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      Patrick Sky, ’60s Folk Star and Later a Piper, Dies at 80

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      He was a part of the folk revival emanating from Greenwich Village, mixing melodic songs and satire. Then he became infatuated with the uilleann pipes.Patrick Sky, who established himself as part of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the mid-1960s with smooth guitar-picking and a Southern twang that could be melodic or sassy, then became adept at playing, and making, the notoriously difficult instrument known as the uilleann pipes, died on May 26 in Asheville, N.C. He was 80.His wife, Cathy Larson Sky, said the cause was cancer. He died at a hospice center and lived in Spruce Pine, N.C.Mr. Sky’s best-known song was probably “Many a Mile,” a weary-traveler lament that opened his debut album, titled simply “Patrick Sky,” in 1965. It was covered by others, including Buffy Sainte-Marie, his girlfriend early in his career. He was also skilled at “sardonic, satiric rags and blues,” as The New York Times put it in 1965, and as his career advanced, those elements of his repertoire became more caustic.That aspect of his music culminated in what fRoots magazine called “the most politically incorrect folk album ever,” a 1973 release titled “Songs That Made America Famous.” The track titles — “Vatican Caskets” and “Child Molesting Blues” among them — convey the tenor of the record.“America’s full of prudes, you know,” Mr. Sky told fRoots in 2017. “So I just did a record that’d sort of gouge them in the eye with a stick.”By then, though, Mr. Sky, who was of both Irish and Creek Indian heritage, had turned his attention to the uilleann pipes, perhaps the most difficult instrument to play in the arsenal of Irish music, after meeting the master piper Liam O’Flynn at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in the early 1970s. Mr. Sky learned not only to play the instrument but also to make it, something he did for the rest of his life, helping to revive a faded art. In 2009 he and his wife, a fiddler, made an album, “Down to Us.”One magazine called this 1973 release by Mr. Sky “the most politically incorrect folk album ever.” Patrick Leon Linch Jr. (who legally changed his name in the 1960s) was born on Oct. 2, 1940, in College Park, Ga., outside Atlanta. His father was a munitions worker, and his mother, Theron Rutilla Heard Linch, was a registered nurse.Patrick grew up in Georgia, Louisiana and other parts of the South and was interested in music from an early age. In 1957 he enlisted in the Army, serving in an artillery unit until his discharge the next year.“I began playing at little coffeehouses,” he said in an interview for the book “Folk Music: More Than a Song” (1976), “eventually finding my way to Florida.”There he met Ms. Sainte-Marie, and a few years later, when she went north to New York, he did, too. His Southern sensibilities sometimes made for an amusing fit with the Greenwich Village folkies he began socializing and playing with. His wife said he used to tell about the time the musician Dave Van Ronk and other friends offered to take him out for soul food, a term he didn’t know. At the restaurant, when the collards and fatback, cornbread, fried pork chops and such arrived, his friends asked what he thought.“Back home,” he told them, “this is what we just call ‘food.’”As folk music enjoyed a boom, a music newsletter called Broadside began sponsoring “singing newspapers,” as they were described — concerts at which a string of performers would sing topical songs, often written for the occasion. Mr. Sky played at the first one, at the Village Gate in 1964, to a crowd of 500; Pete Seeger was the master of ceremonies, and the other performers included Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Jack Elliott and Ms. Sainte-Marie.In February 1965, Mr. Sky played a bigger venue, Town Hall, in Midtown. In his review, Robert Shelton of The Times called him “an important new folk-song talent.” Mr. Sky went on to play to 2,400 at Carnegie Hall in December 1966.Mr. Sky performing at the Eagle Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1986. His Southern sensibilities had made for an amusing fit with the Village folkies he played and socialized with in the 1960s.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesHis second album, “A Harvest of Gentle Clang,” had been released that year. Mr. Sky became a regular at folk festivals, clubs and colleges, and two more albums followed before the decade’s end: “Reality Is Bad Enough” in 1968 and “Photographs” the next year.But he began performing less and less, and after “Songs That Made America Famous,” he retired for a time, though he began doing shows again in the 1980s, adding the pipes to his performances.Few people played that instrument at the time. In a segment filmed several years ago for “Around Carolina,” a local cable show, Mr. Sky, who lived in Rhode Island for a while, joked about his unusual obsession.“I used to tell people I was the best piper in all of New England,” he said, “which is true because I was the only piper.”He continued to perform with his wife at pipers’ festivals and other events until 2018, when he was found to have Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Sky earned a bachelor’s degree in poetry at Goddard College in Vermont in 1978 and a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993.Two early marriages ended in divorce. He married Cathy Anne Larson in 1981. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Liam Michael Sky; a son from an earlier marriage, Marcus Linch; and three grandchildren. More

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      Alix Dobkin, Who Sang Songs of Liberation, Dies at 80

