Jazz

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares39 Views

    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Art Blakey

    by

    For a time in the late 1940s, Art Blakey went to live in West Africa. When he returned to the United States, he told reporters that his time there had given him a fresh appreciation for the music called jazz. This, he declared, was a Black American music — quite distinct from the folk forms he’d heard in Africa.Yet at the same time, Blakey’s experiences in the motherland — where he’d converted to Islam and taken the name Abdullah ibn Buhaina — filled him with a knowledge of jazz’s roots, allowing him to hone a style that was deeply polyrhythmic, powerful and directly related to the drum’s original role: communication. With that knowledge, he would change jazz history.“When he plays, his drums go beyond a beat,” Herb Nolan once wrote in a DownBeat profile. “They provide a whole tapestry of dynamics and color.”Blakey had started out playing piano on the Pittsburgh scene during the Great Depression, but after switching to the drums he stood out, joining the famous big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. Following his sojourn in Africa, he and other young Muslim musicians in New York formed their own large ensemble, the Seventeen Messengers. After that band broke up, he and the pianist Horace Silver started a smaller group, the Jazz Messengers; before long, Blakey was its sole leader, and with his drumming as the linchpin, the Messengers came to define the straight-ahead, “hard bop” sound of jazz in the 1950s and ’60s.Art Blakey at Cafe Bohemia in New York in the mid-1950s.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesBlakey kept the band together for decades, frequently replenishing its lineup with young talent, so that the Messengers became known as jazz’s premier finishing school. “Once he saw that you’d learned the lesson, it was time for you to go,” the saxophonist Bobby Watson recalled of his time as a Messenger in the 1970s and ’80s. He added, “He was one of the most positive people I ever met, and he loved young people. He used to say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being young — you just need some experience.’ And that’s what he provided.”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

    More stories

    • 138 Shares85 Views

      in Television

      Lalo Schifrin, 93, Dies; Composer of ‘Mission: Impossible’ and Much More

      by

      Lalo Schifrin, the Grammy-winning Argentine-born composer who evoked the ticking, ominous suspense of espionage with his indelible theme to the television series “Mission: Impossible” as well as scored movies like “Cool Hand Luke,” “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 93.His wife, Donna, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of pneumonia.Mr. Schifrin had a startlingly diverse career as a composer, arranger and conductor in a wide range of genres — from classical to jazz to Latin to folk to rock to hip-hop to electronic to the ancient music of the Aztecs.He conducted symphony orchestras in London and Vienna, and philharmonic orchestras in Tel Aviv, Paris and Los Angeles. He arranged music for the Three Tenors. He provided what The Washington Post called the music of “rebellious cool” for Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.When Mr. Schifrin won an honorary Academy Award in 2018, it was given to him by Clint Eastwood, a frequent collaborator.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBut the prolific Mr. Schifrin, who wrote more than 100 film and television scores, was best known for “Mission: Impossible.” Interpretations of his propulsive theme have also been featured in the eight movies in the “Mission: Impossible” series, starring Tom Cruise, which began in 1996.Like John Williams, whose many compositions for film include the theme from “Jaws,” Mr. Schifrin was a master of creating jittery unease and peril. Both composers worked with a recognizable style and a distinct purpose.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

    • 138 Shares54 Views

      in Music

      Jack Kleinsinger, Impresario Behind a Marathon Jazz Series, Dies at 88

      by

      A lawyer by day, he created Highlights in Jazz, bringing together artists both famous and unknown in more than 300 concerts over 50 years.Jack Kleinsinger, a lawyer by day who in his evening hours indulged his passion for music by creating and running Highlights in Jazz, one of New York’s longest-running concert series, for which he arranged and hosted more than 300 shows over a 50-year run, died on June 11 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.His cousin, Elizabeth Elliot, said the cause was complications of a fall.Mr. Kleinsinger spent 30 years as a government lawyer, first for New York City and then, from 1970 to 1991, as an assistant attorney general for the State of New York.But his real life began after he punched out every afternoon. Seven times a year, he presented Highlights in Jazz, a roaming concert series that featured some of the country’s best musicians playing alongside a host of promising young artists.Beginning in 1973, at a time when interest in jazz was at its ebb and nightclubs were shutting down, Mr. Kleinsinger nonetheless drew packed crowds. His shows often sold out; any tickets he didn’t sell, he donated to performing-arts high schools around the city.Mr. Kleinsinger’s first shows, in 1973, were such a hit that he immediately began planning. He ended up presenting concerts in various venues around Manhattan.Tribeca Performing Arts CenterHe could count on a core audience of about 350, many of whom took pride in attending virtually every one of his shows. He built on that base with a mailing list of 5,000, which he curated by hand.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

