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      The Worst Masterpiece: ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100

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      The work is a guaranteed success. After it is over, audience members leap out of their seats for a standing ovation.Such has been the response to “Rhapsody in Blue” ever since its premiere 100 years ago, on Feb. 12, 1924. George Gershwin had been asked by the conductor Paul Whiteman to supply a “jazz concerto” for the event An Experiment in Modern Music at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan, and the landscape of American music hasn’t been the same since.Thanks to the centennial, you’re likely to come across a lot of “Rhapsody” performances this year — not that the anniversary makes much difference, because that’s always the case. Indeed, “Rhapsody” is one of the most frequently programmed pieces in the symphonic repertoire by an American composer.Beyond the concert stage, the work’s themes are heard in movies and television, and are piped into the cabins of United Airlines flights. It has even functioned as propaganda: At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, during the height of the Cold War, the American contingent brought out 84 pianists to perform excerpts from the “Rhapsody,” accompanied by a battalion of dancers.As with many other classical hits, casual listeners might be surprised to learn that the familiar melodies are part of a much longer composition. First, George Gershwin wrote a substantial two-piano score. The composer Ferde Grofé orchestrated the premiere for Whiteman’s idiosyncratic jazz band, including banjo. Later on, Grofé did two more orchestrations, in 1926 and 1942; the last one was for full symphonic forces and is the version most often heard today. Gershwin himself never fussed with making an authoritative edition, going so far as to suggest four possible cuts in the score.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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      Review: The Philadelphia Orchestra Revels, and Struggles, in Jazz

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      At Carnegie Hall, a program of Stravinsky, Weill and freely improvised Gershwin highlighted a dialogue between jazz and classical music.Much of 20th-century classical music owes a deep thanks to jazz. And while on paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night was organized for a festival at the hall, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, the subtext was American jazz.All three of the composers on the program (Stravinsky, Weill and Gershwin) loved and, to one extent or another, made references to the style in their music. Although Stravinsky was based in Europe when he premiered “Petrushka” in 1911, he was already a U.S. citizen when he revised this piece in 1947, and had long experimented with incorporating jazz into some of his pieces — and jazz musicians loved him right back. Weill, who left Europe for the United States after the fall of the Weimar Republic, was also steeped in jazz. And Gershwin, of course, wouldn’t be Gershwin without it.The Philadelphians opened with a magical performance of “Petrushka,” led off by a piquant solo from Patrick Williams, the associate principal flutist. The orchestra staked out rhythmic details with crystalline precision and saw each phrase through with patience and a rich sound. Stravinsky relays the spirit of Petrushka, the folkloric Russian trickster puppet, and the ballet’s tale of a deeply twisted puppet love triangle, with equal parts humor and darkness; the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the musicians captured the piece’s flickers of light and its swirls of despair.Weill’s Symphony No. 2, from 1934, is an oddity: structurally and harmonically a mash-up of plush, Mahlerian harmonies, Weill’s acidic stage works, and jazz-inflected plain-spokenness. In its best moments, such as in the dreamy, lonely slow movement — with a trombone solo played gracefully by Nitzan Haroz — this music feels like being inside an Edward Hopper painting.The giddiest part of the evening was a literally jazzed-up version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” featuring the jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and the members of his trio: the bassist Martin Jaffe and the drummer Jason Marsalis.Roberts has made a specialty of reworking Gershwin; along with the “Rhapsody,” which he recorded nearly three decades ago, he has toured his version of the Concerto in F. In Tuesday’s account of the “Rhapsody,” the orchestra played its traditional score, but Roberts used the piano solos to introduce extended improvisations for himself, sometimes in flights of Romantic, Rachmaninoff-esque fancy, and occasionally nodding instead to the blues and stride piano. By the jazz standards of 2024, Roberts is conservative, and while he didn’t cast any new light on a cherished standard, his performance was still charming.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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      An Elastic and Impressive Year in Jazz

