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    Joe Louis Walker, Free-Ranging Blues Explorer, Is Dead at 75

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    A product of the San Francisco rock crucible of the 1960s, he fashioned his own brand of the blues, blending gospel, soul, rock and other genres.Joe Louis Walker, a blues master and musical omnivore whose snarling guitar work, gritty vocals and introspective songwriting earned him the praise of Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger and many others over a six-decade career, died on April 30 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 75.His wife, Robin Poritzky-Walker, said his death, in a hospital, was from a cardiac-related illness.Mr. Walker recorded more than 30 albums for a variety of labels, starting with “Cold Is the Night” in 1986. He toured extensively and was a staple of blues festivals around the world. He won the Blues Music Award (formerly the W.C. Handy Award) multiple times and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.” He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013.Mr. Walker was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.”ProvogueAlong the way he traded riffs with blues powerhouses like B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.The keyboard innovator Herbie Hancock deemed him “a singular force” with a “remarkable gift for instantly electrifying a room.” Mick Jagger called him “a magnificent guitar player and singer.” The jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea playfully anointed him “the Chick Corea of blues.”Critics, too, felt Mr. Walker’s power. “His voice is weather-beaten but ready for more; his guitar solos are fast, wiry and incisive,” Jon Pareles wrote in a 1989 review in The New York Times, “often starting out with impetuous squiggles before moaning with bluesy despair.”Mr. Walker in performance in 1995. One reviewer called him “a fluttering blues guitarist” whose “lines seem blown by the wind.”Simon Ritter/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jazz at Lincoln Center’s New Season Highlights Ties to Africa

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      From July through June 2026, the new season will showcase works by John Coltrane, the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and more.Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 38th season will celebrate jazz, Africa and the African diaspora with programs that pay tribute to genre greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, while others will spotlight vocalists, pianists and other trumpeters. It will also include a tour of Africa by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.The new season opens on July 24 with a preview concert,, “Reflections on Africa,” in the Rose Theater. The program, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Vincent Gardner as the musical director, offers compositions reflecting the effect of African consciousness on music composed by jazz artists including Coltrane, Randy Weston, Jackie McLean and Horace Parlan.The season continues on Sept. 18 with “Afro!,” a new composition by Wynton Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which illuminates his meditations on the African continent. It will also feature the vocalist Shenel Johns, the djembe player Weedie Braimah and the drummer Herlin Riley.On Oct. 3-4, Jazz at Lincoln Center will present a 91st birthday retrospective of the 75-year-long career of the Capetown-born pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. (He was known as Dollar Brand when Duke Ellington first heard his trio in 1963 and sponsored his first recording.)On Oct. 24 and Oct. 25, the Orchestra will feature another South African pianist, Nduduzo Makhathini, including a debut of new work that he has composed.Works by Ellington take center stage Jan. 15-17, 2026, with “Duke in Africa.” The music directors for that program will be Chris Lewis and Alexa Tarantino, two of the Orchestra’s newest members.On Feb. 13 and on Valentine’s Day, Dianne Reeves will explore the universal theme of love as she shares songs that highlight rapture, anguish, romance and heartbreak.The Orchestra will feature works by Davis from May 14-16, 2026, in “Sketches of Miles: Miles Davis at 100.” Later that month (May 29-30, 2026), Jazzmeia Horn, the winner of the 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Vocals Competition, will present a program showcasing her vocal range and improvisation, with the Her Noble Force big band.Etienne Charles, the Trinidad-born trumpeter and composer, will take on Anglophone Afro-Caribbean traditions in “Folklore LIVE Vol. 2” from June 5-6, 2026, in the Appel Room. Later that month, June 12-13, 2026, the Orchestra with Marsalis will also explore the African roots that help make up the genres of Brazil, with “Soul of Brazil,” featuring Hamilton de Holanda and the music of Moacir Santos, in the Rose Theater.The full season is online at jazz.org/25-26. More

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      Essentially Ellington Keeps Duke Ellington Very Much Alive

