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      Lou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94He led the team at Philips that changed the audio world in 1963 by introducing a small, portable way to play and record: the cassette.Lou Ottens in 1988, 25 years after he led the team that introduced the cassette tape to the world.Credit…Philips Company ArchivesMarch 11, 2021, 6:58 p.m. ETIn these digital days, it may be hard to appreciate how radically Lou Ottens changed the audio world when, in 1963, he and his team at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, introduced the cassette tape.“As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email.Mr. Ottens was in charge of product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time.“The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.”The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, something not easily done with vinyl, and to record it conveniently as well. Artists started using cassettes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live concerts for the underground market. Young lovers used them to swap mixtapes of songs that expressed their feelings.Soon record labels began releasing entire albums on cassettes and automakers were installing cassette players on dashboards.Another portable technology, the bulkier 8-track cartridge, was introduced in the same period, but cassettes, smaller and recordable, quickly doomed those devices, and also cut into the vinyl market.The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, and to record it conveniently as well. “It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens said in 2013.Credit…Philips Company Archives“It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens told Time magazine in 2013, the 50th anniversary of that wallet-size breakthrough. “It was so small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that it was at that moment a sensation.”Mr. Ottens died on Saturday in Duizel, in the Netherlands, Tommie Dijstelbloem, a spokesman for Philips, said. He was 94.In the 1970s, after spearheading the development of the cassette, he contributed to the development of the compact disc, a product Philips and Sony jointly unveiled in 1982. The new format soon pushed the cassette aside.“The best thing about the compact cassette story,” the newspaper Nederlands Dagblad wrote in 2011, “is that its inventor also caused its downfall.”Not quite. Cassettes remain popular with some aficionados, in a retro sort of way. Mr. Ottens, though, was not one of them.“Now it’s nostalgia, more or less,” he said in the documentary. “People prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia.”Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. He graduated from what is now Delft University of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering and began working at Philips in 1952.He became head of product development in Hasselt in 1957 and began overseeing the development of a portable reel-to-reel machine in 1960. Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, said that when he conceived the idea of a cassette tape, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.“His wooden block prototype was lost when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire,” she said by email. “However, we still have the very first cassette recorder he developed on display, a testimony to his foresight and innovation.”The company unveiled the cassette in 1963 at a product exhibition in Berlin. The old saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery was quickly proved.“Our cassette was extensively viewed and photographed by the Japanese,” Mr. Ottens told an interviewer in 2013. “A few years later, the first Japanese imitations came, with a different tape format, different dimensions, different playing time. Not shocking, but too many hit the market. Then it becomes a big mess.”Mr. Ottens in 2013. When he conceived of the idea of a cassette tape half a century earlier, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.Credit…Jerry Lampen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPhilips made its licensing available free, largely at Mr. Ottens’s urging, and its version of the cassette soon became the standard.“That’s the reason that it didn’t become obsolete too early,” Mr. Ottens said in the film, “and it’s taken 50 years to die.”Philips says 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide.After the cassette, Mr. Ottens worked on an unsuccessful videodisc project before shifting to the CD. And before that innovation was released, he had shifted his focus to Video 2000, a system intended to compete with VHS; it, too, did not catch on.He retired from Philips in 1986. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.The makers of “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape” took a romanticized view of the cassette and its importance to the countless people who made use of it in myriad ways, but Mr. Taylor said Mr. Ottens had a much more utilitarian view.“Lou was never comfortable taking credit for the cassette, or for the incalculable impact it had on the history of music,” Mr. Taylor said. “What I saw as a deeply personal medium, Lou saw as a pragmatic answer to the cumbersome nature of the reel-to-reel.”In the film, Mr. Ottens and three of the men who worked under him on the cassette project reminisce. Mr. Ottens still seems surprised by the impact of the little gizmo.“We expected it would be a success,” he says, “but not a revolution.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Attend the Tale of ‘Anyone Can Whistle,’ Then and Now

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookAttend the Tale of ‘Anyone Can Whistle,’ Then and NowA sparkling new recording of the 1964 musical makes half the case for Stephen Sondheim’s endlessly inventive score.From left, Maria Friedman, John Owen Edwards, John Yap and Stephen Sondheim working on the recording of “Anyone Can Whistle” at Abbey Road Studios in 2013.Credit…Doug Craib, via JAY RecordsPublished More

