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      Willie Ruff, Jazz Missionary and Professor, Dies at 92

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      A master of the French horn, a rarity in jazz, he toured the world with the pianist Dwike Mitchell and taught music at Yale.Willie Ruff, who fashioned an unlikely career in jazz as a French horn player and toured the world as a musical missionary in the acclaimed Mitchell-Ruff Duo while maintaining a parallel career at the Yale School of Music, died on Sunday at his home in Killen, Ala. He was 92.His death was confirmed by his niece Jennifer Green.Mr. Ruff, who was also a bassist, played both bass and French horn in the duo he formed with the pianist Dwike Mitchell in 1955, which lasted until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013. They opened for many jazz luminaries, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan; played countless concerts in schools and colleges; and toured foreign countries where jazz was little known or even taboo.In 1959, they flouted edicts against music that the Soviet Union deemed bourgeois, performing an impromptu set in Moscow while on tour with the Yale Russian Chorus. Their concerts in China in 1981 were considered the first jazz performances there since the Cultural Revolution.A globe-trotting musical career, however, seemed a remote possibility when Mr. Ruff was growing up in a small Southern town during the Great Depression.Mr. Ruff, left, and Dwike Mitchell, right, in November 1959 with the classical pianists Lev Vlassenko, second from left, and Van Cliburn. Mr. Ruff and Mr. Mitchell met in the Army and in 1955 formed the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, which stayed together until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013.Associated PressHe was born on Sept. 1, 1931, in Sheffield, Ala., the sixth of eight children of Willie and Manie Ruff. “We lived in a house — my mother and eight children — that had no electricity, so there was no radio or music,” he said in a 2017 interview with Yale. “But there was always dancing, to silence. The dances made their own rhythm.”He eventually learned to pound out his own rhythms on piano and drums. At 14, he fudged his way into the Army, on the advice of an older cousin who had enlisted at 17 with his parents’ permission and dismissed Mr. Ruff’s concern that he was too young: “For a musician, you sure are dumb,” Mr. Ruff recalled the cousin saying. “Don’t you know how to write your daddy’s name?”He hoped to leverage his skill with the sticks into a spot in a highly regarded all-Black military band, but, seeing a glut of drummers, he took up the French horn instead. It was in that band that he met Mr. Mitchell, who taught him to play the stand-up bass.After leaving the Army, Mr. Ruff applied to the Yale School of Music, hoping to use his financial windfall from the G.I. Bill of Rights to study with the famed composer Paul Hindemith. “I brought my French horn and played an audition, and by some miracle they let me in,” he said in an interview with the quarterly newspaper The Soul of the American Actor. “So, Uncle Sam put me through my schooling!”He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953 and his master’s degree a year later. In 1955, he was weighing an opportunity to join the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra when he turned on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and saw his old friend Mr. Mitchell at the piano, as a member of Lionel Hampton’s band. He called him at the television studio, and Mr. Mitchell soon recruited Mr. Ruff to play in the band.Playing an instrument associated with classical music in a jazz band was unconventional, but it opened doors for Mr. Ruff, as did the broad musical training he had received at Yale.“Lionel Hampton’s band was the worst-paying, hardest-working band in the world,” he recalled in an interview for Yale’s Oral History of American Music project. “So if a saxophone player quit, I played his part. If a trombone player quit, I played his part, and that would make me valuable because I could transpose all these parts.” With no parts written for the French horn itself, he said, Mr. Hampton “didn’t know what to expect”:“As long as it worked, I was left to invent. It was wonderful training.”From left, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Mr. Ruff in 1972, the year Mr. Ruff founded the Ellington Fellowship program at Yale.Reggie Jackson/Yale University Art GalleryMr. Ruff joined the Yale faculty in 1971 and stayed until he retired in 2017. In 1972 he founded the Ellington Fellowship, which is dedicated to expanding the study of African American music and has honored a long list of jazz notables, some of whom performed concerts in New Haven, Conn., and shared their musical knowledge with hundreds of thousands of local public school students.His immediate survivors include a brother, Nathaniel. His wife, Emma, and daughter, Michelle, died before him.Late in his life, Mr. Ruff recalled that his turn to education seemed almost predestined. When he was in second grade, W.C. Handy, the composer and musician known as “the father of the blues,” who was from nearby Florence, Ala., visited his class. He played trumpet for the students and talked to them about “how important it was to continue our education and hold up our heritage and our culture,” Mr. Ruff told Yale in 2017. “He said that it’s not from royalty or from the highborn that music comes, but it is often from those who are the farthest down in society.”“After he finished,” Mr. Ruff added, “all the children who were musically inclined were permitted to shake the hand of the man who wrote ‘The Saint Louis Blues.’”“I was never the same boy again,” he recalled. “I had to be a teacher.” More

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      Zita Carno, Concert Pianist, Coltrane Scholar and More, Dies at 88

