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      Joe Bussard, Obsessive Collector of Rare Records, Dies at 86

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      His life revolved around his massive hoard of fragile 78 r.p.m. disks of jazz, blues, country and gospel music recorded between the 1920s and ’50s.Joe Bussard, who made it his life’s obsession to collect rare 78 r.p.m. records — some 15,000 of them, encompassing jazz, blues, country, jug band and gospel — and who spread his love for the music on radio and among visitors who joined him to listen to the fragile disks in his basement, died on Monday at his home in Frederick, Md., one floor above his hoard. He was 86.His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Susannah Anderson. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2019.“He basically lived the songs, breathed the songs and passed them on to as many people as he could,” John Tefteller, a rare-records dealer and auctioneer, said in a phone interview. “It was his life from morning to night. I consider him a national treasure.”And any fan of his treasures could come to his house and listen to his 78s.“Anybody who got ahold of him, he’d say, ‘Come on over,’” Ms. Anderson said.From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.“How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. “It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.”One day, in the 1960s, Mr. Bussard was driving the streets of Tazwell, a small town in Virginia — the kind of place he often canvassed door to door, asking people if they had 78s — when he met an old man who said he had some 78s at the shotgun shack where he lived.From a dusty box under the man’s bed, Mr. Bussard found some good country records (Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter family) and then the sort of mind-blowing discoveries he craved: a 78 on the Black Patti label, which recorded jazz, blues and spirituals in the late 1920s.“‘Oh my Gahhd!’” he recalled thinking in the liner notes to his CD “Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s” (2002). “It was all I could do to keep my hands from trembling.”“So I laid it down, you know, and said, ‘Oh, that’s nice,” he continued. “The old man says, ‘Oh, them, there’s a lot of them in there.’”There were 15 Black Patti records, and the old man, who didn’t care for them, asked for $10 for the bunch. Years later, Mr. Bussard said, he was offered $30,000 for one of them, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull. He didn’t sell it.“When I leave this world,” he added, “I think I’m gonna have that record laying on top of me in my coffin.”Mr. Bussard with an early record by the country music star Jimmie Rodgers, a particular favorite.Ted Anthony/Associated PressMr. Bussard built his life around his records. After working in a supermarket and in his family’s farm supply business, he held no regular job after the late 1950s. He was supported by his wife, Esther (Keith) Bussard, a hairdresser, and his parents.“It’s like my mom and I were in one world, he was in another,” Susannah Anderson said in a phone interview. “It was hard. He was like an absent father, even though he was in the house.”In a profile of Mr. Bussard in Washington City Paper in 1999, his wife was quoted as saying that if she had not been a “born-again, spirit-filled Christian, who the day I married him made a commitment to God,” she “would have left long ago.”But, she added, she loved music as well (she blared bluegrass records in another part of the house while her husband blared his music from the basement), respected his collection and appreciated that he was “saving it for history.”Mr. Bussard found kinship in people like Ivy Sheppard, a disc jockey and 78 collector with whom he recorded radio programs for several stations including WAMU in Washington and WBCM in Bristol, Va., all built mostly around his rare records but also including some of hers. He recorded shows for a variety of stations over more than 40 years.Ms. Sheppard recalled that she and Mr. Bussard often talked for hours on the phone while listening to records. She described visiting his basement as “the greatest experience in the world.”She added, “I’m lost in this world without that crazy old man. He was my best friend.”Joseph Edward Bussard Jr. was born in Frederick on July 11, 1936. His father ran a farm supply business, and his mother, Viola (Culler) Bussard, was a homemaker.When he was 7 or 8, Joe began stocking up on records by Gene Autry, the star of western movies who was known as “the Singing Cowboy”; within a few years he heard the country singer Jimmie Rodgers and was smitten. When he couldn’t find any of Rodgers’s records at a local store, he began hunting for them, knocking on local doors until a woman gave him a box that contained two of Rodgers’s 78s.As a teenager, he began hosting a local radio show from his parents’ basement. When he got his driver’s license, he expanded his search for the records he loved — the 78s made of hard, brittle shellac resin, the format that preceded vinyl — while canvassing in Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.It became an obsession, one that delighted him and made him dance and play air sax, air guitar and air banjo in his basement. (He also played the guitar and mandolin.)He made one last trip a month ago, to a flea market in Emmittsburg, Md., in search of 78s, but didn’t find any.“He had a lot of record hunting left in him,” Ms. Anderson said, adding that there were no plans, for now, to move the collection.Mr. Bussard in his basement in 1965. He not only collected 78s; he also built a studio there to make his own.Collection of Marshall WyattMr. Bussard not only collected 78s; he also built a basement studio in his parents’ house in the 1950s to make his own. Under his Fonotone label, he recorded artists like the Possum Holler Boys, a country and rockabilly band, and the Tennessee Mess Arounders, a blues group (he was a member of both), as well as the influential fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey. (He later moved his collection and his studio to the house he shared with his wife and daughter.)A five-CD collection containing 131 of Mr. Bussard’s 78s, “Fonotone Records: Frederick Maryland (1956-1969),” was released in 2005 by Dust-to-Digital and nominated for a Grammy Award for best boxed or special limited-edition package.In 2003, Mr. Bussard was the subject of a documentary, “Desperate Man Blues: Discovering the Roots of American Music,” directed by Edward Gillan.In addition to Ms. Anderson, he is survived by three granddaughters. His wife died in 1999.Once, in a little coal town in southwest Virginia, Mr. Bussard asked a gas station attendant where he could find records and was told to go to a nearby hardware store. When he got there, the owner guided him to a cache of 5,000 records, which had never been played.“The first one I pulled out was ‘Sobbin’ Blues,’ by King Oliver on Okeh, absolutely new, at least a $400 record,” he excitedly recalled in the Washington City Paper interview, referring to a record label founded in 1918. “The next one I pulled out was ‘Jackass Blues’ on Vocalion by the Dixie Syncopators.” He picked out four stacks of 78s and paid $100.“I was so high when I went out of that store,” he said, “I could have floated.” More

