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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Miles Davis’s Electric Period

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    Navigate the trumpeter’s snaky, endless grooves with picks from Flying Lotus, Cindy Blackman Santana and Terence Blanchard, among other musicians, writers and critics.For the past year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz — one artist, instrument and subgenre at a time. We’ve covered Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, New Orleans music, jazz vocalists and much more.Now, we’re turning to the man known as the Prince of Darkness, who gave us the “Birth of the Cool” and never stopped redefining it: Miles Davis. Since the trumpeter’s shape-shifting career encompassed so many phases and styles, we’ve decided to focus on just one: the era known as “Electric Miles,” starting in 1968 and continuing for more than 20 years, when he embraced electric instruments and stubborn, snaky grooves, in the process basically drawing up a blueprint for the genre now known as jazz-rock fusion.“I have to change,” Davis once said. “It’s like a curse.” And as he changed, so did American music. For much of the 1950s and basically all of the ’60s, any time Davis released an album, the center of gravity in jazz shifted a bit.In the late 1960s, urged on by his young wife, the singer Betty (Mabry) Davis, and impressed by funk and rock musicians like Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, the trumpeter disbanded his acoustic quintet and put aside his tailored business suits. (It bears noting that his marriage to Betty was part of a toxic pattern: He frequently drew creative inspiration from the women in his life, but he was often physically abusive and ruthlessly controlling, as he was toward her.) With Betty as a kind of creative adviser, he bought a psychedelic wardrobe, started running his trumpet through a wah-wah pedal — like Hendrix’s guitar — and convened enormously long jam sessions with hordes of musicians: With multiple guitarists, keyboardists, drummers, bassists and percussionists playing together, he would build collective improvisations that took on lives of their own.About that: When you’re dealing with Electric Miles, you aren’t going to get very far in five minutes. So we’ve got to beg a little forgiveness for the name of this piece. But if you’ve got a little more than five, read on to see the picks of musicians, critics and writers who share a deep love for Davis’s electric period; a playlist is at the bottom of the article, and you can leave your own favorites in the comments. We’re sure you’ll find yourself happily immersed in Davis’s “brew.”◆ ◆ ◆Kalamu Ya Salaam, poet“Mademoiselle Mabry (Miss Mabry)”And the music cried Miles. So much was going on. Many of us turned significant corners during the decade after M.L.K. was murdered, April 1968. “Filles de Kilimanjaro” was the gone song. Nothing would any longer be the same. Miles went electric. Clothes and all. The concept was new directions. Miles responding to the killing fields. Post-funeral drug. After this, he had no more memorable bands. (Most of us could not even name the new members — only one great musician, Kenny Garrett, would graduate from that post-60s academy de Miles.) But, oh my, Miss Mabry had us enraptured. This was a way to meditate, to think about what was unthinkable, a new era, a realm most of us did not see coming. Miles knew the music had to change because the times they were a-changing, and the sound of the “Filles” album in 1968 was a lonely goodbye. If you listen to this late at night with the lights out, you will be able to deal with both the death of what was and the birth of things to come.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Cindy Blackman Santana, drummer“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” from “Bitches Brew” (1970), has got a really slinky, cool, funky groove that’s very inviting. It’s easy for people to feel where it’s at. I love the way the song progresses and starts to fill in, with the guitar and the keyboards. And as Miles develops into playing inside of that groove, you hear that big, gorgeous trumpet sound that everybody’s used to. All of the phrasing is just so meaningful and so heartfelt. When Miles first heard Tony Williams’s Lifetime, he wanted to make that band his band — but that wasn’t going to fly with Tony, so Miles took the guitarist, John McLaughlin, and the organist, Larry Young, and he recorded with them. A lot of people don’t give Tony the credit he deserves for that beginning. But at the end of the day, Miles had the openness of mind and the foresight to see how incredible that was, and to take his version of that and keep progressing with his ideas.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Flying Lotus, electronic musician“Lonely Fire”“Lonely Fire” happens to be my favorite Miles Davis tune. People always describe Miles as sounding like the voice of “the outsider” or “the loner,” and this track breathes life into those labels, a testament to his unparalleled spirit. I’ve listened to this song countless times through many phases of my life and moods, and I still don’t know what kind of configuration it takes to create a moment like this. And to be honest, I kinda don’t want to know. To me, it’s magic.I hadn’t thought of it until now — but this song really does sound like what it’s like to stare into a fire. For a moment, nothing else exists. There’s that same feeling of being lost and suspended in time, mesmerized by some destructive beauty.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter and composer“Prelude, Pt. 1”My favorite pieces from Miles’s electric era are the live recordings he made in Japan in 1975 for the “Agharta” and “Pangaea” albums. The band develops a certain kind of tapestry that allows each performer to have individuality, but measured by the whole: Everything is equal. And the only thing that really stands out from that tapestry are the comments that Miles Davis makes on his horn. In this era, he chose to make shorter phrases than he had in his acoustical music — not disconnected from each other, but just shorter phrases with more space in between them — and he blurred the palette that dealt with tone or pitch. With the guitars and electric keyboards and all those extra components in play, he would shape whatever was coming out of the band based off what I would call his unspoken philosophy of what the music should be. It would all depend on whether he looked at somebody, or he played something, or he changed the mute on his trumpet, or he went over to the keyboards. All of those things were the components of his composition.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Lakecia Benjamin, saxophonist“Human Nature” (live)This cover of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” was actually the first music of Miles Davis’s that I heard. I had a teacher who was like, “You guys like Michael Jackson? Michael Jackson and jazz are the same.” And we were like, yeah right. But then they played us Miles’s version of “Human Nature.” Because of the time period, I knew that song really well, and to hear somebody so famous playing that melody on a trumpet was really inspiring. I can’t tell you how motivational it was. I started exploring videos online and saw all the different ways he might solo on that song; this also was the first time I saw how Miles dressed and how he looked, how he interacted with his band, how the audience interacted with him. An instrumentalist operating at a rock-star level was something that I had never seen before in my life.On live performances, like this one from 1991, there would be a huge Kenny Garrett solo at the end of the tune, and that helped me understand the role that the alto saxophone was playing in a modern era, too. We all know Kenny Garrett is kind of like the god of the alto, and this was my first experience of knowing who he is: completely ripping “Human Nature.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Terence Blanchard, trumpeter“Filles de Kilimanjaro”“Filles de Kilimanjaro,” to me, marks the start of the fusion period in Miles’s career. His moment in time was filled with experimentation, so his being open to new sounds and approaches was not a shock. Using those electric elements seems to come from a need to find new sounds and colors. I think what made it so useful is how their use didn’t result in him watering down his musical approach, it only enhanced it. Which reminded all of us how the music was always the most important thing, not just the use of those elements. Miles Davis’s entire career was based on a pursuit for truth and discovery. With his electric period, this constant pursuit of new ideas and sounds brought us an entire genre of music.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Teebs, electronic musician“In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time”“In a Silent Way” is just magical. The song’s beginning gives me a sense of sustained stillness within the air before moving into a full groove and returning back again into a still space. I find a lot of value in spacing and timing in music, and Miles seems to capture these sensibilities with purpose. This record, from 1969, was around the beginning of his step into more electric sounds, and I enjoy how confidently it was made. I am forever grateful for this song and the records that followed.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elena Pinderhughes, flutist“He Loved Him Madly”On “He Loved Him Madly,” a tribute to Duke Ellington from 1974, you can hear every musician really searching: taking their time, searching for the collective sound and vision. There’s so much patience, it’s almost meditative, even though it’s so electric: three guitars, and then all these different layers of electricity on top of them. At many times, you wouldn’t even know how many people are on the song, but if you listen and break it down, it’s amazing. It grows into this groove; you start getting this beautiful alto flute moment with the guitars, and then around halfway — which is 16 minutes in! — Miles comes in with his perfect trumpet voice and opens it up again completely.