    • 138 Shares54 Views

      in Music

      An Unearthed Joni Mitchell Jazz Demo, and 11 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Sarah McLachlan, Camilo, Us3 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.Joni Mitchell, ‘Be Cool’The first preview of “Joni’s Jazz,” an archival collection of Joni Mitchell’s collaborations with jazz musicians, is this 1980 demo of “Be Cool,” a song that featured Wayne Shorter on saxophone when it was released in 1982 on “Wild Things Run Fast.” This version — two guitars, drums and a click track — doesn’t have all its lyrics yet. It doesn’t need them. Instead, Mitchell flaunts some bold, sure-footed scat-singing. The groove and the attitude — “50-50 fire and ice” — were already fully formed.Sarah McLachlan, ‘Better Broken’Sarah McLachlan ponders giving a second chance to a fraught, long-ago relationship in “Better Broken,” her first new song since 2016 and the title track of a coming album. It’s in vintage McLachlan style: a stately piano ballad with a melody that climbs gradually and holds some aching notes. She knows the possible rationalizations, envisioning “a jagged edge worn smooth by time”; she also, it seems, knows better.Caroline Polachek, ‘On the Beach’It was probably inevitable that Caroline Polachek — whose pop pushes toward the posthuman without losing physical connection — would fulfill a videogame commission. With the hyperpop producer Danny L Harle, she created “On the Beach” for Hideo Kojima’s game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. She sings about Sanzu — the Japanese analog of the river Styx, dividing life and death — in a slow march with a melody that leaps to superhuman, computer-tuned peaks and valleys. She still sounds awe-struck.Us3, ‘Resist the Rat Race’In the 1990s and early 2000s, the British group Us3, led by Geoff Wilkinson, backed rappers with jazz grooves, mixing samples — primarily vintage Blue Note jazz tracks — with performances. Now Us3 has returned as Wilkinson’s instrumental band, still merging loops, beats and live musicians — now with arrangements for 18 brasses and reeds. A low-slung piano vamp and programmed trap drums run throughout “Resist the Rat Race,” topped by tootling synthesizer melodies and dense horn-section outbursts worthy of Gil Evans and Henry Mancini. It’s a swaggering alliance of human and machine.Camilo, ‘Maldito ChatGPT’Artificial intelligence matchmaking fails completely in Camilo’s “Maldito ChatGPT” (“Damned ChatGPT”). When he tells ChatGPT the attributes of his ideal partner, the system insists he’s chosen the wrong person, sabotaging his confidence. “I make a list of everything I’ve always dreamed of / And it looks nothing like the person next to me,” he sings. The track feels transparent, with a steady, subdued beat and skeletal piano chords. But as with an A.I. interface, there’s a lot going on under the surface: percussion, vocals, pizzicato strings, echoes. True to chatbot conventions, the A.I. ends its response with a question; Camilo can barely sputter an incredulous reply.

      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

    • 138 Shares96 Views

      in Music

      Rigmor Newman, Behind-the-Scenes Fixture of the Jazz World, Dies at 86

      by

      She was a concert promoter, a nightclub impresario and the producer of an award-winning 1992 film about the Nicholas Brothers dance duo.Rigmor Newman, who began her career in Sweden as a singer and beauty queen and went on to become a fixture in the U.S. jazz world as a concert and film producer as well as a talent manager, died on April 26 in the Bronx. She was 86.Her daughter, Annie Newman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Her death was not widely reported at the time.Ms. Newman, who sang at the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm in 1957, arrived in New York in the early 1960s after marrying Joe Newman, a standout trumpeter in the Count Basie and Lionel Hampton orchestras.She later managed the Nicholas Brothers, a gravity-defying dance duo that dazzled cinema audiences starting in the late 1930s, and became heroes to many Black Americans. Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers became her second husband.Among her many professional incarnations, Ms. Newman served as the executive director of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit organization promoting jazz throughout the New York metropolitan area, which Joe Newman helped found in the early 1960s.Ms. Newman appeared with the trumpeter Joe Newman, whom she married, on the cover of his 1960 album “Counting Five in Sweden.” Given the racial climate of the day, the image was a symbolic triumph.World Pacific RecordsWe 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