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      Ray Edenton, ‘A-Team’ Studio Guitarist in Nashville, Dies at 95

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      In a career that spanned four decades, he played on thousands of sessions and accompanied many of the biggest names in country music.NASHVILLE — Ray Edenton, a versatile session guitarist who played on thousands of recordings by artists like the Everly Brothers, Charley Pride, Neil Young and Patsy Cline, died on Sept. 21 at the home of his son, Ray Q. Edenton, in Goodlettsville, Tenn. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ronda Hardcastle.A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio professionals, Mr. Edenton contributed discreet, empathetic rhythm guitar to myriad hits in a career that spanned four decades. His name was less known than his musicianship, but generations of listeners knew the records he helped make famous, a body of work estimated to exceed 10,000 sessions.Ms. Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass,” Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough” were among the blockbuster country singles, many of them also pop crossover successes, that featured his guitar work.“I did 22 sessions in five days one week,” Mr. Edenton, who retired in 1991 at age 65, said in looking back on his years as a studio musician during an interview at an event held in his honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2007.“That’s four a day for three days and five a day for two days,” he went on. “You don’t go home on five-a-days, you sleep on the couch in the studio.”On the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love,” both of which reached the pop, country and R&B Top 10 in 1957, Mr. Edenton played driving, syncopated acoustic guitar riffs alongside Don Everly.“I lived for quite a few years off those licks I stole from Don,” he said at the 2007 event.It was in fact the two men matching each other note for note that gave those big-beat Everly classics their distinctive stamp.Although primarily a rhythm guitarist, Mr. Edenton was occasionally featured on lead guitar, notably on Marty Robbins’s 1956 recording “Singing the Blues,” which was galvanized by his careening electric guitar solo. His lead work on 12-string acoustic guitar was heard on George Hamilton IV’s 1963 hit “Abilene” — a record that, like “Singing the Blues,” topped the country chart and also reached the pop Top 20.Mr. Edenton was also a songwriter. His chief credit was “You’re Running Wild,” a Top 10 country single for the Louvin Brothers, written with his brother-in-law at the time, Don Winters, in 1956. (He also played rhythm guitar on the recording.)Mr. Edenton in the studio with the singer Charlie Louvin. He co-wrote “You’re Running Wild,” a Top 10 country single for Mr. Louvin and his brother Ira, in 1956.Hubert Long Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Edenton’s work as a session musician reached beyond country music, with singers like Julie Andrews, Rosemary Clooney, Sammy Davis Jr. as well as rock acts like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and the Sir Douglas Quintet. He played on Mr. Young’s acclaimed 1978 album, “Comes a Time.”He also took part in the Nashville sessions that produced the album “Tennessee Firebird,” a pioneering fusion of country and jazz released by the vibraphonist Gary Burton in 1967.“Everybody in the world came here, and we recorded with all of them,” Mr. Edenton said of Nashville’s studios in his Country Music Hall of Fame interview. “You might do a pop session in the morning and bluegrass in the afternoon and rock ’n’ roll at night.”In 2007, Mr. Edenton, who played mandolin, ukulele and banjo as well as guitar, was inducted with the rest of the A-Team into the Musicians Hall of Fame.Ray Quarles Edenton was born on Nov. 3, 1926, in Mineral, Va., a gold-mining town about 50 miles northwest of Richmond. He was the youngest of four children of Tom Edenton, a sawmill operator, and Laura (Quarles) Edenton, a homemaker.Young Ray taught himself to play ukulele and guitar at an early age and later provided music for square dances with his two older brothers, who played fiddle and guitar.In 1946, after serving in the Army, he joined a band called the Rodeo Rangers, which performed at dances and on the radio in Maryland and Virginia. Two years later he became the bassist for the Korn Krackers, an ensemble led by the guitarist Joe Maphis that appeared on the Richmond radio show “Old Dominion Barn Dance.” He began working at WNOX in Knoxville in 1949 before being treated for tuberculosis in a Veterans Administration hospital, where he spent 28 months.Mr. Edenton with the singer Jeanne Pruett and others. “Everybody in the world came here, and we recorded with all of them,” Mr. Edenton said. “You might do a pop session in the morning, and bluegrass in the afternoon, and rock ’n’ roll at night.”Hubert Long Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Edenton moved to Nashville in 1952 and became a guitarist at the Grand Ole Opry while also working in the touring bands of, among other luminaries, Hank Williams and Ray Price. A notable early recording session was “One by One,” a honky-tonk weeper that was a No. 1 country hit for Red Foley and Kitty Wells in 1954.Most country acts of the era did not feature drummers in their lineups. Mr. Edenton’s nimble, unobtrusive guitar playing, inspired by the cadences of a snare drum, created a steady demand for his services among record companies, especially when he was tapped to fill the vacancy created on the A-Team when the guitarist Hank Garland suffered disabling injuries in a car accident in 1961.Besides his daughter and his son, Mr. Edenton is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Polly Roper Edenton. His marriage to Rita Winters, a country singer who performed under the name Rita Robbins, ended in divorce.“People often ask me about session musicians and why, back in those days, only a few people made all the records,” Mr. Edenton said in 2007, reflecting on his heyday with Nashville’s A-Team.“It was several things. You had to learn real quick. You had to adapt real quick. And if you couldn’t do that, you couldn’t do sessions.” More

