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      Bad Bunny’s Surprising Return and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ice Spice, Sleater-Kinney, Roy Hargrove and more.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.Bad Bunny, ‘Mr. October’Bad Bunny surprise-released a new album, “Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana” (“Nobody Knows what’s Going to Happen Tomorrow”). Many of its 22 songs circle back toward the programmed trap beats that helped start Bad Bunny’s career, but now they’re just part of the sonic domain of a world-conquering star. In “Mr. October” he sings and raps about wealth, clothes, fame, sex and celebrity, comparing himself to Michael Jackson and Reggie Jackson and rightfully claiming, “Yo cambié el juego”: “I changed the game.” But the track is far from triumphal; with tolling piano notes, filmy minor chords and skittering electronic tones, the music laces every boast with anxiety. JON PARELESIce Spice and Rema, ‘Pretty Girl’The utterly unflappable Bronx rapper Ice Spice cannily connects with Afrobeats — and with the gentle-voiced, hook-making Nigerian songwriter Rema, who offers slick, robotic blandishments in what sounds like one repeating cut-and-pasted chorus. Ice Spice responds with encouraging, human-sounding specifics: “Think about my future, got you all in it.” But the track ends with Rema’s looped doubts — “Give me promise you ain’t gonna bail on me” — rather than her wholehearted welcome. Why give him the last word? PARELESDesire Marea, ‘The Only Way’The style-melting South African songwriter Desire Marea turns to funk and Afrobeat in “The Only Way.” His voice lofts a sustained melody and layered backup vocals over an arrangement that feels hand-played and organic: all staccato cross-rhythms — drums, bass, guitar, electric piano, horns — with a nervy, constantly shifting beat and one melodic peak topping another. The only lyrics in English are “It’s the only way” — and with such urgent music, there’s no need for more. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Não Ao Marco Temporal’If Esperanza Spalding has been in feeds this week for precisely the wrong reasons, consider this your cue to close that tab. Spalding’s mind has been elsewhere: specifically in Brazil, where the battle over the fate of the world’s largest rainforest is reaching a decisive point. On “Não Ao Marco Temporal,” recorded in Rio de Janeiro, Spalding and a small crew of musicians protest the Temporal Framework, a recent attempt to roll back Indigenous Brazilians’ land sovereignty that would have left the Amazon increasingly vulnerable to deforestation. (The Brazilian Supreme Court recently rejected the framework, but industry’s attempts to undermine that decision have continued.) Over strums on the cavaco and violão, the resounding of drums and the squeals of a cuica, Spalding sings of the “grabbing hands” that seek to violate the rainforest. “There are some men who stop at nothing to have their way with the body of a woman or a girl,” she and a small chorus of voices declare. “Right now they’re calling her Brazil.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBrittany Howard, ‘What Now’Brittany Howard, who led the Alabama Shakes, grapples with a disintegrating relationship in “What Now,” singing “If you want someone to hate, then blame it on me.” Over a fierce, choppy funk groove, Howard restrains her far-ranging voice to make her point about “learning lessons I don’t want to.” She is not happy about the breakup; she sings like she has no choice. PARELESMadi Diaz, ‘Same Risk’Madi Diaz sings about a high-stakes infatuation in “Same Risk,” spelling out both her physical passion and her misgivings. “Do you think this could ruin your life?/’Cause I could see it ruining mine,” she asks, then wonders, “Are you gonna throw me under the bus?” What starts with modest acoustic guitar strumming rises with an orchestral crescendo to match the urgency of her questions. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Hell’“Hell” will be the opening track on “Little Rope,” the album Sleater-Kinney will release in January and which was made in the wake of the sudden deaths of Carrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather. The song breaks wide open with anguish and inconsolable fury, as tolling, elegiac verses erupt into bitter power-chorded choruses. Corin Tucker unleashes her scream on the word “why.” PARELESJamila Woods featuring Saba, ‘Practice’Jamila Woods takes the pressure off a new relationship in “Practice,” the latest single from her excellent album “Water Made Us.” “We don’t gotta hurry up, you ain’t gotta be the one,” she sings in an airy, unburdened voice, carried along by an insistent beat. The Chicago rapper Saba sounds similarly breezy and wise on his verse — “learned from her, moved on, learned more” — and Woods’s lyrics extend the song’s playful basketball metaphor. After all, in the immortal words of Allen Iverson, we’re talking about practice. LINDSAY ZOLADZSen Morimoto, ‘Deeper’“I lost my senses like I’ve lost so many times/Why do the answers seem impossible to find?” sings Sen Morimoto, who plays most of the instruments on his tracks himself, in “Deeper.” A lurching beat, meandering chromatic harmonies and keyboard and guitar incursions that seem to have wafted in from other songs just add to the sense of disorientation. Morimoto’s saxophone solo sounds more sure of itself than he does, but he’s clearly not too perturbed. PARELESRoy Hargrove, ‘Young Daydreams (Beauteous Visions)’The trumpeter Roy Hargrove was just 23, but already near the top of New York’s jazz scene, when his friend and mentor Wynton Marsalis commissioned him to write “Love Suite in Mahogany.” The suite, which he performed with a septet at Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, in fall 1993, begins in a downward slide of moonlit harmony, gesturing toward Gil Evans and Billy Strayhorn (this was the Young Lions era; a direct address to the masters was encouraged). It finds its way gradually into a slowly creeping groove before a false ending gives way to a coda of driving post-bop. The track cuts off as he cues the band into the suite’s next movement. You can hear the rest of the suite’s debut performance, which has just been released as an LP on J.A.L.C.’s Blue Engine Records. RUSSONELLOMendoza Hoff Revels, ‘New Ghosts’There’s gristle and bone in every last satisfying bite of “Echolocation,” the debut album from Mendoza Hoff Revels, a four-piece band co-led by the guitarist Ava Mendoza and the bassist Devin Hoff. There is also a delightfully wide range of musical shapes at play. One moment, they’re descending straight from the slow drag of doom metal and stoner-rock; later, Mendoza’s wily, spiral-bound melodies have more to do with the tactics of John Zorn (both she and Hoff have played on Zorn projects). Her acid-soaked electric guitar rarely leaves center stage here. On “New Ghosts,” Mendoza, Hoff and the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis hover around a heavy minor chord, occasionally repainting it in an uncanny major. Then Hoff and the drummer Ches Smith join, and the improvisation ascends into a gray cloud of swirling saxophone and bludgeoning guitar. RUSSONELLOboygenius, ‘Afraid of Heights’Lucy Dacus regrets confessing her fear of heights on this wry highlight from boygenius’s new four-song EP, “The Rest”: “It made you want to test my courage, you made me climb a cliff at night.” Though, like all boygenius songs, it’s a collaboration with her singer-songwriter peers Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, here Dacus takes the lead, bringing complexity to a simple chord progression through the specificity of her lyricism. “I never rode a motorcycle, I never smoked a cigarette,” she sings, balancing poignancy with dry humor. “I wanna live a vibrant life, but I wanna die a boring death.” ZOLADZAllegra Krieger, ‘Impasse’The folky, deceptively understated songwriter Allegra Krieger released her album “I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane” in July; now she extends it with “Fragile Plane — B-Sides.” In “Impasse,” she calmly confronts someone who’s been “building quite a big brand,” touting “family values, patriot song” in a culture where “Everyone here is trying to win/Power or paper or recognition.” Over an unhurried modal guitar line, she warns how it could suddenly come crashing down, and she sings like she won’t mind if it does. PARELESNdox Électrique, ‘Lëk Ndau Mbay’Gianna Greco and François R. Cambuzat, who have worked with post-punk artists including Lydia Lunch, have spent recent years traveling the world, documenting and collaborating with musicians who play traditional trance rituals. For their latest project, Ndox Électrique, they collaborated with Senegalese drummers and singers who perform spirit-possession healing rituals called n’doep, layering drones and assaultive noise-rock guitars atop the fiercely propulsive beat, translating and transmuting the music’s incantatory power. PARELES More

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      After Viral Beef, Robert Glasper Returns to the Blue Note

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      Mounting his fifth annual residency at the Blue Note (after a viral beef at the Grammys), the pianist, producer and composer is hungry for a challenge.In February, on the night of this year’s Grammy Awards, the pianist, producer and composer Robert Glasper was enjoying himself in the audience at the Microsoft Theater when he realized he didn’t have his phone. He had given it to his assistant earlier in the evening, before taking the stage to accept the award for best R&B album — his second win in that category and fifth career Grammy.When he retrieved the phone, Glasper saw that it was filled with messages about the R&B singer Chris Brown, who was among the nominees whom he had just bested. Brown had reacted to the loss with a discourteous post to his 131 million followers on Instagram: “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper,” appending a crying laughing emoji to the word “who.”The comment, which Brown followed with a video comparing his success on the record charts to Glasper’s, was an attempt to undercut his rival’s achievement. But Brown had fallen into a trap. Over the previous 10 years, Glasper had been methodically chipping away at the boundaries between jazz — the music for which he originally became known — hip-hop and R&B. In some ways, his winning album, “Black Radio III,” was designed to force precisely the kind of showdown with contemporary Black popular music that Brown’s intemperate posting had unwittingly supplied.Scrolling through his phone at the venue, Glasper was almost giddy.