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      A veteran of 25 years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she was known as much for her eccentricities as for her exceptional musicianship.Zita Carno in 1960 with the composer Wallingford Riegger. The critic Harold C. Schonberg called her the “perfect interpreter” of Mr. Riegger’s technically difficult “Variations for Piano and Orchestra.”Whitestone PhotoWhen the Bronx-bred pianist Zita Carno auditioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1975, she played short excerpts from the orchestra’s repertoire for the music director, Zubin Mehta.“Then Mehta said, ‘Come back tomorrow. I want to hear you play the Boulez,’” she recalled years later, referring to the French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.“Well, I said, ‘I eat that stuff for breakfast,’ which made him laugh.”Ms. Carno was hired and spent the next 25 years as the orchestra’s pianist, capping a career as a widely praised classical keyboardist (she also played the harpsichord and organ) who was also an expert on the music of the innovative jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.Ms. Carno died on Dec. 7 in an assisted living facility in Tampa, Fla. She was 88.Her cousin Susanna Briselli said the cause was heart failure. Ms. Carno had moved to Tampa with her mother after her retirement from the Philharmonic to be near the spring training facility of the Yankees, her favorite baseball team.Ms. Carno was known as much for her eccentricities as for her musicianship.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director from 1992 to 2009, said in a phone interview that Ms. Carno “had an extraordinary capacity as a musician,” adding, “She could read basically everything — not only Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms but pieces by Hindemith and Richard Strauss, with all sorts of complex transpositions, and play them in real time and in tempo.”Mr. Salonen said that Ms. Carno’s talents transcended sight-reading piano pieces and extended to calculating a full orchestral score in her head. “She had a particular kind of C.P.U. that could process a lot of information in real time,” he said. “She had that kind of unusual brain.”She also frequently used the phrase “Yoohoo, bubeleh!” — “bubeleh” is Yiddish for “sweetheart” — as a greeting in her booming voice.“Those words came out of her with startling regularity,” David Howard, a former clarinetist with the Philharmonic, said by phone. The two collaborated on an album, “Capriccio: Mid-Century Music for Clarinet,” released in 1994.During a rehearsal when Mr. Boulez was conducting the orchestra, Mr. Howard recalled, “He asked Zita to play something a little bit softer and she said, ‘Sure, bubeleh!’“Boulez was as serious and solemn a music figure as ever lived,” he added. “We had to grit our teeth to keep from laughing.”She also used the words “yoohoo” and “bubeleh” in musical scores, To Ms. Carno, “yoohoo” denoted a duplet (a group of two notes), and “bubeleh” was her word for a triplet (a group of three).Joanne Pearce Martin, Ms. Carno’s successor at the Philharmonic, wrote on Facebook after Ms. Carno’s death that she “never erased a single mark of Zita’s in any of the LA Phil keyboard parts. Seeing those ‘Bubulas’ and ‘Yoohoos’ peppered throughout the parts brings a special smile to my face — how could it not?”Ms. Carno, right, performed in an elimination round of the Leventritt Competition, a prestigious international contest for pianists and violinists, in 1959. To her left was Harriet Wingreen. Sam Falk/The New York TimesZita Carnovsky was born on April 15, 1935, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. Her father, Daniel, who immigrated from Poland, was a pharmacist. Her mother, Lucia (Briselli) Carno, who was born in Odessa, Russia, was a homemaker whose piano playing Zita began to imitate when she was quite young — anywhere from 2½ to 4 years old, depending on the account.From ages 4 to 6, Zita traveled with her parents to Philadelphia, where she played duets with her uncle, Iso Briselli, a violin virtuoso, who also coached her, Ms. Briselli, his daughter, said in a phone interview. At 10, she finished writing her first fugue.She graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in New York and, in 1952, received honorable mention for a piece she wrote for violin and piano in a composition contest conducted by the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts.She attended the Manhattan School of Music, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1956 and her master’s the next year.When she made her debut at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1959, the New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she was “without a doubt one of the major young American talents, with splendid technical equipment, brains and finesse.”In October 1960, she was the soloist in a program of Romantic music during four concerts with the New York Philharmonic, with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Mr. Schoenberg called her the “perfect interpreter” of Wallingford Riegger’s technically difficult “Variations for Piano and Orchestra.”In the 1960s, she was a member of the Pro Arte Symphony Orchestra of Hofstra University and the Orchestra da Camera, both on Long Island. She was also in demand for recitals and concerts around the United States. She joined the New Jersey Symphony in the early 1970s and stayed until she left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.She was also intrigued by jazz. (“She was always interested in cutting-edge music,” Ms. Briselli said.) In 1959, she wrote a two-part article about John Coltrane in The Jazz Review. Explaining his technique, she wrote, “Tempos don’t faze him in the least; his control enables him to handle a very slow ballad without having to resort to the double-timing so common among hard blowers, and for him, there is no such thing as too fast a tempo.”Ms. Carno, who was introduced to Coltrane by the bassist Art Davis, was able to transcribe his solos while listening to him perform.“I used to go equipped with music paper and a few well-sharpened pencils and I would take them down during the performances, which amused Trane no end,” she told Lewis Porter, the author of “John Coltrane: His Life and Legend” (1998).She wrote the liner notes to “Coltrane Jazz,” Coltrane’s second album for the Atlantic label, which was released in 1961.No immediate family members survive.In addition to her musical pursuits, Ms. Carno was an amateur baseball scholar. She wrote articles for the Society for American Baseball Research (about the pitcher Eddie Lopat) and the Baseball Research Journal (about pitchers who were notoriously tough on certain teams).She was also a science fiction fan and frequently commented online about the “Star Trek” television series and films.In a post on the science fiction author Christopher L. Bennett’s website in 2018, she said that she had been researching the Vulcan mind-meld and the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock’s advanced telepathic abilities. “As a result,” she wrote, “I have gained a whole new appreciation of the power of the mind — ‘wuh tepul t’wuh kashek’ in Vulcan — and how Spock was able to use it, especially when it came to getting himself, Captain (later Admiral) Kirk and the great starship Enterprise out of one jam after another.” More