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      Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

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      Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist and composer celebrated for music that was at once spiritual and visceral, purposeful and ecstatic, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death was announced in a statement by Luaka Bop, the company for which he had made his most recent album, “Promises.” The statement did not specify the cause.The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming. He first gained wide recognition as a member of John Coltrane’s groups from 1965 to 1967. He then went on to a fertile, prolific career, with dozens of albums and decades of performances.Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.Gilles Petard/RedfernsMr. Sanders played free jazz, jazz standards, upbeat Caribbean-tinged tunes and African- and Indian-rooted incantations such as “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” which opened his 1969 album, “Karma,” a pinnacle of devotional free jazz. He recorded widely as both a leader and a collaborator, working with Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Joey DeFrancesco and many others.Looking back on Mr. Sanders’s career in a 1978 review, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote, “His control of multiphonics on the tenor set standards that younger saxophonists are still trying to live up to, and his sound — huge, booming, but capable of great delicacy and restraint — was instantly recognizable.”Mr. Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020: “I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark, on Oct. 13, 1940. His mother was a cook in a school cafeteria; his father worked for the city. He first played music in church, starting on drums and moving on to clarinet and then saxophone. (Although tenor saxophone was his main instrument, he also performed and recorded frequently on soprano.) He played blues, jazz and R&B at clubs around Little Rock; during the era of segregation, he recalled in 2016, he sometimes had to perform behind a curtain.In 1959 he moved to Oakland, Calif., where he performed at local clubs. His fellow saxophonist John Handy suggested he move to New York City, where the free-jazz movement was taking shape, and in 1962, he did.At times in his early New York years he was homeless and lived by selling his blood. But he also found gigs in Greenwich Village, and he worked with some of the leading exponents of free jazz, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Sun Ra.It was Sun Ra who persuaded him to change his first name to Pharoah, and for a short time Mr. Sanders was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.Mr. Sanders made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” for ESP-Disk in 1964. John Coltrane invited him to sit in with his group, and in 1965 Mr. Sanders became a member, exploring elemental, tumultuous free jazz on seminal albums like “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Sanders went on to record with his widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, on albums including “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” both released in 1970.Mr. Sanders had already begun recording as a leader on the Impulse! label, which had also been Coltrane’s home. The titles of his albums — “Tauhid” in 1967, “Karma” in 1969 — made clear his interest in Islamic and Buddhist thought.His music was expansive and open-ended, concentrating on immersive group interaction rather than solos, and incorporating African percussion and flutes. In the liner notes to “Karma,” the poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka wrote, “Pharoah has become one long song.” The 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” moves between pastoral ease — with a rolling two-chord vamp and a reassuring message sung by Leon Thomas — and squalling, frenetic outbursts, but portions of it found FM radio airplay beyond jazz stations.During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Sanders’s music moved from album-length excursions like the kinetic 1971 “Black Unity” toward shorter compositions, reconnections with jazz standards and new renditions of Coltrane compositions. (He shared a Grammy Award for his work with the pianist McCoy Tyner on the 1987 album “Blues for Coltrane.”) His recordings grew less turbulent and more contemplative. On the 1977 album “Love Will Find a Way,” he tried pop-jazz and R&B, sharing ballads with the singer Phyllis Hyman. He returned to more mainstream jazz with his albums for Theresa Records in the 1980s.But his explorations were not over. In live performances, he might still bear down on one song for an entire set and make his instrument blare and cry out. During the 1990s and early 2000s he made albums with the innovative producer Bill Laswell. He reunited with the blistering electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock — who had been a Sanders sideman — on the 1991 album “Ask the Ages,” and he collaborated with the Moroccan Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania on “The Trance of Seven Colors” in 1994.Mr. Sanders at the 1996 North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands.Frans Schellekens/RedfernsInformation on Mr. Sanders’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sanders had difficult relationships with record labels, and he spent nearly two decades without recording as a leader. Yet he continued to perform, and his occasional recorded appearances — including his wraithlike presence on “Promises,” his 2021 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points — were widely applauded.Reviewing “Promises” for The Times, Giovanni Russonello noted that Mr. Sanders’s “glistening and peaceful sound” was “deployed mindfully throughout the album,” adding, “He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”Mr. Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-NyströmIn 2016 Mr. Sanders was named a Jazz Master, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States, by the National Endowment for the Arts.In a video made in recognition of his award, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington said, “It’s like taking fried chicken and gravy to space and having a picnic on the moon, listening to Pharoah.” The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin said, “It’s like he’s playing pure light at you. It’s way beyond the language. It’s way beyond the emotion.” More

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      Morgan Wallen’s Career Seemed Over. Now He’s Broken a Billboard Record.

