Music

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Ellis Marsalis, a pianist and educator who became the guiding force behind a late-20th-century resurgence in jazz while putting four musician sons on a path to prominent careers, died on Wednesday in New Orleans. He was 85.The cause was complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, his son Branford said in a statement.Mr. Marsalis spent decades as a working musician and teacher in New Orleans before his eldest sons, Wynton and Branford, gained national fame in the early 1980s embodying a fresh-faced revival of traditional jazz.Mr. Marsalis’s star rose along with theirs, and he, too, became a household name.“Ellis Marsalis was a legend,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night. “He was the prototype of what we mean when we talk about New Orleans jazz.”That was not always so. Mr. Marsalis’s devotion to midcentury bebop and its offshoots had long made him something of an outsider in a city with an abiding loyalty to its early-jazz roots. Still, he secured the respect of fellow musicians thanks to his unshakable talents as a pianist and composer, and his supportive but rigorous manner as an educator.Once they reached the national stage, the Marsalises’ advocacy of straight-ahead jazz made them renegades of a different sort. Wynton, a trumpeter, boldly espoused his father’s devotion to heroes like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and he issued public broadsides against the slicker jazz-rock fusion that had largely displaced acoustic jazz during the late 1960s and ’70s.Photogenic, erudite and fabulously talented, Mr. Marsalis’s children and many other young jazz musicians he had taught — including Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison Jr., Harry Connick Jr. and Nicholas Payton — became the leaders in a burgeoning traditionalist movement, loosely referred to as the Young Lions.“My dad was a giant of a musician and teacher, but an even greater father,” Branford Marsalis said in a statement. “He poured everything he had into making us the best of what we could be.” More

This obituary is part of a series about people who died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Adam Schlesinger, an acclaimed singer-songwriter for the bands Fountains of Wayne and Ivy who had an award-winning second career writing songs for film, theater and television, died on Wednesday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 52.The cause was complications of the coronavirus, his family said.In Fountains of Wayne, which was started in 1995, Mr. Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood perfected a novelistic form of hummable pop-rock in a style derived from the Kinks and from 1970s groups like Big Star and the Cars.They chose northern New Jersey and boroughs outside Manhattan as thematic territory, chronicling the lives of suburban mall shoppers, Generation X slackers and down-market cover bands in songs like “Hackensack” and “Red Dragon Tattoo.”Adored by critics, Fountains of Wayne — in which Mr. Schlesinger played bass and Mr. Collingwood played guitar and sang lead vocals — became a cult favorite but had modest record sales. Its most famous moment came in 2003 with “Stacy’s Mom,” a winking novelty track about a teenage boy infatuated with a friend’s mother. With a racy video featuring the supermodel Rachel Hunter, the song made it to No. 21 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.Almost from the start of his career, Mr. Schlesinger found success in other mediums. He wrote the Beatlesesque theme song to “That Thing You Do!,” a 1996 film directed by Tom Hanks about an also-ran 1960s rock band; like the best Fountains of Wayne songs, “That Thing You Do!” had an instantly catchy melody, a twisting chord progression and plenty of wordplay.The movie brought Mr. Schlesinger nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. He also won three Emmys, including one last year for his songs on the 2010s TV show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which often threaded campy, Broadway-style numbers into its plot.As a journeyman songwriter, he also wrote jingles for the Maryland State Lottery and Gillette.Mr. Schlesinger received two Grammy nominations with Fountains of Wayne, but his sole trophy was for his work with David Javerbaum — another frequent collaborator — on Stephen Colbert’s “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!,” which took best comedy album in 