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThere was much to celebrate in jazz this past year — great new albums from Meshell Ndegeocello, Ambrose Akinmusire and Immanuel Wilkins; outstanding live performances by Cecile McLorin Salvant and Brandon Woody. It was also a year of reflection, following the passing of Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal, Jaimie Branch, Les McCann and others.Conversations about jazz often extended beyond the bounds of the genre, thanks both to work by open-minded jazz musicians (Kassa Overall, Chief Adjuah) uninterested in that label or the expectations that come with it, and also because of music released outside of the genre (Laufey, André 3000) that prompted conversations about who is included in jazz, and who should be left out.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about some of the year’s most impressive jazz releases, the ways in which its borders are softening, and who benefits, and suffers, when people working outside of formal jazz idioms are lumped into conversations about jazz.Guests:Marcus J. Moore, who writes about music for The New York TimesGiovanni Russonello, who writes about jazz for The New York TimesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Winter Jazzfest Has Company: Unity Jazz Festival

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      The decision to place another festival right on top of Jazzfest highlighted how much has been flipped upside-down in jazz over the past 20 years.Back in 2005 — when the first NYC Winter Jazzfest was held at the Knitting Factory in Lower Manhattan, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s multimillion-dollar facilities had recently opened on the Upper West Side — it was clear which represented the establishment, and which was proposing an alternative. Today, it’s not such an easy distinction.Steered by its artistic director, the Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter and retro jazz philosopher Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center was cultivating an older and affluent audience, adjacent to the opera-going crowd. Marsalis’s bookings proudly held the line for what he considered jazz’s defining virtues. Two decades later, those things are still true.Winter Jazzfest was geared toward disruption. The mid-2000s were lean years for the music: Online file sharing hit jazz musicians especially hard, and the fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks left many live-music venues closed throughout New York City.Brice Rosenbloom, Winter Jazzfest’s founder, positioned it as both an infusion of crucial life support and a challenge to some of jazz’s passively dominant trends. The festival’s biggest target, perhaps, was the idea that you could draw any stark dividing lines through music: Pop-friendly, fusion-driven, acoustic and tradition-revering improvisers coexisted on the festival’s bill, which in that first year unfolded across three stages on a single night at the Knit.New York jazz lost its flagship summertime festival in 2009, leaving Winter Jazzfest as the biggest game in town; since then it has grown into more than a week of concerts and satellite events. Every year, it offers a full buffet of the current flavors in jazz at a mix of theaters, rock halls and small rooms.The 20th annual Winter Jazzfest marathons took place over the weekend, in Lower Manhattan on Friday night and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Saturday. From the sound of things, no matter how dark things may look in the wider world, the state of improvised music appears strong.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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      Jay Clayton, Vocal Innovator in Jazz and Beyond, Dies at 82

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      She sparred with avant-garde instrumentalists and used electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette. She was also at home in more conventional settings.Jay Clayton, a singer whose six-decade career encompassed freewheeling improvisation, lyrical songs and poetry, and the prescient use of electronics, died on Dec. 31 at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 82.Her daughter, Dejha Colantuono, said the cause was small-cell lung cancer.Ms. Clayton established herself as an innovator in the 1970s and ’80s, sparring with instrumentalists in avant-garde settings and using electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette well before the practice became common. She worked frequently with other singers — she formed an especially close bond with Sheila Jordan, an early mentor — and she sang in playfully aerobatic vocal groups with peers like Jeanne Lee, Ursula Dudziak, Norma Winstone and Bobby McFerrin.“She works in the familiar avant-garde terrain of wordless, spontaneous improvisations in duo and group settings,” the critic Jon Garelick wrote of her work in The Boston Phoenix in 1990. “But Clayton is also a warm, gracious interpreter of lyric standards, and this lyricism pervades all her work.”Ms. Clayton in 1969. She fell in with the downtown jazz scene after moving to New York in 1963.via Clayton familyShe performed for a decade with the composer Steve Reich, participating in the development and recording of breakthrough pieces like “Drumming,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Tehillim.” She also worked closely with dancers and choreographers early in her career, and she maintained an enduring collaboration with the tap dancer Brenda Bufalino.