“He Loved Him Madly” encapsulates one of my favorite things about Miles, which is that he’s so intentional with everything. Every note and every change that’s happening with the rhythm section matters to how it feels collectively, with this simple slow groove that’s almost 30 minutes long. And then in the last section, you get a little more edge — that grittier, funkier side that comes out — and it’s just the most incredible evolution. For anyone that’s not as familiar with Davis’s work, I think it would be rewarding to just sit with the evolution of this one song, sit with the intention and the patience that it takes to create something like this.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Tony Bolden, Black Studies scholar“Yesternow”While listening recently to Maurice White playing drums on “The Mighty Quinn,” Ramsey Lewis’s 1968 cover of the Bob Dylan classic made popular by Manfred Mann, I heard inklings of jazz-funk. (Of course, White became better known as the founder and lead singer of Earth, Wind & Fire.) However, Miles Davis’s 1971 album “Jack Johnson” is an early example of genuine jazz-funk. Recorded in 1970, “Jack Johnson” features Davis’s characteristically pensive sound on trumpet, while Michael Henderson’s head-nodding bass lines are classic funk. Also notable are John McLaughlin’s bluesy licks on guitar and the actor Brock Peters’s interpretation of Jack Johnson’s unreconstructed Blackness (heard in a voice-over at the end of the 25-minute “Yesternow”). The album foreshadows Davis’s increasing fascination with funk and its broader impact on Black music and culture in the 1970s.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic“Hannibal”Hear me out on this. With Davis’s 1980s stuff, there will always be things you need to get over. Let’s call it the “Law & Order”-theme aesthetic, for short, and leave it at that. But if some of the choices on “Hannibal” can feel superficial (Marcus Miller’s slap-happy bass, the strings-adjacent synth sound, the misfit steel pan), they also make the track’s major achievement all the more impressive: It preserves the sense of darkness and danger that has always run just below the surface through Davis’s best work. You can’t miss how tightly plotted and produced this tune is — it’s far from his sprawling funk jams of the 1970s — but it still bristles and skulks mysteriously. You can’t pin it down. “Hannibal” comes from “Amandla,” a masterful 1989 LP whose name, meaning “power” in Zulu, expressed solidarity with the revolutionaries fighting apartheid in South Africa. Let your expectations go, and it’ll win you over.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Harmony Holiday, poet“Two Faced”Miles Davis is the “hero with a thousand faces,” the one Joseph Campbell reveals as the muse of all myths and legends that arrive in his realm, beyond the West, beyond life and afterlife, beyond evil and virtue, what Ellington might call “beyond category.” On the sessions that would become his album “Water Babies” (1976), he gave us two of those faces, halved to the precision of divine union and returning as one. “Two Faced” as in Gemini, along with fellow heroes who attempt to pierce the electroacoustic farce like Kendrick Lamar, like Tupac, like Ye — like stars, like years, like numerals. At times they draw their own blood in search of sound’s life force. It makes logical sense that this album, composed of outtakes from “Nefertiti” and “In a Silent Way,” would also harbor what I believe is one of the only autobiographical moments in Miles’s catalog. He tells on himself for the 18-minute relay between ballad and blues, upbeat and adagio. He admits the excess of vision that he cannot help, retraces it slowly, retracts it with urgency, back and forth in perfect and signature ambivalence. He once said he played ballads so well he had to stop playing them, to get better, or to master himself. On “Two Faced,” recorded in 1968, he blurs a ballad so well you think he succeeded; he hides his restrained saunter in the piano’s frenetic sprint. He takes himself back. In a bit of humor, the album also has a song called “Capricorn.” He knows his foils. He knows himself.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Graham Haynes, trumpeter“Lonely Fire”I remember something Miles said in an interview, right around the time this piece was released: “Don’t write about the music. The music speaks for itself!” I’ve always agreed with this opinion, particularly with Miles’s music and particularly from this period. So, with that in mind, I’m hoping that Miles doesn’t get too angry with me here, wherever he is. “Lonely Fire” is a beautiful piece of music. The performance is as fresh today as it was in 1974, when it was released. The orchestration is something that classes in conservatories need to make a part of their curriculums. The song is essentially a sketch. The melody is played by Miles several times, then Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, then Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet, then back to Miles, who keeps embellishing more. There are no solos. In that way it is also like the Wayne Shorter piece “Nefertiti,” because there are no “solos,” only the melody, over and over with embellishments. The choice of colors with the rhythm section is stellar, with sitar, tamboura, Fender Rhodes piano, bass, drums and percussion. Miles’s sound here is hauntingly beautiful. In an interview Greg Tate did with Wayne Shorter several years ago, Wayne referred to Miles’s trumpet sound as “Excalibur.” Here we see why. This music is beyond any words I can think to give it. I would give it 10 stars!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆David Renard, Times senior editor“Rated X”It’s a little perverse to choose a song where Miles Davis plays the organ, not the trumpet. That alone would set “Rated X” apart, even on an album (“Get Up With It”) brimming with experiments and stylistic shifts. But “Rated X” delivers a singular jolt, one of those “this was recorded in which decade?” moments. (It’s the ’70s.) The drums sound more programmed than played — crisp and frantically precise, completely modern — and they’re both a backbone and a destabilizing force, cutting off abruptly into silence and pulling the rug out from under the droning organ, only to drop back in just as quickly. Propelled by galloping bass and heavily wah-wah’d guitar, the track sets a mood that’s anxious and tense but exhilarating, an unsettling rush into the future.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Jlin, electronic musician“Pharaoh’s Dance”I have so many Miles Davis favorites, but one track that just does it for me every time is “Pharaoh’s Dance,” from his album “Bitches Brew,” which is insanely genius. “Pharaoh’s Dance” for me just screams the word “fulfilled.” I can hear how in-tune Miles is with himself each time I play this. He never misses a chance to play, but also never overplays his chance, either. Miles has this striking beauty of balance he creates with his eclectic approach each time he decides to pop in and out of the track. It’s never the same; he never repeats a phrase or sequence.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Ibrahim Maalouf, trumpeter“Turnaround”The first time I listened to this box set, “The Complete On the Corner Sessions,” I was in my 30s. I had just played with Marcus Miller on the French Riviera, and I felt the urge to revisit all of Miles Davis’s work. I realized that the entire electric part had eluded me. It was “On the Corner” and specifically “Turnaround” that helped me understand his approach. His desire never to be bound by the norms that often turn success in jazz into a curse. He embraced his history while resonating with the evolution of his time. This album, for me, is the pursuit of that sound. And on “Turnaround,” he found it.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆George Grella Jr., music critic“Sivad”One of the vital revelations about music came to me as a teenager, sitting in a friend’s basement, listening to his parents’ LPs. The move from Miles’s quintet albums to “Live-Evil” (1971) was drastic; the reward was understanding that groove and details of space, placement and articulation were profound and masterful. Even more, during the heyday of album-rock radio and the singer-songwriter stars, it was thrilling to feel music that wasn’t about anything but its own sound, saying so much more than words could. And that the sensuality of music in the body could carry Miles’s rich, complex intellect.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      53 Years After Miles Davis’s Album, a Fresh Spin as ‘London Brew’