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      She broke new ground in 1973 with her album “Lavender Jane Loves Women,” recorded and distributed by women for women, which sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia.Long before K.D. Lang transformed herself from a country artist into an androgyne pop idol and sex symbol, smoldering in a man’s suit on the cover of Vanity Fair being mock-shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford; long before Melissa Etheridge sold millions of copies of her 1993 album, “Yes I Am,” and in so doing came out as a gay rock star; and long before the singer-songwriter Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” hit the Billboard charts, the folk singer Alix Dobkin chopped her hair off, formed a band and recorded “Lavender Jane Loves Women.”Released in 1973, it was the first album recorded and distributed by women for women — arguably the first lesbian record. Ms. Dobkin started her own label, Women’s Wax Works, to do it.Once a folk star playing Greenwich Village clubs with Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ms. Dobkin turned to writing songs like “View From Gay Head” (“Lesbian, Lesbian/Let’s be in No Man’s Land”). Her lyrics sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia and also poked fun at its vernacular and customs, as she did in “Lesbian Code,” which contained lines like “Is she Lithuanian?,” “Is she Lebanese?” and “She’s a member of the church, of the club, of the committee/She sings in the choir.”Her music was the soundtrack for many young women coming out in the 1970s and ’80s, a rite of passage spoofed by Alison Bechdel, the graphic memoirist, in her long-running comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (A panel titled “Age 21” showed a young woman with cropped hair and pinwheel eyes, smoking a bong and reading Mary Daly’s “Gyn/Ecology,” another feminist touchstone, as the lyrics from Ms. Dobkin’s “The Woman in Your Life Is You” waft around her, a Lavender Jane album cover propped up in a corner.)“I can’t tell you how cool it was as a young dyke to see those album covers,” said Lisa Vogel, founder of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, otherwise known as Michfest, where Ms. Dobkin would perform for decades. “To see someone not trying to pass one bit.”Ms. Dobkin died on May 19 at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., after suffering a brain aneurysm and a stroke. She was 80. Her former partner Liza Cowan announced the death.She was a star of the women’s festivals that were an expression of the alternative economy lesbian feminists were building in the ’70s — a byproduct of second-wave feminism — with their own books, publishing companies, record labels and magazines. Michfest was the biggest, an entire city built from scratch each season in Oceana County, complete with health care clinics, crafts, workshops and food for thousands. It was a complete matriarchal society. No men were allowed.When the festivals began in the mid-’70s, there were no safe spaces for lesbians, said Bonnie J. Morris, a historian and archivist of feminist music and the author of “Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals.” “You weren’t welcome to have a double bed in a hotel; there were no Disney Gay Days. Festivals were a way to get together, share information and recharge.”It was backstage at a women’s festival in 1983 that Ms. Etheridge first met Ms. Dobkin. “She was in the tradition of the classic folk troubadour, changing the world through song and cleverness,” Ms. Etheridge said in an interview.“She made an impact,” she added, “and she did it with humor. Until I heard Alix, I had no idea I would be an out lesbian performer; I just wanted to be a rock star.”“When I told her I was thinking of recording an album, she said, ‘Oh, Melissa, there’s no radio station that’s going to play a lesbian.’ After ‘Yes I Am’ came out — and I came out — she said to me, ‘Damn it, you proved me wrong. I’m so grateful.’”Alix Cecil Dobkin was born on Aug. 16, 1940, in New York City. She was named for an uncle, Cecil Alexander Kunstlich, a womanizing, drug-addicted ne’er-do-well who cleaned up his act and was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Her parents, Martha (Kunstlich) and William Dobkin, were, like many Jewish intellectuals of the time, Communist Party members and social activists. Alix grew up listening to the folk music of Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, as well as the Red Army Chorus and Broadway show tunes, and singing at home with her parents.Ms. Dobkin at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1980.Liza CowanAlix was 16 when the F.B.I. began investigating her. She had joined the Communist Party that year, but her parents had become disillusioned and left; there were too many F.B.I. informants, her father told her later.The F.B.I. followed Ms. Dobkin until she turned 30, noting in her file that she had become a housewife and mother. The file, which Ms. Dobkin retrieved in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, proved useful decades later, when she was writing her memoir, “My Red Blood” (2009). It recorded her many addresses and helpful dates, like that of her wedding in 1965, though it had the venue wrong.Ms. Dobkin studied art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, earning a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1962. A fellow student and Communist Party member was also a booker at a local nightclub, and he began to manage her, often along with a young comic named Bill Cosby. He found the pair regular work at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, where she met her future husband, Sam Hood, whose parents owned the place, as well as Mr. Dylan and other folk luminaries. When Ms. Dobkin married Mr. Hood, her career as a performer took a back seat to his as a producer. They divorced amicably in 1971, when their daughter, Adrian, was a year old.Like many women in that transitional time, Ms. Dobkin was frustrated by her role as a housewife and had joined a consciousness-raising group. When she heard Germaine Greer, the feminist author of “The Female Eunuch,” interviewed on the countercultural radio station WBAI, it was a revelation. She wrote to Ms. Cowan, a producer at the station who had conducted the interview. Ms. Cowan invited her on the program to perform, and the two women fell in love.After they got together, Ms. Dobkin decided she wanted to make music for and by women only. Ms. Cowan would go on to found lesbian magazines like Dyke, A Quarterly. In the mid-’70s, the couple bought a 70-acre farm in rural Schoharie County, in central New York State — not an easy locale to plunk down a gay family.“I remember being called a ‘hobo’ by the kids in school,” Adrian Hood said, “though they were trying to say ‘homo’. I craved a normal mom with long hair.”Ms. Dobkin in performance in Ulster County, N.Y., in 2017. “She made an impact,” her fellow singer Melissa Etheridge said, “and she did it with humor.”Retts ScauzilloMs. Dobkin’s tour schedule slowed down a bit in the late ’90s, and when Ms. Hood had her own children, Ms. Dobkin took on a new role.“She was a stay-at-home grandma by choice, which allowed me to work full time,” said Ms. Hood, who is dean of students and director of admissions at a day school in Woodstock. “That was a huge gift. She was able to express that everyday maternal attention that she missed with me.”In addition to her daughter, Ms. Dobkin is survived by her brother, Carl; her sister, Julie Dobkin; and three grandchildren. In 2015, a photograph of Ms. Dobkin taken by Ms. Cowan wearing a T-shirt that read “The Future Is Female” exploded on social media, thanks to an Instagram post by @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, an account that documents lesbian imagery. It brought the T-shirt, originally made in the 1970s by Labyris Books, the first feminist bookstore in New York City, back into production — and introduced Ms. Dobkin to a new generation of young women.“I’ve prepared all my life for this job,” Ms. Dobkin told the crowd at a women’s music festival in 1997. “Because being a Jew and being a lesbian are very similar. That’s why I look so much alike. I have so much in common. It’s OK to be a Jew, it’s OK to be a lesbian — as long as you don’t mention it. And what we also have in common is that we were never supposed to survive.” More

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      Mustafa, a Folk Hero for a Weary Generation