“Oh yeah,” he thought to himself. “This is going to be great.”Glasper, 45, whose long face and soft features are capped by closely trimmed hair, ascended the ranks of modern jazz nearly 20 years ago. Born and raised in Houston, he arrived in New York to study at the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in 1997, right as the neo-soul movement, pioneered by artists like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, was integrating jazz instrumentation and vocal performance into a chart-topping variant of R&B.At the New School, Glasper befriended the singer Bilal, a member of a loose musicians collective called the Soulquarians with D’Angelo, Badu, the producer J Dilla, and the rappers Common, Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) and Talib Kweli, among others. The group shared recording space at Electric Lady Studios and occasionally attended concerts together. At the same time, Glasper was getting an education in the world of straight-ahead jazz while playing piano in bands led by Christian McBride and Russell Malone — both took him on tour, at the expense of his attendance record — and forming his own acoustic trio.The Blue Note residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites Glasper’s extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHis first album, “Mood” (2004) and two follow-ups for Blue Note Records, “Canvas” (2005) and “In My Element” (2007), hewed largely traditional, with an occasional nod to hip-hop, as on the “In My Element” track “J Dillalude.” But by the release of his fourth album, “Double Booked” (2009) — half featuring the Robert Glasper Trio and half featuring a new electric fusion ensemble called “The Robert Glasper Experiment” — Glasper’s inner Soulquarian was edging into view.“Real jazz is supposed to reflect the times you’re in; that’s the true history and tradition of the music,” he said. “I’m not supposed to sound like Thelonious Monk did when I have so much more music to be influenced by.”The “Black Radio” series, which Glasper described as a distillation of his brand, made breathing room for those influences. The first album, released in 2012, featured several of his neo-soul compatriots — Badu, Bilal, Musiq Soulchild — as well as rapping from Lupe Fiasco and Bey, with covers of songs by David Bowie and Nirvana thrown in for good measure.“Black Radio” earned Glasper his first Grammy Award (for best R&B album) and set him on a collision course with popular culture not seen from a jazz musician this century. He played piano on several tracks of Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released a remix album with the house music producer Kaytranada and was recruited by the actor Don Cheadle to compose the score for “Miles Ahead,” a 2015 biopic of Miles Davis.“He has that desire to get to the next level,” said Common, who appeared on “Black Radio 2” (2013) and formed the group August Greene with Glasper and the drummer/producer Karriem Riggins. “He wants to be the one that people will look to and say, ‘Yeah, he was the greatest of that time.’”Last month, Glasper arrived at a recording studio in Downtown Brooklyn to work on his latest film score, for a documentary about Luther Vandross, one of his mother’s favorite artists. “The first time I fell in love with acoustic piano wasn’t Duke Ellington, or Monk, or Herbie — it was Luther,” he said, crediting Nat Adderley Jr., Vandross’s longtime pianist and arranger. His large frame was draped in a black T-shirt with a portrait of Dilla, whose idiosyncratic production style inspired a generation of hip-hop and jazz musicians before and after his death in 2006.“Watching him work changed the way I play,” Glasper said.A couple of days after the session, Glasper would fly to Johannesburg for nearly two weeks to play festival dates. He is also working on a Christmas EP and composing another film score, for a documentary about Billy Preston. On Wednesday, back in New York, he began his annual, monthlong residency at the Blue Note Jazz club, colloquially known as “Robtoberfest.” The residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites his extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting. It has become known for drawing A-list surprise performers (Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock are fans) and, this year, will mix tributes to giants like Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey with featured performances from Bey, Norah Jones, Yebba, D Smoke, Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington, among others.Glasper finds scoring films a welcome challenge. “Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy,” he said.Jasmine Clarke for The New York Times“It’s a reflection of his unique contribution to music,” said Alex Kurland, the director of programming at the Blue Note. “He enables everyone around him to sound great and to feel great.”Since the pandemic, Glasper has lived full time in Los Angeles. He got an apartment there in 2017 on the suggestion of Martin (with whom he, Washington and the producer 9th Wonder perform as Dinner Party) and to be closer to the film business. He composed the music for the 2020 film “The Photograph,” starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield, and for the television series “Run the World,” “The Best Man: The Final Chapters” and “Winning Time.” (He has also appeared in front of the camera, including in a small role on Showtime’s “Black Monday,” the since-canceled series Cheadle starred in and executive produced.)Of his many jobs, Glasper said he finds scoring the most challenging. It requires two acts of translation — from image to sound, and from director to composer — for which his background as an artist provided little preparation.“Directors will ask you to do weird things: ‘I need this to feel melancholy — but in a calypso way,’” he said, laughing. “But it’s good exercise. Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy.”During the pandemic, he was inspired to make “Black Radio III” in part because his usual, “easy,” recording methods were unavailable to him. Instead of inviting musicians to jam live in a studio, he worked more like a hip-hop producer, crafting beats and soliciting vocal performances remotely. The result — featuring, among many others, H.E.R., Ty Dolla Sign and, on a special edition produced in partnership with the streetwear label Supreme, Mac Miller — is the most accessible and thoroughly modern music Glasper has released.Even Chris Brown eventually had to pay his respects. The day after his viral Grammys outburst, the singer posted a public apology: “After doing my research I actually think your amazing,” he wrote.Glasper gladly accepted — and quickly printed “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper?” on T-shirts. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sarah Vaughan

