all-stars boygenius, Williams conjures poignant imagery:Think of all the wilted womenWho crane their necks to reach a windowRipping all their petals off just ’cause“He loves me now, he loves me not.”As a solo artist, Williams is emboldened to both embrace and interrogate femininity as never before, and to admit to herself that, even if the male-dominated punk scene caused her to internalize some sexism and write some sanctimonious lyrics in the past, it’s not too late to forgive herself, or to change.“Dead Horse” begins with a caveat, presumably for the “Petals” producer and Paramore member Taylor York: “It took me three days to send you this, but uh, sorry, I was in a depression, but I’m trying to come out of it now.” On one hand this is an admirable peek into the ways mental health can affect the creative process. But tacked onto the beginning of one of her album’s most accessible songs, it feels like a sign of ambivalence toward, even a retreat from, the record’s most straightforwardly poppy moments. Many of these songs sparkle with insight and the daring of a shape-shifting vocalist, but a handful assume too readily that maturity and seriousness are only achieved through dour restraint.Still, as she and her band proved on Paramore’s excellent 2017 record “After Laughter,” Williams was already a pro at packing complex emotions and perceptive wisdom into bright, technicolor pop-rock songs. Tracks like “Hard Times” and “Forgiveness” were no less sophisticated for inviting full-throated singalongs.By the end of “Petals for Armor,” she seems to have arrived at a similar conclusion. “Sugar on the Rim” expands the record’s palette with a fun, new-wave sheen and a hint of a churning techno beat. Even better is the crystalline groove of “Pure Love,” which ties its succinct self-knowledge to an absolute rocket-ship of a chorus: “If I want your love, got to open up.” Sounds like she’s giving herself a second chance.Hayley Williams“Petals for Armor”(Atlantic) More