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    Luther S. Allison, a Jazz Pianist With Big Hands and Bigger Traditions

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    The musician, 28, has won a Grammy for his work with Samara Joy and earned the respect of the elders who mentored him. His debut album is due Friday.On a beautiful day in Harlem a few months before the release of his debut album, Luther S. Allison stood chatting a few yards away from Duke Ellington’s white baby grand. Allison, a wiry 6’4” with huge hands and a contagious enthusiasm, was surrounded by history at the National Jazz Museum — Eddie Lockjaw Davis’s tenor saxophone, the famous Great Day in Harlem photo of 57 musicians taken on a stoop on 126th Street. It was a fitting scene for the pianist, a 28-year-old up-and-comer who’s drawn comparisons to Mulgrew Miller and learned to use the past as fuel for his own future.Over the last whirlwind year, Allison won his first Grammy (for his work with the jazz vocalist Samara Joy), acted in and played music for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie “The Bride,” toured nationally with the singer Ekep Nkwelle, performed at the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival with the bassist Endea Owens and landed a fellowship at the Jazz Museum’s Jazz Is: Now! program, which involves playing and curating a series of events. It’s all happened so quickly, he hasn’t even had time to hire a manager.On Friday, Allison will release his first LP, “I Owe It All to You,” on Posi-Tone, and then he’ll soon hit the road again. Jazz at Lincoln Center has chosen him as a featured artist for a 40-city bandleading tour across the country, arranging, playing and directing the music of New Orleans; he’ll also tour Mexico with his own band in October.“I’ve had unique opportunities to play with my elders,” Allison said in his Southern lilt. “That gave me a lot more visibility than if I was only playing with people my age range.” While an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee, his mentor was Donald Brown, the Jazz Messengers pianist who schooled him on Memphis greats like Miller, Harold Mabern and James Williams.“I Owe It All to You,” Allison’s debut, includes four original compositions.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“Donald would tell stories about them,” Allison said, smiling at the memory. “It felt like we could have been just in his living room. He was just playing us music and expressing himself freely and it was so soulful.”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 Wayne Shorter

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      “He always was a genius,” Herbie Hancock says of his friend and collaborator. Hear a sampling of that genius in these 13 tracks.This month we feature Wayne Shorter, the iconoclastic composer and tenor saxophonist whose work with Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Weather Report and through his own solo discography has influenced generations of like-minded visionaries to push the boundaries of jazz. Since his death in 2023 at 89, it’s felt like he’s still around. That’s because his music always felt so otherworldly and progressive, as if it were beamed in from outer space or somewhere deep into the future.Shorter rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early ’60s as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where his husky and complex sound proved a worthy complement to Blakey’s propulsive rhythms. By 1964, Miles came calling: He wanted Shorter to join his quintet — an all-star squad that included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — but it was no easy sell. Davis “had even gone as far as telephoning Art Blakey’s backstage dressing areas to speak to the saxophonist,” the author Ian Carr wrote in his definitive Miles Davis biography. As a member of the quintet, Shorter once said, “it wasn’t the bish-bash, sock-’em-dead routine we had with Blakey, with every solo a climax. With Miles, I felt like a cello, I felt viola, I felt liquid, dot-dash … and colors started really coming.”Shorter was thought to be a catalyst for one of Davis’s most fruitful creative periods. “All of us wrote some songs, I wrote a couple of things myself, but the main writer: Wayne,” Hancock told me over the phone recently. “If we were going to go to a recording session, Miles would ask Wayne, ‘Did you bring the book?’ Once in a while, we would play things written by Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. But most of the things we recorded were written by Wayne.” The quintet broke up in 1968; Shorter worked with Davis until 1970.In 1971, Shorter helped pioneer jazz fusion, releasing the first album by the group Weather Report with the keyboardist Joe Zawinul. The group created a genre-bending style of music that incorporated jazz, rock, funk and improvised electronic arrangements. By the late ’80s and ’90s, Shorter’s output didn’t slow down, but his focus shifted to deeper spiritual enlightenment, which led to a deeper friendship with Hancock, who was also a practicing Buddhist. In recent years, even though they’d been collaborators for several decades, Hancock and Shorter became best friends.“He always was a genius, just an amazing human being,” Hancock said. “Most jazz players are composers, too. But I would say that the majority of us who are still living and were around during the major part of Wayne’s life, if we had to pick someone to be No. 1, I think we all would probably pick Wayne.“Even though I know Wayne passed away,” he continued, “he’s been in my heart for a long time and he’s still there. So in a certain way I don’t see him anymore. But he hasn’t died for me. It’s not gone forever. He’s still there.”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 100, the Intergalactic Jazz Hero Marshall Allen Is Still on a Mission