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      All it might take is a second and a half of hearing her sing to make your spine tingle or your heart drop. Opera singers, jazz vocalists, writers and Vaughan’s biographer share their favorites.For over a year, we’ve been rooting through jazz history five minutes at a time. We’ve covered favorites by Ornette Coleman, Mary Lou Williams, New Orleans’s jazz greats and many others. Now let’s turn our attention to a vocalist who epitomized — but couldn’t be contained by — jazz: Sarah Vaughan, “The Divine One,” owner of perhaps the most impressive vocal instrument in recorded history.Forget five minutes, all it might take is a second and a half of hearing her sing to make your spine tingle or your heart drop. Across her wide contralto range she could easily alternate between thick vibrato and crystal-clear precision. Vaughan began her career as a teenager singing bebop — a then-new style that was almost exclusively the domain of hotshot instrumentalists. But she could improvise an exacting scat solo, right alongside the horn players.Raised in a musical family in Newark, Vaughan first hit the road with Earl Hines’s big band in the mid-1940s, after its other singer, Billy Eckstine, saw her win a talent show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She became an integral part of the band, and then a star. Though naturally shy, she made it clear early on that she was to be treated as any other musician, and her bandmates soon started calling her “Sailor,” because of her fluency with four-letter words.Heading off on a tour with Hines in 1944, she and the pianist John Malachi were lugging their suitcases into Union Station in Washington when he made the mistake of chivalry, holding the door open for her. “What are you standing up there looking at me for, fool?” she demanded. “Go on through the door! You damn fool.” Maybe that’s the moment when he gave her another of her many nicknames: “Sassy.” In any case, it stuck, and it’s the one she is still known by today.As her career progressed, Vaughan — who died in 1990, at 66 — ventured into rock and Brazilian music. Read on for a sampling of standout Vaughan performances selected by opera singers, jazz vocalists, critics, fiction writers and Vaughan’s biographer. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Lizz Wright, vocalist“Tenderly”Sarah Vaughan’s voice is a whole atmosphere. In a few exquisite phrases, the current of her vibrato and the richness of her tone usher the listener into a place in time, into the poetry of song, and hint at the wealth of a great mind. As a Black woman in America, Sarah found a way to stand before masses of people around the world commanding their patient attention, respect and admiration through her powerful vocals and masterfully whimsical phrasing. Her enchanted voice gently opened doors that were often closed to women, people of color and vocalists. Everything under Sarah’s voice is draped in a playful and sacred charm that makes the moment richer than it was. She was aptly called “The Divine One.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Wesley Brown, novelist“Send in the Clowns”Sarah. Words fail to measure up. Like Beckett, I try to fail better. A hush steadies all in the club. The mic rests ready against her chest where voice and heartbeat greet. Me on the ground, she in midair with her usual flair. Every breath a parachute, full of rumbles and quivers and flavors of sass. Such a flirt she is, the shimmy in the shoulders, much girlish mischief in the mouth. Isn’t it bliss? Me still on the ground, she in midair. Words not up to snuff. Quick. Don’t bother. She’s here!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Cécile McLorin Salvant, vocalist“Maria”The most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard is Sarah Vaughan singing this. I believe this is one of the most luxurious vocal recordings of all time. I go back to this video very often when I want to treat myself. I’m so fascinated by her vibrato and by the moments when she gives us those sweeps in range. This version of “Maria,” a song from “West Side Story,” has an intimate, secret quality at crucial moments, and yet it is overwhelmingly grandiose, regal. I have always loved this about Sarah Vaughan. She can take you to these incredible heights with her voice, but with a word, a note, is able to infuse her interpretations with a quotidian, offhand quality. She does not keep her voice in the same place — it is heterogenous, which is what makes it so fun, so rich, so moving. She is divine and human.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Emily Lordi, writer“I’ll Be Seeing You”Many artists have performed “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal’s ballad of lost love and longing. But no one has lingered in it as languorously as Sarah Vaughan. Her version of the song, recorded live with her veteran trio at Tivoli Gardens in 1963, expresses no interest in moving on or “healing.” Instead, Vaughan initiates a long, slow waltz with heartache. By casting herself into every phrase, she implies that the pain of imagining her lover in their old haunts (carousels, cafes) not only revives him; it enlivens her (hence the protracted “I” with which she begins). In a feat of breath control, she bridges the song’s two opening statements — inviting, even willing, a world made more vibrant by the afterlife of love, as it smudges the edges of everything.