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      Rupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94His equipment became the industry standard and influenced the sound of groups like Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Chicago and the Who.Rupert Neve in 2009 at a mixing console at the Magic Shop recording studio in New York City. His revolutionary Neve 8028 console (not shown here) had a huge impact on the music industry.Credit…Joshua ThomasFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETWhen the Seattle grunge band Nirvana recorded their breakthrough album, “Nevermind,” at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., in 1991, they used a massive mixing console created by a British engineer named Rupert Neve.The Neve 8028 console had by then become a studio staple, hailed by many as the most superior console of its kind in its manipulating and combining instrumental and vocal signals and as responsible in great part for the audio quality of albums by groups like Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.For Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer and later the leader of Foo Fighters, the console “was like the coolest toy in the world,” he told NPR in 2013 when his documentary film about the California studio, “Sound City,” was released. “And what you get when you record on a Neve desk is this really big, warm representation of whatever comes into it.”He added, “What’s going to come out the other end is this bigger, better version of you.”In 2011, long after forming Foo Fighters, Mr. Grohl purchased the console as Sound City was closing, took it to his garage and used it to record the band’s album “Wasting Light.”Mr. Neve’s innovative, largely analog equipment has been used to record pop, rock, jazz and rap — genres distinct from his preferred one: English cathedral music, with its organs and choirs.After his death last Friday, the influential hip-hop engineer Gimel Keaton, known as Young Guru, tweeted: “Please understand that this man was one of a kind. There is nothing close to him in the engineering world. RIP to the KING!!!”Mr. Neve (pronounced Neeve) died in a hospice facility in San Marcos, Tex., near his home in Wimberley, a Hill Country town that he and his wife, Evelyn, moved to in 1994. He was 94. The causes were pneumonia and heart failure, according to his company, Rupert Neve Designs.Arthur Rupert Neve was born on July 31, 1926, in Newton Abbott, in southwestern England. He spent most of his childhood near Buenos Aires, where his parents, Arthur Osmond and Doris (Dence) Neve, were missionaries with the British and Foreign Bible Society.Rupert developed a facility with technology as a boy taking apart and repairing shortwave radios. It accelerated during World War II, when he served in the Royal Corps of Signals, which gave communications support to the British Army.After the war, working out of an old U.S. Army ambulance, he started a business recording, on 78 r.p.m. acetate discs, brass bands and choirs as well as public addresses, like those by Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II when she was a princess.His future father-in-law was unimpressed. When Mr. Neve spoke to him about marrying his daughter, Evelyn Collier, the older man couldn’t imagine recording as a way of making a living.“He’d never heard of it,” Mr. Neve told Tape Op, a recording magazine, in 2001. “To him a recorder was a gentleman who sat in a courtroom and wrote down the proceedings.”During the 1950s, Mr. Neve found work at a company that designed and manufactured transformers. He also started his own business making hi-fi equipment.With his expanding knowledge of electronics, he recognized that mixing consoles performed better with transistors than with vacuum tubes, which were cumbersome and required very high voltage.He delivered his first custom-made transistor console to Phillips Studios in London in 1964, and its success led to thousands more orders over the years — bought by, among others, Abbey Road Studios in London (in the post-Beatles years), the Power Station in Manhattan and the AIR Studios, both in London and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, founded by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer.The singer-songwriter Billy Crockett bought a Neve console about eight years ago for his Blue Rock Artist Ranch & Studio, which is also in Wimberley. He is quick to extol its “warm, open, transparent” sound.“It’s all about his transformers,” he said in a phone interview, referring to the components that Mr. Neve designed that connect microphone signals to the console and the console to a recording medium like vinyl or a CD. “They provide something intangible that makes the mix fit together. So when people get poetic about analog, it’s how the sound comes through the transformers.”Mr. Neve received a Technical Grammy Award in 1997. In a 2014 interview with the Recording Academy, which sponsors the Grammys, he said he was pleased with the loyalty that his consoles had fostered.Mr. Neve in 2013 with the musician Dave Grohl at a screening of “Sound City,” Mr. Grohl’s documentary film about the famed recording studio in Los Angeles. The film was being shown at the SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Mr. Neve’s pioneering mixing console was at the heart of Sound City.Credit…Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW“I’m proudest of the fact that people are still using designs of mine which started many years ago and which, in many ways, have not been superseded since,” he said. “Some of those old consoles are really hard to beat in terms of both recording quality and the effects that people will get when they make recordings.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Neve is survived by his daughters, Evelyn Neve, who is known as Mary, and Ann Yates; his sons, David, John and Stephen; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Mr. Neve was more aware of the engineers who handled his consoles than of the singers and bands whose albums benefited from his audio wizardry.That preference was borne out when rock stars approached him after the screening of Mr. Grohl’s “Sound City” documentary at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin in 2013.“They all wanted to take pictures with him,” Josh Thomas, the general manager of Rupert Neve Designs, said in a phone interview. “And after each picture, he asked me, ‘Why is he important?’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      One Album Released by 44 Labels. Is This the New Global Jukebox?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOne Album Released by 44 Labels. Is This the New Global Jukebox?For a decade, Senyawa has helped redefine how Indonesian music sounded. Now, the duo wants to revolutionize how it gets heard.Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara at their studio in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Their group, Senyawa, is an international emissary of Indonesia’s experimental music scene.Credit…Ulet Ifansasti for The New York TimesFeb. 