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      Carlos Lyra, Composer Who Brought Finesse to Bossa Nova, Dies at 90

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      When Brazilian musicians fused samba with jazz and classical influences in the 1950s and ’60s, he was among the first, and the best.Carlos Lyra, a Brazilian composer, singer and guitarist whose cool, meticulous melodies helped give structure and power to bossa nova, the samba-inflected jazz style that became a worldwide phenomenon in the early 1960s, died on Dec. 16 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 90.His daughter, the singer Kay Lyra, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was sepsis.Alongside Antônio Carlos Jobim, Mr. Lyra was widely considered among the greatest composers of bossa nova. Mr. Jobim once called him “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.”Mr. Lyra was part of a loose circle of musicians who in the 1950s began looking for ways to blend the traditional samba sounds of Brazil with American jazz and European classical influences. They often gathered at the Plaza Hotel in Rio, not far from the Copacabana beach, to discuss music and hash out ideas.One of those musicians, the singer and guitarist João Gilberto, included three of Mr. Lyra’s compositions — “Maria Ninguém” (“Maria Nobody”), “Lobo Bobo” (“Foolish Wolf”) and “Saudade Fêz um Samba” (“Saudade Made a Samba”) — on his “Chega de Saudade” (1959), which has often been called the first bossa nova album. Mr. Lyra released his own first album a year later, titled simply “Carlos Lyra: Bossa Nova.”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?  More

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      A Holiday Version of ‘I’m Just Ken,’ and 12 More Songs