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      The country singer was rebuked by the music industry after using a racial slur. Still, “Dangerous: The Double Album” has logged 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s 200 chart.Nineteen months ago, it seemed that the music career of Morgan Wallen — primed as Nashville’s next crossover star — might be dead. Instead, he is now playing to sold-out arenas and has broken chart records set by the likes of Adele and Bruce Springsteen, in a success story that highlights the power of fan loyalty and the challenges of cancel culture.“Dangerous: The Double Album,” Wallen’s second LP, came out at the beginning of 2021 and shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, with big streaming numbers that demonstrated his power among a new generation of country performers. The album was in its third week at the top when TMZ published a video of Wallen using a racial slur. The rebuke was immediate and strong, with Wallen’s songs removed from radio and streaming playlists, and Wallen’s label, Big Loud, saying it would “suspend” his recording contract “indefinitely.”Yet “Dangerous” would hold at No. 1 for a further seven weeks, and since then it has become an unusually enduring hit. The album has now spent 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s chart — dipping to No. 12 only once, when it was pushed out by holiday albums last December — and has been in the Top 5 for 65 of those times.“Dangerous” stands at No. 2 on the latest chart, beaten only by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” another streaming blockbuster that came out in May and has just matched Wallen’s 10-week run at No. 1.Wallen has now beaten the 1964 record set by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary for the longest Top 10 run for an album by a single artist. (In the 66 years of the Billboard 200 album chart, seven other titles have had longer stretches in the Top 10, but those are all movie soundtracks or Broadway cast albums; the longest run of all albums is 173 weeks for the cast album of “My Fair Lady,” which came out in 1956.)In the wake of the controversy last year, Wallen issued multiple apologies, but was otherwise largely unseen in the mainstream media — a rare test of the commercial appeal of an artist without the benefit of supportive TV interviews or magazine covers. But for many in Nashville, he remains a symbol of a pervasive racism that exists just below the surface of the country music business.To hear it from executives at Big Loud, which functions as Wallen’s label, management company and music publisher, the success of “Dangerous” is proof of Wallen’s broad cultural appeal and the quality of his music, which blends beer-soaked bro-countryisms with mellow melodies that at times recall classic rock like Eagles.“We’re having our Garth Brooks moment, our Taylor Swift emergent moment,” Seth England, the chief executive of Big Loud, said in an interview, “of just an artist so big, everyone is getting used to it. Pop is short for popular culture, and he just is popular culture.”When asked how “Dangerous” has managed such extraordinary success, Greg Thompson, the president of Big Loud Management, added simply: “There’s only one explanation. The music is that good.” (Wallen’s suspension from Big Loud, which continued to sell his music, was temporary. Through a representative, Wallen declined to answer questions for this article.)Yet from the beginning, Big Loud — and Republic Records, the division of the giant Universal Music Group that has a deal with Big Loud to promote its artists — has pursued smart strategies to make “Dangerous” a success in the streaming era. Most obvious is the album’s length; taking a page from hip-hop albums that have been exploiting this aspect of the streaming economy for years, “Dangerous” has 30 songs on its standard edition, each of which contributes to the album’s overall numbers each week.Second, Wallen stoked his fans by releasing batches of new songs ahead of the album’s release, sometimes a few at a time, which helped foster the fan loyalty that sustained him in his fallow months of promotion.With Republic’s help, Wallen has also had some success as a pop crossover act, though that process has been slow. Two of his songs, “7 Summers” and “You Proof,” his latest single, have gone as high as No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. According to data from the tracking service Luminate, a little more than half of Wallen’s radio airplay has been on country stations, with pop stations a distant second.In the wake of Wallen’s use of the slur, musicians and journalists debated the role of racism in country music. Wallen gave an interview to “Good Morning America” in which he characterized the incident as a mistake among close friends who “say dumb stuff together.” He added: “In our minds it’s playful. That sounds ignorant, but that’s really where it came from.”Gradually, the Nashville world, and beyond, has largely welcomed him back. In an interview with The New York Times published this month, the country singer Kane Brown, who is Black, said: “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” Late last year, Wallen appeared on Lil Durk’s track “Broadway Girls,” a hit on the rapper’s No. 1 album “7220.”Despite the intensity of the criticism levied against Wallen, fans remained loyal. According to Chartmetric, a company that tracks data from streaming and social media, Wallen’s followers on Facebook and Spotify increased at the height of his controversy.Within months, his songs were back in force on the official playlists of major streaming platforms. And according to Luminate, radio stations are now playing Wallen more than at any point since “Dangerous” was released, with his songs being played about 19,000 times a week this summer.Also on this week’s Billboard album chart, the veteran metal band Megadeth opens at No. 3 with its first studio release in six years, “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!” DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4, and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      What Is a ‘Fake’ Artist in 2022?