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      A 12-member collective of noted U.K.-based musicians used “Bitches Brew” as a springboard, improvising a new LP after the pandemic thwarted a 50th anniversary celebration for the original.In 1970, Miles Davis released “Bitches Brew,” an album so musically daring that some critics and listeners didn’t know what to make of it.By then, the trumpeter’s ear had drifted from traditional jazz to edgier blends of funk and psychedelic rock; he wanted to craft an amorphous sound only loosely tethered to any genre. “Instances of subtlety and formal improvisational mastery come thick and fast,” the critic Carman Moore wrote of “Bitches Brew” in The Times upon its arrival. “It is all so strange and new and yet so comfortable.”Others weren’t sold. “With ‘Bitches Brew,’ Davis was firmly on the path of the sellout,” Stanley Crouch wrote in 1990. “It sold more than any other Davis album, and fully launched jazz-rock with its multiple keyboards, electronic guitars, static beats and clutter. Davis’s music became progressively trendy and dismal.”“Bitches Brew” did indeed sell well. It delivered Davis’s first gold and platinum albums, and shifted mainstream jazz from elegant arrangements optimized for cramped nightclubs to bigger, grungier structures tailor-made for stadium speakers. Now it’s the focus of an ambitious jazz album called “London Brew,” out Friday.The LP convenes a 12-member collective of noted musicians in Britain — including the saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, the tuba player Theon Cross, the D.J. Benji B and the guitarist Dave Okumu — and uses “Bitches Brew” as a springboard to a new album informed by the Davis classic without recreating it. The idea was to improvise an album with the same fiery expanse, with samples from Davis’s electric period of the late 1960s and early ’70s as the binding agent.“We wanted to do something that would be our imagination of what it could possibly have been to be in his presence during those sessions,” the guitarist and “London Brew” producer Martin Terefe, 53, said in a video interview. “The kind of freedom that the musicians on that album were given.”Bennie Maupin, 82, the acclaimed reedist and a featured player on “Bitches Brew,” said spontaneity was a key to the original recording. “Everything that happened, happened right in the moment,” he recalled in a telephone interview. “Miles never told anybody what to play, not once. He allowed us to totally be ourselves. He would give us some direction to just kind of start. And when we started something, we might play for 10 minutes, and then he would stop us and go onto something else.”Okumu, on guitar, was part of the group that convened in December 2020 at the Church Studios.Nathan WeberDavis’s double album, with its dark aura, thick acoustic-electric instrumentation and seemingly endless grooves, also made way for like-minded bands to assemble in its wake. Maupin would go on to play with the pianist Herbie Hancock in his Mwandishi and Head Hunters bands; the keyboardist Joe Zawinul and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter formed Weather Report; the pianist Chick Corea and the drummer Lenny White started Return to Forever; and the guitarist John McLaughlin and the drummer Billy Cobham founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra. They all played on “Bitches Brew,” a record that’s still bearing fruit 53 years later.“That was a golden moment,” Maupin said. “Miles is gone. Wayne just left. I just thank my lucky stars that he invited me to come and be myself.”“London Brew” was supposed to be a one-off live event at the Barbican Center in London in 2020 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bitches Brew.” Bruce Lampcov, a 69-year-old veteran producer and engineer who has mixed Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel and Eurythmics and had recently signed a deal to administer Davis’s publishing catalog, happened to be in London in late 2019, and was thinking of ways to introduce the legend’s music to younger listeners. The signing, along with the upcoming anniversary, presented “an obvious sort of launching-off point, a record that in itself built a wider audience at the time for jazz music,” Lampcov said in a video interview. In London, he was introduced to the local jazz scene, and was taken by what he saw there.“I went into a theater, there was a capacity crowd with a reggae sound machine going, and D.J.s playing jazz music,” he said, describing then seeing a live show with “a crowd of like, 18-year-olds and 20-year-olds. It was like being at a rock gig. And I thought, ‘This is amazing. This is perfect. We just need to do something that connects Miles to this audience.’”Cross, Garcia and Hutchings in the studio. “The whole thing was meant to be a mesh,” Garcia said.Nathan WeberIn February 2020, Lampcov started reaching out to musicians to see if they’d want to do the “Bitches Brew” tribute gig. After making some initial contacts, he boarded a plane back to the United States as the world was about to change. “Everyone was wearing a mask and I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’” he recalled. “And that was it. That’s how it fell apart.”Covid-19 lockdowns shuttered venues and canceled the show, leaving any sort of celebration in limbo. But as the pandemic lingered, and it became clear the concert couldn’t be rescheduled, Lampcov put the idea to rest — until Terefe called with another idea: Get everyone in the studio and record an album.“I couldn’t really let go of it, it felt like such an exciting project,” Terefe said. “There was a point when I kind of suggested to Bruce, ‘Listen, when it’s so rough out there, what’s better to do than to find a good studio and self-isolate with all these musicians and make a record together?’”On Dec. 7, 2020, the group convened at the Church Studios in North London, with Covid testing personnel in place and a scaled-down technical crew, to record what would become “London Brew,” an eight-song, almost 90-minute LP of genre-hopping experimentation that blurs the lines between rock, jazz and ambient, sometimes within the scope of one song.At the beginning of the three-day session, Terefe asked the collective to play a single note for as long as it could hold it, “just expressing their frustration with the pandemic.” Where the two-part title track on the new album centers hard-thumping drums, breakneck electric guitar riffs and squealing wind instruments, “Raven Flies Low” is a methodical collage: Raven Bush plays the violin through effects pedals (a nod to Davis running his trumpet through tape delay on “Bitches Brew”), slowly bringing the track to a volcanic peak, with crashing drum cymbals and undulating saxophone.While “London Brew” is foremost a nod to one of Davis’s most famous albums, songs like “Bassics” and the title track’s midpoint evoke the cosmic Afrocentricity and tightly coiled funk of Davis’s “Live-Evil,” released in 1971, and “On the Corner,” from the following year. Toward the end of “London Brew Pt 2,” the producers sample the wafting guitar and subtle organ of the ambient-leaning “In a Silent Way,” from 1969, a direct repurposing of Davis’s music.“His recordings are so special and so unique that to actually try and repeat something that’s very much so improvisational wouldn’t do it justice,” Lampcov said. “We really didn’t feel like it would be a celebration of the record, and it never would be as good.” On purpose, there’s no trumpeter on the new album: “Because how could you do that?”Garcia, 31, the saxophonist, gave herself a directive in the studio: Just be free and in the moment; don’t interrupt anything going on between other musicians. “If there’s something special happening between the flute and drum kit, why would I get in the way of that?” she said over the phone from London. “I don’t need to be talking all the time.”Still, her voice persists, much like everyone else in the collective, much like the large ensemble Davis convened all those years ago. A half-century after Davis brought the likes of Maupin, Hancock and Shorter into one room for one common goal, that same sense of community dots “London Brew,” an album built on the same organic principles, scanning as the same inscrutable jazz. Like “Bitches Brew,” it’s an album that just is.“The whole thing was meant to be a mesh,” Garcia said. “We were in the room together, we played things, then we left. I hope it conveys the necessity and beauty of community. I hope it conveys that we need each other.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Bebop

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      Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell: They altered the course of American music and raised the bar for improvisation. Listen to 10 experts’ favorites.What five minutes of music would you play for a friend to make them love Alice Coltrane or Duke Ellington? After a few years of listening to a wide range of classical music, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers, editors, critics and scholars to share their jazz favorites with readers.This month, our focus isn’t an artist, but a style: bebop. Think of a horn player zipping through a dizzying line, over a swinging beat that sizzles so fast you can almost see smoke drifting from the cymbals. That’s bebop.Forged in the fires of Black urban life during the postwar era, bebop was, as Amiri Baraka writes in “Blues People,” the style that “led jazz into the arena of art.” It was also laced with irreverence. “To a certain extent, this music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding,” Baraka says.By way of its corrugated harmonies, its dashing tempos and the particular spotlight it placed on the interplay between horns and drums, bebop altered the course of American music, and raised the bar for improvisation and composition worldwide. And it’s never really gone out of fashion: Bebop is the music Jean-Michel Basquiat painted to, and it’s the foundation of jazz theory that music students around the world are taught when they learn to improvise.Enjoy listening to these tracks selected by a range of the genre’s practitioners, commentators and devotees. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own bebop favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jon Faddis, trumpeterFor me, any discussion of bebop must include Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This is not to negate the contributions of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Fats Navarro, Max Roach and many others. Parker spearheaded bebop; Gillespie, a consummate teacher, conveyed this complex musical style to others. On an autumn evening over 75 years ago, at one of my favorite venues, Carnegie Hall, a groundbreaking concert made many fall in love with bebop. It still inspires and resonates. Although there are many classic bebop recordings, such as “Complete Jazz at Massey Hall,” “Parker’s Mood,” “Koko,” “Groovin’ High,” and another favorite of mine, Bird’s solo on “Lady Be Good,” this version of “Dizzy Atmosphere” epitomizes the genius abilities of Bird and Diz to create at such a high level. Charlie Parker is on fire, and Dizzy Gillespie is right there with him. As Dizzy used to say, “Two hearts as one.”“Dizzy Atmosphere”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Camille Thurman, saxophonist and vocalistCharlie Parker was the epitome of bebop. His improvisations were innovative, limitless, freeing, bold, boundary-pushing and unapologetically groundbreaking in the way he transcended all preconceived understanding of western harmony. This version of “Just Friends” is what bebop is all about in a nutshell. You have this beautiful orchestration of strings, with a whimsical yet eerie backdrop, and like a bolt of lightning, Bird comes in with a highly imaginative, vivid, rapid flow of endless ideas that for four measures is exhilarating, taking you on a virtuosic sonic roller coaster ride. He ever so gracefully lands into the melody of “Just Friends” and perfectly introduces the song at the end of his improvisation. To love bebop is to recognize how musicians like Bird had the gift of hearing beyond the scope of what we might take for granted when listening to a standard. Bird could take something ordinary and recreate it into something that was iconic, sophisticated, unique and timeless while freely and honestly expressing himself. He set the standard for what makes bebop, bebop.“Just Friends”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆Gary Giddins, former Village Voice jazz criticOnly in bebop could you take a pop song, strip it of its melody and lyrics, and create a defining standard from the remains: the chord changes. The British musician Ray Noble’s 1938 “Indian Suite” harkened to the romantic Americana of Victor Herbert and Coleridge-Taylor, yet the first movement, “Cherokee,” was a swing-era hit, despite a slow-moving melody and a fast-moving harmonic episode considered so challenging (B major, A major, G major) that Count Basie relieved Lester Young from having to solo on it. Charlie Parker obsessed over those chords, and in 1945 launched bop with his transformational “Koko.” Several classic versions ensued, none more dazzling than Bud Powell’s masterpiece. He begins with a caricature of Indian music à la Hollywood, witty but also rhythmically intense so that you smile but don’t laugh, which leads to Noble’s often-ignored theme, powered by a contrapuntal plateau of chords, as if he’s laying out the territory before he explores it, which he does in two choruses of electrifying linear invention, against a barrage of bass clef chords. The solo is staged within two octaves, dipping only once as low as the area of middle C, spelled by infrequent breath-like rests, a minimal reliance on triplets, and a few heady riff episodes. After dozens of hearings over six decades, it hasn’t lost one iota of its joy, ingenuity and wonder.“Cherokee”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticAn unforgettable tune, hung loosely upon chord changes that originated in a George Gershwin composition but are adapted here and restructured, turned sideways and adorned with a rockslide of rhythmic melody. A French announcer atop the sound, running through titles and names. A young Miles Davis, not yet 23, blasting forth with enough squiggly canned heat on the trumpet to leave the announcer’s words sounding lifeless, irrelevant. In each of these facets, this recording of “Good Bait” — penned by the quietly revolutionary pianist Tadd Dameron — epitomizes the brilliant moment of bebop: a reckoning for Western modernism, the greeting of its own limitations, the Molotov cocktail concealed under the lapels of a three-piece suit.“Good Bait”The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet (Legacy Recordings)◆ ◆ ◆Natalie Weiner, writerScat singing wasn’t a bebop innovation, but it was a core part of the subgenre’s development — right down to its name, derived from common scat syllables. Betty Carter shows why on this 1958 record, cramming a nearly unfathomable number of notes into a whirlwind minute and 48 seconds of slick big band sound. Her tics and riffs sound so familiar because they’ve become standard, but here Carter was forging new ground, extending the scat innovations of Dizzy Gillespie with wild virtuosity and never conceding to the mellow, background music stylings often expected of “girl singers.”“You’re Driving Me Crazy”Betty Carter (Master Tape Records)◆ ◆ ◆Sean Jones, trumpeterThis group’s performance with Thelonious Monk on “Evidence” is one of the greatest displays of bebop musicians communicating at a highly sophisticated level at extremely brisk tempos. This form of communication, improvisation, is one of the world’s best examples of spontaneous composition. The improvised section is based on Jesse Greer’s iconic “Just You, Just Me,” showing bebop’s ability to recontextualize the pop song form. Referencing that title, Monk thought, “Just Us/Justice” — which requires “Evidence.” This track also reflects the most profound aspects of rhythm and its relationship to harmony through the African American experience, creating new sonic phrasing that would become the foundation of hip-hop and other American styles of music.“Evidence”Thelonious Monk Quartet With Johnny Griffin (Riverside Records)◆ ◆ ◆Charles McPherson, saxophonistBird comes from the middle of the country, Kansas City, in the middle of the 1930s, when that area was in a good musical period. But besides absorbing all the Kansas City blues and the Kansas City swing, Bird was pretty eclectic. He very much knew about people like Stravinsky: He quoted passages from “Firebird Suite” or “Petrushka.” Bird listened to cowboy country-western; he listened to everything. So he was like a sponge, musically. He also probably listened to Middle Eastern music — certainly Dizzy did that. So they’re pushing all kinds of envelopes. These guys were particularly smart and wide open, with the technique to merge it all. Billy Higgins, the drummer, said that bebop was the beginning of “sanctified intelligence.” That says it all.The way that Bird and Dizzy play “Shaw ’Nuff,” they’re so accurate it almost sounds like one person playing. It’s a lot of moving parts, it’s very notey — but they’re played very cleanly. And these guys are right with each other. When I talk to California musicians who are of that age, they say: “We just heard Bird and Dizzy on record, they had never come out here to Los Angeles, so we thought it was one person playing. So when they came out there in the 1940s it was the first time we saw them playing, and it amazed us. Because a lot of the compositions that we thought were one person playing — no, it was two people playing.” That floored them.“Shaw ’Nuff”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Savoy)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerI’ve always admired the brazenness of the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard: No matter how powerfully the music swirled around him, and whether he was the bandleader or a sideman, his wail scorched through the arrangement every time. On this 1969 version of “Space Track,” from the live album “Without a Song,” Hubbard dots the composition with brisk upper-register notes that float atop the band’s turbulent mix of piano, drums and bass, bolstering the song’s urgency while guiding its shape-shifting journey. “Space Track” dips into occasional silence meant to reinforce its balance of power and tranquillity. With each of the band’s upswings, Hubbard also ascends, at one point following Louis Hayes’s spirited drum solo with an equally blistering tone. To me, the track typifies Hubbard’s command of his instrument alongside the message he wanted to convey. His mastery of tension was unparalleled.“Space Track”Freddie Hubbard (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Kenny Barron, pianistThis is a very melodic piece. I know some people may be intimidated by bebop — the lines can be very fast and complicated — but this is a very melodic piece, with a very accessible line. It’s not a simple melody but it’s not super-complicated, either: You can actually sing along with it. And it’s taken at a tempo that’s not too fast, so it’s really very clear. Where the rhythmic emphasis falls, that’s one of the things that makes it work. One of the things that makes bebop work is that the way the one is felt — the first beat of the bar — is actually the “and” of four. So that gives it a certain kind of propulsion and forward motion, at any tempo. So when the tempo’s not that fast, you really hear that forward motion. Bud Powell’s important because he improvised like a horn player. There were some things that he did that were kind of demonic, they were so incredible. Speed-wise, and also some of the things he wrote. He was an amazing pianist.“Celia”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Melissa Aldana, saxophonistTo me, this album — “Charlie Parker With Strings” — captures the deepness of Parker’s innovative nature as an artist in a way that is beautiful, lyrical and emotional. Bird’s sound is raw and personal, but this track shows what it means to simply have a beautiful sound. It made a particular impact on me years ago, and continues to affect me now.“April in Paris”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Michael Henderson, Funk Bassist Turned Crooner, Dies at 71