18, 2021Updated 2:02 p.m. ETWhen coronavirus lockdowns began to grow among Indonesia’s 900 inhabited islands late last March, Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi, like many artists worldwide, began to fret over their musical future.During the last decade, their duo, Senyawa, has emerged as one of the lone international emissaries of Indonesia’s rich experimental scene. They have hopscotched among the islands of Southeast Asia and flown abroad for prestigious festivals, earning 90 percent of their income on tour. Their tumultuous mix of heavy-metal aggression and free-jazz bedlam — bellowed in Shabara’s athletic baritone, backed with Suryadi’s elaborate homemade instruments — has dispelled notions that all Indonesian music chimes like gamelan or hypnotizes like one of its folk forms.“When Senyawa started, if someone knew about Indonesia, they knew gamelan, Bali; they think everybody is playing traditional music,” Shabara said, laughing during a recent video call from Yogyakarta. “If you wanted to go to the United States and scream, people expected you to play the flute. But people know Indonesian music now. That door was opened.”The pandemic threatened to slam it shut again, so Senyawa came up with an unconventional plan. Last September, while making its new album, “Alkisah,” the duo decided its music would no longer be issued through a single label. Instead, the group would make an open online call for any imprint willing to enlist in a global confederation, with each member selling small localized editions of the same record. This week, at least 44 labels scattered across four continents will offer unique versions of “Alkisah,” each with distinct artwork and, in many cases, bonus tracks. It is the most daring iteration yet of Senyawa’s new credo: “Decentralization should be the future.”“It’s not about Senyawa anymore. It’s not about our album,” Shabara said, jabbing his finger toward the screen as a cross-legged Suryadi perched behind him like a mantis, taking long drags from a cigarette. “We don’t want to dominate anybody. This can be anyone’s music.”Unless they’re self-released, most albums fall under the purview of a single label. Or perhaps one imprint handles a record in the Americas, while another takes the reins in Europe or Asia. At best, the stakeholders coordinate release dates or promotional strategies, with priority often given to the label with the biggest potential market share. They are unequal members on one loose team.Senyawa wondered what would happen if it not only grew the team to an unusually large size but also gave the players relative autonomy. After all, “Alkisah” is a dizzying eight-song suite about the revolution that’s possible when world powers collapse, built into a fun house of prog-rock, noise, metal and a little traditional chanting. Why not rethink, from every angle, the very system that delivers music to listeners?The duo doled out graphics and audio files, encouraging labels to make covers that might appeal to their audiences and to commission remixes that might warrant local excitement.“We want the labels to have ownership. Somebody in Beirut may have the Senyawa album, but it should feel like an album from Beirut, not Indonesia,” Shabara said. The Beirut cover glows in iridescent orange and pink, the band’s name scrawled across it in Arabic. One of four German editions is stark and striking, suggesting cool minimal electronics. Together, the assorted editions of “Alkisah” sport nearly 200 remixes.“We want the labels to have ownership,” Shabara said. “Somebody in Beirut may have the Senyawa album, but it should feel like an album from Beirut, not Indonesia.”Credit…Ulet Ifansasti for The New York TimesWhen James Vella first heard Senyawa’s plan last October, he was conceptually intrigued, if pragmatically uncertain. His boundless British label, Phantom Limb, had previously issued Shabara’s solo work, and he loved the pair’s adventurous ardor. But could his fringe upstart afford to divvy the audience for experimental Indonesian rock with more than 40 other imprints?“As fans, we wanted to say yes,” Vella said by phone from London. “But any tiny label is forever one release away from failure. If you invest time and resources in a record that doesn’t sell, it could be the death knell. That is slightly more complicated here.”Vella began to understand, though, that this plan would enhance the sort of resource sharing some labels already use. Phantom Limb, for instance, partnered with a Belgian imprint to market “Alkisah.” The 44 labels now commingle on the chat application Discord, swapping ideas and information.These private international companies have digitally merged into a de facto mutual-aid network, mirroring Senyawa’s ethos back home. With an instrument-building shop, studio, kitchen, sleeping quarters and even indoors beehives, their Yogyakarta compound recalls an artist loft from a bygone New York. The group licenses Senyawa-brand hot sauce, cigarettes and incense for community relief. During the pandemic, Shabara has drawn 200 portraits of strangers, each of whom agreed to feed one neighbor in exchange.For the labels, it’s not just altruism. Senyawa contracted Morphine Records in Berlin to oversee the production and distribution of 2,300 copies for a dozen imprints, driving costs far lower than if those businesses placed separate orders. One in Bali will get 50, another in Spain 200. The savings mean each transaction might net $10, giving these boutique brands a rare shot at a modest profit. Phantom Limb sold what Vella called a “healthy” chunk of its 300 copies before “Alkisah” was actually released.“There may only be 500 people who are interested in the record I am putting out, but I am trying to find all 500,” said Phil Freeman, whose Burning Ambulance is one of two tiny American imprints working with Senyawa. “Wherever they are in the world, great.”Shabara gushed when he discussed this scheme’s future feasibility, detailing organizational refinements he imagines. And Rabih Beaini, the owner of the German label handling manufacturing, suggested that bands big and small could increase their audience by recruiting a plethora of cooperative partners. “You could have 100 labels that reach obscure markets in countries where you might not normally sell your music,” Beaini said from Berlin. “It’s quite utopian.”But Stephen O’Malley — the co-founder of metal duo Sunn O))) and a label owner — warned against reducing Senyawa’s idea into a novel strategy for sales. Several years ago, O’Malley invited Senyawa to perform with him at Europalia, a biennial arts festival, each event devoted to a different country’s culture. He reveled in their openness and enthusiasm.