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherHere’s one sort of simulated artist: This month, a virtual rapper called FN Meka became the center of a critical storm involving digital blackface and the ethics of using artificial intelligence to (re)create cultural production. As a result of the backlash, FN Meka was dropped from Capitol, the major label that had signed the project, though it was debatable exactly how much of the rapper’s music was algorithmically derived at all.And here’s another sort: Spotify continues to populate some of its main playlists with so-called “fake” artists, which is to say, music made by artists under pseudonyms who create tracks purely to populate these playlists at a lower cost to Spotify than artists who are signed to major record labels. They have, in some cases, millions of listens, but outside of the walls of the streaming platform, they fundamentally don’t exist.Are either of these cases acceptable? And more pressingly, are they avoidable?On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the various ways music is being alienated from the humans who created it and the listeners who hear it, and the philosophical implications for creative agency.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterRyan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletterTim Ingham, founder and publisher of Music Business WorldwideConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Joey DeFrancesco, Reigning King of the Jazz Organ, Dies at 51

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      A prodigy whose playing had drawn raves since he was a teenager, he helped bring the Hammond B3 back into the jazz lineup.Joey DeFrancesco, who was widely credited with bringing the organ back into vogue in jazz circles in recent decades, has died. He was 51.His wife, Gloria, posted news of his death on Facebook on Friday. She did not say where or when he died or cite the cause.Mr. DeFrancesco had musicianship in his genes: His father, John DeFrancesco, has been playing jazz organ since the 1950s. He was dazzling listeners when he was a teenager.“DeFrancesco — whose infectious, imp-of-the-perverse expressions make him as much fun to watch as listen to — can stride, flatten fifths and string together quotes from Bird, Diz, Monk and Miles with the polished resourcefulness of the eight-year veteran that he is,” Gene Seymour of The Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1986 after observing the Settlement Jazz Ensemble at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, where the young Mr. DeFrancesco was then a student.“And all the while you watch and listen,” Mr. Seymour added, “you find a little voice inside yourself chanting: ‘He’s 15 years old!’”Within two years Mr. DeFrancesco had toured with Miles Davis and opened for Bobby McFerrin and Grover Washington Jr. In 1989, at 17, he played at Duke University with well-known musicians like the trumpeter Clark Terry in a concert that announced the forthcoming Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which would open soon after.“As Mr. DeFrancesco played Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady,’ the elder musicians beamed and whispered encouragement,” Jonathan Probber wrote of that show in The New York Times. “The distinct impression was that Mr. DeFrancesco was an example of hopes on the way to realization.”Certainly he was on the way to a formidable career, one that included more than 30 recordings as a bandleader, numerous others as a sideman and countless concerts. Along the way he brought the organ back into fashion in jazz.The Hammond B3 organ became a favorite in jazz circles in the 1950s, with Jimmy Smith, who had numerous hit albums on the Blue Note label, leading the way. But in 1975 the Hammond company stopped making the instrument, and the trend of organ-based trios in jazz clubs faded.Mr. DeFrancesco was a multi-instrumentalist; he also played trumpet, saxophone, piano and synthesizer. But he built his career playing an old-school B3.“I love the synthesizers and play all that stuff, but you can’t beat the sound of the B3,” he told The Associated Press in 1991. “The instrument has a very warm tone. It’s got the contrasts. It just has all those emotions in it. It’s got little bits of every instrument in it. It’s like having a whole orchestra at your fingertips.”Mr. DeFrancesco’s first album, “All of Me,” was released in 1989, and dozens more followed, with his musical interests ranging far and wide. He recorded his own original music. A 2004 album was called “Joey DeFrancesco Plays Sinatra His Way.” His “Never Can Say Goodbye” in 2010 reimagined the music of Michael Jackson. And he collaborated on albums with Van Morrison, the guitarist Danny Gatton and others.The bassist Christian McBride had known Mr. DeFrancesco since they were students at the Settlement School.“Joey DeFrancesco was hands down the most creative and influential organist since Jimmy Smith,” he said in a statement. “In terms of taking the organ to the next level and making it popular again for a younger generation, no one did it like Joey.”Mr. Seymour, who decades ago wrote about the teenage Mr. DeFrancesco in Philadelphia and later became a critic at Newsday, remembered Mr. DeFrancesco in a Facebook post on Friday.“His meteoric rise to fame didn’t surprise me at all,” he wrote. “What did, over time, was how deeply and consummately he mastered the jazz organ tradition at all ends of the musical spectrum, from blues and funk to post-bop and avant incantations. He fulfilled the obligations of his calling by never standing still, never being complacent.”Mr. DeFrancesco in performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 2011.Erik Jacobs for The New York TimesMr. DeFrancesco was born on April 10, 1971, in Springfield, near Philadelphia. He didn’t wait long to pick his career path.“When I was 4, my father brought in this monstrous thing, a B3, and he turned it on,” he told The Boston Herald in 1994. “It has a motor and a generator. I started playing it and the sound just moved me. Being a 4-year-old and making up your mind about what you want to do for the rest of your life — I was very fortunate.”He of course credited his father with being his first influence.