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      He was a sideman with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis before embarking on a successful second career as a singer of soulful, romantic ballads.Michael Henderson, a self-taught bassist who performed and recorded in the 1960s and ’70s with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, then remade himself as a soulful balladeer and songwriter, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 71.His son, Michael Jr., said the cause was cancer.Mr. Henderson began his career early. He was about 14 and on tour with the Detroit Emeralds, an R&B group, when he met Mr. Wonder at a theater in Chicago.“There was a piano upstairs where the dressing rooms were,” Mr. Henderson said in the liner notes to “Take Me I’m Yours: The Buddah Years Anthology” (2018), a two-CD collection of his records from the 1970s and ’80s released by Soul Music Records. “Stevie was playing something I’d heard before, so I got my bass and sat down next to him. He started playing, and I started playing right along with him.”Mr. Wonder soon hired him. For the next five years, Mr. Henderson toured with Mr. Wonder while also working as a session musician for Motown Records. He said he had learned all he could from the influential Motown bassist James Jamerson, who would sometimes come to clubs or recording sessions where Mr. Henderson was playing.“I stayed close to James’s sound but began adding in my little stuff every now and then,” he said in the “Anthology” liner notes. “I’d go up the neck and find higher notes.”Mr. Henderson’s skills had advanced enough to pique Miles Davis’s interest when he heard him play with Mr. Wonder’s band in 1970 at the Copacabana in Manhattan. Davis had already begun using electric instruments and rock rhythms on “Bitches Brew” and other albums; now he wanted to take his music in more of a funk direction and decided to hire Mr. Henderson, who was not a jazz musician, to replace Dave Holland, who was best known as an upright bassist but had begun playing the electric bass with Davis.When the show was over, Mr. Henderson recalled in a 2017 interview for the website Lee Bailey’s Eurweb, which covers urban entertainment, sports and politics, Davis came backstage and told Mr. Wonder that he was “taking” his bass player.Over the next few years, Mr. Henderson recorded a string of albums with Davis, including “A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner.” In a 1997 review of CD reissues of five Davis albums from 1969 to 1973, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff cited “Live-Evil” and “In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall” as evidence of Mr. Henderson’s noticeable impact on Mr. Davis’s band.“Mr. Henderson made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “Instead of improvising and interacting with the band, he took a simple bass vamp and percolated it endlessly.”Mr. Henderson with Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. One critic said that Mr. Henderson, who did not have a jazz background, had “made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic.”David Warner Ellis/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMichael Earl Henderson was born on July 7, 1951, in Yazoo City, Miss., and moved to Detroit with his mother, Rose Williams, who sang in church, and his stepfather, Earl Henderson, when he was young. During his childhood, he played cello and then switched to bass. Precociously talented, he was performing with local bands before his 12th birthday.“Mom was always cool with the noise I was making in the basement and backyard, and later as I began playing in the local bar scene,” he said in the liner notes. When he was 10 or 11, he saved enough money to take a bus to see a bill of Motown artists at the Fox Theater.“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to be onstage with all those artists,’” he said.Mr. Henderson was a sideman until 1976 — the year his time with Davis ended — when the jazz drummer and bandleader Norman Connors invited him to write and record a song for his album “Saturday Night Special.” He sang that song, “Valentine Love,” with Jean Carne. Mr. Henderson wrote and sang on the title song of Mr. Connors’s next album, “You Are My Starship,” and sang a duet with Phyllis Hyman on his song “We Both Need Each Other.”After making a deal with Buddah Records in 1976, Mr. Henderson’s transformation into a sexy crooner and songwriter continued. The cover of his 1981 album, “Slingshot,” showed him on a beach wearing a tiny aqua swimsuit.When Mr. Henderson appeared at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in 1979, Connie Johnson, a pop critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that he “isn’t a platinum sex symbol in the manner of Teddy Pendergrass — yet,” adding, “Currently, he’s in the same league as Peabo Bryson and Lenny Williams.”Mr. Henderson found success on the Billboard R&B chart with singles like “Take Me I’m Yours,” which hit No. 3 in 1978; “Wide Receiver,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1980, and “Can’t We Fall in Love Again,” another duet with Ms. Hyman that rose to No. 9 in 1981.After seven albums for Buddah, the last of them in 1983, he recorded “Bedtime Stories” for EMI America in 1986. That was his last solo album, although he continued to perform.In addition to his mother and a son, Mr. Henderson is survived by his daughters, Chelsea and Michelle Henderson, and his companion, DaMia Satterfield. He was separated from his wife, Adelia Thompson.In 2002, Mr. Henderson returned to Miles Davis’s music. He and several other Davis alumni, including the saxophonist Sonny Fortune and the drummer Ndugu Chancler, formed the group Children on the Corner; a year later, they released the album “Rebirth,” which reinterpreted and recreated Davis’s electric music from the 1970s.“This ain’t no smooth jazz,” Mr. Henderson told All About Jazz in 2003. “Don’t come to hear us and get ready to eat your steak and sit there and have a conversation with your old lady. It ain’t happenin’. Because when we hit the stage, we mean business. We’re going for the throat.” More

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      Betty Davis, Raw Funk Innovator, Is Dead at 77

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      “Nasty Gal” and her two other 1970s albums influenced generations of R&B and hip-hop.Betty Davis, the singer and songwriter whose raunchy persona, fierce funk grooves and Afrofuturistic style in the early 1970s made her a forerunner of R&B and hip-hop to come, died on Wednesday in Homestead, Pa., the town outside Pittsburgh where she had lived. She was 77.Her reissue label, Light in the Attic, distributed a statement from her friend of 65 years, Connie Portis, announcing the death of a “pioneer rock star, singer, songwriter and fashion icon.” The cause was not specified. Ms. Davis, who first recorded as Betty Mabry, got her last name from her one-year marriage to the jazz bandleader Miles Davis. The music she made in the early 1970s didn’t bring her nationwide hits, but it directly presaged the uninhibited funk of musicians from Prince to Janet Jackson to Janelle Monáe.On the three albums she released from 1973 to 1975, Ms. Davis growled, moaned, teased and rasped through songs that were lascivious, bluesy and hardheaded. She posed in lingerie, in neo-Egyptian regalia and in space-warrior garb, with her hair in a towering Afro; she performed in silvery thigh-high boots, short shorts and a bustier. The poet Saul Williams described her as “the burning secret of Black womanhood and sensuality as expressed through song.”In a 2018 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Davis said, “I wrote about love, really, and all the levels of love,” proudly including carnality. “When I was writing about it, nobody was writing about it. But now everybody’s writing about it.”In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued Ms. Davis’s albums with her approval.“Nasty Gal” would be her last studio album released near the time it was recorded, and she never had a certified hit. As the 1980s began, she left the music business almost completely. Yet listeners and musicians have repeatedly rediscovered her, and Davis gained ever-increasing respect as her music was sampled — by Ice Cube, Method Man and Lenny Kravitz among others — and reissued. “This lady was hip before hip was hip,” Mr. Kravitz tweeted.She was born Betty Gray Mabry on July 26, 1944, in Durham, N.C., to Henry and Betty Mabry and grew up in rural North Carolina and in Homestead. Her father was a steelworker, her mother a nurse. In the 2017 documentary film “Betty: They Say I’m Different,” she recalled listening as a little girl to the blues and rock ’n’ roll — Big Mama Thornton, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Chuck Berry — and singing along with the record player. She was 12 when she wrote her first song, “Bake a Cake of Love,” and she sang in local talent shows.As a teenager, Ms. Mabry went o New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology; she brought along a notebook full of songs. She worked as a model for the Wilhelmina agency, appearing in Glamour and Seventeen magazines and as a pinup in Jet magazine. She also worked as a club hostess, and she savored the city’s 1960s nightlife and met figures like Andy Warhol and Jimi Hendrix.Her first single, in 1964, was “The Cellar.” According to Danielle Maggio, an ethnomusicologist and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh who wrote her dissertation on Ms. Davis, the song was named after a private club at Broadway and West 90th Street. Ms. Mabry became its M.C., disc jockey and hostess, and the club drew artists, musicians and athletes.In 1967, the Chambers Brothers recorded one of her songs, “Uptown.” The South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, then her boyfriend, produced a 1968 single for her, “Live, Love, Learn.”Ms. Davis with her husband, Miles Davis, at their home in New York in 1969. During