“Senyawa are approaching this record as a way to connect with a lot of people, a way to collaborate,” O’Malley said from his home in Paris. “So why does it have to be sustainable as a business? Of course music is sustainable. It’s been around since the beginning of the species and transmitted the whole time.”But the added connectivity is already changing the way Senyawa functions. This weekend, the group is presenting Pasar Alkisah, a two-day virtual festival of performances, D.J. sets, cooking classes and interviews, a massive act of coordination between the band and their dozens of partners.In September, when Senyawa recorded “Alkisah,” it reconvened near Borobudur, the iconic Buddhist temple built on Java a millennium ago. Shabara and Suryadi isolated themselves in a friend’s sprawling home there, surrounded by a patch of jungle and a panorama of converging rivers and twin volcanoes. It was a postcard version of Indonesia — and a perfectly ironic place to capture a less stereotypical perspective on the world’s fourth most populous country.“We are normal musicians like anyone else in the world who experiments. We just happen to be Indonesian,” Shabara said, his words arriving in a torrent. “If we want Indonesian musicians to flourish and be as highly respected as musicians from the West, we have to think we’re part of the world, not the ‘Third World.’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Eva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77An executive with the respected label Harmonia Mundi, she shaped classical music careers and public tastes in turning out incomparable recordings from a French farmhouse.Eva Coutaz, the driving force behind the record label Harmonia Mundi, rehabilitated forgotten composers and nurtured some of the leading figures in early music.Credit…Josep MolinaFeb. 4, 2021, 3:13 p.m. ETEva Coutaz, who in more than four decades at the highly respected record label Harmonia Mundi shaped musicians’ careers, rehabilitated forgotten composers and expanded the tastes of record collectors, died on Jan. 26 in Arles, France. She was 77.Jean-Marc Berns, the label’s head of marketing, said the cause was complications of renal failure.Ms. Coutaz joined Harmonia Mundi in 1972 at the invitation of its founder, Bernard Coutaz, whom she would go on to marry. Her first job was to oversee publicity and to organize concerts to promote the label’s artists, but she quickly proved her business acumen and artistic sensibility.Ms. Coutaz nurtured long-term relationships with a stable of musicians that included some of the leading figures in early music, among them the countertenor Alfred Deller and the performer-conductors René Jacobs, William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe. Later she brought in another generation of recording stars, including the violinist Isabelle Faust, the pianist Alexandre Tharaud and the baritone Matthias Goerne.She built a catalog of more than 800 recordings as head of production starting in 1975. On the death of her husband in 2010 she became chief executive of the company and remained in that post until 2015, when she sold the label.At its most prolific, Harmonia Mundi released more than 50 new recordings a year. Industry publications frequently crowned it label of the year, and collectors came to trust it as a guide to hidden gems and illuminating interpretations of the classics. With their beautifully designed covers and thoughtful liner notes, Harmonia Mundi albums stood for a listening culture that was both meticulous and meditative.Ms. Coutaz was “the great guiding force” behind the label, Mr. Christie said in a phone interview. As a businesswoman, he said, she could be “tough as old boots.”“She had a strong will and an extraordinary sense of rightness about repertory,” he added. “And she was going to take risks.”In the 1970s and ’80s, those risks paid handsome dividends in a market buoyed by fresh interest in early music and historically informed interpretations. Ms. Coutaz recognized, for example, the market potential of the French baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier at a time when his ilk lagged far behind the popular appeal of their German and Italian counterparts, Mr. Christie said.Costly productions of unknown oratorios and operas remained a gamble, and Ms. Coutaz greenlighted some projects against her own better financial judgment. In a 2018 radio interview with the Belgian station RTBF, she spoke about a recording, led by Mr. Jacobs, of the opera “Croesus” by the northern German baroque composer Reinhard Keiser — a footnote in music history books.“I thought it would be a loss for us,” she said. But she was so taken by the music that she told herself, “I want to record it — it would be a shame if people don’t hear it.” “Croesus” sold more than 25,000 copies, a triumph for classical music.Mr. Jacobs said that Ms. Coutaz had encouraged his conducting career when he was still known mainly as a countertenor. After he had gained fame as a champion of Baroque music, she urged him to record Mozart operas. His Harmonia Mundi recording of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” won a Grammy Award in 2004 and became a best seller.“She pushed me to go further,” he said.Eva Schannath was born in Wuppertal, Germany, on Feb. 26, 1943. Her father was a cabinetmaker. After attending a Roman Catholic school in Düsseldorf, she took on an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Eager to experience France, she went to Marseille in 1964 as an au pair, then stayed on, working first at a book shop in Montpellier and then for a cultural center in Aix-en-Provence.It was there, in 1972, that she met Mr. Coutaz, who was then running Harmonia Mundi from Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire, a remote village in Provence. Mr. Coutaz founded the company in 1958.Jean-Guihen Queyras, a boy studying the cello, was living in a nearby hamlet, and his parents befriended the couple. When he was 10 he received his first taste of a Harmonia Mundi recording session when Ms. Coutaz invited him to work the organ bellows for Mr. Christie in a tiny Romanesque mountain chapel.Years later Mr. Queyras joined the label as a soloist. “What was different to other labels was her vision and her very human and