“You can’t be better off than having a dad who plays the same instrument that you do,” he said. “The music that I heard from the time I was born was jazz.”Happenstance helped propel his career: As a teenager he was performing on a local television show in Philadelphia when Miles Davis was the featured guest. The veteran jazzman was impressed, and Mr. DeFrancesco ended up touring with him for six months.He released a steady stream of albums, five of which received Grammy Award nominations, including, most recently, “In the Key of the Universe” (2019). On his latest album, “More Music” (2021), which features 10 original compositions, he played six different instruments and threw in some vocals well.A full list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. DeFrancesco was something of a showman, even when he was a sideman. In 2010, for instance, he played with a trio led by the saxophonist David Sanborn. Mr. Sanborn was the headliner, but, as Nate Chinen wrote in The Times of the trio’s gigs, “It’s often as much Mr. DeFrancesco’s show, and sometimes more so.”If he was more flamboyant than some of his contemporaries, that was deliberate, Mr. DeFrancesco told The Buffalo News in 2004.“I think these new players are too damn serious,” he said. “The joy of it, the fun of it, is something that jazz has lost. I mean, we are entertainers, after all. If you don’t look like you’re having fun onstage, how is anyone in the audience supposed to?” More

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      Creed Taylor, Producer Who Shaped Jazz for Decades, Dies at 93

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      He made scores of albums with artists who were well known and others who soon would be. He also founded two important record labels.Creed Taylor, one of the most influential and prolific jazz producers of the second half of the last century, best known for the distinctive work he did for his CTI label in the 1970s, died on Monday in Nuremberg, Germany. He was 93.Donna Taylor, his daughter-in-law, said he had been visiting family there when he had a stroke on Aug. 2. He never recovered, she said.Mr. Taylor began his career as a jazz producer in the 1950s, and in 1960 he founded the Impulse! label, which would become the home of John Coltrane and other stars. He did not stay there long, though, and most of the label’s best-known records were produced later.He moved to another jazz label, Verve. He made a lasting mark there by producing recordings by the saxophonist Stan Getz that popularized bossa nova, including “Getz/Gilberto,” the celebrated 1964 album by Getz and the guitarist João Gilberto that included “The Girl From Ipanema,” with Mr. Gilberto’s wife, Astrud. Both the album and the single, a crossover hit, won Grammy Awards.Mr. Taylor made a lasting mark at Verve Records with recordings by the saxophonist Stan Getz that popularized bossa nova, most notably “Getz/Gilberto.”In 1967, Mr. Taylor was at A&M, where he founded another label, Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI. Three years later it became an independent label, which over the next decade became known for stylish albums by George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Grover Washington Jr. and others — and for a degree of commercial success that was unusual for jazz.“In many ways the sound of the 1970s was defined by CTI,” the musician and producer Leo Sidran said in introducing a 2015 podcast featuring an interview with Mr. Taylor.The records Mr. Taylor released on the label often emphasized rhythm and favored accessibility over esoteric exploration. As J.D. Considine wrote in The New York Times in 2002 when some of these recordings were rereleased, Mr. Taylor “believed that jazz, having started out as popular music, ought to maintain a connection to a broader audience.”Some purists might have scowled at the time, but the effect was undeniable.“The true measure of his impact was that at the height of the 1970s when so many musical styles were jostling for attention, more people were listening to jazz than ever before,” Ashley Kahn, a music historian, said by email. “For most, CTI wasn’t thought of as a jazz label; it was a sound, a musical identity like Motown. When you bought a CTI album you knew it was going to be top-quality on all levels, with at least two or three tracks you’d be grooving to for a long time to come.”Impulse!, still a force in jazz, memorialized Mr. Taylor on Twitter.“He was a genius when it came to finding new and special music that would stay with listeners forever,” the company’s post said.Creed Bane Taylor V was born on May 13, 1929, in Lynchburg, Va. His father was, as Donna Taylor described him, a “gentleman farmer,” and his mother, Nina (Harrison) Taylor, was a personnel director.Mr. Taylor grew up in Bedford, Va., and in a bucolic area known as White Gate, west of Roanoke, where his family had owned land for generations. He played trumpet in high school, inspired by Harry James. He was surrounded by bluegrass and country music, he said in a 2008 interview with JazzWax, but much preferred jazz.“It was cooler music,” he said. “It made you feel hip, not corny.”He enrolled at Duke University, where he studied psychology until the Korean War interrupted his schooling. After finishing his service with the Marines, he completed his psychology degree in 1954 but quickly made his way to New York to pursue his real interest, music. An earlier one-week visit to the city, he said on Mr. Sidran’s podcast, had whetted his appetite.“Fifty-second Street was on fire,” he said. “You could walk into any little club at the base of any brownstone in that whole section and at no charge you could hear Basie, Ellington, Getz, you name it. I could hardly wait to get back again.”Mr. Taylor at the Institute of Audio Research in New York in 2005. With the revival of vinyl in recent years, collectors are valuing the records he made for his CTI label in the 1970s.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesHe was inspired, in a manner of speaking, to go into producing by “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” the long-running series of concerts and recordings organized by Norman Granz, whom he would later succeed at Verve: He didn’t like it.“The long bass solos, the tenor solos, you name it,” he said on the podcast. “Drum solos, and the crowd, and all the excitement — what happens to the music in all that? ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ was, for me, a circus.”In 1954 he landed a job at Bethlehem Records, where he produced albums for the vocalist Chris Connor and others. It was an era when producers did everything for a record, from lining up musicians to trying to get radio stations to play it. Mr. Taylor enjoyed being Mr. Do-It-All.