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      The Sun Ra Arkestra saxophonist, who remains captivated by the power of sound, is an inspiring onstage presence.In late June, the Sun Ra Arkestra was onstage at Roulette in Brooklyn, swinging its way through “Queer Notions,” a jaunty big-band tune by the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. The rendition hewed closely to the relaxed, seesaw riffing of the original, recorded by Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra in 1933. But there was one prominent difference: the barrage of bleeps, whooshes and wobbly theremin-like tones emanating from an EVI — short for electronic valve instrument — played by Marshall Allen, the multi-instrumentalist and longtime Arkestra mainstay who had recently celebrated his 100th birthday.Allen’s longevity onstage would be noteworthy on its own. But when you take in an Arkestra gig — watching Allen repeatedly leap to his feet to solo, resplendent in a gold-sequined cap and vest — his endurance is mind-boggling. Both at Roulette, where the ensemble played the concluding set of the Vision Festival in honor of Allen’s centennial, and during a trio performance at the Brooklyn Music School a few days earlier, he wasn’t merely an eminent elder but a mirthful dynamo. His contributions on EVI and alto saxophone often clashed brilliantly with the surrounding textures, embodying the joyous eclecticism that helped make Sun Ra — the pianist, composer and Afrofuturist thought leader who helmed the Arkestra from the mid 1950s until his death in 1993 — one of the 20th century’s most prescient musical visionaries.Much like Sun Ra’s own keyboard work, Allen’s art is a study in extremes. His alto saxophone phrases are mini eruptions: Tensing his shoulders as he blows and raking his right hand up and down over the keys, he produces squeals, snarls and honks that register as Expressionist gestures as much as avant-garde sounds. Even set against the alto work of a musician one-fourth his age — as on the tribute LP “Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City,” where Allen appears alongside the rising star Immanuel Wilkins — his sonic splatters still hold a bracing power.But focusing on Allen’s more outré qualities can obscure just how much history he embodies. Enlisting in the Army during World War II, he played clarinet in a military band and, after an honorable discharge, studied at the Paris Conservatory and recorded with the bebop luminary James Moody. When he joined up with the Arkestra in Chicago in 1957, it was a compact, immaculately swinging big band, with a sound rooted in both Sun Ra’s admiration of giants like Fletcher Henderson and a pervasive Space Age aesthetic, manifesting in shiny costumes and sung slogans like “We travel the space ways/From planet to planet.” Allen was drawn in, he recalled to The New York Times in 2020, by the leader’s lectures on space and “all this other stuff: ancient Egypt and the Bible.”The Brooklyn Music School performance — where Allen was joined by fellow Arkestra members Tara Middleton (vocals) and Farid Barron (piano) — served as a reminder of his firm grounding in a bygone era. Though the set featured plenty of jump-scare saxophone and echoey EVI tones, there were also roomy stretches of poignant lyricism. On “Sometimes I’m Happy,” a 1920s-era standard that Sun Ra often played, Allen answered Middleton’s lines with soft, ruminative phrases that strongly evoked Johnny Hodges, whose legacy is as closely intertwined with Duke Ellington as Allen’s is with Sun Ra.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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      4 Objects That Explain the History of Carnegie Hall