    • 125 Shares146 Views

      in Music

      Brandee Younger Has a New Secret Weapon: Alice Coltrane’s Harp

      by

      Brandee Younger has noticed her audience changing lately. The harpist, composer and bandleader, whose elegant, groove-anchored sound has made her a standout presence in and around jazz in recent years, had grown accustomed to seeing a certain type of listener at her shows.“It’s, like, a Portland, 40s man,” she said with a smile during an interview last month at her East Harlem apartment, referencing demographic data on her fan base — not atypical for a contemporary jazz artist — furnished by her label.During recent tours, though, she started to notice an influx of “young girls that are, like, so excited.”It’s been an encouraging sight for Younger, 41, who said that growing up as “this little Black girl playing harp” and devoting herself to classical studies while also keeping close tabs on hip-hop and R&B, she struggled to find role models.“I want to grab their hands,” she said of these new converts. “I want to nurture these 20-year-old girls, because I wish I had that — something like that — when I was 20.”Younger’s latest batch of music, out Friday, feels like a nurturing, affirming message too. “Gadabout Season,” her third album for Impulse!, offers the best encapsulation yet of the tasteful, subtly radical sonic hybrid that she has been honing since she picked up the harp at age 11. It’s a persuasive argument for the vast, trans-idiomatic potential of her instrument.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

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ella Fitzgerald

      by

      Ella Fitzgerald, “the First Lady of Song,” had a voice so nuanced that it conveyed vast emotions within the contexts of jazz and soul with unparalleled grace and dignity.Born April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Va., she grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., working odd jobs — including one as a runner for local gamblers — then, as a teenager, she’d go to Harlem and catch shows at the Apollo. There, in 1934, she won a chance to compete in Amateur Night, and only decided to sing (she was going to dance initially) after a dance group, the Edwards Sisters, did such a great job that she needed to switch gears. Fitzgerald wowed the crowd, and from that moment, her career was set. “I knew I wanted to sing before people the rest of my life,” she once said.Ella Fitzgerald’s masterful use of scatting has been copied by vocalists the world over.National Jazz Archive/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesBy the mid-1930s, as the frontwoman of Chick Webb’s big band, Fitzgerald started experimenting with her voice, using it as an additional horn in the group in the emerging style that became known as scatting. To this day, her masterful use of it is copied by vocalists the world over. At 21, Fitzgerald became a star with her sprightly version of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” which sold more than one million copies. Over the next decades, she was a fixture in jazz and entertainment, touring and performing with pretty much everyone of note while cementing her own status as a cornerstone in music.Fitzgerald’s stature has only grown since then. Here are 16 songs chosen by musicians, authors, curators and scholars who admire the singer’s contributions to art and culture. Find playlists embedded below, and don’t forget to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’Valerie June, musician and authorOnce Cupid’s arrow strikes, falling in love is the easy part. Staying in love is where we get one chance in a lifetime to conjure the best of ourselves with the only true love of our lives. I write this with joy in my soul and sadness in my heart as I dedicate this Ella Fitzgerald song, “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” to my brother and his wife, Rae Marie Hockett. You see, Rae Marie and Jason were high school sweethearts. I wasn’t initially sure if they were a fling or forever. But until death do us part was truly their love story. Last month, Rae passed away suddenly from heart issues at 45. Her life was short but full of love and sweetness. It was like a dream, and their passion tells the tale of longevity and beauty, as we never know how long we get to spend with those we love. Artists like Ella and Count Basie are the forces that hold us together with songs. Once the curtain closes, it might feel like a dream, but every time we hear the song, it reminds us that every moment is real. While my heart beautifully breaks with grief and loss, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” is from Ella to Rae Marie. Love true, love hard, love and let go — it will come back to you.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

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Guy Klucevsek, Multi-Genre Accordion Virtuoso, Is Dead at 78

      by

      He elevated his instrument’s often-maligned reputation with deft musicianship, and by writing and commissioning a wide range of music.Guy Klucevsek, a masterly accordion player who developed an eclectic body of work for his beloved, if sometimes mocked, instrument that expanded its repertoire well beyond polkas and other traditional fare, died on May 22 at his home on Staten Island. He was 78.His wife and only immediate survivor, Jan (Gibson) Klucevsek, said the cause was pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.Praise for Mr. Klucevsek (pronounced kloo-SEV-ek) typically noted that he had elevated the profile of the accordion beyond the realms of beer halls and “The Lawrence Welk Show.”Writing in The Village Voice in 2015 about a series of performances by Mr. Klucevsek in the East Village, Richard Gehr noted that, “having mastered the instrument in virtually all of its classical, modern, jazz and international manifestations,” Mr. Klucevsek “has extended it into another dimension altogether.”Mr. Klucevsek performed with the dancer Claire Porter at the Kitchen in Manhattan in 2000.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty ImagesHe recorded more than 20 albums, composed dozens of pieces and commissioned others, in multiple genres. He accompanied the performance artist Laurie Anderson on her 1994 album, “Bright Red,” and collaborated with the dancer Maureen Fleming on “B. Madonna,” a 2013 multimedia piece based on the myth of Persephone.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