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      The 24-year-old Canadian musician memorializes friends lost to violence on his debut EP, “When Smoke Rises.”LOS ANGELES — In the middle of Mustafa’s potent, chilling and heart-rending debut EP, “When Smoke Rises,” is “The Hearse,” a startling two-minute meditation on revenge in the wake of a friend’s murder.“I was all about the peace/I didn’t wanna risk it all/Oh, I know what’s at stake,” he sings, trying to maintain equanimity in the face of trauma. But his mood, and the song — a soft folk number with fingerpicked acoustic guitar and an almost unconscious, corporeal rhythm — takes a somber, unexpected turn: “But you made yourself special/I wanna throw my life away/For you.”Mustafa, 24, sings these lines with an almost ethereal sigh, like you would serenade a lover, not the enemy in your cross hairs. And yet it is, somehow, a love song. And also an elegy. An indictment of the self. An indictment of the state. A bitter promise.When Mustafa began writing songs a few years ago, there were no other topics but the heaviness of his experiences. “I couldn’t write anything else,” he said earlier this month, in a sparsely decorated Airbnb on the east side of Los Angeles. “It was everything I was dealing with. It engulfed me.”More than 2,000 miles away from where he grew up in Regent Park, Canada’s oldest housing project and one of the roughest neighborhoods of Toronto, he was relaxed, wearing a black sweatsuit and a kufi, and speaking with a sober, sometimes sorrowful peace that comes from years of weathering storms.“When Smoke Rises” is a suite of folk songs about life — and death — in his hometown; the title refers to the rapper Smoke Dawg, a close friend who was killed in 2018. The EP is bracing and beautiful, hopeful and desperate, a solemn prayer for lives that never reached their potential, and a determined act to render their stories with beauty and care.For just this reason, Mustafa wasn’t sure if he was going to include “The Hearse” on the EP — whether it was fair to center his own hurt and preoccupation with those he perceived as enemies. “I thought about some opps more than I thought about friends, I was so obsessed with them,” he said. “This project is about the grace of the friends that I lost, you know? And I’m like, does that take away from that grace?”But ultimately, he concluded, he couldn’t fairly tell the story of his upbringing, and how it has both shaped and undone him, without it. “My grief,” he said, “is incomplete without the rage.”“When Smoke Rises” is full of such cruel, pained calculations: how to memorialize the dead, how to express love in hopeless circumstances, how to protect those you care about when no one else will, or can. “Don’t crease your Air Forces/Just stay inside tonight,” he gently pleads on the weeping sigh “Air Forces.” On the directly anxious “What About Heaven,” he sings as if calling after someone he fears he might never see again: “We forgot to talk about heaven.”The turbulence he sings about is still very much ongoing. Sometimes, Mustafa said, after writing a song, he’d wonder, “Did I just crystallize a feeling that I haven’t even survived?”Mustafa — born Mustafa Ahmed — has been grappling with the weight of injustice since his older sister first encouraged him to form his thoughts into poems in the mid-2000s. His family emigrated to Canada from Sudan around 1995. By age 12, he was getting local media attention for his verse about the challenges facing his community; in 2016, he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Youth Council.None of that changed the cycle of devastation in Regent Park, though, and Mustafa has become something of a community ethicist and mentor, a guide for families dealing with the death of their loved ones, and an outspoken advocate for the Muslim community. He is also something of a guardian: His younger brother Yassir and a young Toronto rapper named Lil Berete were staying in the Airbnb with him. At one point during the conversation, Berete’s mother called on FaceTime, and Mustafa assured her that her son was praying every day, going to the mosque and not smoking.“I’m just using the avenue of music to do the very thing that I’ve always done,” Mustafa said.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times“It doesn’t matter how anti-establishment, anti-imperialist I am, change won’t be in my lifetime,” Mustafa said. “So all that I can do is within me. I try to keep people alive. And I try to make sure that we’re protected.”As a young person, while many of his peers were finding themselves in hip-hop, Mustafa gravitated to folk music and earthy singer-songwriters: Nick Drake, Richie Havens, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. “I remember being younger and people were mad, like, ‘This guy’s always emotional,’” he said with a laugh. “But the truth is, I was just exploring a sentimental language, you know what I mean?”During the making of “When Smoke Rises,” Mustafa was taken by how Sufjan Stevens memorialized his mother on the 2015 album “Carrie & Lowell.” Mustafa pulled out his phone to read a letter he sent to Stevens via an intermediary, part mash note, part confessional. “I dreamed to bridge the worlds of grief and glory,” he wrote, confiding in Stevens about the ghosts hovering over his music. “The deaths were complicated and violent and unfair, but still they are my own. And the way I reflect them can be all that and still beautiful, as you have so brilliantly displayed. Nothing in vain.” (He hasn’t yet heard back.)Tensions in Regent Park are ongoing; Los Angeles has become a safe retreat for Mustafa, a place where he can explore his creativity. When he was first exploring the studio, as he was struggling to find the proper voice and tone for his stories, he fell into songwriting for others, collaborating on tracks by the Weeknd and Camila Cabello, as well as the Shawn Mendes-Justin Bieber hit “Monster.” But writing about anyone but himself was, in fact, a distraction.“I wasn’t being daring at all,” he said. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anything, explaining anything in its full truth.”Eventually, in 2019, he went to London to work with the producer Simon Hessman on demos he’d been chipping away at for a couple of years. Later, they were joined by Mustafa’s friend Frank Dukes, who has produced for Post Malone, Rihanna and the Weeknd. Dukes had been probing Smithsonian Folkways anthologies of Sudanese and Egyptian music, some samples of which ended up on “When Smoke Rises,” bridging Mustafa’s modern-day tales to the past. Mustafa also includes vocal samples of friends who have died, and of his mother, his way of inscribing them into history.Mustafa’s earliest versions of these songs tilted toward pure folk. “I think we always struggled with what the rhythmic architecture of the music was, because it was so guitar-driven,” said Dukes over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Los Feliz the following evening. Working with North African samples helped create an unobtrusive backdrop that deepened Mustafa’s storytelling. “Sometimes it takes a while to arrive at that simplicity,” Dukes said. (James Blake and Jamie xx also contributed production.)Before he started writing music for himself, “I wasn’t being daring at all,” Mustafa said. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anything, explaining anything in its full truth.”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesThe mood at dinner was lighthearted, with clouds in the distance. Mustafa had spent some time earlier that day in a public back and forth on Instagram with an executive at Warner Records, a minor social media conflagration — “a microcosm of what happens when you’re in full support of Palestinian lives,” he posted — spurred by the recent violence in Gaza.“I’m just using the avenue of music to do the very thing that I’ve always done,” he said, underscoring the complete overlap of his personal and creative lives. He’d just returned to the table after stepping away to find a quiet spot for prayer. “For a lot of people, they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a seamless transition. He’s saying exactly what he’s always been saying. And he’s standing alongside of the same people he’s been standing alongside. All that he’s doing is stretching those words through melody.’”But being the bard of a horrific stretch of time, and a creative conscience for a community in pain, hasn’t come without a tax.“I don’t want to write these songs. I don’t like these songs,” he said later that night, in a car headed to meet up with some of his Palestinian friends. “I resent everything about them and how they’ve come to be and everything that surrounds them. I hate that I had to make them.” The music remains a live wire, not a safe haven: “Just because it’s my responsibility doesn’t mean that it’s serving me.”At this point, he’s not even sure if he’ll ever perform them in concert. But he’s relieved to have put them into the world, if only so he might move on: “I just want young kids to come up and be like, ‘Oh, that’s what grief looks like.’ It wasn’t tucked away. It wasn’t buried.” More

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      The Endless Curiosity of Chris Thile

