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    Michael Cuscuna, Who Unearthed Hidden Jazz Gems, Dies at 75

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    Possibly the most prolific archival record producer in history, he was a founder of the Mosaic label, which became the gold standard of jazz reissues.Michael Cuscuna, who brought an artist’s level of devotion and a scientist’s attention to detail to the work of exhuming and producing archival jazz recordings — work that vastly expanded access to the buried treasures of American music’s past — died on Saturday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 75.The singer and songwriter Billy Vera, a friend of more than 60 years, said the cause was complications of esophageal cancer.Mr. Cuscuna may have been the most prolific archival record producer in history. Starting in an era when midcentury jazz experienced a resurgence of interest, his name showed up in the fine print on over 2,600 albums, most of them reissues, many of which included his painstaking liner notes.The Mosaic label, which he founded with the music-business veteran Charlie Lourie 41 years ago, has become the gold standard of archival jazz releases. Its first issue was an exhaustive boxed set of old material that Mr. Cuscuna had found in the vaults of the famed Blue Note label.Soon after that, he helped to revive Blue Note, which had been dormant for years. Working with Bruce Lundvall, who became Blue Note’s president in 1984, Mr. Cuscuna took charge of the label’s back catalog. He released unissued gold by John Coltrane, Art Blakey and numerous others, ultimately combing through the entire catalog and putting out virtually every lost track that seemed fit to be heard.Mr. Cuscuna in the 1970s with Bruce Lundvall, center, who was the president of CBS Records at the time, and the saxophonist Dexter Gordon. When Mr. Lundvall took over the venerable jazz label Blue Note, Mr. Cuscuna took charge of its back catalog.via Cuscuna familyWe 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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      Peter Gordon, Music’s Mr. Adjacent, Is Starting His Own Record Label

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      Peter Gordon, who studied with Terry Riley, has always made music that is surprising but accessible. Now he’s starting his own record label.For 45 years, Peter Gordon has held onto a reel-to-reel tape of a show he performed in 1979 at the Mudd Club in New York City with a trio called the Blue Horn File. Gordon, the violinist Laurie Anderson and the percussionist David Van Tieghem — a group of new music all-stars — did a short set with the playful and unshackled feel of cartoon music. It was one of only three shows the Blue Horn File played.Gordon, a saxophonist, composer and bandleader who has been a mainstay of downtown music for decades, has recorded for several different labels. But he decided to take a different path with these tapes: This week, he is releasing “The Blue Horn File at Mudd Club” as one of the first titles on Adjacent Records, his new digital-only label.“It eliminates the middleman,” he said. “With record companies, people second guess at every point what’s going to work or not work. It’s really about setting up artistic freedom, from creation to distribution.”In the course of his restless, mutable career, Gordon, 72, has written all kinds of music, from classical pieces for solo piano or chamber orchestra to dance scores and experimental operas. But he also has used his classical background to write disco-kissed rock music for the long-running group he formed in 1977, Love of Life Orchestra.He isn’t as well-known as some of the people he’s worked with, like Anderson, the novelist Kathy Acker, the choreographer Bill T. Jones, the singular cellist Arthur Russell, or David Byrne; or the people he’s studied with, including the founding Minimalists Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, with whom he played in a klezmer band. “But he’s known by the right people,” said Tim Burgess, frontman of the Charlatans U.K. and another of Gordon’s many collaborators.Gordon is Mr. Adjacent: “Adjacent” is more than the name of his label, it’s a description of his music, which sits in a distinct Venn diagram of influences, including jazz, classical and rock, often with R&B at the center. The one constant is a kind of populist experimentation: He makes music that’s surprising but also accessible.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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      Kamasi Washington Wants to Remain Unstoppable