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      Hear tracks by Central Cee, Kesha, Jason Moran and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson, ‘I’m Just Ken (Merry Kristmas, Barbie)’A well-timed holiday remix that doubles as shameless Oscar campaigning? Yes, they Ken! Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson’s “Barbie” showstopper “I’m Just Ken” is reimagined in three different formats — acoustic lament, club banger and Christmas novelty — on the newly released “I’m Just Ken” EP. “I’m Just Ken (Merry Kristmas Barbie)” reworks the arrangement into a stately, vaguely festive bit of chamber-pop; Gosling doesn’t fill the lyrics with Christmas puns, thankfully, but merely mutters in conclusion a wistful, “Merry Christmas, Barbie … wherever you are.” LINDSAY ZOLADZCentral Cee, ‘Entrapreneur’“We put the trap in entrapreneur,” the British drill rapper Central Cee spits on his first solo single of the year, following high-profile collaborations with Dave, Drake and PinkPantheress. In his signature knottily conversational flow, Cee boasts about his hustler mentality and sudden success, never forgetting from where he came: “Went from a Toyota Yaris to Urus,” he raps. “I still got the same work rate as before.” ZOLADZFlagboy Giz and Kango Slim, ‘Fell in Love at the Secondline’Flagboy Giz grew up on hip-hop, but he’s also a proud carrier of New Orleans tradition as a member, since 2015, of the Wild Tchoupitoulas tribe of Mardi Gras Indians. The title of his 2023 album “Disgrace to the Culture” points to the way his music determinedly mixes hip-hop with New Orleans lore. Twitchy trap programming and a low-slung piano riff join hints of brass-band sousaphone and Mardi Gras tambourine to carry “Fell in Love at the Secondline,” a flirtation mapped onto the city’s streets. JON PARELESGenesis Owusu, ‘Survivor’A fierce beat, relentless but changeable — with percussion, voices and programming — drives “Survivor,” a knowing vow of defiance in the face of every obstacle. “I am the lawless, formless, thoughtless, flawless chaos of the sun/I am the seed of life and love, you see the blaze, you better run” chants Genesis Owusu, born in Ghana and living in Australia. The track is brutal, full of paradoxical wordplay — and fully confrontational. PARELESIza, ‘Que Se Vá’Iza, a Brazilian singer and rapper, isn’t just breaking up in “Que Se Vá” (“Let It Go”); she’s also canceling the ex’s credit card. Her gleeful good riddance, with verses that build toward laughter, is propelled by Afro-Brazilian rhythms, programmed handclaps and a harmony chorus that exults in its spite. PARELESKesha, ‘Eat the Acid’Kesha set aside her pop and rock reflexes for the somber “Eat the Acid” from her 2023 album, “Gag Order.” She sings about indelible drug revelations and warns, “You don’t wanna be changed/like it changed me.” With stark keyboard drones, a cappella moments, processed vocals and distant, ethereal harmonies, Kesha pushes toward the experimental realms of songwriters like Julia Holter and Björk. PARELESMedicine, ‘That’s Alright, Friend’Medicine, the indie-rock band Brad Laner has led since 1990, thrives on overload, placing poppy tunes within a pile-on of instruments, voices, electronics and distortion. “That’s Alright, Friend” — the opening track on its 2023 album, “Silences” — bashes out a six-beat stomp behind Julia Monreal’s cheerful voice while bells ping, electronics chatter and layered guitars pick up her melody. Then the track starts lurching into new territory, swerving through a few episodes before ending up somewhere like a psychedelic sea chantey, while Monreal repeats the title as reassurance amid the din. PARELESEsperanza Spalding and Fred Hersch, ‘But Not for Me’A vocalist sits on a stool in a dark-lit subterranean jazz club, topped with a beret, she-bopping through standards. Even if that’s more or less what you think of when you hear the word “jazz,” it’s probably not what the name “Esperanza Spalding” calls to mind. But back in 2018, Spalding took a detour into the old songbook, at the elbow of the piano maestro Fred Hersch, during a weeklong stand at the Village Vanguard. A few tracks from those dates were released as an album earlier this year.Yes, she wore a beret and sat on a stool, and the lights were low. (She also left her bass at home.) Still, Spalding created healthy distance between herself and the old material. On “But Not for Me,” even as she delights in banter with Hersch’s piano, Spalding seems certain this Gershwin tune was not written “for” her. “They say that Russian plays do boast of many gray skies,” she sings, before tapping out on the next line. “And then some words I don’t really understand, ’cause it’s like Old English: ‘hi-ho, alas and lackaday?’” she says. “That’s how I feel — confused about the whole situation.” The audience laughs easily, agreeing that the old material shines best when thrown open to the light of the present day. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODarcy James Argue’s Secret Society, ‘All In’Darcy James Argue and his airtight big band, Secret Society, have long made a cottage industry out of dynamic torque, and Argue rarely wastes a note. “All In,” from their aptly named album “Dynamic Maximum Tension,” starts with a tenuous and crooked drum beat, then a procession of rich harmonies — packed with just enough dissonance to tighten up the energy — before a heavier beat kicks in. The horns swell atop a percussive, string-muted piano part from Adam Birnbaum. Even as the sound grows triumphant, that catalytic dissonance never goes away. RUSSONELLOJason Moran featuring Brian Settles, ‘Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain/Ghosts’“From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” is the culmination of a long project for the pianist and multivalent artist Jason Moran, who has spent years exploring and elevating the legacy of James Reese Europe, a pioneering bandleader who was also the first Black American to lead U.S. troops into combat, as a lieutenant in the 369th Infantry Regiment (the renowned “Harlem Hellfighters”) during World War I. Europe also helmed the regiment’s orchestra, which made waves in France and helped pave the way for the Jazz Age’s big-band boom.On “From the Dancehall,” Moran leads a 10-piece ensemble through a swirl of material, placing Europe into conversation with the 100 years of jazz history that have followed in his wake. One highlight comes on “Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain/Ghosts,” as Moran pairs a dirge-like Europe composition — which Europe’s band used to play whenever an infantryman had died on the battlefield — with Albert Ayler’s spiritualist free-jazz classic “Ghosts.” Brian Settles, a prominent tenor saxophonist on the jazz scene in Washington (Europe’s hometown), carries the melody to “Ghosts,” smearing and savoring his notes, then shifts into a shivery, heart-spilling solo. RUSSONELLOConexión Divina, ‘Anestesia’A thunderstorm rumbles through “Anestesia” (“Anesthesia”) by Conexión Divina, a three-woman band based in Los Angeles that plays the regional Mexican style called sierreño, which features melancholy love songs. In “Anestesia,” Liz Trujillo sings about a longing so intense she needs to numb herself. Whether it’s a blinding infatuation or post-breakup regret, the desperation is palpable. PARELESAngelica Garcia, ‘El Que’In “El Que” (“He That”), Angelica Garcia wrestles with an inner demon who “chills, robs energy, controls and bewitches,” preying on her own self-doubt. A throbbing electronic pulse underlines her vulnerability; she fights back with booming drums and a choral chant, achieving a tense standoff. PARELESMary Lattimore, ‘Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow’On her 2023 album, “Goodbye, Hotel Arkada,” the harpist Mary Lattimore welcomed electronics and processing while keeping the plucked, resonant tones of her instrument at the center of her music. “Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow” is minimalistic and meditative with little exact repetition. Basking in the slow alternation of two echoey chords topped with ever-changing fragments of melody, it does, indeed, shimmer. — PARELES More

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      Mars Williams, 68, Saxophonist Who Straddled New Wave and Jazz, Dies