organic way to bring together musicians in a way that really feels like a family,” he said.He recalled her strong emotional reactions to music. “Sometimes she would talk to you after a concert, and you could see there had been tears,” he said. “She really made all this out of pure, intense love for music.”Eva and Bernard Coutaz worked closely together even as they married, divorced and remarried. They had no children. Information on her survivors was not immediately available.The couple moved the label to an old farmhouse in Arles in 1986. It became the creative and logistical hub for a company that at its height employed more than 350 people. Its influence spread through subsidiaries in Spain and the United States, a publishing arm and a network of record boutiques.In the early 2000s, the rise of streaming started to put the recording industry in crisis and forced painful cuts at Harmonia Mundi. In the radio interview, Ms. Coutaz spoke of a 70 percent drop in CD sales over a span of 10 years. She warned that as earnings plummeted, high-quality studio recordings would become a thing of the past. “If digital sales are not monetized, the moment will come when you can no longer produce,” she said.In 2015, she approved the sale of Harmonia Mundi’s catalog to PIAS, a Belgian group of independent labels. She remained involved as a consultant for another year, to help maintain quality. In 2018, Gramophone, a leading classical music publication, named Harmonia Mundi label of the year.Reflecting on Ms. Coutaz, Mr. Christie said his generation had known a recording industry led by “strong-minded and intensely committed individuals who had an extraordinary sense of the rightness of what they were doing and how to create markets.”“And she stood out among them.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Frank Kimbrough, Pianist With a Subtle Touch, Is Dead at 64

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrank Kimbrough, Pianist With a Subtle Touch, Is Dead at 64He could hold the spotlight in everything from a trio to Maria Schneider’s 18-piece big band. He was also a passionate educator.The pianist Frank Kimbrough in performance at Jazz Standard in New York in 2014. He had an understated style that fit well in many different settings.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesJan. 12, 2021, 6:09 p.m. ETFrank Kimbrough, a deft and subtle jazz pianist known for his work in the Maria Schneider Orchestra and other prominent groups, and as the leader of his own small ensembles, died on Dec. 30 at his home in Queens. He was 64.Ann Braithwaite, his publicist, said that the cause was not yet known but that it was believed to be a heart attack.Casual of gesture but deeply focused in demeanor, Mr. Kimbrough had an understated style that could nonetheless hold the spotlight in trio settings, or fit slyly into Ms. Schneider’s 18-piece big band.In many ways, his playing reflected the Romantic, floating manner of his first jazz influence, Bill Evans. But his off-kilter style as both a player and a composer also called back to two of his more rugged bebop-era influences: Herbie Nichols and Thelonious Monk, both of whom he eventually paid tribute to on record.In 2018, Mr. Kimbrough put forth “Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk,” the most ambitious recording of his career, a six-disc collection on Sunnyside Records spanning Monk’s entire known songbook. Mr. Kimbrough’s loose and generous spirit as a bandleader permeates the record, driving a quartet that features Scott Robinson on saxophones and other horns, Rufus Reid on bass and Billy Drummond on drums.All told, Mr. Kimbrough released well over a dozen albums as a leader, starting with “Star-Crossed Lovers” (1986), a cassette-only release for Mapleshade Records, and including the celebrated recordings “Lullabluebye” (2004), “Play” (2006) and “Live at Kitano” (2012).Since 1993, he had appeared on every album except one by Ms. Schneider, a Grammy winner and National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, including last year’s widely acclaimed double disc “Data Lords.”In a New York Times review of the trumpeter Ron Horton’s sextet in 2000, Ben Ratliff wrote, “Part of Mr. Kimbrough’s originality takes the form of an almost passive or Zenlike approach to an active situation; his solo in an urgent piece called ‘Groveling’ was a sustained rubato rhapsody, and otherwise he plays cloudlike chords where you would normally expect rhythmic stabs.”Frank Marshall Kimbrough Jr. was born on Nov. 2, 1956, in Roxboro, N.C. His mother, Katie Lee (Currin) Kimbrough, was a piano teacher, and he always said that he had been playing since before he could remember. His father was a florist. Frank took piano with a local Baptist minister, then briefly studied at Appalachian State University before dropping out because the school’s curriculum didn’t have a place for jazz.By his mid-20s he was a known bandleader on the Chapel Hill scene, and in 1980 he relocated to Washington, where he gigged with a number of local stalwarts and came under the wing of the pianist and vocalist Shirley Horn. It was through her that he eventually signed with Mapleshade, after moving to New York City in 1981. His mentors there included the pianists Andrew Hill and Paul Bley, as well as the drummer Paul Motian.“They were all very kind to me, and we’ve spent a lot of time together,” he said in a 2019 interview with jazztrail.net. “So their influence was not just musical. I observed how they worked and we spent time talking about music, but other things too.”Mr. Kimbrough himself went on to be an educator known for his commitment to his students. He taught piano at New York University in the 1990s and in 2008 became a music professor at the Juilliard School, where he taught until his death.“I think it’s my responsibility to pass all the information I’ve learned from these great musicians on,” he said in 2019. “This music is not taught in books, it’s taught person to person, and I try to give all that away.”In addition to his wife of 31 years, the vocalist Maryanne de Prophetis, Mr. Kimbrough is survived by his mother and four younger brothers: Conrad, Mark, Edwin and David.In 1985, he won the Great American Jazz Piano Competition, held annually at the Jacksonville Jazz Festival in Florida. In the early 1990s he and the bassist Ben Allison founded the Jazz Composers Collective, whose members often played and recorded together. Their work in that organization led to the Herbie Nichols Project, an effort that was led by Mr. Allison but that featured Mr. Kimbrough prominently.Mr. Kimbrough listened to a wide array of music, in jazz and well beyond, often leaning toward ruminative composers like Morton Feldman or folkloric sources from around the world.His favorite place to compose, he said, was on a park bench by the East River, overlooking Manhattan.