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      Before Kamasi Washington unveiled his breakthrough opus, he admits, he second-guessed it.“The Epic” (2015) was a major moment, not just for the Los Angeles saxophonist and composer, but for jazz at large. Arriving on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s seismic “To Pimp a Butterfly” — an album featuring contributions from Washington and his tight-knit hometown coterie — it contained nearly three hours’ worth of surging, spiritually charged music, spearheaded by Washington’s roaring tenor sax. Despite its daunting scope and operatic grandeur, it resonated broadly, serving as a gateway to jazz and the thriving scene orbiting Washington’s label at the time, Brainfeeder.But in the long interval between its recording — most of which took place in 2011 — and its release, Washington toyed with the idea of trimming it down to make it more palatable. “I had so much time, sitting on it for a good little minute, so I made edited versions,” he said with a sheepish laugh during a recent video interview from his Inglewood, Calif. home, sporting a black-and-gold striped knit hat and a flowing, floral-embroidered shirt. But, inspired in part by the boldness of “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and the way it further challenged Lamar’s audience following the rapper’s 2012 multiplatinum hit “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” he decided to honor his original vision, keeping “The Epic” epic.“I’m just going to let it be what it is,” he recalled thinking at the time. “And I’m cool with whatever that does.”Washington onstage in 2022. The saxophonist and his close collaborators have helped bring a thrilling West Coast jazz scene into the spotlight.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn the years since “The Epic,” that principle has continued to serve Washington well. His new album out May 3, “Fearless Movement,” includes high-profile guest spots from George Clinton, who sings on the woozy, grinding “Get Lit,” and André 3000, who contributes blissed-out flute textures to the relaxed jazz-funk excursion “Dream State.”Overall, it finds Washington, 43, adhering to his longstanding vision, presenting sprawling, eclectic tracks — 12 in just shy of 90 minutes — that refute any notion of jazz as a cloistered musical zone and showcase the chemistry of his core musical crew, a decades-strong friend group that started taking shape in early childhood.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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      How the Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt Became a Chronicler of Black Jazz History

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      Inspired by the drummer Arthur Taylor’s “Notes and Tones” collection of interviews with fellow musicians, Pelt started his own book series, “Griot.”The trumpeter Jeremy Pelt was sitting on his couch, browsing YouTube, when he decided to become an author.It was 2018, and Pelt, by then a fixture on the New York jazz scene for two decades, came across a 1994 interview with the jazz drumming great Arthur Taylor, conducted by a fellow percussionist, Warren Smith. “It could have been ‘Batman,’ or something,” Pelt recalled during a recent conversation in his Harlem apartment. “It was like an hour and 45 minutes, I remember, and I just was transfixed the whole time.”Pelt was especially taken with a section where Taylor discussed “Notes and Tones,” his landmark book of musician-to-musician interviews, first self-published in 1977 and later reissued more widely. In it, giants like Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Max Roach spoke with often bracing candor about race, the music business, their feelings about the term “jazz” and more. Pelt had first come across the book more than 20 years earlier at the Berklee College of Music library.“This is way before internet and all that,” he said, so listeners had no idea what their musical heroes’ “comportment was, how they sounded, anything. So what you have is these words that gave you this peek into their personality.”Pelt often found himself wishing for a sequel. Taylor noted in the 1993 paperback edition that he had recorded more than 200 interviews and intended to publish a follow-up; two years later, he died at 65. Watching the conversation between Taylor and Smith, Pelt made a resolution: “After wondering how come somebody hasn’t done such and such, I said, you know what? I’m going to go ahead and do it.”He started conducting interviews with elders, peers and younger artists, accelerating during the pandemic, when it was easy to reach musicians via Zoom. In 2021, he self-published the first volume of “Griot,” settling on that title after seeing the term — meaning a West African storyteller-musician who passes down the oral history of a tribe — in an old social-media handle used by the bassist Buster Williams. “I looked it up, and that’s when it hit me,” Pelt, 47, said. “That’s exactly what this project is, is really passing down the culture. It’s these stories.”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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      Casey Benjamin, Free-Spirited Saxophonist, Dies at 45

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      A musical voyager who wouldn’t be limited by genre, style or even instrument, he brought exuberance to the Robert Glasper Experiment and other groups.Casey Benjamin, who brought colorfully expansive saxophone flourishes to the Grammy-winning Robert Glasper Experiment and added rich layers of texture to recordings by Solange, A Tribe Called Quest and many others, died on March 30 in Maryland. He was 45.The cause was pulmonary thromboembolism, his brother, Kevin Benjamin, said. He did not say where in Maryland Mr. Benjamin died.Known for his willingness to experiment, his exuberant stage persona and his trademark swirl of locs, often streaked with teal or red, Mr. Benjamin was a founding member of the pianist Robert Glasper’s combo, which, the critic Nate Chinen wrote in The New York Times in 2012, “specializes in deep, immersive grooves, nourished as much by hip-hop and R&B as any known species of jazz.”“Black Radio,” the band’s fourth album on the venerable Blue Note label, featured guest appearances by the neo-soul singer Erykah Badu, the rappers Lupe Fiasco and Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) and others. It won the 2012 Grammy Award for best R&B album and rose to No. 15 on the Billboard album chart. Mr. Benjamin shared another Grammy with the band in 2015 when “Jesus Children,” a Stevie Wonder cover, won for best traditional R&B performance.Whether collaborating with Mr. Glasper or the critically acclaimed vibraphonist Stefon Harris in the band Blackout, Mr. Benjamin showed off his distinctive voice on his primary instrument, alto saxophone. In an obituary, the jazz bible DownBeat wrote that he “possessed a fluid, round sound on the alto saxophone and a unique sense of phrasing.”But he never let himself be limited by genre, style or even instrument; he created a rainbow of sounds using not only reeds and woodwinds but also a vocal synthesizer manipulated with a keytar (a keyboard instrument worn with a strap around the neck), along with other synthesizers and effects pedals.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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      Albert Heath, Jazz Drum Virtuoso, Is Dead at 88