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      In a dressing room behind the stage in the Metropolitan Opera House, Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter and educator, intently watched a live feed of the big band representing the Osceola County School for the Arts, from Kissimmee, Fla. They were playing Dizzy Gillespie’s “Things to Come,” a piece that can expose any weaknesses in a big band. Being a good jazz musician isn’t just about playing fast and loud and high, but this song requires musicians to do all of that.The school’s lead trumpet player was in the middle of a solo. A dexterous player who could hit the high notes, he sounded like a professional. “Watch, the director’s going to wave off the backgrounds here,” Mr. Marsalis said, using some colorful language to say the soloist had not gotten to his good stuff yet.The director then made a small gesture to the rest of his band, telling them to wait to let the solo develop. It was a chart that Mr. Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, had surely heard live hundreds of times, but each time it is full of small decisions like these, making it a new experience.The songs performed at the festival involve a great deal of improvisation, with a saxophonist from Osceola County School for the Arts in Kissimmee, Fla., taking the lead on Saturday.It has been nearly a century since Duke Ellington’s orchestra became the house band at the Cotton Club on 142nd Street. Even there, where Ellington and his group of Black musicians played in front of all-white audiences, patrons were expected to be active listeners. Ellington is quoted in the book “Duke Ellington’s America” as saying the club “demanded absolutely silence” during performances, and that anybody making noise would quickly be ushered out the door.Ellington knew his work had a signature. He wrote with particular members of his orchestra, like the saxophonist Johnny Hodges or the trumpeter Cootie Williams, in mind, and he believed that nobody else could sound like them, no matter how hard they tried.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fiona Apple’s Statement About Jailed Mothers, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis, Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, I’m With Her and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Fiona Apple, ‘Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)’Fiona Apple’s first solo single in five years is topical, focused on poor women who are imprisoned before trial and drawing on Apple’s time spent as a court watcher. Over a percussive track built on hand drumming, Apple sings about a single mother who can’t afford to post bail; by the time her case is dropped, she has lost her home and her family. Her voice is bitterly sympathetic; the video adds stark statistics.Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, ‘I Like It I Like It’Hayley Williams of Paramore joins Mosey Sumney for a song he wrote with a co-producer, Graham Jonson (a.k.a. quickly, quickly) about desire thwarted by its own intensity. “I turn cactus when we touch,” Sumney moans; “My lips clutch when you open up,” Williams admits. Deep, loping, stop-start synthesizer lines and a lumpy beat underline both their hesitancy and their obsession; all they can agree on is, “I like it too much.”Billy Woods and Preservation, ‘Waterproof Mascara’The most harrowing track on “Golliwog,” the new album by the rapper Billy Woods, is “Waterproof Mascara.” A sobbing woman and an elegiac melody share the foreground of the production, by Preservation, as Woods recalls domestic abuse and suicidal thoughts and tries to numb himself with weed. Like the rest of the album, it’s bleak and uncompromising.Kali Uchis, ‘Lose My Cool,’“Sincerely,” the new album by Kali Uchis, is one long, languorous sigh of relief at finding true love, then basking in it. The production luxuriates in relaxed tempos and reverbed guitars in songs like “Lose My Cool,” a two-part song — slow and slower — that shows off her jazzy side with melodic leaps and airborne crooning. She revels in clinginess: “Whenever I’m without you babe, it don’t feel right,” she coos.Hxppier, ‘Aller’Hxppier — the 20-year-old Nigerian songwriter Ukpabi Favor Oru — lets smoldering irritation boil over in “Aller,” singing, “I can’t right now with your wishes / You try but you lie.” The bass-loving production, by ValNtino, is grounded in an earthy low drumbeat and keeps expanding — with call-and-response voices, ululations, shouts, horns, strings, organ, even a crying baby — as if Hxppier is mustering allies from all sides.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sonny Rollins