2010.In the theater, Mr. Schlesinger worked with Mr. Javerbaum to write songs for the 2008 Broadway musical “Cry-Baby,” based on John Waters’s 1990 film of the same title. That earned them a Tony nomination in 2008, and Mr. Schlesinger and Mr. Javerbaum worked together again in 2015 on the play “An Act of God.”Adam Lyons Schlesinger was born in Manhattan on Oct. 31, 1967, to Bobbi and Stephen Schlesinger, and grew up in Montclair, N.J. He studied philosophy at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he met Mr. Collingwood.After graduation, Mr. Schlesinger went to New York, where he founded the group Ivy with Andy Chase and Dominique Durand, while Mr. Collingwood moved to Boston. The two men later reconnected in New York and founded Fountains of Wayne, writing most of the songs for their first album in a West Village bar.The band was signed by Atlantic Records and released its first album, “Fountains of Wayne,” in 1996. With jagged guitars and sneering vocals on songs like “Radiation Vibe,” the band fit the mold of post-grunge alternative rock.But Mr. Schlesinger and Mr. Collingwood stood out with witty and sharp-eyed lyrics. Melody and location were central elements to their music, a lesson they derived from Ray Davies of the Kinks, as Mr. Schlesinger told The New York Times in an interview in 1999 for the band’s second album, “Utopia Parkway,” named after a road in Queens.“When we were teenagers, we liked listening to Kinks records because we’d never been to England, and we got a sense of what it was like to live there,” he said.With minimal sales, though, the band was dropped from Atlantic. It released its next album, “Welcome Interstate Managers,” in 2003 on the small label S-Curve. That album found some success with “Stacy’s Mom” and reached No. 3 on The Village Voice’s critics’ poll for that year.Fountains of Wayne released two more studio albums, “Traffic and Weather” (2007) and “Sky Full of Holes” (2011), but had been on hiatus since.In recent years, Mr. Schlesinger had devoted himself to “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and to the theater world. Two of his Emmy wins were for songs he wrote with Mr. Javerbaum that were performed during Tony Awards telecasts: “It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore,” which won in 2012, and “If I Had Time,” in 2013.More recently, Mr. Schlesinger had been collaborating with Sarah Silverman on a stage adaptation of her memoir, “The Bedwetter,” which was scheduled to begin performances Off Broadway this month at the Atlantic Theater Company, but was delayed by the pandemic; he wrote the music, and co-wrote the lyrics with Ms. Silverman. And he had begun working with Rachel Bloom of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” to write songs for a musical adaptation of the TV show “The Nanny,” which is in development and aimed at Broadway.Mr. Schlesinger is survived by his parents; two daughters, Sadie and Claire Schlesinger; a sister, Laurie Rose; and his partner, Alexis Morley. His marriage to Katherine Michel ended in divorce.Mr. Schlesinger’s mother, a former public relations executive, has sometimes been credited with suggesting the name Fountains of Wayne, but in an interview on Wednesday, she refuted that.Her son had been playing music and writing songs from the time he was a child, she said, and from a young age had an eye on a garish, only-in-New Jersey lawn ornament shop in Wayne, N.J.“Every time we drove past it,” Ms. Schlesinger said, “Adam would say, ‘Fountains of Wayne. That would be a great band name.’”[embedded content] More

Pop music — what’s left of it anyway — is a hodgepodge of styles and moods. A landing place for any number of likely and unlikely approaches more than a big flashing-red target, the way it was two or four decades ago. Even the poppiest stars of the day tend to filter their ambition through reluctance, which leaves a clear path for the Weeknd, an unlikely preservationist of mega-pop’s grand ambitions. No current pop star is more invested in the idea of pop’s majesty, its iridescent gloom, its exultant relief.When the Weeknd began working with the hitmaker Max Martin, on the 2013 singles that would rocket him from cult leader to mainstream superstar, it took some balancing to maintain the fetid streak of misbehavior at his core while his music was becoming alarmingly shiny.But that balance is old hat now. “After Hours,” his rousing fourth studio album, is laden with sparkled trauma, kaleidoscopic emotional confusion, urgent and panting physical release paired with failed-state romantic dyspepsia. For the Weeknd, being broken is a kind of thrill, in a way that being thrilled never could be.