“I write things that are sketches, one page long. I like to write simple pieces that are easy to play,” he told DownBeat in 2016. “There is a park across the street from my house, and I go over there at night, maybe around 11:00, and I sit there. And if an idea hits me, I may walk around the park with the idea bouncing around my head for six months, and then I might write 16 bars of music.”A patient, deliberate process suited Mr. Kimbrough, and he was uninterested in any approach that valued physical skill over earnest expression. “Music is not athletics,” he said. “I am tired of hearing clever athletic music.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Pop and Jazz Wrapped Up the Past in 16 Boxed Sets

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Pop and Jazz Wrapped Up the Past in 16 Boxed SetsReissues and deluxe editions of albums by PJ Harvey, Lil Peep, Charles Mingus and others provide fresh looks at familiar works, and the creative processes that birthed them.Iggy Pop’s “The Bowie Years” revisits the two albums David Bowie produced for the Stooges frontman, “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life,” with a host of extras.Credit…UMeJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Giovanni Russonello and Dec. 23, 2020Neneh Cherry, ‘Raw Like Sushi (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’(Virgin/UMC; three CDs, $63.89; three LPs, $75.98)Alive with isolated, collagelike layers and exuberant ad-libs (“Now, the tambourine!”), the Swedish pop artist and rapper Neneh Cherry’s cult classic debut album, “Raw Like Sushi,” is a remixer’s dream. This 30th-anniversary set contains a vibrant remastered version of the original LP, along with two entire discs of imaginative remixes: Massive Attack transforms the synth ballad “Manchild” into a snaking, meditative groove, while the early hip-hop producer Arthur Baker reworks two different extended club mixes of Cherry’s ebullient hit “Buffalo Stance,” furthering its eternal cool. LINDSAY ZOLADZCredit…UMeCream, ‘Goodbye Tour Live 1968’(Polydor; four CDs, 66-page book, $69.98)Cream — Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass, Ginger Baker on drums — was a power trio of flashy virtuosos with big egos; it lasted only from 1966 to 1968. While its studio work was disciplined and cooperative, marrying blues to psychedelia, its live sets were improvisatory free-for-alls, with all three musicians goading one another and grappling for attention. This collection gathers three full California concerts from October 1968 along with Cream’s last show, Nov. 26 at the Royal Albert Hall; half of the tracks, including an entire San Diego concert, were previously unreleased. The nightly set list barely varies, but the performances are explosive jams — tempos shift (listen to the assorted “Crossroads”), vocal lines swerve and stretch, guitar solos take different paths each night. The California shows were carefully recorded, but with historic stupidity, the BBC filmed Cream’s last shows yet only captured the music in muddy, low-fi mono. Cream’s members didn’t think they played well at their farewell, and through the murk, that final show is full of wailing excess and rhythm-section overkill. But it deserved better preservation. JON PARELESBela Fleck, ‘Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions’(Craft; three CDs, one DVD, $49.99)The banjoist Bela Fleck visited Africa in 2005 with a film crew for a five-week trip to Mali, Gambia, Tanzania and Uganda, tracing the banjo’s African origins and collaborating with African musicians. The results were a documentary, “Throw Down Your Heart,” two albums of collaborations recorded in Africa and, in 2009, a tour with Toumani Diabaté, a Malian master of the harplike kora. Live recordings from the 2009 tour were released earlier this year as “The Ripple Effect,” a showcase for tradition-bridging melodies, flying fingers and shimmering plucked-string counterpoint. This box gathers them all, including a newly expanded version of the documentary. The whole project shows Fleck learning from every encounter and figuring out countless ways that his bright, speedy, bluegrass-rooted picking and runs can intertwine with African tunes and rhythms. PARELESCredit…UMePJ Harvey, ‘Dry — Demos’(Island; one CD, $13.98; one LP, $24.98)When a 22-year-old Polly Jean Harvey and her band released their sensual, earth-rumbling 1992 debut album, “Dry,” some listeners and critics regarded its songs as almost feral outpourings of spontaneous intensity. A recently released collection of demos proves, once and for all, they were remarkable and carefully constructed achievements of songcraft. Available for the first time as a stand-alone album, “Dry — Demos” is sparse, often consisting of just Harvey’s mesmeric voice and rhythmic stabs of guitar. But the bones of enduringly sturdy songs like “Dress,” “Sheela-Na-Gig” and “O Stella” are, impressively, already locked in place. As a finished product, “Dry” was hardly overproduced or polished, but the incredible artistic confidence of these demos brings the album’s elemental power, and Harvey’s songwriting gifts, into even greater clarity. ZOLADZElton John, ‘Jewel Box’(UMe/EMI; eight CDs in hardcover book, $109.80; four LP set “Deep Cuts Curated by Elton,” $89.98; three LP set “Rarities and B-Side Highlights,” $59.98; two LP set “And This Is Me…” $35.98)Elton John’s “Jewel Box” is at least three projects side by side; its vinyl versions make them available separately. For two CDs of “Deep Cuts,” John selects non-hit album tracks; he likes sad songs with dark lyrics, collaborations with his idols (Leon Russell, Little Richard) and music that evaded his usual reflexes. Three CDs of “Rarities 1965-71” — with five dozen previously unreleased songs — detail his songwriting apprenticeship with the lyricist Bernie Taupin, a good argument for Malcolm Gladwell’s proposition that expertise requires 10,000 hours of practice. At first they tried to write potential hits that were generic enough for others to cover; John once called them “pretty horrible.” The duo learned by obvious imitation, with near-miss mimicry of both British and American approaches: the Beatles, Motown, Phil