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      The 40-year-old mandolinist has found inspiration in groups, and as the host of “Live From Here.” “Laysongs” is his most directly personal work yet.At his first in-person performance before a New York audience in over a year, the mandolinist Chris Thile spent a lot of time with his instrument on his lap, listening.Half-encircled by a sizable but well-spaced-out crowd at the East River Park Amphitheater last month, Thile welcomed an assortment of New York-based artists to the stage. Some, like the members of the pop-soul band Lake Street Dive, were familiar collaborators; others, like the poet Carl Hancock Rux, he’d just met that day.He introduced them all with the kindly salesman flair of a consummate radio host — which in fact he was, until the pandemic put the kibosh on his syndicated variety show, “Live From Here,” the successor to “Prairie Home Companion,” which Thile had taken over from Garrison Keillor in 2016. Then, sitting by the side of the stage for much of the show, he took part as a listener as much as a performer.At 40, Thile has been the leading mandolin virtuoso of his generation since before its members could legally drink. After becoming a prodigy on the Southern California trad-music scene in the early 1990s, Thile has stayed endlessly busy. He’s found his way across most of the stylistic divides that might present themselves to a mandolin player from the bluegrass tradition.But during the pandemic, Thile took a rare cue to stop, slow down and dial back. Sitting outside a coffee shop blocks from his home in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent afternoon, he said that throughout the past year — one of activism, upheaval and isolation — he had found himself longing for the chance to listen, just as much as to perform.Thile’s quietly powerful new album, “Laysongs,” out June 4, ends with a Hazel Dickens ballad, “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me,” for a reason. “I like that she’s saying ‘for,’ instead of ‘with,’” he said. “She’s implying that she wants to listen to those people,” he added — whoever they may be.As the host of “Live From Here,” he welcomed a smattering of guests each week, mostly musicians and other performers, and relished his role as a kind of participant-observer. “It was my job to be turned back into a listener, and then show people: ‘Hey, I heard this thing that I think you might like,’” he said. “I had to constantly be on the hunt for new sounds.”The show was abruptly canceled last year, amid pandemic-related financial constraints at American Public Media, but Thile hopes to carry that work with him going forward: “I would love to think that — fool us once — we’re not going to take being able to listen to one another for granted ever again.”Thile said his new album is an attempt “to push back” against the exclusion that comes with building community.Clement Pascal for The New York TimesTHILE WAS RAISED in an evangelical Christian household in Southern California, and grew up playing in the bluegrass-and-beyond band Nickel Creek; its songbook catalogs, among other things, the evolution of Thile’s relationship to God, and his bandmates’ too. Nickel Creek’s self-titled third album, released when Thile was just a teenager, went platinum, and put the trio near the commercial center of a rising alt-folk movement. A few years later, he started the Punch Brothers, with the goal of infusing bluegrass’s country craftsmanship with classical and jazz techniques. In 2012, he won a MacArthur “genius” grant mostly on the power of his musical strides alone.In more recent years, when not focused on the radio show or playing with one of the two bands, Thile collaborated regularly with the banjoist Béla Fleck, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and other laureates of what you might call contemporary American concert music. His big outlet for that these days is the Sony Masterworks-signed all-star group Goat Rodeo, which also includes Ma.He hadn’t seen — let alone played with — any of them for months when he and an engineer, Jody Elff, headed into a decommissioned church in upstate New York last summer to record “Laysongs.” It’s Thile’s first fully solo album, just his voice — still boyish after all these years — and his mandolin. Co-produced with his wife, the actress Claire Coffee, it’s his most directly personal work yet, and also his most potent reckoning with spirituality and Christianity.Specifically, Thile said, he was troubled by the question of what it means to build community in a world where our politics have grown so plainly defined by exclusion and parochialism. “I would say it’s centered around communion, and a yearning for it, and a mistrust of it,” he said, pausing his chipper cadence to search for the exact right words.“When we come together with people that we love, or with our fellow like-minded human beings, we also then immediately start demonizing non-like-minded human beings,” he said. The album is an attempt “to push back against that element of exclusion that comes with building community,” whether in church or in politics, and against how “we then isolate ourselves with those people that we love.”At its center sits a three-part suite, “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” which he wrote after revisiting the Christian writer and theologian C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,” a satire that imagines a conversation between a demon and his nephew. Thile’s suite begins with a single mandolin string, repeatedly plucked, then gives way to two, then three. Finally it blossoms out into a rustling chord, which Thile attacks in frustrated swipes. Then he starts to vocalize: “Ha, ha, ha.”In the suite’s windy, self-scolding lyrics, Thile sends up the folly of certainty — wagging his own fear of death in his face, daring himself to wonder how deeply it has influenced his beliefs. Throughout the disc, you can hear his big questions hanging in the stillness of the old church’s once-sacred air.Thile said that with both his instrumental playing and his lyrics, he wants to communicate, but not push a worldview. “I want the gestures to be clear,” he said. “I want to give people clear, defined building blocks. And now you get to put them together.”“Here are some things that I’m thinking about,” he said. “What do you think about it?”NICKEL CREEK BEGAN in 1989, as the Nickel Creek Band, when Thile was 8 and his friends, the fiddler Sara Watkins and her brother, the guitarist Sean, were about the same age. (Thile’s father, Scott, played bass and was an official member in its early years.) All three children were wunderkinds, but Thile stood out for his chutzpah and ostentatious talent.He was already winning bluegrass competitions, playing the instrument with a remarkable precision and speed usually matched only by banjo pluckers and bluegrass guitarists. Playing the instrument of the genre’s inventor, Bill Monroe, he took it well past the role that Monroe and acolytes like Marty Stuart had established.The group’s first album, “Little Cowpoke,” released in 1993 when Thile was 12, barrels through old country-western repertoire and bluegrass picking; a few tracks have been bootlegged onto YouTube, but it’s now a collector’s item. So is the follow-up, “Here to There,” released in 1997, which softened up on the traditionalism and leaned toward gentler songs about Christian faith and devotion.Like Thile, the Watkins siblings had grown up in a fundamentalist household, and in their telling, the security of their faith was part of their bond. But as they traveled the world, they encountered a wider range of humanity, and their thinking adjusted. Thile said he felt the effects in his music immediately.“The further away from fundamentalist Christianity I got, the further away from athleticizing the act of music-making I got,” he said. “For a long time there was a real desire to be ‘the best,’ whatever that means. And falling away from the idea that there was a hard-and-fast ‘right way’ just blew the doors off my concept of music-making.”Both the Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek remain active, and in recent months Thile took separate retreats with each to work on projects that should soon lead to new albums.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesThe group’s music began to reflect new lines of questioning, particularly the songs written by Thile. On “Doubting Thomas,” from Nickel Creek’s 2004 album, “Why Should the Fire Die?,” he reckons with religion through mortality. “What will be left when I’ve drawn my last breath/Besides the folks I’ve met and the folks who know me?” he sings. “Will I discover a soul-saving love/Or just the dirt above and below me?”In the mid-2000s, after more than a decade of often-constant touring, Nickel Creek went on a long hiatus. All three of the band’s members fanned out to work on independent projects and engage new collaborators, but Thile’s pace stood out, Sara Watkins said in an interview. She marveled at his “stamina for musical development, his stamina for the pursuit of what he’s going after.”“He has an insatiable appetite creatively,” she said.Thile buried himself in the Punch Brothers, a group that he’d pulled together with the goal of executing a complex, four-movement suite, “The Blind Leaving the Blind,” that he wrote in a daze as he processed the dissolution of his first marriage. It wound up setting a new standard in progressive bluegrass.The five-piece band — a wrecking crew of young talent in traditional formation: mandolin, banjo, fiddle, guitar and bass — could nimbly handle Thile’s jump cuts between sections and his layering of harmonic modes. “It was like all of a sudden getting the keys to a Lamborghini, or a spaceship,” the banjoist Noam Pikelny said in a phone interview. “You want to take the turns as fast as possible. You want to do what you could never do before, now that you have the brain power and the instrumental prowess.”If Nickel Creek’s sometimes-fatal flaw was its completely unconstrained willingness to give you what felt good, the Punch Brothers’ was its disregard for that, in favor of whatever had the most ideas packed into it.But as that band has grown more comfortable, its arrangements have grown airier, less abstruse, and Thile has learned to admit more of his bandmates’ contributions. Pikelny said that receptivity to others’ ideas had become one of Thile’s big strengths. “Even if the initial seed wasn’t something that he thought of, seemingly in just a moment, he internalizes this thing and a whole puzzle appears in his mind of how he could put this together,” Pikelny said.“I would love to think that — fool us once — we’re not going to take being able to listen to one another for granted ever again.”Leah Nash for The New York TimesBoth the Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek remain active, and in recent months Thile took separate retreats with each to work on projects that should soon lead to new LPs. The Punch Brothers rehearsed and ultimately recorded an album of material by the guitar luminary Tony Rice, who died just weeks later.With Nickel Creek, which has not released an album in seven years, the band members brought their families with them for a full retreat in Santa Barbara, Calif., and took their time. They got as far as writing a handful of songs, a process they have always closely shared, and will find time to record them sometime soon, as life allows.“Every time we go away from a Nickel Creek tour, we live lives, dig into our other projects that challenge us in different ways, and then when we come back these are things we can add,” Watkins said. “These songs can kind of be born out of that reconnection.” More