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton held positions at the City College of New York, the Peabody Institute and Princeton University. She developed a vocal program for the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, where she taught with Ms. Jordan. The two further collaborated in training programs in Massachusetts and Vermont and ran a celebrated retreat for singers at Willow Lane Farm in Berne, N.Y., near Albany.Prominent among Ms. Clayton’s students are the composer Karen Goldfeder and the protean vocal improviser Theo Bleckmann. But through her widespread pedagogy — including a book, “Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing,” published in 2001 — her progeny are legion.She was born Judith Theresa Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio. Her father, William Colantone, was a carpenter and construction worker; her mother, Josephine (Armeni) Colantone, had sung professionally during the big-band era.Ms. Clayton took up the accordion and later had several years of piano lessons. After high school, she attended a summer program at the St. Louis Institute of Music and then enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1963. Since jazz courses were not available, she studied classical repertoire while quietly polishing her improvisational skills on weekend dates with a local trombonist.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton was the author of what she called “a practical guide” to the study of jazz singing/No creditAfter moving to New York City in 1963, Ms. Clayton fell in with the downtown jazz scene and formed an early association with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Through him, she met the drummer Frank Clayton, with whom she began a relationship in 1965. In 1967, the couple started a concert series, “Jazz at the Loft,” in their home on Lispenard Street, in the neighborhood later called TriBeCa, presenting performances by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, the pianist Joanne Brackeen and others. They married in 1968.Not long afterward, Ms. Clayton was introduced to Mr. Reich by the singer Joan La Barbara, who was her student. What he sought, he said in a phone interview, was a “modern-day equivalent” of Ella Fitzgerald: someone who could perform his music with spontaneity as well as precision.Ms. Clayton fit the bill. “Her pitch was dead-on, and her rhythm was a lift to the spirit,” Mr. Reich said. “She grasped what had to be done, and she did it to perfection.”Flourishing among her fellow innovators and iconoclasts, Ms. Clayton led educational workshops with Jeanne Lee and performed with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at the Public Theater in 1979. That same year, she consulted on the first Women in Jazz festival, produced by Cobi Narita (who died in November).In 1981, Ms. Clayton released her first album, “All-Out,” a wide-ranging statement with an ensemble that included Mr. Clayton, the pianist Larry Karush, the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, the vocalist Shelley Hirsch and others. On several tracks Ms. Clayton sang swooping, soaring lines in tandem with Ms. Bloom, a recent arrival from New Haven, Conn., whom Ms. Clayton had taken under her wing.“From the minute she and I met, we had this linear synchronicity,” Ms. Bloom said in an interview. “There’s something about the combination of her sound and my sound: We played lines together, and it was like this other instrument.” They collaborated for decades.In 1982, Ms. Clayton, her husband and their two children moved to Seattle, where she taught at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts. When she and Mr. Clayton divorced in 1984, she remained in Seattle, developing a new circle of collaborators that included the drummer Jerry Granelli, the trombonist Julian Priester, the bassist and the saxophonist Briggan Krauss.Ms. Clayton, center, in the 1980s with, from left, the pianist Larry Karush, the bassist Harvie Swartz, the drummer Frank Clayton and the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom.via Clayton familyShe recorded works by the experimental composer John Cage in the late 1980s and returned to Mr. Reich’s music on occasion. Her jazz recordings from those years include “Beautiful Love,” a 1995 album devoted to vintage popular standards with the pianist Fred Hersch.“I always think that doing standard material lets you know where somebody’s coming from,” Mr. Hersch said in an interview, likening the practice to a painter rendering a still life or a nude. “In Jay’s case, a lot of it is very hauntingly beautiful, and pretty fierce in terms of improvising.”Ms. Clayton moved back to New York in 2002, re-establishing a local presence both alone and in collaboration with Ms. Jordan. She made a stream of recordings for the Sunnyside label, ranging from a lyrical tribute to the songwriter Harry Warren to an adventurous electronic fantasia involving poetry by Emily Dickinson, made with the composer and pianist Kirk Nurock.She was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in December 2022. Her final recording, “Voices in Flight,” a collaboration with the singer Judy Niemack, was released in June.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Clayton is survived by her brother, William Colantone Jr.; her son, Dov Clayton; and two grandchildren.To the end, Ms. Clayton remained devoted to her students. “She was always just exactly herself, personally and musically,” Ms. Goldfeder wrote in a Facebook post; “it’s one of the many ways she was a great teacher.” More

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      The Saxophone Master Shabaka Hutchings Is on a New Journey: Flutes