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      He accompanied stars like John Coltrane and worked frequently with his brothers. “I’ve always thought I was a master,” he once said. Few disagreed.Albert Heath, a virtuoso jazz drummer who collaborated with luminaries like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone and Herbie Hancock; performed and recorded with his older brothers, Percy and Jimmy; and for a few years played alongside Percy in one of the great jazz ensembles, the Modern Jazz Quartet, died on Wednesday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 88.The cause of his death, it a hospital, was leukemia, his stepson Curt Flood Jr. said.Mr. Heath, who was known as Tootie, was primarily a bebop and hard bop drummer but was adept in a range of styles. In 2020, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, an honor that his brothers had received earlier.He accepted the news with a mixture of humility and self-confidence.“I am honored that they acknowledged me,” he told The Santa Fe New Mexican, “but it doesn’t mean anything because I’ve always thought I was a master.”From left, Albert, Jimmy and Percy Heath in an undated photo. They began working together as the Heath Brothers in 1975.Alan NahigianMr. Heath’s career had its origins with his family in Philadelphia, where his father played clarinet in an Elks marching band, his mother sang in a church choir and his brother Jimmy, a saxophonist, brought members of his big band — including his fellow saxophonist John Coltrane — to the Heaths’ house.“They’d have section rehearsals in our parents’ house because it wasn’t big enough to have the whole band in there, 18 pieces or so,” Mr. Heath said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2015. “So the trumpets would come one day, the reeds the next. The drummers and the bassists would be there a third day.”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 Shirley Horn

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      The pianist and vocalist was at once magnetically powerful and laid-back, glamorous and understated. A mix of musicians, writers and radio personalities share their favorites.We’ve spent five minutes with icons of the avant-garde, big-band heroes and saxophone titans. This time around, we’re putting the spotlight on one of jazz history’s rarest talents, the pianist and vocalist Shirley Horn, who would have turned 90 next month.Horn was at once magnetically powerful and laid-back, glamorous and understated. A daughter of Washington, D.C.’s Black bourgeoisie, Horn often attired herself in furs and white gloves, but she could outlast even the hardiest barfly as the night wore on. Her claim to fame will always be her way with a ballad — slow, smoothly poetic, not exactly beckoning but fully inviting — but she also had a ferocious knack for swing rhythm. As influenced as her musical language was by the French Romantics, like Ravel and Debussy, the blues was always her mother tongue.Born, raised and stationed throughout her life in the nation’s capital, educated in classical piano at Howard University, Horn developed a reputation in Washington by her mid-20s, but she had little interest in chasing the spotlight. She remained only a rumor in New York until Miles Davis — after hearing her 1960 debut album for the small Stere-O-Craft label — convinced Horn to bring her trio for an extended run opposite him at the Village Vanguard. The club’s owner had never heard of her, but Davis insisted: “If she don’t play, I ain’t gonna play.” Her showing there led to a contract with Mercury Records, and a solid run of recordings followed, including the Quincy Jones-arranged “Shirley Horn With Horns.”But Horn prized the comforts of hearth and community, and she had the benefit of plentiful local scene in Washington, where she had become a linchpin. For most of the 1970s she barely recorded. But she kept working, holding together the same trio of expert D.C. musicians for decades, with the bassist Charles Ables and the drummer Steve Williams. The three developed a joyous dynamic, not so much telepathic as alert from moment to moment, so that Horn’s suave but intensely improvised playing always had a plush bed to land in.Here the fact of her immense slowness — Horn often played at tempos so draggy that, at 30 or 40 seconds in, it felt like the song had barely begun — became an asset: You’ll often hear Ables reroute gamely in response to a rhythmic choice she’s made or a transitional chord she’s adjusted. The famed vocalist Carmen McRae loved the sound of that trio so much, she hired them as her backing group; on McRae’s final album, from 1991, Horn can be heard tossing glittery harmonies on ballads and driving the band on up-tempo tunes. It was around this time that Horn swept back into the spotlight, thanks to a deal with Verve Records, and enjoyed one of the great late-career renaissances in jazz history, in particular with her Grammy-winning 1992 album, the now-canonical “Here’s to Life.”Below, read a selection of appreciative takes on Horn’s distinctive sound from a mix of musicians, writers and radio personalities, some of whom knew Horn personally by way of the Washington scene. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure 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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      Jazz at Lincoln Center’s New Season Includes Tribute to Bayard Rustin