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Samara Joy, vocalist“Time After Time”I admire how much care she puts into every word, making sure that the story of the song is heard and felt. Any improvisatory changes made to the melody are done with taste and feeling. I also love how she uses the full range of her voice to deliver the song. I almost thought the song ended once she hit that final high A-flat, but after descending two octaves lower, oscillating between G and A-flat, this Sarah performance became an instant favorite.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Ben Ratliff, former Times jazz and pop critic“The Thrill Is Gone”I like hearing Sarah Vaughan tear it up on an extra-slow-tempo ballad, 50 beats per minute or lower. With small groups, her unremitting virtuosity made a certain kind of design sense: She filled in the canyon-like spaces between beats. But I also like hearing her singing at slug tempos with thick, commercial, easy-listening studio arrangements: In an atmosphere of languid appeasement, she bounces off the walls. For the front half of “The Thrill Is Gone,” on “Vaughan and Violins” (1958), the arrangement by Quincy Jones clears open space for her to go full Sarah, strange Sarah, with her feats of breath control, mic technique, timbral shifts, trilling and sliding notes, hard emphatic gestures. But she keeps doing it after the tide of violins enters. I mean, the first “gone” is more than three seconds long, most of it the letter “n”; at 0:34, she delivers a pinched, acid “… si-ii-ighs”; at 0:38, “a-hand re-ee-huh-a-lize”; at 0:51, “the nights: the nights are so cold.” At a certain point you’re noticing every detail. Most affective ballads work their affect intermittently — there are a few select peaks, which makes them easier to remember. Vaughan’s were nearly all peak, and in that she took a risk.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Charenee Wade, vocalist“Once in a While”Sarah Vaughan, my first musical love, always brought newness to everything she sang each time she stepped onto the stage. There is a great early recording on MGM in 1949 of this song where, if one listens closely, her undeniably infectious tone and masterful phrasing speak through. This particular clip of her live performance of “Once in a While” is filmed almost 30 years later, and that essence is still there, but even more enriched. Her vocal range was unparalleled and became even deeper as she “seasoned.” She is a soulfully spontaneous and playful improviser. Her stage presence is transfixing, and her comedic timing is delightfully charming. She holds the entire room in the palm of her hand with each story she tells and intimate moment she shares. Her vocal technique is flawless, no matter which decade of her career, and one would be blessed to be able to witness her sitting down at the piano and accompanying herself just as well as any pianist had for her in the past. She is iconic, and quintessentially the definition of a True Jazz Vocalist. My first love, and I know you will love her too!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elaine M. Hayes, biographer“Whatever Lola Wants”Sarah Vaughan’s “Whatever Lola Wants,” released in 1955, is a pop masterpiece. In less than three minutes, she perfectly embodies her role as a provocative temptress while demonstrating her vocal prowess, technical mastery, and savvy as a storyteller. On the surface, she sings straight. But she in fact infuses the Broadway tune with her trademark vocal inflections and nuances. A delicious slide here, a microtonal bend there. With each verse she adds layers of complexity that build momentum, pulling the listener through her performance. And while Vaughan keeps a strict beat, she deftly conveys uncertainty and spontaneity, constantly pushing the boundaries between control and the loss of control to produce a delightful tension between the two. Musically, she has re-created the dynamics of a successful seduction. By the time she sings the final “I’m irresistible, you fool/Give in, give in, give in,” her success — and the success of her single, which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard and Variety charts — seems a foregone conclusion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, scholar“The Shadow of Your Smile”The older I get, the more I revel in listening to grown women’s voices. We often think of what age subtracts, but I’m attracted by what it adds. Growing up in church, people would say, “You have to be a certain age to sing that song.” Sometimes, life experience has to catch up with lyrics. One recording that always makes me feel this way is Sarah Vaughan’s 1966 interpretation of Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster’s “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Sarah Vaughan is a master interpreter of song, both melodically and narratively. I know there are countless recordings of this song, but whenever someone mentions it, I only ever think of hers.This is Vaughan in her 40s singing with an alluring alchemy of tender reflection with the gravitas of life experience. All of her soulful vocal virtuosity paired with an orchestral arrangement infused with a bossa nova groove lulls the listener into a dreamscape. It is nearly four minutes of her starting deep in her rich contralto voice and carrying us higher into her lilting soprano. Her vocal ascent reflects the lyrical joy of remembrance, and then toward the end, she gently descends and places us back into reality. It’s an expertly crafted blend of shadow and sun, light and dark, in the colors of her voice and the story she tells. This is Sarah Vaughan in full bloom as a singer and as a woman.