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      A Rapper, Hitting His 30s, Reinvents Himself as a Scion of Spanish Pop

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      C. Tangana was a provocative star of trap music. Now, his songs are played in supermarkets and praised by 50- and 60-somethings on YouTube.LONDON — C. Tangana, one of Spain’s biggest rap stars, two years ago hit “a little bit of a crisis.”He was riding a wave of fame, known for provocative songs and equally provocative interviews. But he was fast approaching his 30s, he said in a recent Zoom interview, and risked becoming one of those “cringe-y, embarrassing” rappers who act a decade younger than they are.So C. Tangana — real name Antón Álvarez Alfaro — did a U-turn and decided to try his hand at other styles of music that he had loved since childhood, like flamenco and rumba, even Spanish folk.“I was opening a window I’d kept closed,” he said, adding, “I assumed it would go wrong.”Álvarez’s experiment appears to have paid off. In February, he released “El Madrileño,” an album that mixes traditional Spanish and Latin American styles, including rock, with electronic sounds and beats more familiar to his trap and reggaeton fans. It’s turned him from Spain’s biggest rapper into one of its biggest pop stars.One of the album’s early tracks, “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”), has over 100 million views on YouTube.“You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop” Pablo Gil, a music journalist at El Mundo, a Spanish daily newspaper, said in a telephone interview.Some of the musical styles it features were last popular in Spain in the 1970s, when the country was under Franco’s dictatorship, Gil added. Álvarez, he said, was taking old-fashioned sounds, “subverting their meaning and making them modern.”In a review for the newspaper El País, the music critic Carlos Marcos wrote, “It remains to be seen whether this is the birth of a new Spanish pop, or something that we will forget in a few years.”“But who cares?” he added. “Let’s enjoy it today, and we’ll see tomorrow.”On YouTube, C. Tangana’s videos now attract comments from older music fans who would presumably never have gone near his records before. “I thought the music my son listened to was for landfill,” wrote Felix Guinnot, who said he was in his 50s, “but this boy is changing my musical perception.”On the set for the music video of “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”).Javier RuizÁlvarez’s road to fame has been winding, with multiple changes of name to reflect new musical personas. Born in Madrid, he started rapping in his teens, he said, but twice gave up on music entirely. When the 2008 global financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard — its lingering effects are still felt by the country’s youth — he stopped rapping to work in a fast-food restaurant. Later, he got a job in a call center selling cellphones.He started rapping again after falling in love with a colleague. It was a toxic relationship, Álvarez said, but it inspired him to get back into the studio. “I said, ‘It must be possible for me to make money doing this rather than selling phones or cleaning,’” he recalled. “It changed my whole mentality. I started to think I had to sell myself. I started to do things to get attention.”In 2017, Álvarez had his first major hit with “Mala Mujer,” a track about his longing for a “bad woman” whose “gel nails have left scars all over my body.” But he was soon known more for his relationship with Rosalía, a Spanish pop star (he co-wrote much of “El Mal Querer,” or “Bad Love,” her breakthrough album, although they have since broken up) and for getting into political controversies.Álvarez with the team filming a video for the song “Comerte Entera.” “You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop,” one music journalist said.Javier RuizÁlvarez used a derogatory term to refer to King Felipe VI at a 2018 news conference after being asked about the fate of another rapper who had been given a jail term for insulting the royal family. He also described the monarchy as “a robbery” and called for an end to “representative democracy,” arguing that it prevented the public from being directly involved in important decisions.The next year, the northern Spanish city of Bilbao threw C. Tangana off a concert lineup, saying that his lyrics were degrading to women.More recently, he called for people to reclaim Spain’s flag from fascists, a potentially contentious endorsement in a country where some associate it with Franco’s dictatorship.Ana Iris Simón, a music journalist and author who has written about the reaction to “El Madrileño,” praised Álvarez’s outspoken nature. “He’s not afraid of getting involved or giving his opinion,” she said in an email.Some critics still accuse him of being overly macho, Simón said. They point out that only one of the new album’s 15 guests is a woman (La Húngara, a flamenco singer). But Simón said those comments were out of touch with how Spaniards viewed him. “Public opinion and published opinion have never been as far apart as they are now,” she noted.Álvarez’s with the director Santos Bacana in Cuba, where they recorded a song with the guitarist Eliades Ochoa.Javier RuizThe new album also plays to Spain’s class divides, Simón said. It involves artists and musical styles “reviled by the cool cultural scene for years for being music typical of the common people,” she said. Álvarez uses those styles without irony, Iris added, instead embracing them as would an heir.Álvarez said his choice of collaborators — who include the Gypsy Kings, the flamenco band that was hugely popular in the 1980s; Ed Maverick, a “Mexican folk romantic”; and Jorge Drexler, a Uruguayan singer-songwriter — was driven by his love of artists who’ve taken their own distinct musical paths. But he also hoped the collaborations with Latin American musicians might change some Spaniards’ view of the region.“In Spain, we have this problem that a lot of people still have this colonial mentality,” Álvarez said. “They think that our culture is better than their culture, and that’s so stupid.”During the interview, Álvarez said he was overjoyed that his experiment had paid off. He talked a lot about the joy of being seen as a good songwriter. But he seemed happiest when asked about the album’s impact on one specific person. His mother had “always been super proud” of him, he said, “but now she can sing my songs.”Comments on his YouTube tracks suggest that is mother is not the only member of another generation doing that. Antonio Remacha, in Madrid, wrote a long message beneath one track saying that his daughter had forced him to listen to the record against his better judgment, but that he had loved it.“I have to admit that at 62 years of age, he’s managed to impress me,” Remacha wrote of Álvarez, before politely and formally signing off: “Congratulations and all of my praise.” More

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      Sally Grossman, Immortalized on a Dylan Album Cover, Dies at 81