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      The civil rights activist’s life and legacy will be honored in a 2024-25 lineup that will also include spotlights on jazz history, and a rising star to warm up November.Jazz at Lincoln Center announced its 2024-25 concert season on Tuesday, which will include performances that celebrate the 20th anniversary of the center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall, a tribute to the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and concerts by Grammy Award-winning artists.The season will run from Sept. 19, 2024, to June 14, 2025, and will begin with Hot Jazz and Swing, in which the music director Loren Schoenberg will guide the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra through revitalized arrangements of 1920s and ’30s tunes.On Oct. 18-19, Bryan Carter, a drummer and composer, will lead the Jazz at Pride Orchestra in honoring the life and legacy of Rustin.Other nods to the past will focus on the history of jazz. Led by Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the center’s orchestra will perform 10 concerts that will each pay homage to a decade of jazz history, from the 1920s to the present.Performances in February will honor the early years of jazz and its many inspirations by incorporating cuts from blues, gospel, country and bluegrass, as well as from recordings by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others. On Nov. 8-9, a pair of concerts will focus on the jazz pioneers Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron and others.From Jan. 16-18, Cool School & Hard Bop concerts will explore midcentury jazz, featuring works from Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Max Roach and others. And May 29-31, the saxophonist Ted Nash will lead the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in performances of new arrangements of music associated with the 1970s.The season will also include more modern performances, including concerts that will feature music from Joanne Brackeen, Charlie Haden, Terence Blanchard and others.Several concerts will also spotlight specific musicians. On Nov. 15-16, Joshua Redman will return to the Rose Theater in a collaboration with Gabrielle Cavassa, a rising star from New Orleans. Later in the season, on Feb. 14-15, Dianne Reeves will perform in a Valentine’s Day celebration filled with songs about romance and heartbreak. The pianist and composer Monty Alexander will celebrate his 80th birthday by performing on Jan. 24-25, while Anat Cohen and her brothers will celebrate her 50th birthday with performances of early swing, post-bop and Brazilian choro on March 14-15.The final performances of the season, June 13-14, will feature music directed by Marsalis and will showcase works by the veteran band members Chris Crenshaw, Vincent Gardner and others. More

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      Alice Coltrane’s Explosive Carnegie Hall Concert, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by St. Vincent, Ani DiFranco, Camila Cabello 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.Alice Coltrane, ‘Journey in Satchidananda’Alice Coltrane’s concert at Carnegie Hall, recorded in 1971 but only released in full this month, gathered force like a typhoon, and is well worth experiencing as a whole. Its serene opening was “Journey in Satchidananda,” a modal meditation with the flute and saxophones of Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp enfolded in her cascading harp arpeggios. Later in the concert, she switched to piano and led her group — which also included two drummers and two bassists — in a squall of free jazz that “Journey in Satchidananda” doesn’t begin to foreshadow. JON PARELESAni DiFranco, ‘The Thing at Hand’Ani DiFranco’s next album, due in May, was produced by BJ Burton, who has come up with studio abstractions for Bon Iver and Low. Two songs released in advance, “The Thing at Hand” and “New Bible,” are starkly unadorned musical close-ups. In “The Thing at Hand,” DiFranco embraces living completely in the moment, beyond identity or premeditation. The melody is bluesy; the minimal accompaniment is from frayed-edged keyboards, distant bell tones and near the end, when DiFranco insists, “I defy being defined,” just a raw, barely tuned guitar, proclaiming a bare-bones intimacy. PARELESWe 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