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      Walter Theodore Rollins: the “saxophone colossus.” Jazz’s Prometheus, its Siddhartha and its heavyweight champ. Or, as Nate Chinen once put it in a New York Times review of one of Rollins’s marathon-like concerts, “the great unflagging sovereign of the tenor saxophone.”Growing up in 1940s Harlem, Sonny Rollins idolized swing-era heavyweights like Coleman Hawkins and jump-blues saxophonists like Louis Jordan. But when he heard Charlie Parker and the torrid improvisations of Parker’s bebop revolution, which was overtaking Harlem’s clubs, Rollins’s world changed. “He was going against the grain,” Rollins is quoted saying of Parker in “Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins,” Aidan Levy’s authoritative biography. “Highly intricate, involved, complicated, intellectual.”Sonny Rollins at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2012.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesFor Rollins, bebop’s emphasis on physical tenacity and fast-paced intellect became a personal religion. Many of the tunes he wrote have become jazz standards — including some on the list below, like “St. Thomas,” “Oleo” and “Airegin” — but as soon as he composed them, he invariably set about tearing them apart, recasting them, allowing the substance to push against the limits of its own form until it burst, and then to see how that bursting could be multiplied.Sonny Rollins’s sound is as uncapturable as it is memorable, so you’re left with nothing to do except to keep on listening. In the same way that, over his seven-decade career and across more than 60 albums, Rollins wanted nothing more than to simply keep playing. Rollins, who will turn 95 this summer, has not performed publicly since 2012, for health reasons. But he remains indefatigable as a listener. Interviews with him are still liable to veer toward his favorite contemporary saxophonists — some of whom weigh in on the list below.Read on for a ride through Rollins’s catalog, guided by a team of musicians, scholars and critics. Find playlists embedded below, and don’t forget to leave your own favorites in the comments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Baltimore’s Brandon Woody Channels His Hometown on ‘For the Love of It All’

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      “To get here, it hasn’t been a yellow brick road. Even now, it’s not no damn yellow brick road,” the trumpeter and composer Brandon Woody said on a video call from a Fort Myers, Fla., hotel room. It was mid-March and Woody, 26, was in between tour stops supporting Luther S. Allison. In the weeks leading up to the release of his first album as a bandleader, his eyes glimmered with vigor.The road he spoke of was both metaphorical and literal. Woody has earned a fortunate position among 20-something peers like Allison and the Toronto electro-jazz group BadBadNotGood (with whom he toured this spring). To get there he traveled a serpentine, sometimes-rocky path through institutionalized jazz education that has, for others, been a prerequisite for obtaining a record deal with a grande dame of jazz labels. It took him from Boston to Stockton, Calif. to New York, in search of a breakthrough that he eventually got — in his hometown, Baltimore.“I’m always going to be a little bit jagged around the edges,” he said of his music. “You’re going to hear my struggles, but you’re also going to hear my celebrations and my successes. This is a homegrown thing, and it’s going to stay that.”“I’m always going to be a little bit jagged around the edges,” Woody said.Kyle Myles for The New York TimesOn Friday, Blue Note Records will release “For the Love of It All,” an album he and his Baltimore-based band Upendo (Swahili that translates roughly to “love”) honed not in the studio, but in front of audiences, primarily in his hometown. At club performances over the past half decade, fans would find ways to request songs that had never been recorded and weren’t yet titled. “People would remember the songs and be like, ‘Yo, when are you going to do,’ — and just sing it because they know the melody,” Woody recalled.The multidisciplinary artist and fellow-Baltimore native Nia June helped title some of the tracks that appear on his album. After “telling her about the story line and what the songs meant to me,” he explained, she worked to synthesize the ideas as titles. June, a filmmaker, poet and writer who has worked with Woody extensively since 2020, described the common thread of artists in the city: They are “brave, real and radically vulnerable.” She added, “The people here possess an unnatural resiliency — an unashamed, relentless will to survive. And with style.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Dave Chappelle Rallies to Keep ‘Tradition Alive’