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      He made his name in the 1980s with the Waitresses and the Psychedelic Furs, but his roots were in the exploratory jazz of Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.Weakened by surgery to remove a tumor near his pancreas in January, followed by six months of chemotherapy, the high-wattage saxophonist Mars Williams learned this past summer that his treatment options were nearly exhausted.But rather than resting an ailing body, he chose to return to the road. He joined the Psychedelic Furs, a band he had performed and recorded with since the 1980s, as it toured the United States.“Being on a grueling bus tour would be exhausting for anyone,” Dave Rempis, a friend and fellow saxophonist, said in a phone interview. “By the end, he was sitting in a dressing room with blankets and heaters all around him. He could barely move. But he would still go out onstage and play as hard as ever. He just wanted to be back onstage where he felt most alive.”Mr. Williams died at a hospice facility in Chicago on Nov. 20. He was 68. His brother, Paul R. Williams, said the cause was ampullary cancer.Mr. Williams was angling for a career in jazz in 1981 when the Waitresses, an idiosyncratic New York-based new wave band, came calling, dangling a newly minted record deal with Polydor. The band, marked by the deadpan vocal stylings of Patty Donahue, scored with the indelible cult hits “I Know What Boys Like” and “Christmas Wrapping,” as well as the theme song to the celebrated, if short-lived, 1980s high school sitcom “Square Pegs.”With his explosive horn lines and electric stage presence, Mr. Williams captured the spirit of the band — never mind that his grounding in the exploratory jazz of Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman made him an odd fit in the milieu of MTV in its early days, when acts could find overnight fame on the strength of cotton-candy haircuts and passable synthesizer skills.“He was a goofball, like a lot of reed players,” Chris Butler, the Waitresses’ founder and chief songwriter, said in a phone interview. “I think it has something to do with all that back pressure on their brains when they’re blowing into a brass tube, you know. But he had such massive chops. When we played live, he would improvise, solo, fill the arrangements with this magnificent stuff. And it was different every night.”No instrument, it seemed, was off limits to Mr. Williams, including bells, whistles, and pots and pans. “I had a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2019 interview with the jazz journalist Howard Mandel. “I’m up blowing Tibetan monk horn solos over their rhythms. I’m able to do all these different styles within this pop band.”From left, Tracy Wormworth, Patty Donahue, Dan Klayman and Mr. Williams of the Waitresses at the Peppermint Lounge in New York in 1981, the year Mr. Williams joined the band. Michael Macioce/Getty ImagesHe joined the Psychedelic Furs, a British post-punk band, after the Waitresses fragmented in 1983. His new group was then trading its early Velvet Underground-style rawness for a slicker brand of pop following the success of alternative hits like “Love My Way” (1982).Mr. Williams lent his wailing horn lines to the band’s 1984 album, “Mirror Moves,” although he was not featured on the album’s sleeve or in the heavily aired videos for its songs “Heaven” and “The Ghost in You.” He toured and recorded with the Psychedelic Furs until 1989. After a long hiatus, he rejoined them in 2005.Ever the musical explorer, Mr. Williams performed with many rock and pop acts, including the Killers, Billy Idol and Jerry Garcia, and earned acclaim with several Chicago jazz outfits, including his own long-running ensemble, Liquid Soul, which performed at inauguration festivities for President Bill Clinton in 1997 and earned a Grammy Award nomination for its 2000 album, “Here’s the Deal.”“Mars Williams is one of the true saxophone players — someone who takes pleasure in the sheer act of blowing the horn,” the avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer John Zorn wrote in the liner notes to “Eftsoons,” Mr. Williams’s 1981 collaboration with the jazz composer and bandleader Hal Russell, “and there are not many saxophone players I can truthfully say this about.”Marc Charles Williams was born on May 29, 1955, in Elmhurst, Ill., the fifth of six children of Jack Williams, who owned several pharmacies and served as an Illinois state representative, and Hilda (Van Outrive) Williams, who managed the Cook County ethics department. He picked up his nickname from a mispronunciation of his first name by his baby brother, Paul.In addition to his brother, his survivors include his mother and two sisters, Michele Williams-Piotrowski and Suzy Williams. His sister Valerie Williams and his brother Jack died.A classically trained clarinetist as a youth, Mr. Williams switched to saxophone after graduating from Holy Cross High School in River Grove, Ill., in 1973 and briefly studied music theory at DePaul University in Chicago.His musical journey led him to New York City, where he worked as a bike messenger and played gigs with punk bands at the nightclub CBGB while trying to build a career in jazz before taking a detour into pop that would last until his final months.Once his pop career took off, life on the road came with familiar perils, including drug addiction, which he wrestled with for years. He spent his last two decades sober, he said in interviews, while counseling other musicians in their struggles.Mr. Rempis said he last saw Mr. Williams on Oct. 25.“He had gotten back from six weeks on the road with the Psychedelic Furs,” he said, “and ended up in the hospital for a few days. When he got out, he said, ‘You know, I might not be able to do these tours in December in Europe.’ That’s where his head was at: Where am I going now? What’s the next thing?” More

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      10 New Christmas Albums for 2023