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Will Friedwald, author“Misty”Back in the ’80s, my favorite selection on the jukebox at the Angry Squire was the 1959 single of Sarah Vaughan singing “Misty,” with Quincy Jones’s orchestra and Zoot Sims on tenor. Even at that noisy bar in Chelsea, the first notes of that 45 would cause the whole room to instantly freeze — as if the voice of a goddess were beaming in from another world. Some critics accused Vaughan of not paying enough attention to lyrics in general, but here was a song where she didn’t just sing the words, she actually became them. She didn’t just get “Misty” in the sense of teary-eyed, but she seemed to dissolve bodily into the atmosphere and cling “to a cloud.” Even 30 years after her passing from this world to the next, that record still has that effect on me.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Angel Blue, vocalist“They Can’t Take That Away From Me”The brilliance of Sarah Vaughan reaches far beyond her exquisite sound. Perhaps her most intriguing quality is her vocal ability. Going from a high soprano range to a low contralto range effortlessly seems to be something that she was able to do within any song. One of the songs that I find particularly fascinating is “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”: She demonstrates her ability to catch the listener’s ear with a simple melody by her strong use of diction, straight tone singing, and embellished vibrato to highlight a specific word or end of the phrase.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic“Like a Lover (O Cantador)”In the last chapter of her career, Vaughan built herself a new home in the music of Brazil, recording three albums of bossa, jazz and contemporary Brazilian pop. At the end of the first LP, “I Love Brazil,” she’s joined by the Rio de Janeiro-born balladeer Dori Caymmi on his song “Like a Lover (O Cantador).” Caymmi adds the occasional cascade of wordless vocals, as if to provide Vaughan with her string section, but mostly it’s just his acoustic guitar and her voice, singing lyrics in English about an unrequited love. In her mid-50s, Vaughan sounds like someone who knows the feeling of desire inside and out: its urgency, its unreason, the sting that can sometimes be its only reward. But enough with all that. You don’t get very far weighing Sarah Vaughan down with conversations about “authenticity” or “message.” She is concerned almost completely with the joy of singing: the variety of shapes that her notes can take, how they feel, how they taste, whether they’ll sit still or wriggle in her grasp. And that’s where the optimism that you can hear in this track comes from: She knows a song is a lover that will always requite. Sure enough, if you go back to the original Portuguese lyrics, they aren’t actually about a lover at all, they’re about a singer’s devotion to song. One of them translates to: “If only I knew how to cry/Alas, I’m a singer, I can only sing.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      I Started Playing My Sax Outdoors. Then the Fans Came.

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      When your rehearsal space is the bank of the Hudson, the audience is a bit unconventional.It was Year 2 of the pandemic, in the spring, that I hit on the idea of having my high school saxophone refurbished. My 48-year-old horn came back from the repair shop in Midtown Manhattan a week later. I put it together in my Upper West Side apartment and … for the love of God, it was loud. A couple of days later, I saw my downstairs neighbor in the lobby, and he asked, “Is that a sax I hear?” He professed to be OK with my rudimentary jazz stylings, but I was uncomfortable.My building is directly adjacent to Riverside Park. The day after that encounter, I walked 10 minutes down to the bank of the Hudson, found an arrangement of boulders where I could put my case and started to improvise to some 1960s soul jazz playing through my headphones. I was loud. Gloriously, triumphantly loud. Within minutes, bike riders and strolling couples stopped to listen. Some took photos. After that, I took my sax to the park almost every day. Over the next few weeks and on through this summer, paddleboarders, canoers and motorboats on the river hove to the shore to listen for a few minutes. When the traffic on the nearby West Side Highway ground to a halt, I got a round of applause. I had at least two cameos on Instagram.I find it hard to practice inside now, even in my building, where the jazz pianist and composer Billy Strayhorn once lived. It’s inhibiting. I miss the expansiveness of playing outside. And I’ve found nature surprisingly attentive, despite the noise. Robins and sparrows — and only one word is possible here — flock to me as if I’m St. Francis of C Minor. Squirrels stand on their hind legs and fix me with hard stares, like miniature critics. My most cherished fan, though, was Zippy, a goose with whom I had a prior relationship. (My wife is known as the Goose Lady of Riverside Park, but that’s a subject for another essay.) One summer day, Zippy and his extended family were paddling south down the Hudson but then circled back and flew up to the riverbank next to me. Zippy sat there quietly for the next 45 minutes until I packed up to head home. There is nothing more satisfying than entertaining a goose you’re fond of.But, of course, it’s the interactions with people that mean the most. Little kids in matching T-shirts on day-camp outings are delighted. They clap for the noisy man. The guy with the wild hair, eating a sandwich on a nearby bench, loved it too. “Do you know Hall and Oates?” he asked. “You should learn ‘Maneater.’ You could make a lot of dough playing that. Hey, if you need some grub, that church on 99th is pretty good.” I wasn’t sure if I looked like I could use a square meal or just sounded like it.Robins and sparrows — and only one word is possible here — flock to me as if I’m St. Francis of C Minor. To be honest, I stink. This is not humble-bragging. I’m just realistic about my abilities. I imagine that for many people, what I’m playing sounds “jazzy.” (Common questions from passers-by: “Are you professional?” “Do you play in a club someplace?”) But if I showed up at Smalls, the Greenwich Village jazz spot, for one of their jam sessions, and someone said, “Let’s do ‘How High the Moon’ in D flat,” it wouldn’t take more than a few measures for the drummer to toss one of his cymbals at me. (It happened to Charlie Parker in Kansas City in the 1930s, although he went on to great things.) I’m OK with simple chord progressions or, better yet, just wailing to a Jimmy Smith recording. But I still can’t throw in those diminished-seventh licks or tritone substitutions at will. It’s shocking, really, how little I have progressed since fourth grade. I don’t care. When I play outdoors, perfection is neither possible nor expected.In 1960, Sonny Rollins, already one of the greatest tenor-sax players ever, quit recording and appearing in public so he could concentrate on getting better. He was living on the Lower East Side. He tried to practice in a closet (I’ve been there). Still too loud. There was a pregnant neighbor. “I felt real guilty,” he said, according to a 2022 biography. So he walked over to the Williamsburg Bridge and played outside day and night until he returned two years later with an LP called “The Bridge.” I’m not Sonny Rollins, but I can hear progress.I can be pretty jumpy in public. It’s New York: You pay attention (and a sax is not cheap). I was playing a few weeks ago at another spot I like, just off the main path that runs through the upper park. My sax case and music were on a stone wall. At some point, I noticed a man squatting a few feet behind me, fumbling through some kind of bag. I thought, Here we go! He stood up and lurched over to me, his hand raised. And then he said, “Do you want me to put it there?” indicating my open case. He had a few coins in his hand. This guy wasn’t in good shape — maybe under the influence of something, maybe just struggling with life — but he wanted to share what he had.I said: “That’s really nice of you, but I’m just practicing. Keep that for yourself.”“You sure?”“Yeah, I’m sure.” I did two taps on my heart.“I love what you’re doing,” he said, quite emotionally. He gave me a soul shake and then brought me in for a bro hug. “I love you, man.”“I love you too, man,” I said.Really, what I should do is go to the park with a case full of dollar bills and pass them out to the people (and geese) who stop to listen, because I owe them for a music lesson I didn’t know I needed.Harvey Dickson has been a staff editor at The Times since 1997, for the last 16 years at the magazine. He has also worked at The International Herald Tribune in Paris. More

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      Zach Bryan’s Melancholy Bon Iver Duet, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Holly Humberstone, Byron Messia, Laurel Halo 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.Zach Bryan featuring Bon Iver, ‘Boys of Faith’The memorably wistful title track from the new Zach Bryan EP — which arrives just a few weeks after his most recent album — is a collaboration with Bon Iver, which means a couple of very pointed things. First, Bryan is making kin with fellow roots-adjacent cult heroes. Though he has become wildly successful improbably quickly, Bryan still fancies himself outside of the mainstream, stubbornly stomping to his own drum. That parallels the story of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who likely could fill arenas if he was interested. Both singers are vividly emotional, too, building whole houses upon sadness. Where the two acts diverge is in tone — Bryan sings with raspy jabs, and Vernon buries himself behind echo and fog. Bryan is such a force, though, that he pulls Vernon in his direction on this song; when the two sing in harmony, Vernon sounds as if he’s chasing after Bryan ever so slightly, following his bark with moon-aimed howls. A lament followed by a hug. JON CARAMANICAHolly Humberstone, ‘Into Your Room’On her latest single, the warm, synth-pop tune “Into Your Room,” the English singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone oscillates between sincere yearning and wry, self-deprecating humor: “You’re the center of this universe, my sorry ass revolves around you,” she sings, begging forgiveness from someone she’s mistreated. There’s a casually tossed-off, conversational appeal to her lyrics and delivery, but when the chorus surges, she’s suddenly leading with her heart. LINDSAY ZOLADZTroye Sivan, ‘Get Me Started’Following the lusty thrill of his summertime single “Rush,” Troye Sivan starts catching feelings on “Get Me Started,” the second song released from his forthcoming album “Something to Give Each Other.” “He’s got the personality, not even gravity could ever hold him down,” Sivan sings atop an insistent, club-ready beat, aglow with the agony and ecstasy of a new crush. ZOLADZLandon Barker, ‘Friends With Your Ex’A disarmingly refined pop-punk debut single from Landon Barker — the son of Travis Barker, who plays drums here, and whose label is putting out the song. That teen-angst pop-punk became the de facto sonic landing place for the first wave of TikTok superstar pretty boys was about finding the safest available package of rebellion (and one that largely skirted issues of race). Barker is perhaps that movement’s third wave, following early adopters like Jaden Hossler and Chase Hudson, and then the mainstream carpetbagging of Machine Gun Kelly. Which is to say there is a lot to emulate — the blueprint is loud and easy to follow. It hardly almost