Music

“Greetings, virus people!”The on-air patter was hardly what you would expect from a radio D.J. addressing his listeners during a pandemic last week. But Ken Freedman, the station manager and program director at Jersey City’s WFMU 91.1 and 91.9 FM — broadcasting to the greater New York City area, “Your station from the epicenter!” — sounded practically chipper.Like the rest of the country’s noncommercial, community radio programmers, Freedman has been forced into hastily improvising a response to the growing spread of Covid-19. Staffed largely by volunteer D.J.s taking time away from paying jobs as teachers, bartenders and everything in between, these scrappy local stations have had little in the way of either precedent or outside resources to fall back on. Operating independently of both National Public Radio’s networked affiliates, as well as the rigidly formatted music stations owned by corporate chains like iHeartMedia, they’ve been left to figure out the changed media landscape for themselves. Some have adopted a “keep calm and carry on” philosophy. Others have taken a decidedly different tack.Indeed, Freedman’s jarring salutation was only a warm-up. He soon segued into disturbing aural collages, no less lyrically foreboding songs from John Cale and Big Blood and tongue-in-cheek announcements (“Tomorrow in Bushwick, the Millennial Bodily Fluids Festival has been canceled!”). For three hours, it was anything but sonic comfort food.“That’s the nature of WFMU as a New Jersey institution,” Freedman explained over the phone last week. “We do have a real gallows sense of humor, an irreverence.” Which isn’t to say he hasn’t been taking the coronavirus seriously.After one D.J. with symptoms self-quarantined while others seemed too cavalier about the risks of infection, Freedman felt forced to create a makeshift lockdown. Of the station’s weekly rotation of 60 D.J.s, a self-described skeleton crew of nine, several of whom already live together (and all of whom are pictured on the station’s website as, yes, skeletons running the radio equipment), are now the only ones allowed inside WFMU’s studios, with no more than three ever in the building together. A few more are broadcasting from remote locations, others are pre-recording their shows at home and archival programming fills out the rest of the schedule.“This is the situation that so many broadcasters dream of!” Freedman said. “You have a global, captive audience, and everyone can share and commiserate their experiences. But it’s not safe to go to the station!” More

Mike Longo, a jazz pianist, composer and educator best known for his long association with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, died on March 22 in Manhattan. He was 83.The cause was from the coronavirus, Dorothy Longo, his wife of 32 years, said.As a musician and a composer, said Matthew Snyder, who had studied composition with Mr. Longo and played baritone saxophone with the big band he led, the New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble, Mr. Longo “was simultaneously very earthy and also had the highest possible level of harmony and melodicism and complexity in his musical conception.”As an educator, Mr. Longo wrote 10 books and produced four DVDs, espousing concepts he had refined while working with Mr. Gillespie. He also advocated tirelessly for other artists, engaging them for concerts and releasing their recordings on CAP (Consolidated Artists Productions), which he had established as a publishing company in 1970 and a record label in 1981.“He took on other artists because he wanted them to have a forum to produce their own music and express their creativity,” Ms. Longo said in an email. “CAP is an umbrella organization whereby musicians produced and owned their own product, but if Mike chose to take them on, because of his reputation, he was able to get airplay and distribution.”Born into a musical household, Mr. Longo played his first nightclub date, with the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, while still in high school. After arriving in New York in 1960, he found work supporting musicians like the trumpeter Red Allen and the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins at the Metropole, a Manhattan nightclub. A year later, he moved to Toronto to study with the pianist Oscar Peterson.Returning to New York in 1962, Mr. Longo became an in-demand accompanist for singers including Nancy Wilson, Gloria Lynne and Joe Williams. In 1965 he led a house band at the New York nightclub Embers West, where he performed with a wide range of luminaries. A year later, Mr. Gillespie engaged him as his musical director and arranger, an association that would endure until 1975, and informally until shortly before Mr. Gillespie’s death in 1993.Mr. Longo went on to perform and record solo, in duos and trios, and with the New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble, which he founded in 1998.