their yearlong marriage she introduced him to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.Baron Wolman/Getty ImagesShe met Miles Davis at a jazz club and became his second wife in 1968. A photograph of her is the cover of Davis’s 1969 album, “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” which includes a tune titled “Mademoiselle Mabry.” Ms. Davis introduced her husband to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.While Mr. Davis was working on a later album, he considered calling it “Witches Brew”; his wife suggested “Bitches Brew,” the title that stuck. She also convinced him to trade the dapper suits of his previous career for flashier contemporary fashion. “I filled the trash with his suits,” she recalled in the documentary.Mr. Davis encouraged her to perform. In 1969, he produced sessions for her, choosing musicians including Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter from Davis’s quintet and Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox from Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. His label, Columbia Records, rejected the results, which remained unreleased until 2016.The marriage was turbulent and sometimes violent before ending in 1969. “Miles was pure energy, sometimes light but also dark,” Ms. Davis recalled in the documentary. “Every day married to him was a day I earned the name Davis.”She kept the name as she returned to songwriting. Material she wrote for the Commodores brought her an offer to record for Motown, but she turned it down because she insisted on keeping her publishing rights.Ms. Davis subsequently moved to London — where a new boyfriend, Eric Clapton, offered to produce an album for her — and then to the Bay Area, where Michael Lang, who had promoted the 1969 Woodstock festival, signed her to his label, Just Sunshine. Greg Errico, the drummer from Sly and the Family Stone, produced her debut album, “Betty Davis”; it opened with “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” and included “Anti Love Song,” which warned, “Just as hard as I’d fall for you, boy/Well you know you’d fall for me harder.”Ms. Davis wrote all the songs on her albums, and she produced the next two herself: “They Say I’m Different” and “Nasty Gal,” which brought her to a major label, Island Records. The music and arrangements were hers; she sang each part to her band members. Her songs were aggressive, jaggedly syncopated funk that was anything but shy. In “Nasty Gal,” she boasted, “You said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you.”But while Davis conquered club audiences, she found little traction on radio, denying her any commercial success. In 1976, she recorded another album, which included the autobiographical “Stars Starve, You Know.” The song complains, “They said if I wanted to make some money/I’d have to clean up my act.”Island shelved the album, which went unreleased until 2009, and dropped Ms. Davis. “The doors in the industry kept closing,” she said in the film. “All these white men behind desks telling me to change. Change my look, change my sound. ‘Change your music, Betty.’”In 1979, she found independent financing to make another album, “Crashin’ With Passion,” recording it in Los Angeles with musicians including Mr. Hancock, Martha Reeves (of Martha and the Vandellas) and the Pointer Sisters; it, too, went unreleased. Ms. Davis felt that the music business was done with her. In 2018, she said: “When I was told that it was over, I just accepted it. And nobody else was knocking at my door.”The death of her father, in 1980, deepened her isolation and depression. On a yearlong visit to Japan in the early 1980s, she played some club dates with a Japanese band, her last live performances. She left no immediate survivors.But as the decades passed, she was far from forgotten. In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued her albums with her approval, along with the Columbia sessions produced by Mr. Davis and her unreleased 1976 album, “Is It Love or Desire.” Hip-hop samples made clear how hard-hitting her productions still sounded, and the 2017 documentary brought new affirmations that Ms. Davis had been ahead of her time.“Being different is everything,” she said in the film. “It is the way forward.” More

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      Badal Roy, Who Fused Indian Rhythms With Jazz, Is Dead at 82

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      He collaborated across cultures, playing tabla with Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin and others in the jazz world and beyond, including Yoko Ono.Badal Roy, an Indian tabla player whose drumming propelled East-West fusions for some of the most prominent musicians in and out of jazz, died on Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.His son, Amitav Roy Chowdhury, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Roy was largely self-taught. He was not trained in the Indian classical apprentice tradition of gurus and disciples. Where classical tabla players use a pair of differently tuned drums, Mr. Roy sometimes used three or four. His improvisational flexibility and his skill at sharing a groove made him a prized collaborator for jazz, funk, rock and global musicians.He first became widely known for his work in the early 1970s with the English guitarist John McLaughlin and Miles Davis, appearing on Davis’s pivotal jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors. He went on to many other collaborations,— recording with Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Yoko Ono, Bill Laswell and Richie Havens — and spent more than a decade as a member of Ornette Coleman’s electric band, Prime Time.Amarendra Roy Chowdhury was born on Oct. 16, 1939, in the Comilla District of what was then British India. (The area was later part of East Pakistan and is now in Bangladesh.) His father, Satyenda Nath Roy Chowdhury, was a government official in Pakistan; his mother, Sova Rani Roy Chowdhury, was a homemaker. “Badal,” which means “rain” in Bengali, was a childhood nickname.An uncle introduced him to the tabla and taught him its rudiments: the vocal syllables that denote specific drum sounds. Later, in New York, he took some lessons from Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s longtime tabla player. While growing up, he was also a fan of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. His introduction to jazz was hearing Duke Ellington perform in Pakistan in 1963.Mr. Roy wasn’t planning a career in music when he came to New York in 1968. He intended to earn a Ph.D. in statistics.To support himself, he worked as a waiter at the Pak India Curry House and found a weekend gig playing tabla with a sitarist at A Taste of India, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Mr. McLaughlin was a regular there, and he sometimes sat in with the duo. After a few months of jamming, he asked Mr. Roy to join a recording session. The resulting album, “My Goals Beyond,” released in 1971, was an early landmark in Indian-influenced jazz.Mr. McLaughlin was also working with Miles Davis at the time, and he brought Mr. Roy to Davis’s attention; when Davis was appearing at the Village Gate in 1971, Mr. Roy’s duo auditioned for him during a break between sets at A Taste of India, carrying their instruments a few blocks down Bleecker Street. Davis called on Mr. Roy for a 1972 session that also included Mr. McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Jack DeJohnette on drums.In an interview with an Indian newspaper, The Telegraph, Mr. Roy recalled: “All of a sudden, Miles tells me: ‘You start’ — no music, no nothing, just like that. Realizing I have to set the groove, I just start playing a ta-ka-na-ta-n-ka-tin rhythm. Herbie nods his head to the beat and, with a ‘Yeah!,’ starts playing. For a while, it’s just the two of us, and then John and Jack join in. Then all the others start and, to me at least, it’s pure chaos. I’m completely drowned out by the sound. I continue playing, but for the next half-hour, I can’t hear a single beat I play.”Those sessions yielded Davis’s “On the Corner.” Mr. Roy joined Davis for other 1972 sessions that contributed material for Davis’s “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It,” both released in 1974, and performed with him at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center for what became Davis’s 1973 album “In Concert.”Mr. Roy received a copy of “On the Corner” when it was released in 1972. But after his frustration at the sessions, he didn’t listen to it until the 1990s, when his son, then a graduate student, told him, “All the hip-hop guys are sampling it.”In 1974, Mr. Roy married Geeta Vashi. She survives him, along with their son and Mr. Roy’s sisters, Kalpana Chakraborty and Shibani Ray Chaudhury, and his brother, Samarendra Roy Chowdhury. He lived in Wilmington.Mr. Roy backed the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders on the albums “Wisdom Through Music” (1972), “Village of the Pharoahs” (1973) and “Love in Us All” (1974), and in later years performed with Mr. Sanders onstage. With the saxophonist Dave Liebman, who had been in Davis’s group, Mr. Roy appeared on “Lookout Farm” (1974), “Drum Ode” (1975) and “Sweet Hands” (1975). (“Sweet hands” is the translation of a Bengali term praising a virtuoso tabla player.)He released two albums as a leader in the mid-1970s, both featuring Mr. Liebman: “Ashirbad” (1975) and “Passing Dreams” (1976), which also included the Indian classical musician Sultan Khan on sarangi, a bowed string instrument.Mr. Roy performed and recorded widely, often as part of cross-cultural fusions. He had a longtime duo with the bansuri (wooden flute) player Steve Gorn, which appeared regularly at the Manhattan restaurant Raga. He shared the 1978 album “Kundalini” with the American jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson and the Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the flutist Herbie Mann’s group and appeared on the 1981 Mann album “All Blues/Forest Rain.” He also recorded with the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell; with the trombonist and conch-shell player Steve Turre; with Yoko Ono on her 1982 album, “It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)”; and with the Brazilian guitar duo Duofel, the Japanese bassist Stomu Takeishi, the bassist and producer Bill Laswell and the Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider.In 1988, he joined Ornette Coleman’s band Prime Time, and though the group rarely released studio albums, he appeared on its final one, “Tone Dialing,” in 1995. In the early 2000s he was a member of Impure Thoughts, a group led by the keyboardist Michael Wolff. Mr. Roy also recorded often as a leader, collaborating across idioms and styles.In an interview for All About Jazz, Mr. Roy emphasized that his solos were about “telling a story.” “I go with the groove,” he said, “and then go free.” More