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySally Grossman, Immortalized on a Dylan Album Cover, Dies at 81She picked out a red outfit and struck a relaxed pose on the cover of “Bringing It All Back Home,” leaving much for fans to guess about.Bob Dylan wanted his manager’s wife, Sally Grossman, to appear on the cover of his 1965 album taken at her home in Woodstock, N.Y. March 15, 2021, 6:53 p.m. ETOne of Bob Dylan’s most important early albums, “Bringing It All Back Home” from 1965, has the kind of cover that can strain eyes and fuel speculation. It is a photograph of Mr. Dylan, in a black jacket, sitting in a room full of bric-a-brac that may or may not mean something, staring into the camera as a woman in a red outfit lounges in the background.“Fans became so fixated on deciphering it,” the music journalist Neil McCormick wrote in The Daily Telegraph of London last year, “that a rumor took hold that the woman was Dylan in drag, representing the feminine side of his psyche.”She wasn’t. She was Sally Grossman, the wife of Mr. Dylan’s manager at the time, Albert Grossman.“The photo was shot in Albert Grossman’s house,” the man who took it, Daniel Kramer, told The Guardian in 2016. “The room was the original kitchen of this house that’s a couple hundred years old.”“Bob contributed to the picture the magazines he was reading and albums he was listening to,” Mr. Kramer added, a reference to the bric-a-brac. “Bob wanted Sally to be in the photo because, well, look at her! She chose the red outfit.”Ms. Grossman died on Thursday at her home in the Bearsville section of Woodstock, N.Y., not far from the house where the photograph was taken. She had long been a fixture in Woodstock, operating a recording studio, a theater and other businesses there after her husband died of a heart attack at 59 in 1986. She was 81.Her niece, Anna Buehler, confirmed her death and said the cause had not been determined.Ms. Grossman in an undated photo, taken in the same room, against the same fireplace, in which the 1965 album cover photo was shot. She and her husband ran recording studios and restaurants in Woodstock, and after his death she created the Bearsville Theater there. Credit…Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty ImagesSally Ann Buehler was born on Aug. 22, 1939, in Manhattan to Coleman and Ann (Kauth) Buehler. Her mother was executive director of the Boys Club (now the Variety Boys and Girls Club) of Queens; her father was an actuary.Ms. Grossman studied at Adelphi University on Long Island and Hunter College in Manhattan, but she was more drawn to the arts scene percolating in Greenwich Village.“I figured that what was happening on the street was a lot more interesting than studying 17th-century English literature,” she told Musician magazine in 1987, “so I dropped out of Hunter and began working as a waitress. I worked at the Cafe Wha?, and then the Bitter End, all over.”Along the way she met Mr. Grossman, who was making his name managing folk music acts that played at those types of venues, including Peter, Paul and Mary, whom he helped bring together.“The office was constantly packed with people,” Ms. Grossman recalled in the 1987 interview. “Peter, Paul and Mary, of course, but also Ian and Sylvia, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, other musicians, artists, poets.”The couple, who married in 1964, settled in Woodstock, where Mr. Grossman had acquired properties and which Mr. Dylan had also discovered about the same time, settling there with his family as well.In due course came the photo shoot for the album cover.“I made 10 exposures,” Mr. Kramer told The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2014. One image, with Mr. Dylan holding a cat, was a keeper. “That was the only time all three subjects were looking at the lens,” Mr. Kramer said.The photo, staged by Mr. Kramer with Mr. Dylan’s input, was an early example of what became a mini-trend of loading covers up with imagery that seemed to invite scrutiny for insights into the music. The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967) might be the best-known example.The album itself was a breakthrough for Mr. Dylan, marking his transition from acoustic to electric. Its tracks included “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm.”Ms. Grossman and her husband established recording studios and restaurants in Bearsville, and after his death Ms. Grossman renovated a barn to create the Bearsville Theater, bringing to life a vision of her husband’s. It hosted numerous concerts over the years. She sold the businesses in the mid-2000s.Ms. Grossman is survived by a brother, Barry Buehler.Though she knew many American musicians, Ms. Grossman had a special place in her heart for an order of religious singers from Bengal known as the Bauls, whom she encountered in the 1960s. She created a digital archive of Baul music. Deborah Baker, author of “A Blue Hand: The Beats in India” (2008), wrote about Ms. Grossman and her connection to the Bauls in a 2011 essay in the magazine the Caravan.“Despite all the famous musicians and bands who once passed through her life,” Ms. Baker wrote, “she found it was the Bauls she missed the most from those years.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Flory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97A charismatic musician, she sang and wrote songs that linked her to Jewish ancestors who lived in Spain until their expulsion in 1492.Flory Jagoda, left, performing with Heather Spence in Potomac, Md., in 2012. She sang songs she knew from her childhood in the former Yugoslavia and wrote new ones in the Sephardic tradition.Credit…Dayna Smith/Getty ImagesMarch 14, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETTo Flory Jagoda, the language, rhythms and joys of the Sephardic Jewish music she sang and wrote connected her to her beloved nona — her grandmother — who lived in the small mountain village of Vlasenica in the former Yugoslavia.“I think all the feeling that I have for the Sephardic culture, for stories, for song — it’s really a gift from her to me that I will have for the rest of my life,” Mrs. Jagoda said in an oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumin 1995.They were songs of home and family, of love and Hanukkah, many of them in the diasporic language — Ladino, a form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish — spoken by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Some eventually settled in Vlasenica, where Mrs. Jagoda spent part of her childhood, among her beloved grandparents and extended family.Mrs. Jagoda was a Bosnian. She spoke Ladino with her family in Vlasenica, but she conversed in Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian to outsiders.“Our ancestors were Spanish Jews,” she said in the 2014 documentary “Flory’s Flame.” “You carry that love subconsciously. It’s in you. Everything that was Spanish to us was Jewish.”A charismatic musician who played accordion and guitar and was known for the quavery trills of her singing voice, Mrs. Jagoda recorded five albums; performed in her homeland long after immigrating to the United States; and was named a National Heritage Fellow in 2002 by the National Endowment for the Arts.Mrs. Jagoda died on Jan. 29 in a memory care facility in Alexandria, Va. She was 97.Her daughter Betty Jagoda Murphy confirmed the death.Flory Papo was born on Dec. 21, 1923, in Sarajevo, when it was the capital of Yugoslavia, to Samuel and Rosa (Altarac) Papo. Her father was a musician.When Flory was a baby, her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to Vlasenica, where they lived with her grandparents for several years and where she remained when her mother married Michael Kabilijo. Eventually, at about 10, Flory joined her mother and stepfather in Zagreb. She was close to her nona, Berta Altarac, and unhappy about the move to a big city.But she adjusted. Her stepfather bought her an accordion and adopted her. But the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 forced the family to move.Her stepfather bought train tickets to the Croatian city of Split, using gentile names for the family. Flory went first, charming other travelers on the trip by playing her accordion.“I play it for four hours,” she said in “Flory’s Flame.” “They all came into the compartment. They love it. They love music over there. They sang, we had a party, the conductor came in and sat there and he started singing. Saved my life.”She later wrote a song about the episode, which in English translation says in part:My father tells me,“Don’t speak! Just play your accordion!Play your accordion and sing your songs!”I don’t know why I’m running.What have I done?After Flory and her family had spent several months in Split, the Italian Fascists controlling the city sent hundreds of Jewish refugees, including them, to Korcula, a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea, where she taught accordion in exchange for food.In 1943, with the Nazis approaching Korcula and other Adriatic islands, Flory and her parents fled on a fishing boat to Bari, an Italian port city on the Adriatic. She spent the rest of the war there.While working as a typist for a U.S. Army salvage depot in Bari, she met Harry Jagoda, a master sergeant. They married in June 1945. She wore a gown made out of a parachute.Mr. Jagoda returned to the United States before her; she arrived in April 1946, on a ship with 300 Italian war brides.Over the next 27 years, Mr. Jagoda built a real estate development business in Northern Virginia. Mrs. Jagoda raised their four children, gave private guitar and piano lessons, and performed traditional Yugoslav folk music with the Washington Balalaika Society and other groups.But she did not sing the Ladino songs her grandmother had taught her. Her mother, who had emigrated with her husband to the United States in 1948, was haunted by the wartime massacre of 42 family members, including her mother, Flory’s nona, and felt that the Ladino language had died when they did.Her stepfather’s death in 1978, five years after her mother’s, let Mrs. Jagoda reset her musical course.With her parents gone, she began writing down the songs she knew from her childhood; she also started to write new ones in the Sephardic tradition. One of them, “Ocho Kandelikas” (“Eight Candles”), a Hanukkah song, has been performed by the United States Army Band and covered by many artists, including Idina Menzel, the band Pink Martini and the Chopped Liver River Band.Mrs. Jagoda sang at synagogues, folk festivals, community centers and universities, sometimes in various combinations with her daughters, Betty and Lori Jagoda Lowell; her son, Elliot; and two of her grandchildren. In 1985, the family gave concerts at several cities in the former Yugoslavia.“In Novi Sad, we gave a concert in a synagogue with no windows and birds flying in,” Ms. Jagoda Murphy said in a phone interview.Mrs. Jagoda taught her Sephardic oeuvre to Susan Gaeta, who became the older woman’s apprentice in 2003 through a program run by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. They performed as a duo and as the Flory Jagoda Trio, with Howard Bass.“Flory embodied her culture,” Ms. Gaeta said by phone. “Singing Sephardic music and talking about her family was like oxygen to her.”In 2003, Mrs. Jagoda sang at Auschwitz at the unveiling of a plaque to honor Sephardic Jews murdered by the Nazis. She sang a Ladino song, “Arvoles Yoran por Luvias” (“Trees Cry for Rain”), which Sephardic inmates had sung there.The words, translated into English, include the lines “I turn and say, what will become of me,/I will die in a strange land.”In addition to her daughters, Mrs. Jagoda is survived by a son, Andy; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband and son Elliot both died in 2014.For Mrs. Jagoda, her grandmother’s influence never waned.“It was her mission,” she said during a concert in 2013 at the Smithsonian Institution, “to carry and to teach her young ones this language of her heritage — and never forget it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Everything Emma Ruth Rundle Sings Sounds Like a Warning