“Mike’s book was roughly split between his arrangements of other tunes and his original tunes,” Mr. Snyder said of Mr. Longo’s repertoire, “and it was obvious it was all the same thing for him; even his arrangements were recompositions.”ImageMr. Longo was still with Mr. Gillespie when he released the album “Matrix” in 1972. He would continue to perform and would record prolifically as a bandleader, arranger and composer after leaving Mr. Gillespie’s band in 1975.Michael Joseph Longo was born on March 19, 1937, in Cincinnati, to Michael Anthony Longo and Elvira Margaret (Vitello) Longo. He began to study piano with his mother, a homemaker who sang and played the piano and the organ, at age 3, starting formal lessons a year later. The family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where Mr. Longo’s father established a successful business supplying produce to stores and to restaurants while also leading bands in which he played bass.Mr. Longo’s father hired Mr. Adderley, who was black, to play in his band at a time when racial mixing was uncommon and potentially perilous. Mr. Adderley in turn took young Mr. Longo under his wing, engaging him for church performances and, on one occasion, an engagement at Porky’s Hideaway, a Fort Lauderdale jazz club.Mr. Longo studied classical piano at Western Kentucky University, graduating in 1959 with a B.A. in music. Offered a scholarship by the jazz magazine DownBeat, he opted instead to pursue his education on the road with a small combo, the Salt City Six, and then in New York. His studies with Mr. Peterson in Toronto, Mr. Longo recalled in a 2006 interview with the website All About Jazz, taught him “how to play piano and how to be a jazz pianist — textures, voicings, touch, time, conception, tone on the instrument.”Mr. Longo studied composition privately with Hall Overton from 1970 to 1972 and worked prolifically as a bandleader, arranger and composer after leaving Mr. Gillespie’s employ. But his association with Mr. Gillespie would dominate much of his professional career, even offering him the opportunity to compose an orchestral work, “A World of Gillespie” (1980), which Mr. Gillespie performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.In addition to his wife, Mr. Longo is survived by a sister, Ellen.Like Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Longo embraced the Baha’i faith, a religion that espouses the unity of all people and finds truth in multiple faith traditions. In 2004, he began leading weekly concerts at the New York City Baha’i Center in Greenwich Village. The last concert was on March 10. More

Ray Mantilla, a percussionist and bandleader whose career spanned six decades and an array of styles in jazz, Latin music and beyond, died on March 21 in Manhattan. He was 85.His brother Kermit said the cause was complications of lymphoma.Mr. Mantilla never quite became a star in his own right. But he was one of the most respected percussionists in American music, adept at a range of instruments — particularly the congas and timbales — and able to make himself at home in almost any ensemble.He tended to use a full suite of congas, sometimes four at once, each differently tuned, together forming a drum kit of its own.He was 44 and almost a quarter-century into his professional career when he released his first album as a leader, “Mantilla,” in 1978. By that point, he had reached at least the third phase of a protean musical existence.He had come up as a fan of the major midcentury Latin bandleaders and became well-versed in the fundamentals of Afro-Cuban percussion. By his mid-20s, he found himself enamored of jazz and shifted in that direction. And eventually he explored a fusion of the two worlds in the bands he led, while taking on an increasingly diverse inventory of work as a side musician.He played on hundreds of recordings throughout his life, including “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite,” Herbie Mann’s “At the Village Gate,” Charles Mingus’s “Cumbia & Jazz Fusion” and even “I Am Gloria Gaynor,” by the disco star.Over the latter half of his career, he released nine discs under his own name.Raymond Mantilla was born in the South Bronx on June 22, 1934, to Ramona Maldonado and Carlos Mantilla Ghilardi. His father, who hailed from Peru, was an architect and engineer who helped build the George Washington Bridge and played the guitar at home. His mother, who had been born in Puerto Rico, owned and operated a bodega.In addition to his brother Kermit, Mr. Mantilla is survived by two other brothers, Lisandro Gilberto and Rolando; his sisters, Irma Ogden and Sara Kelly; a grandson; and his companion of 20 years, Judy Levy. Both of Mr. Mantilla’s marriages ended in divorce. A son, Robert, died before him.Young Ray played semiprofessional baseball and dreamed of the big leagues throughout his adolescence. But then he heard the Cuban bandleader Machito’s music on the radio for the first time, and he was immediately galvanized.