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      Our critics on 10 new holiday albums from Cher, Robert Glasper, Sabrina Carpenter and more.There is no one correct way to celebrate the holiday season in song. For some, reverence is key. But often the best Yuletide numbers are the ones that fiddle around with tradition, taking the familiar components of joy and generosity and remixing them into something silly, salacious or downright odd.Adam Blackstone, ‘A Legacy Christmas’Adam Blackstone, who has been a bassist and musical director for Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake as well as many television shows, revels in his jazz background on his own Legacy albums. “A Legacy Christmas” merges brassy, swinging big-band arrangements with electronically tweaked R&B, and it’s packed with guests: DJ Jazzy Jeff, Boyz II Men, Andra Day. There are glossy, muscular revamps of songs like “Lil Drummer Boy” (which has BJ the Chicago Kid singing alongside Blackstone’s melodic bass) and “Someday at Christmas” (with Robert Randolph’s slide guitar), as well as Blackstone’s own songs, including the neo-Motown “Christmas Kisses,” which has Blackstone rapping alongside Keke Palmer, who sings like she’s fronting the Jackson 5. JON PARELESBrandy, ‘Christmas With Brandy’Brandy leads with angst on her album “Christmas With Brandy,” which includes six songs she co-wrote including the opener, “Feels Different.” The moody, minor-key track leans into a deep post-breakup loneliness that “hurts the worst around Christmas,” even though “when I’m lovesick, you’re toxic.” But the rest of the album is cheerier and sultrier, like her upbeat, retro-styled “Christmas Everyday” and “Christmas Gift” (a duet with her daughter, Sy’rai) and the slow-motion come-on of “Christmas Party for Two.” The familiar songs play up Brandy’s misty tone and melismatic audacity. Her versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song” and even “Deck the Halls” are gauzy and leisurely. And who but Brandy would, in “Jingle Bells,” make an 11-note flourish out of “way”? PARELESSabrina Carpenter, ‘Fruitcake’The rising pop singer-songwriter Sabrina Carpenter brings her charmingly conversational and occasionally humorous sensibility to the six-song EP “Fruitcake,” her first holiday-themed release. Though she indulges in a straightforward, breathily sung “White Christmas,” the EP’s highlights are its irreverent originals, like “A Nonsense Christmas” (a holiday remix of Carpenter’s 2022 hit), the sleek, sassy “Is It New Years Yet?” and “Cindy Lou Who,” a piano ballad that playfully imagines the sweetest girl in Whoville as a romantic rival: “The snow’s gonna fall and the tree’s gonna glisten,” Carpenter sings. “And I’m gonna puke at the thought of you kissin’.” LINDSAY ZOLADZCher, ‘Christmas’Cher’s economically titled new album “Christmas” is an eclectic mix of holiday standards (a rollicking “Run Rudolph Run,” an especially lustful “Santa Baby”) and upbeat, electro-pop originals tailor-made for the woman who sang “Believe” (the strobe-lit “DJ Play a Christmas Song,” the fist-pumping “Angels in the Snow”). The guest list is star-studded and wide-ranging: Stevie Wonder, Michael Bublé and Darlene Love all drop by to duet with Cher on their own holiday classics, while Cyndi Lauper provides an assist on “Put a Little Holiday in Your Heart,” a country-tinged Christmas tune first recorded by LeAnn Rimes. But the album’s most memorably bonkers moment is surely “Drop Top Sleigh Ride,” a campy party anthem featuring a pun-stuffed rap verse from Tyga. The holidays just aren’t the holidays until you’ve heard Cher sing, “Turn it up, it’s a vibe, it’s Christmas.” ZOLADZRobert Glasper, ‘In December’The keyboardist Robert Glasper is an expert in both abstruse jazz harmonies and sleek hip-hop grooves; he’s also a well-connected collaborator. He brings all those skills to Christmas songs on “In December,” a musicianly rumination on the season; it’s only available on Apple Music. Old carols get elaborate new chromatic convolutions and alternate melodies, while in their new songs, Glasper and his singers consider holiday tensions. In “Make It Home,” PJ Morton and Sevyn Streeter portray a couple wondering if they can possibly reconcile for Christmas; “December,” written by Glasper and Andra Day, cycles through a year of seasonal anxieties and longings. And in “Memories With Mama,” Tarriona Ball, who leads Tank and the Bangas, confides in deep-toned spoken words about how Christmas has changed since her childhood — she’s nostalgic, but realistic. PARELESClockwise from top left: Holiday albums from Gregory Porter, Adam Blackstone, Jon Pardi and Wheatus. Samara Joy, ‘A Joyful Holiday’The resonant, low-end power of Samara Joy’s voice really emerges on her version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me.” A Motown-era number sung sweetly by the Supremes and Stevie Wonder, it’s comforting molasses in Joy’s hands; at one point, she lingers over “twinkle,” toggling back and forth — eee-yuh-eee-yuh-eee-yuh — a caress and a promise. That’s the highlight of “A Joyful Holiday,” the first seasonal release from this sometimes startling jazz vocalist, who won best new artist at this year’s Grammys. See also her take on “Warm in December,” once sung by Julie London, which she renders as the most refined, stately and wise of come-ons. JON CARAMANICAJon Pardi, ‘Merry Christmas From Jon Pardi’For the past decade Jon Pardi has been, quite successfully, a country singer mindful of how the country singers before him conducted themselves. He’s a lightly unruly traditionalist, with an ear that favors Texas and Bakersfield and the, um, funkier sides of honky-tonk Nashville. So naturally, his first holiday album is a collection of frisky covers and originals that add just the faintest tweak to the canon. His take on Buck Owens’s “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy” is cheeky and loose, and “I’ve Been Bad, Santa” — sung a couple of years ago by the Australian pop star Peach PRC — is a flirtatious duet with Pillbox Patti. “Reindeer” is a slow-walk heartbreaker about getting left behind by someone you love during the jolly season: “Might be a white Christmas, but all this snow just feels like rain, dear.” And on the lighthearted “Beer for Santa,” he swaps out the milk and cookies under the tree for something harder, then avers, “I might stay up and have one with him, too.” CARAMANICAThe Philly Specials, ‘A Philly Special Christmas Special’Last year, three offensive linemen who play for the Philadelphia Eagles — Jason Kelce, Jordan Mailata and Lane Johnson — stunned the football world by putting out a surprisingly competent Christmas EP as the Philly Specials. This season, they’re upping the ante with a full album, featuring cameos from Philadelphia musical luminaries like Patti LaBelle, Amos Lee and Waxahatchee. Mailata — a 6-foot-8 left tackle who last year appeared as “Thingamabob” on “The Masked Singer” — is the star of the show, holding his own with LaBelle on a duet of “This Christmas” and nailing that high note at the end of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” but Johnson also impresses with his resonant country croon on a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper.” As for Kelce? Well, as Philly fans already know, he’s got a lot of heart. And, for a spirited reworking of the Pogues’ most famous song, here retitled “Fairytale of Philadelphia,” he recruits perhaps the most high-profile guest of them all, his brother Travis, who sings approximately as well as his girlfriend can play professional football. ZOLADZGregory Porter, ‘Christmas Wish’The jazz singer Gregory Porter brings his kindly baritone and a social conscience to his Christmas album. He reaches back to vintage Motown for the antiwar, pro-equality “Someday at Christmas,” and three songs of his own recognize troubles he wants to rise above for the season. In “Everything’s Not Lost,” he wills himself toward year-end optimism despite “all this misery” and “children in fear.” And with the surging gospel of “Christmas Wish,” he recalls the lessons in generosity his mother taught. Most of the backing uses genteel string arrangements, but in “Christmas Waltz,” with a jazz trio, he reminds listeners how he can swing. PARELESWheatus, ‘Just a Dirtbag Christmas’Skip the clever and fun and totally worthy originals on this EP: You’re here for “Christmas Dirtbag,” the Yuletide updating of “Teenage Dirtbag,” the 2000 debut single from the Long Island punk-pop band Wheatus. The original is somehow both a zeitgeist-definer and a curio. This updating morphs the main character into someone passed over by Santa, perhaps a fate more cruel than being ignored by the girl who mesmerizes him in the original. But here, in a holiday spirit, there’s a twist — it turns out Santa’s a dirtbag, too, and he’s bearing gifts after all: “I’ve got two tickets to AC/DC, baby/After-show party at CBGB.” CARAMANICA More