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      For his final shows before the pandemic, Bill Frisell was touring U.S. jazz clubs with his new quartet, HARMONY: Frisell on electric guitar, along with the great, dramatic singer Petra Haden, Hank Roberts on cello and Luke Bergman on baritone guitar. When I saw them in Baltimore, on the first night of March 2020, they seemed to be in a set-long mind-meld. HARMONY is a quiet group, and though each musician is masterly, their goal is to honor the concept the project is named after. Nothing is high-pitched, no instrument overwhelms the others; they play to blend. Bergman and Roberts added their own background vocals at times, and Frisell glided around all their melodies with his electric guitar, sometimes doubling Haden’s vocal parts, sometimes building drama on his own. At moments — especially when they played old songs like “Red River Valley” or “Hard Times Come Again No More” — they sounded like a chamber group gathered around a prairie campfire.

      Frisell turns 70 this month, and at this point, innovation and exploration are so fundamental to his musical identity that even a small, unflashy band where everyone sings except him still beams with his sensibility. HARMONY’s self-titled debut album — released in 2019, the guitarist’s first record as a leader for Blue Note in his 40-year career — contained the same genre-indeterminate mix of music that’s typical of Frisell: jazz standards, show tunes, old folk songs and haunting, melodic originals.
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      In Baltimore, HARMONY closed with a song the group hasn’t recorded but Frisell has played often over the past few years. It’s an uncomplicated tune with a very deep history. Musicologists have traced its origin to an 18th-century hymn, and a version of it was likely sung by enslaved laborers. It was a union song too, sung by striking workers in the ’40s, around the time Pete Seeger first heard it and helped spread it to the folk-festival audiences of the ’60s. The civil rights movement, starting with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, adopted it as an unofficial anthem, making it famous enough that President Johnson quoted its title in his 1965 call for the Voting Rights Act. In all of these cases — and also in Tiananmen Square, Soweto and the many other sites of protest where it has been heard — “We Shall Overcome” has been more a statement of collective hope than a call to arms. It is a proclamation of faith.

      Frisell told me that, musically speaking, he likes the song because of how deeply he has internalized it. “Like when you’re walking and humming or whistling, almost unconscious that you’re doing it — that’s what you want,” he says. “That’s what ‘We Shall Overcome’ is. It’s in us, the melody and the words. When I play it, the song is like a jungle gym you can play around in. The song is there, and you can take off anywhere.”

      In Baltimore, Frisell and his bandmates moved through “We Shall Overcome” with joyful purpose, Frisell improvising while all three vocalists joined together. I didn’t know it then, but this would be my last ticketed concert before venues across the country went dark. The last thing I experienced in a full club was Petra Haden raising her hands high and compelling us all — Frisell now included — to sing together for our deliverance.

      Had things gone as planned, Frisell’s next move would have been to focus on a new group, this one nominally a jazz trio, with the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Rudy Royston. Things, of course, did not go as planned. Frisell’s datebook was soon filled with canceled gigs. “It’s been kind of traumatic,” he told me via Zoom, though his ever-present smile never quite wavered. But the new trio’s debut album did eventually come out, in August 2020. It closes with its own version of “We Shall Overcome” — this one instrumental, pastoral in its feeling, a soul ballad at the end of a record spent rambling around the outskirts of high-​lonesome country and spacious modern jazz.

      Royston and Morgan are well established in their own careers, but they’re both younger than Frisell, and each came up in a wide-open jazz world that Frisell helped create. In the early 1980s, Frisell began incorporating digital loops and other effects into his live and recorded playing and wound up crafting an entirely new role for the electric guitar in a jazz setting: creating atmospheres full of sparkling reverb, echoing harmonics, undulating whispers that sneak in from outside the band. As he wove those patches of sound around a trio, with the drummer Paul Motian and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, he brought a new spaciousness and pensiveness to the instrument, completely resetting its dynamic range. His quietest playing was like a distant radio; his loudest was a heavy-metal scream that could sit neatly beside, for instance, the Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid on a 1985 duet album, “Smash & Scatteration.”