“When I heard those drums, that’s when I first started to realize I had something: a vocation, they call it,” Mr. Mantilla told the jazz historian Maxine Gordon in an interview for the Bronx African-American History Project at Fordham University.He started hanging out at the local Y.M.C.A., where young musicians would jam. At first he played on a coffee can, but eventually he bought himself a conga drum.His friends in the South Bronx included future stars like the pianist Eddie Palmieri, the flutist and percussionist Johnny Pacheco and the percussionist Manny Oquendo. All of them were fusing mambo, traditional Afro-Caribbean music and jazz, creating a new approach that would become broadly labeled “salsa.” Like many musicians, Mr. Mantilla came to resist the term, saying that a single genre name obscured the complexity of the music.Mr. Mantilla developed his talents alongside his fellow percussionists Ray Barretto and Benny Bonilla, both of whom went on to lauded careers. It was Mr. Barretto, his closest friend and counterpart, who recommended Mr. Mantilla for his inaugural studio date.Mr. Mantilla played his first professional show in the singer Eartha Kitt’s band, taking a break from his own honeymoon to make the gig. In 1960, Mr. Barretto brought him into Mr. Mann’s band, where he stayed for three years. For a time, they were a percussion tag team in that group before Mr. Barretto departed, leaving Mr. Mantilla in charge of the percussion chair.Playing in the Mann band planted a creative seed, and Mr. Mantilla soon found himself gravitating toward jazz.He particularly impressed drummers, and in the early 1970s he was approached by two of jazz’s finest: Max Roach, who brought him into the all-percussion ensemble M’Boom, and Art Blakey, who made him a member of his band, the Jazz Messengers. (He had briefly recorded with Roach years earlier, on the landmark “We Insist!”)In 1977, Mr. Mantilla joined Dizzy Gillespie in the first ensemble of musicians from the United States to perform in Cuba since the embargo was put in effect in the early 1960s. A year later, he released “Mantilla” on Inner City Records, an independent label. An erudite if also rambunctious fusion effort, it featured four jazz-musician bandmates.Mr. Mantilla soon named that band Space Station, and on future recordings he would use it to experiment with odd time signatures in a Latin fusion context — something few had tried before.By the mid-1980s, Mr. Mantilla had expanded his horizons further and was working with avant-garde improvisers and composers in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; he recorded with both the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers.No matter where the music took him, he remained proud of his roots in the South Bronx. “I’m a street drummer,” he told Ms. Gordon. “Congas are street drumming things, man. You can’t write music for that.”Even as he battled cancer in his later years, Mr. Mantilla never gave up playing. He put out his latest album, “High Voltage,” in 2017. Another, titled “Rebirth,” is expected to be released this year on Savant Records. More

Out in the world, the coronavirus is upending the economy and global politics, tearing at the social fabric, and also, by extension, brutalizing the arts — canceled performances, delayed releases, gig economy workers left to fend for themselves.But art itself persists, especially music, which can be made and distributed on the cheap. The last couple of weeks have seen a glut of live-stream performances, and the release of many new albums and songs. Sometimes the collision of good intentions and free time can lead to missteps, like the Gal Gadot-organized celebrity round table singalong of “Imagine” that unified social media in resistance. Sometimes you get Cardi B’s “Coronavirus (Remix).”This week’s Popcast includes conversations with pop music critics about how to do their work when the world is in tumult. What might you hear in music under these circumstances that you wouldn’t otherwise? Is it possible to hear music without framing the experience through the lens of the current circumstances? Is it ethically correct, or worthwhile, to write negative reviews while the world is in upheaval?Guests:Rob Harvilla, staff writer at The RingerCraig Jenkins, pop music critic at New York magazineLindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times, Pitchfork, Vulture and others More