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      James Mtume, Whose ‘Juicy Fruit’ Became a Hip-Hop Beat, Dies at 76

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      In a wide-ranging career, he went from playing percussion with Miles Davis to writing and producing sleek R&B to a long stint on political talk radio.James Mtume, the musician, songwriter, producer, bandleader and talk-radio host whose 1983 hit “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled in more than 100 songs, died on Sunday at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 76.His cause was cancer, his family said.Mr. Mtume started his career as a jazz percussionist. He was in Miles Davis’s band for the first half of the 1970s, appearing on Davis’s landmark 1972 jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors.But in the late ’70s he pivoted to R&B: He co-wrote hits for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills, produced albums and formed a group, Mtume, which had major hits with his songs “Juicy Fruit” and “You, Me and He.” His sparse, sputtering electronic beat for “Juicy Fruit” gained an extensive second life in hip-hop when it was sampled on the debut single by the Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy,” a No. 1 rap hit in 1994.Mr. Mtume was born James Forman on Jan. 3, 1946, in Philadelphia. His father was the jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath, but he was raised by his stepfather, James Forman, a jazz pianist also known as Hen Gates who had played with Charlie Parker, and his mother, Bertha Forman, a homemaker.Jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington and John Coltrane were frequent family visitors, and the young James Forman grew up playing piano and percussion; his biological uncle, the jazz drummer Albert (Tootie) Heath, gave him his first conga drum.He was a champion swimmer in high school, winning the Middle Atlantic title for backstroke, and attended Pasadena City College on an athletic scholarship.In California, he joined the US Organization, a Black nationalist cultural group that introduced the holiday Kwanzaa, and he took an African last name: Mtume, Swahili for messenger. He also turned seriously to music.In 1969, Albert Heath recorded four modal, Afrocentric jazz compositions by Mr. Mtume on his album “Kawaida,” featuring Mr. Mtume on congas alongside Herbie Hancock on piano, Don Cherry on trumpet and Jimmy Heath on saxophones. Mr. Mtume also worked with Art Farmer, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard and Gato Barbieri.He joined Miles Davis’s band in 1971 as it was making the transition to the jagged, open-ended, rhythm-dominated funk of “On the Corner.” In an extensive Red Bull Music Academy interview in 2014, Mr. Mtume said that Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” He worked with Davis until 1975, touring and appearing on the albums “Big Fun,” “Dark Magus,” “Agharta,” “Pangaea” and “Get Up With It,” which included a Davis composition titled “Mtume.”Working with Davis, Mr. Mtume expanded his sound with electronic effects. “You don’t fight technology, you embrace it,” he said in 2014. “It’s like fire. It’ll burn you, or you learn how to cook with it.”In 1972, Mr. Mtume made his recording debut as a leader with “Alkebu-Lan: Land of the Blacks” on the Strata-East label, credited to the Mtume Umoja Ensemble. It opened with a spoken manifesto that praised “the role of Black music as a functional organ in the struggle for national liberation.” He released a second jazz album, “Rebirth Cycle,” in 1977.Mr. Mtume with Miles Davis in 1973. In a 2014 interview, he said Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” R. Brigden/Express, via Getty ImagesWhen Davis stopped performing in 1975, Mr. Mtume and the guitarist Reggie Lucas, another member of the Davis group, joined Roberta Flack’s band. Their composition “The Closer I Get to You,” which she recorded as a duet with Donny Hathaway, reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978 and was later remade by Beyoncé and Luther Vandross.They formed Mtume-Lucas Productions to write and produce songs. Among the artists they worked with were Phyllis Hyman, Teddy Pendergrass, the Spinners and Stephanie Mills, for whom they wrote the 1980 hit “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” a Grammy Award winner for best R&B song. On Instagram this week, Ms. Mills praised Mr. Mtume, writing, “He was so brilliant and an amazing music mind.”Between production jobs, Mr. Mtume and Mr. Lucas recorded with their core musicians as the group Mtume, which featured the singer Tawatha Agee. Mr. Mtume described the group’s first albums as “sophistifunk,” using plush harmonies and elaborate orchestrations.But one day, Mr. Mtume recalled, he realized that “I was playing something that sounded just like something else I had done. I got up and I walked away, and I disbanded the band, and I decided not to do any more productions.”He put together a second lineup of Mtume, without Mr. Lucas, and turned to a style he described as “neo-minimalism,” using just a handful of instruments and fewer effects. The new Mtume lineup recorded “Juicy Fruit.” At first, Mtume’s record label, Epic, dismissed the song as too slow for daytime radio, but it became a No. 1 R&B hit.The title song of Mtume’s 1984 album, “You, Me and He” — a confession of polyamory — reached No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart. On the group’s final album, “Theater of the Mind,” released in 1986, Mtume turned to sociopolitical commentary in songs like “Deep Freeze (Rap-a-Song) (Part 1).” That same year, Mr. Mtume wrote the score for the film “Native Son” and produced a solo album for Ms. Agee.In a radio interview in 1988, during a freewheeling era of hip-hop when samples were widely used without payment or credit, Mr. Mtume denounced hip-hop’s reliance on sampling, calling it “Memorex music” and complaining that the originators were ignored. The hip-hop group Stetsasonic responded with “Talkin’ All That Jazz,” which argued, “Rap brings back old R&B/And if we would not, people could’ve forgot.”Eventually, sampling — by then licensed and credited — would keep Mr. Mtume’s music on the radio. “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled by Alicia Keys, Warren G, Jennifer Lopez, Keyshia Cole, Faith Evans and dozens of others, and many of Mr. Mtume’s other songs and productions have made their way onto new tracks.In 1994, Mr. Mtume scored the TV series “New York Undercover.” At his urging, the show’s story lines featured a nightclub, Natalie’s, where an older generation of musicians, including B.B. King and Gladys Knight, got new TV exposure and younger performers revived old songs. During the 1990s he also produced songs for Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, and K-Ci & Jojo.Yet by the mid-1990s, Mr. Mtume had grown dissatisfied with the music business. He moved into talk radio, and was a co-host from 1995 to 2013 on the weekly show “Open Line,” heard first on WRKS-FM (Kiss-FM) in New York and then on WBLS-FM when the stations merged, discussing politics, activism, news and culture alongside Bob Slade and Bob Pickett. Over the years, he also traveled to Cuba, Libya, Sudan and South Africa. He recorded a TED Talk in 2018, “Our Common Ground in Music,” in which he discussed “the cross-pollination of culture, politics and art.”He is survived by his wife, Kamili Mtume; his brother, Jeffrey Forman; two sons, Faulu Mtume and Richard Johnson; four daughters, Benin Mtume, Eshe King, Ife Mtume and Sanda Lee; and six grandchildren.“Pressing the boundaries. To me that’s always what it was about,” Mr. Mtume said in 2014. “Never give yourself a chance to look back, because that’s always easier. Looking forward is always harder.” More

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      Chick Corea, Jazz Keyboardist and Innovator, Dies at 79