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      Nicki Minaj and Drake Reunite, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Tems, Idles, Adrianne Lenker and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Nicki Minaj featuring Drake, ‘Needle’Thirteen years ago, on her debut studio album “Pink Friday,” Nicki Minaj recruited her Young Money labelmate and fellow rising star Drake for the galvanizing hit “Moment 4 Life.” They join forces once again on “Needle,” a noticeably more laid-back and atmospheric track from Minaj’s long-teased “Pink Friday 2,” which demonstrates how both of these rappers — and the sound of rap music itself — have changed in the intervening years. Drake calls back to the island cadences of his “Views” era, lilting a somewhat strained metaphor: “You’re like a needle, life’s a haystack.” Minaj raps as if on cruise control, characteristically dexterous (“Poppin’ out like a cork/duckin’ ’em like Björk”) if zoologically confused; Nicki, it was a swan dress! LINDSAY ZOLADZTems, ‘Not an Angel’Afrobeats turns inward in the Nigerian songwriter Tems’s “Not an Angel” — an emphatic good-riddance song with lines like, “I was alone when I was with you,” “All you did was give me nothing” and “Right now it’s going nowhere but the graveyard.” Programmed percussion and a moody guitar lick carry her rising resentment and self-realization: “I’m not an angel — I’m just a girl that knows the truth,” she sings, moving into sync with the beat as she pulls away from her ex. JON PARELESWishy, ‘Spinning’Can a band be classified as shoegaze if its head is in the clouds? Such is the delightful paradox posed by Wishy, a promising new group from Indiana releasing its debut EP “Paradise” next Friday. Echoing the spirit of millennial dream-pop acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Wishy’s latest single “Spinning” layers textured guitar, a driving breakbeat and Nina Pitchkites’s airy vocals to create a sumptuous sound. “Spinning around on the kitchen floor,” she sings. “I don’t know what I’m dancing for.” Prepare to do the same. ZOLADZIdles, ‘Grace’The British band Idles generally play sinewy, irascible post-punk songs, but every so often the singer Joe Talbot confesses to vulnerability, as he does in “Grace.” It’s a secular prayer: “No God, no king/I said love is the thing,” Talbot sings. He both longs for and offers refuge and compassion; behind him, the band gnashes and clatters and eventually erupts, but his determined humility lingers. PARELESElephant Gym featuring Yile Lin, ‘Happy Prince’Elephant Gym, a bass-guitar-drums trio from Taiwan, plays a nimble, jazzy kind of math-rock, paced by the hopscotching bass lines of KT Chang and the guitar counterpoint of her brother Tell Chang. “Happy Prince” is loosely based on a children’s story by Oscar Wilde. With bright-eyed guest vocals by Yile Lin, from the band Freckles, “Happy Prince” breezes along, shifting meters and taking chromatic turns; every so often, it explodes. PARELESNnamdi, ‘Going Crazy’A snippet of children singing “We’re all going crazy” led the Chicago pop experimentalist Nnamdi to come up with “Going Crazy.” It appears at assorted speeds, over assorted chords and drum-machine beats, as he croons in falsetto about how “I been up working harder every night” and “I just want to have a little fun” — a workaholic’s jovial complaints. PARELESUsher and H.E.R., ‘Risk It All’It hardly gets more old-school than “Risk It All,” a duet from Usher and H.E.R. — from the soundtrack to “The Color Purple” — that’s happy to risk vocal close-ups: call-and-response, tag-teaming, overlapping, sharing. Little more than piano chords accompany the duo, who sound like they were singing to each other in real time throughout the song, though they couldn’t resist overdubbing some extra harmony vocals. Even so, there’s an unadorned, intimate physicality to the romantic sentiments. PARELESAdrianne Lenker, ‘Ruined’This sparse, movingly fragile song from the Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker is a dispatch from the most devastating kind of obsession: “Can’t get enough of you,” Lenker sings in a warbled falsetto. “You come around, I’m ruined.” Accompanied by just a haunting piano and eerie, echoing effects, Lenker’s plain-spoken vulnerability becomes, by the end of the song, a kind of strength. ZOLADZEliza McLamb, ‘16’Eliza McLamb, a songwriter who’s also a podcaster, revisits a period of severe teenage trauma — her mother’s mental illness, her own self-destructive compulsions — in “16”; it’s from her album due in January, “Going Through It.” Deep, sustained synthesizer tones accompany her breathy voice, offering the stability — or numbness — she longs for. PARELESKaren Vogt, ‘We Coalesce’Layers of wordless, echoey vocal loops, with hints of modal melody, are the makings of “We Coalesce,” one of the eerie, undulating pieces Karen Vogt recorded while mourning her cat. PARELESVijay Iyer Trio, ‘Prelude: Orison’If Vijay Iyer’s music was big for you this year, it was probably thanks to “Love in Exile,” the much-beloved album he released with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. Though cool-blooded and almost ambient, that LP was swept by an undercurrent of disquiet — a feeling the pianist embraces even further in his other working trio, with the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Their 2021 debut, “Uneasy,” was an itchy and stimulating affair inspired, as Iyer said ahead of its release, by the awareness “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be.” Well, wait. Is there some paradox lurking here? How is instrumental music that sounds so elevated and indirect supposed to upend our most basic assumptions? To which another question might provide the response: Processing the news these days, have you felt angry, frustrated or helpless? If that resonates, this trio’s music would like to help you make some sense of that sensation — and maybe even sidestep it, pushing toward some kind of confrontation. (“Uneasy” includes “Combat Breathing,” a rhythmic call-to-action inspired by Black Lives Matter organizers.) The new, tempo-slurring “Prelude: Orison,” is languid, diaphanous, harmonically canted. Whenever it briefly resolves, it starts the cycle over again. It’s as if this band wants to both seduce you and discomfit you, stripping you of everything but the ability to think and see for yourself. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      Best Jazz Albums of 2023