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      The British musician is an artist in residence at Winter Jazzfest in New York this week, playing an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.As Shabaka Hutchings led a concert tribute to Pharoah Sanders in early December, he returned to a familiar equation: funneling gallons of air through his tenor saxophone, transforming it into a corrosive stream of sound.Hutchings has been an essential figure on a British jazz scene that has experienced an uptick in popularity over the past decade because of its erasure of genre boundaries and its embrace of the art form’s foundational dance music sensibilities. His distinctive tenor has long been the through line of his diverse, widely acclaimed projects, connecting the electronic skronk of the Comet Is Coming to the fire of Sons of Kemet, and lately to the legacy of fellow hard-blowing saxophonists like Sanders.But by the time we met earlier this month, Hutchings, 39, had put down the saxophone, if not for good then certainly for the foreseeable. A handful of gigs across London last month — the Sanders tribute, an extended take on John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and a final flourish as a guest with the pianist Alexander Hawkins’s trio — were the final chances to hear Hutchings performing on an instrument that has dominated his musical life for the first part of his professional career. When he appears at New York’s Winter Jazzfest as an artist in residence this week, for the most part he will be playing flutes, an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.“The bands that I was doing those gigs with became successful enough for them to dominate all the space of my work,” Hutchings said, speaking quietly and methodically, in a way that suggested recounting recent life events to others may be another extension of his artistic practice. “People say, because you’re doing lots of work on the saxophone, you are a saxophone player. I’m not really a saxophone player.” He felt that the only chance to be proficient elsewhere was to make a bold change.“I think of him as a sort of a multi-instrumentalist,” said the pianist Alexander Hawkins, a longtime collaborator. “Rather than being a switch, I think this is just a move towards other modes of expression.” The decision, which Hutchings said “ultimately boils down to intuition,” still surprised even him, though. “I literally would never have imagined putting down the saxophone back in 2020,” he said.In 2020, Hutchings also likely didn’t anticipate a rising profile for the flute in jazz. But “New Blue Sun,” a surprise release from the onetime Outkast rapper André 3000 last November that featured him playing different types of flute, gave the instrument a boost. (A new album from Hutchings is due this spring.)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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      Linda Sharrock Has Lost Her Speech, but She’s Still Performing

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      Linda Sharrock, an avant-garde jazz musician who became aphasic after a 2009 stroke, has returned to the stage and inspired new generations.Last April, the Vienna-based avant-garde jazz vocalist Linda Sharrock gave her first New York performance in over 40 years: a sold-out concert at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, as part of a series curated by Solange. Appearing between the poet Claudia Rankine and the saxophonist Archie Shepp, Sharrock guided eight musicians through a fully improvised set while she howled powerfully over the cacophonous squall of free jazz in a declamatory style that evoked the evening’s program title, “The Cry of My People.”It wasn’t until after she’d received multiple standing ovations that most of the audience realized the 76-year-old singer wasn’t able to speak: Sharrock became aphasic after a 2009 stroke that paralyzed her right side; she now uses a wheelchair. A few weeks later at the Cambridge, Mass., home of the pianist Eric Zinman, who plays in her group the Linda Sharrock Network, Sharrock was unable to verbalize much more than “yeah,” “no,” “OK” and “I don’t know.”Despite her limited dialogical abilities, Sharrock was cheerful, charming and quick to laughter. Much of the talking was done by her caregiver — Mario Rechtern, an 81-year-old Austrian free jazz saxophonist who has, by his account, overseen her personal affairs and daily activities for the last 20 years. He not only plays in her band, he helps her dress, feeds her if necessary and carries her down the stairs.“This work with Linda is consuming,” Rechtern said, tugging at his woolly gray beard, “and at the same time, I cannot give in to the consuming, because when I give in, she’s lost. So it’s challenging.”Sharrock’s return to the stage — a manifestation of her stubborn refusal to be silenced — is one of the most stirring comeback stories in recent memory. Over a career stretching six decades, Sharrock has been a resolutely singular figure; almost no peers share her uniquely unorthodox vocal delivery. Too “out” for jazz’s in-crowd, she was relegated to relative obscurity. Yet her commitment to challenging her audience has ultimately made her a role model for experimental vocalists and Black female performers, providing a beacon of tantalizing possibilities.The poet and vocalist Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, recalled hearing Sharrock’s music for the first time and “losing my mind,” she said in an interview. “I wrote a little poem about this because it was such urgency on my part to be like, ‘What is going on here? This is where I want to go! This is what I want to sound like!’ I hadn’t heard anyone before that had inspired me this way besides Betty Carter. I just started to be obsessed about it.”Sharrock’s vocal exclamations have become deeper and more guttural moans than the high-pitched shrieks of her early work with her then-husband, the musician Sonny Sharrock. In the late 1960s, Sonny revolutionized jazz guitar through volume, distortion and feedback while playing with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis. Linda’s approach was no less radical: On three albums of collaborations with Sonny, beginning with their remarkable 1969 debut “Black Woman,” her wordless exhortations included psychedelic sighs, orgasmic yodels and blood-chilling screams, all delivered with an intensity that made “Plastic Ono Band”-era Yoko Ono sound like Anne Murray in comparison.“I’ve never listened to any kind of a female jazz singer for any kind of inspiration or anything like that,” Sharrock said in a 1973 WKCR radio interview. “I was influenced by horn players,” she explained, citing incendiary saxophonists like Sanders and Albert Ayler.“The thing that killed me about her singing was that she was, if not the first, one of the few jazz singers who improvise,” Sonny said in the same WKCR conversation. “That’s one of the reasons she doesn’t use words: because it hinders your improvisation.”Sharrock was born Linda Chambers in Philadelphia, and lived with her grandmother and her younger brother, Pablo, in the working class Germantown neighborhood, according to Jacquelyn Bullock, a longtime friend and former neighbor. In an interview, she said that despite Sharrock’s confrontational vocal approach, offstage “she was quiet and demure,” with an interest in fashion and a distinctive sense of style. “She’s a gracious woman. Like most women, she likes nice things, and she has a great sense of humor.”Sharrock moved to New York after graduating from high school in 1965 with the intention to study painting, but soon became immersed in the Lower East Side’s jazz scene, where her inaugural professional gig was singing with Sanders. When she first began performing, she shaved off her eyebrows and kept her hair close-cropped, she told The New York Times Magazine in 1975. “It was the strangest look I could conceive of,” she said. “My life had taken such a drastic change, I wanted to present it physically.”She met Sonny through Sanders, and they married in 1967. Earnings for most free jazz musicians were lean, but that year, Sonny got the opportunity to work with the commercially successful jazz-funk flutist Herbie Mann, and spent most of the next seven years playing in his group. Linda went on tour with them and eventually joined the band, usually performing two of the couple’s compositions each night, “Black Woman” and “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black.”The Sharrocks lived in an apartment at 77 East 3rd Street in the East Village; the pianist Dave Burrell was a neighbor and hosted rehearsals for the 1969 “Black Woman” album in his tiny living room. Burrell recalled in an interview that hearing Sharrock sing for the first time, “I felt a bolt of excitement,” he said. “I thought of her as a vocalist who could throw herself into the ‘Black is beautiful’ moment and movement, and that made her one of the boys, so having her around was cool.”Another “Black Woman” musician, the trumpeter Ted Daniel, was a childhood friend of Sonny’s from Ossining, N.Y. “She was one of a kind,” Daniel said in an interview. “I haven’t heard anybody sing with the raw passion and just that kind of freedom that she approached in her singing with Sonny in that band.”Released on the Vortex subsidiary of Atlantic Records, the trailblazing “Black Woman” failed to find a larger audience. A few years later, the couple put together the Savages, a working band that could play out regularly. The group included steel drums and Latin percussion and gigged at downtown venues like the Tin Palace and lofts like Studio Rivbea, said Abe Speller, the band’s drummer. The Savages recorded a soundtrack to Sedat Pakay’s 1973 short documentary “James Baldwin: From Another Place” and performed a live set in 1974 on WKCR, which are the only surviving souvenirs of their existence. Speller recalled the band holing up to rehearse before entering a studio in December 1977 to record a four-song demo tape, but the group failed to score a label deal and eventually fizzled out.After Linda and Sonny divorced, she moved to Turkey and then Vienna, where she met her second husband, the Austrian saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig, a few years later. (Sonny died in 1994 at 53.) Initially they were just musical collaborators, Puschnig said in a video call from his home in southern Austria, but a relationship blossomed and they were married in 1987 while in Mozambique for a gig.Under their own names and in groups like the Pat Brothers, AM4 and Red Sun, Puschnig and Sharrock recorded more than 20 albums together on European and South Korean labels from 1986 to 2007, but her vocal approach had changed markedly. Puschnig said that she moved away from singing in her free style after consulting a former Ziegfeld girl turned palm reader, who told her, “I see you’re a singer, but you don’t use words, but you should because you have a talent to use words.”