[embedded content]On “After Hours” — which debuted this week at the top of the Billboard album chart — the songs are head fakes, cloaking their misery with exuberance. As ever, the Weeknd’s voice remains disarmingly pretty as he coos about flirtation and recrimination, his two main topics.For a while, earlier in his career, it was unclear if the Weeknd had a heart. But now, even when he’s leaning toward bloodletting — say, on the plaintive “Hardest to Love” — he sounds as icy as on songs like “Scared to Live,” in which he wounds someone, then callously sends them back out into the wild to fend for themselves. There is always lingering sleaze in his sentiment — he is forever the squire who turned his back, the one who makes a promise only because it’s so freeing to break it.Though his lyrics can be a little skeletal and raw, there is a loose through line here of becoming exasperated with California life. On “Escape From LA,” he lays out a taxonomy of a blurry type of foe: “L.A. girls all look the same, I can’t recognize/The same work done on they face, I don’t criticize.”Drugs, or the intimation of them, remain one of his lodestars. “I don’t wanna touch the sky no more/I just wanna feel the ground when I’m coming down,” he exhales with fatigue on “Until I Bleed Out,” the album’s syrupy final song. On “Snowchild,” he briefly dips back into the after-hours bravado that marked his earliest mixtapes: “Walking in the snow before I ever made my wrist freeze/I was blowing smoke, had me dizzy like Gillespie.” (Typically, when the Weeknd raps, it can veer to the clunky, but this is among his better efforts.)Image“After Hours” is the Weeknd’s fourth album.The Weeknd’s commitment to his bit can feel impersonal at times, especially when the amount of effects layered on his voice make him sound like he’s singing from just outside the studio walls, or from the deep beyond. It sounds like a voice that’s been inscribed into history, and is being resuscitated in order to rouse the masses.Generally, he does so by drawing inspiration from the ecstatic pop of the 1980s, particularly Michael Jackson, a clear vocal influence. But the most striking and unanticipated turns on “After Hours” come when he pivots without sacrificing his gleam: “Too Late” has a peppy 2-step garage beat, and a flicker of industrial clangor near the end; “Hardest to Love” is rollicking big-room drum ’n’ bass à la Roni Size.But the Weeknd also dabbles in abstraction, working with the electro-ambient miserablist Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Repeat After Me (Interlude).” This album is both blatant and curious all at once. (See also the empathetic dub-house remix of the title track by the Blaze, one of several remixes released as bonus tracks.)The rest of the album, though, doesn’t shy away from the Weeknd’s shimmery mid-80s luxuriance. The saxophone solo near the end of the satisfyingly electric “In Your Eyes” could be high-end Muzak (in the best way), and “Save Your Tears” has both tonal echoes of Depeche Mode’s melancholy and a nod to “Everything She Wants” by Wham!And then there’s “Blinding Lights,” currently the No. 1 song in the country, which could have been lifted from a found Jazzercise tape from 1986, though the chilly synths have a slightly sinister tinge. It says a lot about the durability of the Weeknd’s early noir, the full commitment to the louche aesthetic he embodied — see his cameo in “Uncut Gems,” which depends on it — that even the raging centrist popularity of “Blinding Lights” can’t disinter it.The song’s music video is appropriately traumatic, but on TikTok in recent days, the #blindinglightschallenge has been ubiquitous, among the most wholesome of all viral dances. Many of the most popular videos feature two sons dancing with their father: they are relentlessly doofy.But the videos are short, and the music used is just the song’s intro — you never hear the Weeknd sing. It’s another way for him to slip onto the tip of everybody’s tongue while stowing away his feelings in the shadows.The Weeknd“After Hours”(XO/Republic) More