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      Outside the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Wednesday night, hundreds of people in shimmering gowns and velvet tuxes waited for the program to begin. They snacked on popcorn from gold pinstriped bags and sipped cocktails in front of a wall lined with giant black-and-white photos of the jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington.“I love coming here,” said Alec Baldwin, as he posed with his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, who was wearing a plunging lilac gown and a cross necklace, on the red carpet at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s annual fund-raising gala, which celebrated Ellington’s 125th birthday.The couple, who married in 2012, star in a TLC reality TV show, “The Baldwins.” Filmed as Mr. Baldwin faced trial for involuntary manslaughter, it focuses on their hectic family life with seven children, all age 11 and under, and eight pets. A judge dismissed the case in July.“The kids aren’t necessarily into the music I appreciate,” said Mr. Baldwin, 67, who wore a navy suit and a burgundy button-down. “I like a lot of classical. I love Japanese jazz, too.” (Ms. Baldwin, 41, a fitness expert and podcast host, said she played a lot of Billie Eilish.)Alec and Hilaria Baldwin. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesVictoria and Michael Imperioli.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDuke Ellington’s granddaughter, Mercedes Ellington.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Carla Bley’s 1970s Experimental Masterpiece Gets a Belated Premiere

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      On a recent afternoon at the New School, the Tishman Auditorium vibrated with the hum of voices. The sound started so imperceptibly that it took a while to realize that it came from the 10 singers who appeared motionless, lined up in front of microphones.As the low drone grew louder, individual voices peeled off with microtonal shudders and ululations, and foghorn-like trombone blasts wormed their way through the vocal texture. Eventually, a 20-piece jazz orchestra joined in, forming a vast mushroom cloud of sound.“Whatever it is can’t have a name,” a spectral voice intoned, “since it makes no difference what you call it.”The ensemble, made up of students and faculty members, was rehearsing “Escalator Over the Hill” by Carla Bley with lyrics by Paul Haines for a performance on Friday. Remarkably, it will be the staged American premiere of this masterpiece of 1970s experimentalism. In an essay, Bley, who died last year, wrote that the work was conceived as a jazz opera, though “the term ‘opera’ was used loosely from the start, an overstatement by two people who didn’t have to watch their words.”Carla Bley in a photo from around the time that “Escalator Over the Hill” was released. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen a recording was released in 1971, the album cover identified it as a “chronotransduction,” an invented term playing on time and conversion. Whatever it is, “Escalator” became a cult album.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kwame Alexander on Bringing the Free Spirit of Jazz to Young Viewers

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      The latest in the author’s Acoustic Rooster franchise, a PBS Kids special and series aim to teach children the beauty of collaboration and improvisation.In 2010, the poet and novelist Kwame Alexander faced a challenge that is familiar to parents everywhere. His younger daughter, then a year old, wouldn’t stop wailing.Lullabies failed. Rocking didn’t help, nor did a car ride. Finally, Alexander put on a few records and found the solution: It was jazz, Baby, jazz!“So I would play her Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald,” he said in a video interview in mid-April. “I would play her bossa nova, and she would stop crying. And I thought: Wow, this is kind of cool. Maybe I should write something about jazz for her.”The result was “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,” Alexander’s first children’s book. But an enterprising rooster doesn’t crow only once, and the author’s feathered, guitar-strumming character has lived on, in a 2021 Kennedy Center stage musical and in three more books. And now Rooster is making his television debut: On Thursday, PBS Kids is premiering “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,” a one-hour animated special that Alexander created with the screenwriter Kay Donmyer. (The special is streaming on all PBS digital platforms; check local listings for broadcast times.)Alexander, 56, is no stranger to TV: He was the showrunner of “The Crossover,” the Disney+ 2023 adaptation of his Newbery Medal-winning middle-grade novel about basketball, which won an Emmy for best young teen series. In “Acoustic Rooster,” he and Donmyer, who collaborated on the script and the lyrics, are presenting a, well, cockier version of the book’s strutting hero.In the special, Rooster wants to win a jazz band contest, but first he needs to be part of a group. He plans to join the famous Barnyard Band — which has members like “Mules Davis,” “Lil Herdin” and “Ella Finchgerald” (voiced by the jazz singer Dee Daniels) — and help it win the competition by being its undisputed star.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More