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChick Corea, Jazz Keyboardist and Innovator, Dies at 79When jazz and rock fused in the 1970s, he was at the forefront of the movement. But he never abandoned his love of the acoustic piano.The pianist, composer and bandleader Chick Corea at the Blue Note in Manhattan in 2012. In his long career, he recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader and won 23 Grammys.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Chick Corea, an architect of the jazz-rock fusion boom of the 1970s who spent more than a half century as one of the foremost pianists in jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 79.The cause was cancer, said Dan Muse, a spokesman for Mr. Corea’s family.Mr. Corea’s best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating membership that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish and other global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to experiment with a growing arsenal of new technologies.But throughout his career he never abandoned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of harmony made his playing immediately distinctive.Mr. Corea in 2006 at the Blue Note, where his performances often combined reunions with longtime associates and collaborations with younger accompanists.Credit…Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA number of his compositions, including “Spain,” “500 Miles High” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” have become jazz standards, marked by his dreamy but brightly illuminated harmonies and ear-grabbing melodies.By the late 1960s, Mr. Corea, still in his 20s, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with. He gigged and recorded with some of the leading names in straight-ahead and Latin jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Sarah Vaughan. His first two albums as a leader, “Tones for Joan’s Bones” (1966) and “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968), earned rave reviews. Both are now thought of as classics.But it was playing in Miles Davis’s ensembles that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He played the electric piano on Davis’s “In a Silent Way” (1969) and “Bitches Brew” (1970), the albums that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.From left, Dave Holland, Miles Davis and Mr. Corea in 1969. Mr. Corea played electric piano in Davis’s band and on the Davis albums widely considered to have sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.Credit…Tad Hershorn/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesSoon after leaving Davis’s group, he helped found Return to Forever, and he spent much of the 1970s touring and recording with the band, which became one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era.Reviewing a performance at the Blue Note in New York in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen, writing in The New York Times, recalled the innovative sound that Mr. Corea had honed with Return to Forever three decades before: “His Fender Rhodes piano chimed and chirruped over Latin American rhythms; female vocals commingled with the soothing flutter of a flute. Then the ensemble muscled up and morphed into a hyperactive fusion band, establishing pop-chart presence and a fan base to match. To the extent that there is a Return to Forever legacy, it encompasses both these dynamic extremes, each a facet of Mr. Corea’s personality.”By the time of that Blue Note show, Mr. Corea’s career was entering a chapter of happy reminiscence, full of reunion concerts and retrospective projects. But he continued to build out from the groundwork he had laid.In 2013, for instance, he released two albums introducing new bands: “The Vigil,” featuring an electrified quintet of younger musicians, and “Trilogy,” an acoustic-trio album on which he was joined by the bassist Christian McBride and the drummer Brian Blade.Return to Forever, one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era, in 1976. From left: Lenny White, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola and Mr. Corea.Credit…Dick Barnatt/Redferns, via Getty ImagesHe kept up a busy touring schedule well into his late 70s, and his performances at the Blue Note in particular often combined reunions with longtime associates and collaborations with younger accompanists, mixing nostalgia with a will to forge ahead. Those performances often found their way onto albums, including “The Musician” (2017), a three-disc collection drawn from his nearly two-month-long residency at the club in 2011, when he was celebrating his 70th birthday in the company of such fellow luminaries as the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist and Return to Forever co-founder Stanley Clarke and the vocalist Bobby McFerrin.By the end of his career Mr. Corea had recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader and raked in 23 Grammys, more than almost any other musician. He also won three Latin Grammys.In 2006 he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the highest honor available to an American jazz musician.Though he had become symbolic of the fusion movement, Mr. Corea never put much stock in musical categories. “It’s the media that are so interested in categorizing music,” he told The Times in 1983, “the media and the businessmen, who, after all, have a vested interest in keeping marketing clear cut and separate. If critics would ask musicians their views about what is happening, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts taking place. All this means is a continual development — a continual merging of different streams.”Mr. Corea’s first marriage ended in divorce. He met Gayle Moran, who became his second wife, in the 1970s, when he was in Return to Forever and she was a singer and keyboardist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, another top-flight fusion band.She survives him, as do a son, Thaddeus Corea; a daughter, Liana Corea; and two grandchildren.In the early 1970s, Mr. Corea converted to Scientology, and the religion’s teachings informed much of his music from then on, including his work with Return to Forever.Mr. Corea in 1978. “If critics would ask musicians their views about what is happening,” he once said, “you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts taking place.” Credit…Chuck FishmanArmando Anthony Corea was born on June 12, 1941, in Chelsea, Mass., near Boston. His father, also named Armando Corea, was a trumpeter and bandleader in Boston, and his mother, Anna (Zaccone) Corea, was a homemaker. He began studying piano when he was 4.He picked up his nickname from an aunt, who often pinched his big cheeks and called him “cheeky.” The name eventually morphed into the pithier “Chick.”He moved to New York City to study at Columbia University and Juilliard, but that lasted only a few months. As Miles Davis had a generation before, when he arrived at Juilliard from East St. Louis, Ill., Mr. Corea quickly found himself lured out of the classroom and into the clubs. Some of his earliest gigs came in the bands of the famed Latin jazz percussionists Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo, as well as with the swing-era vocalist and bandleader Cab Calloway.In 1968 he assumed the piano chair in Davis’s influential quintet, replacing Mr. Hancock. The band quickly went into the studio to record the final tracks that would round out “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” Davis’s first album to feature an electric piano. It signaled the trumpeter’s growing embrace of rock and funk music, a move encouraged by his second wife, the vocalist Betty Davis. (One of the two tracks featuring Mr. Corea is a tribute to her, the 16 ½-minute “Mademoiselle Mabry.”)The group gradually expanded in size as Davis wandered deeper into the murky, wriggling sound world of his early fusion albums. He brought a version of the “Bitches Brew” band to the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, the largest gig of his career, before an audience of 600,000.Soon after playing that concert, Mr. Corea and the bassist Dave Holland left Davis’s ensemble and joined with the drummer Barry Altschul and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton to found Circle, a short-lived but influential group that embraced an avant-garde approach.Mr. Corea founded Return to Forever in 1971 with Mr. Clarke, the saxophonist and flutist Joe Farrell, the percussionist Airto Moreira and the vocalist Flora Purim. The following year, the band released its Brazilian-tinged debut album, titled simply “Return to Forever,” on the ECM label.Also in 1972, Mr. Corea teamed up for the first time with the vibraphonist Gary Burton to record another album for the same label, “Crystal Silence.” The two became longtime friends and collaborators. Taken together, the two ECM albums represented something close to the full breadth of Mr. Corea’s identity as a musician — ranging from the serene and meditative to the zesty and driving.“We made that record in three hours; every song but one was a first take,” Mr. Burton said in an interview, recalling the “Crystal Silence” sessions. They would go on to record seven duet albums, and they continued performing together until Mr. Burton’s recent retirement.“I kept thinking, ‘Surely it’s going to run out of steam here at some point,’” Mr. Burton said. “And it never did. Even at the end, we would still come offstage excited and thrilled by what we were doing.”Return to Forever changed personnel frequently, but its most enduring lineup featured Mr. Corea, Mr. Clarke, the guitarist Al Di Meola and the drummer Lenny White. That quartet iteration released a string of popular albums — “Where Have I Known You Before” (1974), “No Mystery” (1975) and “Romantic Warrior” (1976) — that leaned into a blazing, hard-rock-influenced style, and each reached the Top 40 on the Billboard albums chart.Mr. Corea released a number of other influential fusion albums on his own, including “My Spanish Heart” (1976) and a string of recordings with his Elektric Band and his Akoustic Band. Later in his career he also delved deeply into the Western classical tradition, recording works by canonical composers like Mozart and Chopin, and composing an entire concerto for classical orchestra.“His versatility is second to none when it comes to the jazz world,” Mr. Burton said. “He played in so many styles and settings and collaborations.”In 1997, delivering a commencement address at Berklee College of Music, Mr. Corea told the members of the graduating class to insist on blazing their own path. “It’s all right to be yourself,” he said. “In fact, the more yourself you are, the more money you make.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More