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      The year’s most thrilling albums were made by artists pushing beyond borders, teaming with new collaborators and making bold statements of their own.That thing we keep calling “jazz” refuses to stop overrunning its borders, reworking itself, showing up in new forms identifiable only by the most basic strands of their DNA. All of its subcultures churned out inspired work this year; many show up below.

      1. Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, ‘Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning’It’s fitting, in this moment, that the hardest-hitting album on this list would be a celebration of Indigenous identity, resilience and resistance. For Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning” is also his first hard break from jazz, a category he has been trying to slip his entire career. Here he sits with the other tradition that raised him: the “maroon” community of New Orleans’s Black masking Indians, commonly known as Mardi Gras Indians. This is Adjuah’s first LP without any trumpet. Instead he circles up with a group of family and longtime collaborators, revisiting classics from the call-and-response Black Indian repertoire and adding his own, newfangled rallying cries over plucked kora strings and charging drums.2. Jaimie Branch, ‘Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War))’Jaimie Branch had nearly finished mixing this album — the third studio record from her trumpet-cello-bass-drums quartet, Fly or Die — when she died suddenly in 2022. It would be hard to imagine a more rousing and generous parting gift. Branch (like Adjuah) was a declarative trumpeter who had only recently embraced her unrefined-but-rewarding singing voice. With it she entreats us to love, to agitate and to put ourselves on the line.

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