Spector, country. They made and scrapped “Regimental Sgt. Zippo,” an album of pop psychedelia. Gradually, they homed in on a distinctive Elton John style: openhearted, big-voiced storytelling backed by two-fisted piano. Two more discs are housekeeping — an archive of B-sides and non-album tracks — and the final pair, “And This Is Me …” is a playlist of songs mentioned in John’s memoir, “Me” — which gives him a chance to end with his 2020 Oscar winner, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again.” PARELESLil Peep, ‘Crybaby’ and ‘Hellboy’(Lil Peep/AUTNMY; streaming services)Platforms change, their overlords get finicky, they get sold to conglomerates that might not respect the historical legacies they contain. Which is why it is crucial for artist catalogs that live in only one place online to be spread as far as possible. It’s a relief that the two key early Lil Peep albums, “Crybaby” and “Hellboy” (from 2016), have finally made it up from SoundCloud to other streaming services (fully cleared, with only minor tweaks). Lil Peep — who died in 2017 — was a critical syncretizer of emo and hip-hop: He was swaggering, dissolute and deeply broken, a bull’s-eye songwriter and a rangy singer and rapper. During this era, he finally figured out how all of those pieces fit together, especially on “Hellboy,” a pop masterpiece that pop just wasn’t ready for yet. JON CARAMANICACredit…Photo by Jochen Mönch, Design by Christopher Drukker‘Charles Mingus @ Bremen, 1964 & 1975’(Sunnyside; four CDs, $28.98)Charles Mingus was stubborn, self-righteous — and open to just about anything. When this bassist and composer gave his first concert in Germany in 1964, at the Radio Bremen studios, he was leading one of the finest bands of his career: a sextet that could carry a ton of weight while turning on a dime, like a dump truck made by Maserati. With Johnny Coles on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on reeds, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone, Jaki Byard on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums, the band followed Mingus’s plucky lead, leaping between Ellingtonian miniatures, bluesy hollers and extended avant-garde improv. The group’s now-legendary performances on that tour might well have represented a high-water mark. But when he returned to Bremen 11 years later, with a quintet, his penchant for misdirection and ludic sophistication had only grown stronger. Both shows are presented side-by-side in this four-CD set, which features remasters of the original radio source tapes. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOCredit…UMeCharlie Parker, ‘The Mercury & Clef 10-Inch LP Collection’(Verve; five LPs, 20-page booklet, $69.99)By the end of the 1940s, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was only a few years into his recorded career as a bandleader but he’d already turned jazz inside-out, contouring the next frontier in American modernism as one of bebop’s lead architects. The impresario and producer Norman Granz recognized Parker’s brilliance — and he saw the potential to broaden his appeal, by shining a softer spotlight on his lemon-cake tone and his richly coiled melodies. The 10-inch LPs that Parker recorded with Granz between 1949 and 1953, for the Mercury and Clef labels, offer portraits of the artist from many angles, including the steaming “Bird and Diz,” the only studio session to feature the Big Three of bebop (Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk); the gauzy orchestral fare of “Bird With Strings”; and “South of the Border,” mixing big-band jazz with Mexican and Afro-Caribbean styles. This boxed set features five newly remastered albums from that period, most of which have been out of print on vinyl since the ’60s. Faithful to their original format, the albums come on 10-inch discs, packaged with David Stone Martin’s now-classic artwork, while the booklet includes new essays from the pianist and jazz historian Ethan Iverson and the Grammy-winning writer David Ritz. RUSSONELLOCredit…UMeIggy Pop, ‘The Bowie Years’(Virgin; seven CDs, $99.98)In 1977, David Bowie restarted Iggy Pop’s career by producing two albums for him — “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life” — and joining Pop’s band on tour. Bowie admired Pop’s pure-id approach to songwriting and performing, but smoothed him out just a little — supplying some glam-rock-tinged backup — and spurred him onward, suggesting concepts and approaches. And the punk rock that Iggy and the Stooges had presaged nearly a decade earlier was taking hold in the United States. The alliance was fertile for both of them; Bowie would have a 1980s hit remaking their collaboration, “China Girl,” a song about acculturalization, imperialism and lust from “The Idiot.” This box includes the two studio albums, the howling 1978 live album “T.V. Eye” (with Bowie in the band on keyboard and backup vocals), a disc featuring rawer alternate mixes from the albums and three live Iggy concerts from 1977. Two of the live discs are low-fi and redundant, but a fierce 1977 set from the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland documents a telling rock moment. PARELESCredit…New West RecordsPylon, ‘Box’(New West; four LPs and 200-page hardcover book, $149.99; four CD version to be released in March 2021, $85.99)Formed in 1978 by art-school amateurs in Athens, Ga., Pylon made hardheaded, pioneering, danceable post-punk. Bass and drums staked out sinewy, deliberate, unswerving riffs. The guitar poked into interstices with pings or echoey chords or scratchy syncopation or dissonant counterpoint. Laced through the instrumental patterns, riding or defying them, were vocals by Vanessa Briscoe Hay: declaiming, rasping, chanting, confiding and yelling while she sang about daily life as a pragmatic revelation — and, onstage, moved like no one else. “Box,” on vinyl, includes Pylon’s first two albums, “Gyrate” (1980) and “Chomp” (1983), plus a disc of extras including Pylon’s brilliantly decisive first single, “Cool”/“Dub,” and a find: the band’s first recording, a vivid 1979 rehearsal tape that shows Pylon already fully self-defined. Pylon was very much of its time, akin to Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Bush Tetras and Pylon’s Athens predecessors and supporters, the B-52’s. But Briscoe Hay’s arresting voice and the music’s ruthless structural economy have made Pylon more than durable. PARELESCredit…Rhino RecordsLou Reed, ‘New York (Deluxe Edition)’(Rhino/Warner Bros.; three CDs, two LPs and one DVD, $89.98)Three