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      A new podcast explores an array of items from the 133-year-old hall’s archive, like Ella Fitzgerald’s glasses and an opening-night ticket.Ella Fitzgerald’s glasses. Benny Goodman’s clarinet. A ticket from opening night in 1891. These items have long been a part of Carnegie Hall’s archive. But now they are getting a moment to shine on the new podcast “If This Hall Could Talk.”In eight episodes, the podcast — produced by Carnegie and the classical radio station WQXR — explores “the legendary and sometimes quirky history of the hall,” according to the show’s introduction. The Broadway performer Jessica Vosk is the host of the series, and archivists from the hall offer commentary.“Time moves so quickly,” said Gino Francesconi, Carnegie’s founding archivist, who is featured on the podcast. “These are little anchors to remind people who we are, what extraordinary things have happened here and what continues to happen.”The hall did not devote much effort to preserving its 133-year history until Francesconi was hired in 1986. The collection now includes more than 300,000 items related to more than 50,000 performances and events. The vast majority of pieces were donated, but archivists have also acquired some objects on eBay and other platforms. (One of the pricier acquisitions: a flier for Bob Dylan’s 1961 debut at Carnegie that the hall bought from a man in Sweden for $6,000.)“If This Hall Could Talk,” whose first season concludes next month, also explores social and political aspects of Carnegie’s history, including a 1910 convention on women’s suffrage there and a starry 1961 concert that paid tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.A wide variety of artists offer their reflections on the hall’s history in the podcast, including the jazz singer Samara Joy, the pianist Emanuel Ax, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines and the clarinetist, saxophonist and composer Paquito D’Rivera.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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      Towa Bird’s Bouncy Revenge Rock, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Camila Cabello, Wilco, Xavi 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.Towa Bird, ‘Deep Cut’Towa Bird — a rock songwriter, guitarist and prolific TikToker who was born in Hong Kong and grew up there, in Thailand and in Britain — uses “Deep Cut” to take lucrative revenge on an ex. “I’ll take your words, turn ’em into a verse and get my check,” she announces, going on to declare, “I wish you the worst/I’ll make sure that it hurts ’cause I’m bitter.” With splashy cymbals and a nyah-nyah guitar hook, it’s victoriously spiteful.Pom Pom Squad, ‘Downhill’Mia Berrin, the singer who leads Pom Pom Squad, balances between regrets and the perverse pleasures of self-destruction in “Downhill.” Over a bouncy beat that carries punk-pop guitars and neatly stacked vocal harmonies, she sings, “All my worst traits every worst case playing in my head/Overwhelm me — heaven help me, I’m in love with it.” At least for the moment, she’s incorrigible: “I never said I was done,” she vows. “I’m coming back from the dead.”Wilco, ‘Hot Sun’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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      James Chance, No Wave and Punk-Funk Pioneer, Dies at 71

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      With the Contortions and James White and the Blacks, the songwriter and saxophonist set out to challenge musicians and stir up audiences.James Chance, the singer, saxophonist and composer who melded punk, funk and free jazz into bristling dance music as the leader of the Contortions, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 71.His brother, David Siegfried, said Mr. Chance had been in declining health for years and succumbed to complications of gastrointestinal disease at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem.During the late 1970s explosion of punk culture in New York City, the Contortions were at the forefront of a style called no wave — music that set out to be as confrontational and radical in sound and performance as punk’s fashion and attitude were visually.Contortions songs like “I Can’t Stand Myself” and “Throw Me Away” filled the rhythmic structures of James Brown’s funk with angular, dissonant riffs, to be topped by Mr. Chance’s yelping, blurting, screaming vocals and his trilling, squawking alto saxophone. He was a live wire onstage, with his own twitchy versions of moves adapted from Brown, Mick Jagger and his punk contemporaries.Although the Contortions often performed in suits and ties, their music and stage presence were proudly abrasive. In the band’s early days, Mr. Chance was so determined to get a reaction from arty, detached spectators that he would jump into the audience and slap or kiss someone. Audience members often fought back.“I got a big kick out of provoking people, I don’t deny that,” Mr. Chance said in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork.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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      Julius Rodriguez Fuses Styles on ‘Evergreen’

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      The multi-instrumentalist Julius Rodriguez hones a bigger, more audacious sound on his second album, “Evergreen.”Sitting outside a bar in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn one recent Sunday afternoon, Julius Rodriguez spoke with characteristic straightforwardness describing music that is anything but. The composer and bandleader, who has played with the rapper ASAP Rocky and style-bending artists like Kassa Overall and Meshell Ndegeocello, articulated the central challenge of his work, an amorphous blend of jazz, funk, gospel and R&B he simply calls “the music.”It’s not about the notes, he explained, it’s about the emotions behind them.“How do you describe the color orange to someone?” Rodriguez said, his tone warm yet flat. “How do you describe the taste of salt to someone who’s never tasted salt? You don’t know that you’re there until you’re there. You don’t know what it feels like until you feel it.”Rodriguez, 25, has been lauded for his tremendous sense of harmony and virtuosity across piano, drums, bass and whatever else he feels like playing any given week. He can hold his own at a psychedelic free jazz show in Brooklyn, a stadium-size rap concert in Los Angeles, a stately supper-club gig on the Upper West Side. “He’s what we call auxiliary,” Ndegeocello said in a phone interview. “He plays everything.”On “Evergreen,” out Friday on Verve Records, Rodriguez funnels sounds into a 40-minute collage of electric-acoustic arrangements steeped equally in tradition and disruption, convention and audacity coming through in big, clean sound seemingly inspired by 1970s jazz fusion. It’s a sharp detour from “Let Sound Tell All,” Rodriguez’s 2022 debut album, which was indebted to the jazz and gospel he grew up playing in churches and small clubs.Rodriguez calls his blend of jazz, funk, gospel and R&B “the music.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesLong before Rodriguez burst onto the New York jazz scene, he was a precocious kid in Westchester. When he was 3 or 4, he took piano lessons from a family friend, Audrey McCallum, the first Black student to attend the Peabody Preparatory, who gave Rodriguez his first keyboard and encouraged his parents to buy a piano. “At the same time, I’m learning about tempo and time signatures, how to read music on a staff, and where the notes are on a piano,” he said. “All that while learning how to read and write English.”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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      Jean-Philippe Allard, Jazz Producer and Musicians’ Advocate, Dies at 67