“I was fascinated by the record business,” he told JazzWax, “from how to put a record’s cover and liner notes together to getting the records into stores and selling them.”And sometimes, it meant discovering the artist. He told JazzWax that in late 1954 he moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village and became intrigued by a flute player he could hear practicing as he sat in his backyard garden.“He’d play scales and then launch into amazing jazz lines,” Mr. Taylor recalled. “I decided I had to find out who the devil was playing.”He followed the sound and knocked on the musician’s door. It was Herbie Mann, then still largely unknown; Mr. Mann recorded some of his first albums for Bethlehem.In 1956 Mr. Taylor moved to ABC-Paramount, where he produced all sorts of albums (one was a collection of speeches and other highlights from the career of Dwight D. Eisenhower) but concentrated on jazz, making records with the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, the singer Bobby Scott and countless others before forming Impulse! as a subsidiary label.There and at his later stops, he encouraged his artists to try new things, and not to shy away from other genres. One of his George Benson albums, for instance, was “The Other Side of Abbey Road” (1970), featuring Mr. Benson’s guitar interpretations of songs from that Beatles album.At CTI in the early 1970s, he also packaged artists together in star-studded stage shows. “A real jazz festival has finally come to Atlanta,” The Atlanta Voice wrote in 1973 when the CTI tour played that city with a lineup that included the vibraphonist Milt Jackson, the guitarist Eric Gale and the singer Esther Phillips.Whatever the project, Mr. Taylor’s stamp was distinctive.“The through line to the labels Creed worked for or started — including Impulse, Verve and CTI — was an auteur-like, 360-degree approach to creating high-quality recorded product,” Mr. Kahn, the music historian, said, “recruiting A-list jazz players and being open to familiar pop melodies — like bossa nova, soul and R&B tunes, even the Beatles. He used top studios — Rudy Van Gelder’s most often — arrangers like Don Sebesky, and placed museum-quality photography on the album covers.“He thought and acted like a one-man record company, and then became one: CTI. Think Phil Spector, but with a deep feeling for jazz and soul, and without the guns.”Mr. Taylor’s first marriage, to Marian Wendes in 1956, ended in divorce in 1984. In 1988 he married Harriet Schmidt. She survives him, along with three sons from his first marriage, Creed Bane Taylor VI, Blakelock Harrison Taylor and John Wendes Taylor; a daughter from his second marriage, Courtney Taylor Prince; and five grandchildren.The CTI label, though successful early, ran into financial trouble — Mr. Taylor said he made some ill-advised decisions on distribution matters — and filed for bankruptcy in 1978.He also got into a protracted legal dispute with Warner Bros. over the rights to Mr. Benson’s music. After a jury found in Mr. Taylor’s favor in 1988 and awarded him more than $3 million, he was able to revive the label for a time. By then, 1970s CTI records had begun to be reissued by CBS Records, which had acquired the catalog. Rappers were sampling his records, and, with the revival of vinyl in recent years, collectors were valuing them.In 2012 Mr. Taylor spoke to a jazz studies class at North Carolina Central University, recounting stories of how he got the guitarist Wes Montgomery to try new things, how he talked Nina Simone through the recording of her album “Baltimore,” and more. He encouraged any would-be producers among the class to remain ever curious.“You have to keep your eyes and your ears open the whole time,” he said. More

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      Bill Pitman, Revered Studio Guitarist, Is Dead at 102

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      As a versatile member of the loose association of musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, he was heard on many of the biggest pop and rock hits of the 1960s and ’70s.Bill Pitman, a guitarist who accompanied Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand and others from the late 1950s to the ’70s, and who for decades was heard on the soundtracks of countless Hollywood films and television shows, died on Thursday night at his home in La Quinta, Calif. He was 102.His wife, Janet Pitman, said he died after four weeks at a rehabilitation center in Palm Springs, where he was treated for a fractured spine suffered in a fall, and the past week at home under hospice care.Virtually anonymous outside the music world but revered within it, Mr. Pitman was a member of what came to be called the Wrecking Crew — a loosely organized corps of peerless Los Angeles freelancers who were in constant demand by record producers to back up headline performers. As an ensemble, they turned routine recording sessions and live performances into extraordinary musical moments.Examples abound: Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” (1966). Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” (1961). Streisand’s “The Way We Were” (1973). The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963). The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966). On “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” from the Paul Newman-Robert Redford hit movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), Mr. Pitman played ukulele.In a career of nearly 40 years, Mr. Pitman played countless gigs for studios and record labels that dominated the pop charts but rarely credited the performers behind the stars. The Wrecking Crew did almost everything — television and film scores; pop, rock and jazz arrangements; even cartoon soundtracks. Whether recorded in a studio or on location, everything was performed with precision and pizazz.“These were crack session players who moved effortlessly through many different styles: pop, jazz, rockabilly, but primarily the two-minute-thirty-second world of hit records that America listened to all through the sixties and seventies,” Allegro magazine reminisced in 2011. “If it was a hit and recorded in L.A., the Wrecking Crew cut the tracks.”Jumping from studio to studio — often playing four or five sessions a day — members of the crew accompanied the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher, the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Ricky Nelson, Jan and Dean, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, the Everly Brothers, Peggy Lee and scads more — nearly every prominent performer of the era.The pace was relentless, Mr. Pitman recalled in Denny Tedesco’s 2008 documentary, “The Wrecking Crew.”