“American Weekend,” the bracing first album the songwriter Katie Crutchfield released as Waxahatchee, was “a result of a snowstorm, a visceral stupor, and a personal breakthrough,” she wrote in the liner notes. Stranded for a week in her parents’ home near Alabama’s Waxahatchee Creek, she found out in winter 2011 what so many of us are learning right now: that self-isolation can lead to heightened emotions, antic spurts of creativity and relentless self-scrutiny.“I don’t care, I’ll embrace all of my vices,” Crutchfield wailed on “Grass Stain,” a muddy and urgent late-night confession. Seven years and three increasingly polished Waxahatchee records later, Crutchfield realized in summer 2018 that she was never going to drink herself happy. “It’s not a very dramatic story,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview. “I had gone back and forth a lot about my substance issues, and I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done with this forever.’” And so on her confident and accomplished fifth album, “Saint Cloud,” Crutchfield takes the same hard look in the mirror that she did nearly a decade ago, only this time without the murky filter of those vices.Though Crutchfield was raised on a steady diet of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, discovering punk’s sound and ethos cemented her as a musician. She and her twin sister, Allison, formed the pop-punk band the Ackleys while still in high school, and they later found a cult audience with their scrappy, lyrical D.I.Y. trio P.S. Eliot. Back then, the twins found plenty to bemoan about their hometown: Birmingham, Ala., was politically conservative and even its seemingly utopian underground music scene was woefully sexist, leading her to reject her Southern identity.Image“Saint Cloud” is Waxahatchee’s fifth studio album.On “Saint Cloud,” Crutchfield, now 31, embraces the homegrown twang she once rebelled against. (The album’s title, like the moody closing number, is a nod to her father’s Florida hometown.) “Saint Cloud” is a departure from the hoarse holler and blustery distortion of Waxahatchee’s previous record, “Out in the Storm” from 2017; instead it finds her adopting a cleaner sound. She sounds at ease with herself: The lead single “Can’t Do Much” has a gentle, breezy energy and guitar licks as delicately intricate as handkerchief embroidery. “I love you ’til the day I die,” she sings. “I guess it don’t matter why.”Many of Waxahatchee’s best-loved songs are odes to bruising breakups, bleary nights and the kind of wisdom that comes with the asking price of a “sharp hangover.” Now that she is sober and in a long-term relationship with the indie musician Kevin Morby, “Saint Cloud” plumbs different sources of tension and conflict, mostly within Crutchfield’s own mind. “I’m in a war with myself,” she sings on the stomping, stirring “War,” a song that deftly maps out the common ground shared by Lucinda Williams and Lana Del Rey.In her earlier songs, Crutchfield’s lyrics could sometimes come off as opaque (from “Brother Bryan” in 2013: “Our habits secrete to the sidewalk and street, our civic hell”). As she’s matured, though, she’s found a knack for simple, evocative lyrics and memorable imagery: eyes “roll around like dice on the felt,” someone’s “selling tomatoes at five bucks a bag.”The album’s final three songs make up its strongest stretch, beginning with the vivid Springsteenian storytelling of “Arkadelphia,” which finds Crutchfield pondering her possible fate had she not cleaned up her lifestyle: “If I burn like a light bulb, they’ll say, she wasn’t meant for that life.” Even more poignant is “Ruby Falls,” an empathic ballad about an old friend who did not survive his addiction. Crutchfield, the one who lived to tell his story, named the song after a passage in Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids.”Though she and her sister came up in a male-dominated scene that saw them as anomalies, Crutchfield has become something of a pioneer to a new generation of young women who make rock music and sing unapologetically about the imperfections of their lives. In a 2017 interview, Crutchfield said that younger bands’ frontwomen sometimes called her for advice. (“Fairy godmother,” Allison playfully teased.)With “Saint Cloud,” though, Crutchfield seems to be reporting back to them from yet another frontier. She’s come to realize that one can still write adventurously about a more balanced way of life. As she articulates on “Saint Cloud,” too, self-reflection is not a one-and-done activity to be checked off a to-do list. Like recovery, love and artistic growth, it’s a life’s work best doled out over the long haul.Waxahatchee“Saint Cloud”(Merge) More