“So that’s how she started to do lyrics,” he said.The jazz fusion bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma performed with them for years, and produced “On Holiday,” Sharrock’s 1990 album of Billie Holiday covers, complete with new jack swing beats and a rapper. “She was pushing the ball,” Tacuma said in an interview, “thinking outside of the box, in terms of music, creativity, and improvisation, and trying to bring something about musically with her voice that had not been done before.”Puschnig said Sharrock’s health started to deteriorate in the mid-1990s, and though their romantic relationship ended around 1996, they continued working together as late as 2007. Around 2004, Rechtern — who had first met Sharrock in 1979 — began caring for her, and was granted power of attorney in 2007. “She was really falling into the nothingness,” Rechtern said. “If I wouldn’t have taken her she would be in a home.”During surgery for an intestinal blockage in 2009, Sharrock suffered her stroke, and spent the following two years in and out of the hospital. In 2012 she was visited in Austria by the jazz bassist Henry Grimes. “She was sitting on the couch while he played,” Rechtern recalled, “and I heard her very softly singing into the music.”Intrigued, Rechtern began gradually coaxing Sharrock to perform again. “She started to develop first this growl sound, this cry, because she couldn’t articulate,” he said. “Out of the blues and this typical sound, she found this explosion.”Beginning with “No Is No” in 2014, Sharrock has released five recordings in Europe since her stroke. Her recent music is more in the spirit of the free jazz she made with Sonny than her somewhat more conventional work with Puschnig, though her vocal range is understandably not the same.Sharrock responded affirmatively when asked if she had needed to sing and perform again, and when asked if she felt better while onstage, she cracked up laughing.“This music is healing for her,” Rechtern replied. “There’s no doubt.”Sharrock’s work and perseverance has inspired a new generation of artists. “So much of it doesn’t have lyrics,” Taja Cheek, who performs as L’Rain, said in an interview, “and isn’t easy to understand in a certain kind of way, but I understood it, and I felt it so viscerally when I first heard her that it got very emotional for me.”On a recent re-listen of “Black Woman,” Cheek said, “it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that ‘Oh, Linda Sharrock is the lineage I might be a part of.’ I am able to do what I’m doing, and it can be met with a little bit of understanding, because Linda has already done something like this.”Sharrock’s resiliency has resonated with her old colleagues, as well. “It is very telling about the heart of a performing artist wanting to be able to do that until it’s completely impossible,” Burrell said, “another further dimension of the determination that she still has, no matter what the circumstances. I’m very proud of her.” More

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      ‘Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got’ Review: A Lens on a Jazz Luminary

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      Brigitte Berman’s dazzling 1985 look at the self-taught virtuoso clarinetist and bandleader is showing after a restoration.The documentarian Brigitte Berman has made two spectacular pictures about American jazz pioneers. The first, “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” (1981), chronicled the life of the brilliant and tragically short-lived cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. It screened in a restoration at Film Forum a couple of years back. Now, her follow-up to that movie, “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1985), is similarly restored and booked at Film Forum.Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader, was a devotee of Beiderbecke, and is interviewed in Berman’s Beiderbecke film. When Shaw walked away from music for a first time, early in what would be a lengthy but nevertheless self-truncated jazz career, he tried to write a novel about Bix. He couldn’t complete it, he says here, because the story had “depth and connotation that I wasn’t philosophically or mentally prepared to cope with.”Shaw was not only a self-taught virtuoso but also often the smartest guy in any room he was in. When he came back to the bandstand, his recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” was a smash hit of the swing era. An unselfconscious civil rights pioneer, he hired the Black singer Billie Holiday to sing with him at a time when that just wasn’t done.Charming as well as erudite, he married eight times, to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner among others. The marriages didn’t last because of his cantankerousness. The fame he avidly sought in his early years — “like any other American kid, I wanted more of everything,” he notes — eventually struck him as inane and repellent. An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga. The movie on its first release did so well — it won an Oscar — that it prompted the ever-unsatisfied Shaw to sue for a bigger share of the picture’s profits.Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve GotNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More