“You leave the house at 7 in the morning, and you’re at Universal at 9 till noon,” he said. “Now you’re at Capitol Records at 1. You just got time to get there, then you got a jingle at 4, then we’re on a date with somebody at 8, then the Beach Boys at midnight, and you do that five days a week.”Mr. Pitman was heard on the soundtracks of some 200 films, including Robert Altman’s Korean War black comedy “M*A*S*H” (1970), Amy Heckerling’s comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), Emile Ardolino’s romantic musical drama “Dirty Dancing” (1987) and Martin Scorsese’s gangster fable “Goodfellas” (1990).On television, Mr. Pitman’s Danelectro bass guitar was heard for years on “The Wild Wild West.” He also worked on “I Love Lucy,” “Bonanza,” “The Deputy,” “Ironside,” “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour,” “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and many other shows. He was credited with composing music for early episodes of the original “Star Trek” series.While generally indifferent toward rock, colleagues said, Mr. Pitman played it well, sometimes expressing surprise at the success of his work in that genre. He was far more enthusiastic about jazz, especially the work of composers and arrangers like Marty Paich, Dave Grusin and Johnny Mandel.Mr. Pitman, who grew up in New York City and had music tutors from the time he was 6 years old, came home from World War II and headed west determined to make a living in music. He attended the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, learned arranging and composing, and essentially taught himself the skills of a master guitarist.In 1951, at a club where Peggy Lee was singing, he met the guitar virtuoso Laurindo Almeida, who was quitting Ms. Lee’s band. After an audition, Mr. Pitman was hired to take Mr. Almeida’s place, and his career was launched.In 1954 he joined the singer Rusty Draper’s daily radio show. Three years later, he sat in for the guitarist Tony Rizzi at a recording date for Capitol Records. It was his big break.Word soon got around about the comer who could improvise with the best. Mr. Pitman got to know the session guitarists Howard Roberts, Jack Marshall, Al Hendrickson, Bob Bain and Bobby Gibbons, and he was soon one of them.Mr. Bill Pitman and a fellow studio musician, the bassist Carol Kaye, in a scene from the documentary “The Wrecking Crew” (2008).Magnolia PicturesHis fellow studio musicians included the drummer Hal Blaine, the guitarists Tommy Tedesco and Glen Campbell (before he had a hit-making singing career), the bassists Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, and the keyboardists Don Randi and Leon Russell (who also went on to a successful solo singing career). They coalesced around Phil Spector, the producer known for his “wall of sound” approach, who regularly employed them.While not publicly recognized in its era, this ensemble is viewed with reverence today by music historians and insiders. Mr. Blaine, who died in 2019, claimed that he named the Wrecking Crew. But Ms. Kaye insisted that he did not start using the name until years after its musicians stopped working together in the ’70s. In any case, there was no disagreement about Mr. Pitman’s contributions.In his book “Conversations With Great Jazz and Studio Guitarists” (2009), Jim Carlton called Mr. Pitman a mainstay of the crew. “Perhaps no one personifies the unsung studio player like Bill Pitman does,” he wrote. “Few guitarists have logged more recording sessions, and fewer still have enjoyed being such a legitimate part of America’s soundtrack.”William Keith Pitman was born in Belleville, N.J., on Feb. 12, 1920, the only child of Keith and Irma (Kunze) Pitman. His father was a staff bassist for NBC Radio and a busy freelance player in New York; his mother was a Broadway dancer. The family moved to Manhattan when Bill was 6, and he attended the Professional Children’s School.Mr. Pitman in 2012. He performed in Las Vegas and on film soundtracks well until the 1980s, and continued to play guitar at home after that.Jan PittmanWhen he was 13, his parents split up. His mother joined a firm that made theater costumes. His father gave him guitar lessons, and young Bill played 50-cent gigs with musicians who would later become famous, like the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and the drummer Shelly Manne. But his schoolwork at Haaren High School in Manhattan suffered, and he dropped out. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, became a radio operator and flew many supply missions over the Himalayas from India to China during World War II.In 1947, he married Mildred Hurty. They had three children and were divorced in the late 1960s. In the ’70s he married and divorced Debbie Yajacovic twice. In 1985 he married Janet Valentine and adopted her daughter, Rosemary.Besides his wife, he is survived by his son, Dale; his daughters, Donna Simpson, Jean Langdon and Rosemary Pitman; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Mr. Pitman quit session work in 1973 and went on the road, performing in concert with Burt Bacharach, Anthony Newley, Vikki Carr and others for several years. In the late ’70s he moved to Las Vegas, where he joined the music staff of the MGM Grand Hotel, playing for headliners well into the ’80s. He also continued to play on film soundtracks until he retired in 1989.Mr. Pitman performed professionally only once in retirement — at a memorial concert in 2001 in Pasadena, Calif., for an old friend, Julius Wechter, leader of the Baja Marimba Band. Mr. Wechter, who died in 1999, had Tourette’s syndrome and was a spokesman for people with the disorder.Mr. Pitman continued writing arrangements, and at 99 he was still playing music — and golf.“He plays the guitar at home just about every day,” his wife said in an interview for this obituary in 2019. “I am a bass player. We play only jazz. No rock ’n’ roll.” As for golf, she said, “He can still beat me.” More