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      He called himself a “professional listener,” and he tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with.Jean-Philippe Allard, a French record executive and producer who helped revive the careers of jazz greats who had been all but forgotten in the United States, and who earned a reputation for uncommonly fierce advocacy on behalf of musicians, died on May 17 in Paris. He was 67.The music producer Brian Bacchus, a close friend and frequent collaborator, said Mr. Allard died in a hospital from cancer, which had returned after a long remission.Artists ranging from Abbey Lincoln to Juliette Gréco to Kenny Barron all said they had never worked with a more musician-friendly producer.“Regarding my work, I would always consider it as co-producing with the artist,” Mr. Allard told the music journalist Willard Jenkins in an interview in March. “Some producers are musicians or arrangers, like Teo Maceo or Larry Klein; others are engineers; some are professional listeners. I would fall in this last category: listening to the artist before the session, listening to the music during the session, and listening to the mixing engineer.”He tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with. “His ear was always open to the artist, and he was always concerned about what was best for the artist,” the vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater said in an interview. “He saw me. He embraced me. He wasn’t afraid of me. He encouraged my independence. He encouraged me speaking out.”Mr. Allard, right, in the studio with the bassist Charlie Haden, one of the many prominent jazz musicians he worked with.Cheung Ching Ming, via PolyGram/UniversalWe 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 South African Jazz

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      The country has a rich, original relationship to jazz, with American techniques layered into regional traditions and rhythms. Explore 50 years of recordings picked by musicians, poets and writers.We’ve spent five minutes each with stars like Shirley Horn, Sarah Vaughan, Max Roach and John Coltrane. We’ve traveled together to New Orleans, and to the outskirts of the avant-garde. But we haven’t jumped past the boundaries of the United States. Let’s change that.Perhaps no country outside North America has as rich, or original, a relationship to jazz music as South Africa. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the apartheid government enforced an increasingly brutal code of racial hierarchy, South African musicians, poets, artists, radical clergy and organizers found in this music a symbol of Black cosmopolitanism, interracial experimentation and free thought — all anathema to the regime.Taking the swinging bravado of American beboppers as their model, young musicians in the mixed neighborhoods of Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and District Six, Cape Town, found their own uses for the techniques of jazz, layering them into regional traditions. In Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape, the vocal tradition of isicathamiya and the steady, Zulu and Xhosa dance rhythms of the regions exerted strong influence. In Cape Town, improvisers picked up on the carnival music of the townships’ Coloured population, a mix of Malaysian, Indian, Dutch, Khoisan and Black African heritages.Many of the country’s greatest musicians wound up in exile, and figures like Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Dorothy Masuka, Johnny Dyani and Abdullah Ibrahim became de facto ambassadors for their country’s repressed population. But back home, the music continued to develop in the hands of figures like Kippie Moeketsi, Robbie Jansen and Dolly Rathebe.After apartheid crumbled — three decades ago this spring — a new wave of musicians, in the so-called “born free” generation, came to jazz with their own set of questions, curious to feel out the meaning of the tradition when its ideals were no longer illicit. Since then, South African society has continued to evolve, and so has the music. (Not covered on this list: the amapiano boom that’s swept the world of late, and that’s definitely worth another five minutes of your time.)Below you’ll find a sampling of South African recordings from the past 50 years, picked out for you by a mix of musicians, poets and scholars. You can find a playlist at the end 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