decades after its release, Lou Reed’s midcareer 1989 opus, “New York,” retains a haunting present-tense resonance: “Halloween Parade” mourns West Village neighbors lost to an epidemic, “Last Great American Whale” frets about environmental collapse, and Trump and Giuliani even cavort through the appropriately titled “Sick of You.” This deluxe edition, released a year after the record’s 30th anniversary, features both a live album and a previously unreleased concert DVD. But its most revelatory additions are the small scraps of Reed’s “work tapes,” capturing such intimate moments as Reed figuring out the chord progression that would become the album’s hit “Dirty Blvd.,” or humming what the bass should sound like on a demo of “Endless Cycle.” Despite his shrugging exterior, these tapes show how deeply Reed cared about the details. ZOLADZCredit…Rhino RecordsThe Replacements, ‘Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)’(Rhino/Warner Bros.; three CDs and one LP, $64.98)Like their beloved Big Star, the Replacements were never quite in the right place at the right time — or maybe, whenever either band was on the brink of mainstream rock stardom, their self-destructive tendencies kicked in. Regardless, the Mats’s fifth album, “Pleased to Meet Me” from 1987, was at once their record company’s last push for success (see the echoing “Jimmy Iovine Remix” of the great single “Can’t Hardly Wait,” which, apparently, even the Midas-like producer couldn’t turn into a radio smash) and a spiritual communion with their underappreciated heroes (the group recorded the album at Big Star’s former Memphis stomping ground Ardent Studios, with their sometime producer Jim Dickinson). The resulting LP, naturally, was caught in the middle: It was too polished to ascend to the cult status of “Let It Be” from 1984, but too snarling and strange to be a hit. This fantastic and exhaustive deluxe edition (featuring 29 never-before-released tracks), though, finally puts it in its proper context: Raw and unvarnished demos (including the final recordings made with their original guitarist, Bob Stinson) restore these songs’ barbed, punk energy, while a rich spoil of melodic leftovers reassert this period as a golden age of Paul Westerberg’s songwriting. ZOLADZCredit…Janette BeckmanStretch and Bobbito, ‘Freestyle EP 1’(89tec9/Uprising Music; streaming services)For some mid-90s New York rap obsessives, the ne plus ultra collaboration is “The What,” by the Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man. For others, it’s “Brooklyn’s Finest,” from the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z. The connoisseur’s choice, however, might be traced back to the night in February 1995, that Big L brought Jay-Z up to the Columbia University radio station WKCR-FM for “The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show,” then the definitive proving ground for the city’s MCs. The result is startlingly good — an excellent showing from Jay-Z, still shaking loose of the twisty syllables he leaned on in his earliest recordings. But Big L — who was killed in 1999 — is the radiant star here, delivering left-field boasts in ice-cold arrangements. Previously available only on hard-to-find cassette releases and online rips, it appears here in an official release for the first time (though sadly without the between-verse banter). It’s one of three unearthed freestyles on this EP — the others are a Method Man and Ghostface Killah team-up, and also the Notorious B.I.G.’s first radio freestyle, a hellacious rumble from 1992. CARAMANICACredit…Cash MoneyVarious Artists, ‘Cash Money: The Instrumentals’(Cash Money/UMe; two LPs for $24.98 or streaming services)The beats used for many of the late 1990s breakout hits of New Orleans’s Cash Money Records were head spinners, one after the next — Juvenile’s fleet, squelchy “Ha,” B.G.’s prismatic “Bling Bling,” Lil Wayne’s chaotic “Tha Block Is Hot.” This compilation gathers those and many others — made mostly by the in-house maestro Mannie Fresh — for a set that lands somewhere between bounce futurism and avant-garde techno. It’s an expanded version of the label’s “Platinum Instrumentals” compilation from 2000, but a less disciplined one, too — the sleepy funk of “Shooter” is wildly out of place here, one of a few more straightforward Lil Wayne tracks that would have been better left off, inconsistent with the pure digital esoterica that made the label impossible to emulate. CARAMANICAVarious Artists, ‘Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music’(Dust-to-Digital; 100 MP3s and liner notes, $35)Excavated Shellac is a website created by Jonathan Ward, a collector of 78-rpm recordings of global music who shares his finds and his research. The digital collection “Excavated Shellac” unearths 100 of his previously unavailable discoveries from nearly as many countries, most released only regionally and long ago. They are extensively annotated, translating lyrics and delving into musicians’ biographies and each country’s recording history. It’s a trove of untamed three-minute dispatches from distant places and eras, full of raw voices, rough-hewed virtuosity and startling structures. Try the ferocious fiddle playing of Picoglu Osman from Turkey, the blaring reeds and scurrying patalla (xylophone) momentum of Sein Bo Tint from what was then Burma, or the accelerating, almost bluegrassy picking and singing of Tiwonoh and Sandikola, from Malawi. Nearly all the tracks are rowdy; as Ward’s notes explain, disc recording favored performers who were loud. PARELESCredit…David GahrGillian Welch, ‘Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs’(Acony; three CDs and 66-page book, $49.99; three LPs and 66-page book, $79.99)The four dozen songs on this collection were all unreleased until this year — they were recorded by the modern folk hero Gillian Welch and her longtime partner, David Rawlings, in a fevered stretch to fulfill a publishing contract in 2002. And yet these are the sketches of a patient perfectionist. Like most of the music Welch put out in that essential era, these songs are marked by the omniscience she builds with small details and her studiously unhurried voice (bolstered by Rawlings’s sturdy sweetness — see especially “I Only Cry When You Go”). It is a torrent of material from an artist who’s long communicated by trickle. And given the music’s elemental beauty, it seems absurd that it languished for all this time, all but unrecorded by others. CARAMANICAAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More