      Frisell’s approach to his repertoire was just as innovative. He knew his standards but gained an early reputation for openness to pop music and just about anything else — most famously on his 1992 record “Have a Little Faith,” which features everything from a small-group orchestration of an Aaron Copland ballet score to the same band’s searing instrumental version of Madonna’s “Live to Tell.” There was a similar adventurousness in his originals: Across the ’90s, he composed for violin and horns (on “Quartet”), for bluegrass musicians (on “Nashville”), for film scores and for installation soundtracks.

      This is Frisell’s great accomplishment: He makes a guitar sound so unique that it can fit with anything. This became fully clear around the turn of this century, when his records skipped from improvised bluegrass to “The Intercontinentals” — which featured a band of Greek, Malian, American and Brazilian musicians — and then through to “Unspeakable,” a sample-based record made with the producer Hal Willner, a friend since 1980. Willner also introduced Frisell to artists like Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello and Allen Ginsberg, three of many legends who have invited Frisell into the studio to add his signature to their recordings. Every year of this century, he has appeared on or led a new record, often several records, and yet it would be impossible for even the most obsessive fan to guess what the next one might sound like.

      Frisell has largely swapped his old dynamic range for a stylistic one: He doesn’t play as loud these days, but he plays everything, and with everyone. He is on the young side of jazz-elder-statesman status, but in the past four decades, no one else has taken the collaborative, improvisational spirit of that music to so many places.

      And now, like so many of us, he’s just at home. “I shouldn’t be complaining,” he told me, from the house in Brooklyn that he shares with his wife. “I’m healthy, I have my guitar. But my whole life has been about interacting musically with somebody else.” At one point he held up a stack of notebooks and staff-paper pads: “What am I gonna do with this stuff?” he asked. “Usually I’ll write enough, and I’ll get a group together and make a record. But that’s after like a week or two of writing. Now it’s a year or more of ideas.”

      He has played a few outdoor shows in front yards with his longtime collaborators Kenny Wollesen on drums and Tony Scherr on bass. He has played similar gigs with Morgan and Royston. He has performed streamed concerts, including a recent Tyshawn Sorey show, at the Village Vanguard, with Lovano. Frisell has mourned too: Hal Willner died from Covid-19 in April, right after the two were discussing their next collaboration. And he has practiced — as if he were back in high school, he says, working through songs from his favorite records in his bedroom. Often they’re the same ones he practiced in the mid-1960s, from Thelonious Monk to “Stardust.”

      But that is the extent of recent musical connection for a guy who describes playing guitar as his preferred method of “speech” — a guy who got a guitar in 1965 and, since joining his first garage band, has rarely gone a day without playing with somebody else.

      Frisell says he can’t remember when he first heard “We Shall Overcome,” but it would have been sometime during his school days in Denver. “I grew up in a time with a music program in public schools,” he told me. “I’m in seventh grade, and that song was coming around that time. And my English teacher, Mr. Newcomb, is playing us Bob Dylan records, because he said it was like poetry. This was 1963, ’64. On TV you see ‘Hootenanny’ along with Kennedy’s assassination. January 1964, I saw M.L.K. speak at our church. A couple weeks before that, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ came out. Then a couple weeks after that, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. It was in the air.”

      The neighborhood he grew up in, he told me, was very “Leave It to Beaver” and overwhelmingly white. It was Denver East High School, and its band threw him together with a wider group of kids, including the future Earth, Wind & Fire members Andrew Woolfolk, Philip Bailey and Larry Dunn. “When Martin Luther King was killed, our high school concert band was performing and the principal came in and told everyone,” Frisell says. “It was horrible. I was in the band room, with Andrew Woolfolk, with my Japanese-American friend whose parents were in the internment camps, and we were comforting each other.” It gave him the sense that music transcended personal differences and that the camaraderie shared by collaborators was a model for other forms of strife. “From that time, I carry with me this idea that the music community is ahead of its time trying to work things out.”

      “We Shall Overcome” became a regular part of his repertoire in 2017. It’s not the first time he has gone through a phase of ruminating on a particular tune, working through it in different settings: Surely no one else has recorded so many versions of “Shenandoah,” and he played “A Change Is Gonna Come” a lot during the George W. Bush presidency. But as we moved through the past four years, he was drawn back to “We Shall Overcome,” this tune from his childhood. “I was just trying to make a small hopeful statement,” he says. He didn’t know that by the time his trio released the song on their debut, it would be the summer of the George Floyd protests and John Lewis’s death. They reminded him, he says, that “We Shall Overcome” is “one of those songs that is always relevant. That song kind of sums it up. Every time I think about giving up, there are these people like John Lewis — we owe it to them to keep going and trying.”

      Frisell appeared on at least nine albums in 2020, including his trio’s “Valentine,” records from Elvis Costello and Ron Miles and Laura Veirs, tributes to the music of T. Rex and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and “Americana,” a collaboration with the Swiss harmonica player Grégoire Maret and the French pianist Romain Collin. “Americana” is the closest to a “typical” Frisell album, meaning it features not just his languid, layered playing but also his heart-tugging sense of emotional drama. The tempos are slow, and the track list includes recognizable pop covers, such as “Wichita Lineman” and Bon Iver’s “Re: Stacks.”

      The album is improvisational, but it’s cozier and more melodic than most contemporary jazz. This is another mode that Frisell pioneered. If you watch solemn documentaries about heartland struggles or are familiar with public radio’s interstitial music, you’ve heard his influence. Younger guitarists in the cosmic-country realm, like William Tyler and Steve Gunn, also have a bit of Frisell’s unassuming lope. He’s one of the quietest guitar heroes in the instrument’s history.

      His only trick, as he explains it, is “trying to stay connected to this sense of wonder and amazement. That’s where it helps to have other people. Even just one other person. If I play by myself or write a melody, it’s one thing. But if I give it to someone else, they’re going to play it slower, faster, suddenly you’re off into the zone. Being off the edge of what you know, that’s the best place.”

      This attitude has earned him a lifetime spent on stages and records with artists that he revered and studied as a boy, jazz players like Ron Carter, Charles Lloyd and Jack DeJohnette. But now that this journey is on pause, for the first time in 55 years, it’s as though Frisell has no choice but to take stock of what he has learned from these artists and his relationship with their legacies. “It’s just overwhelming what we owe to Black people,” he said at one point in our conversation. “Our culture, we would be nothing. Nothing. But personally, too.” He recalled, again, his teenage years: “In Denver, I was always welcomed into it. It didn’t matter that I was white. I remember a great tenor player named Ron Washington. He was in a big band where you just read the charts, and I could do that and get through the gig. An agent set up those gigs, and he called me once, and I showed up, but it wasn’t the big band. It was just Ron, a drummer and me. I didn’t know any tunes at all.” He laughed again, then described something reminiscent of the second verse of “We Shall Overcome,” the one about walking hand in hand: “Ron was so cool. He just said, ‘Let’s play a blues.’ Then another. And another. He led me through.”

      John Lingan is the author of “Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk.” Celina Pereira is a Brazilian-American graphic designer and artist based in Los Angeles. More