matters who’s coloring in between the lines. CARAMANICAShakira and Fuerza Regida, ‘El Jefe’“Stick it to the man,” Shakira advises, in English, at the beginning of “El Jefe” (“The Man” or “The Boss”), a brisk polka-ska hybrid that teams Shakira — the paragon of Pan-American crossover — with Fuerza Regida, a regional Mexican band from California. Backed by crisply syncopated guitars and horns, the song is a worker’s gripe, in Spanish, about a grueling, underpaid, dead-end job with a lousy boss; “I arrive on foot, him in a Mercedes,” growls Fuerza Regida’s lead singer, Jesús Ortiz Paz. It’s peppy class warfare. JON PARELESByron Messia, ‘Mad Dawgs’Byron Messia’s breakout single, “Talibans,” is one of the year’s defining reggae songs, so saccharine you might miss its tough talk. Messia has a sweet voice that gets feistier the more clipped his singing becomes, and on his boastful new single “Mad Dawgs,” he comes almost all the way around to blustery, trading in much of his considered honeyed singing for a choppier rhythm more in key with the chest-puffing lyrics. CARAMANICAChelsea Wolfe, ‘Dusk’The goth crooner Chelsea Wolfe conjures a thick atmosphere on “Dusk,” her first new solo track since composing the score for Ti West’s 2022 slasher flick “X.” Produced by David Andrew Sitek of TV on the Radio, “Dusk” is centered around a slow, methodical beat, murky guitar chords and Wolfe’s breathy, eerie voice. “I will go through fire to get to you,” she sings with a haunting determination. ZOLADZLaurel Halo, ‘Sick Eros’Laurel Halo has a gift for the hallucinatory. “Atlas,” her first new album in five years, is a submersion into abstract imagination, resembling a head-spinning dream that shifts between epochs, story lines and locations. The Los Angeles-based conceptualist has explored Detroit techno, musique concrète and even left-field pop in the past, and was recently appointed to the faculty of Composition and Experimental Sound Practices at CalArts. But “Atlas” traces a new path, slithering between the textures of jazz, ambient and classical. On the highlight “Sick Eros,” a bass trembles and creaks, beats shiver and gurgle, synths groan and swell. There’s a Hitchcockian foreboding — a sense that someone is about to open a shadowy door and never return, or trip over an edge that will lead to oblivion. Discordant strings ache and decay, stretching over waves of vibration. By the song’s end, you can almost picture yourself at the Dead Marshes in the “Lord of the Rings,” gazing upon the corpses floating in the swamp, their spirits emerging from the water with a ghoulish menace. ISABELIA HERRERAColleen, ‘Be Without Being Seen — Movement I’A sense of peace is immanent to the music of Colleen, but especially the work she’s been making since putting aside her viola da gamba in 2017 and adopting an all-electronics approach, centered on modular synthesizers. Her new double LP, “Le Jour et la Nuit du Réel,” is a time-flattening work of minimalism, created with just a monophonic synth (that is, playing one note at a time) and two delay units. Toward the center of the album, the first of three short movements in “Be Without Being Seen” introduces a quizzical pattern of arpeggiated chords, and simply lets it hang in the air. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMicah Thomas, ‘Eros’Listeners to Immanuel Wilkins will recognize Micah Thomas’s piano playing almost immediately: the elastic-band rhythmic tension and snap, the gloriously spilled-out harmonic delivery, his imaginatively redistributed roles for the left and right hands. Thomas is both the binding agent and the stirrer of chaos in Wilkins’s quartet, which for the past few years has been the most praised young band in jazz. On “Eros,” from Thomas’s new trio album, “Reveal,” the bassist Dean Torrey and the drummer Kayvon Gordon cooperate at cross-purposes, a six-beat flow emerging beneath a web of syncopation. Let the drums guide the rhythm of your body; then see how it changes when you let the bass. Then find Thomas within that combination, absorbing it all. RUSSONELLO More

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      Charles Gayle, Saxophonist of Fire and Brimstone, Dies at 84

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      An intense and uncompromising player, he made music that one critic said was more about “motion and spirit” than tonal centers, rhythms and melodies.Charles Gayle, an uncompromising saxophonist who spent years living and performing on the streets of New York before beginning a recording career when he was nearly 50, died on Sept. 5 in Brooklyn. He was 84.His son Ekwambu, who had been caring for him as he dealt with Alzheimer’s disease, announced the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Gayle said he had chosen to be homeless because it gave him the opportunity to explore music unencumbered by worries about changing tastes or living expenses. He was part of an ecstatic lineage of jazz avant-gardists like late-period John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, purveyors of a style often referred to as “fire music.”Mr. Gayle’s playing was eventually documented on nearly 40 albums under his name on a host of labels; he also recorded with the pianist Cecil Taylor, the bassist William Parker and the punk singer Henry Rollins.Reviewing the 2014 Vision Festival, at which Mr. Gayle was given a lifetime achievement award, the New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff wrote, “He plays tenor saxophone in cries and gabbles and interval jumps and long tones; his music usually describes motion and spirit rather than corresponding to preset tonal centers, rhythms and melodies.”An ardent Christian, Mr. Gayle channeled his intense spirituality not only into his sound; it was also reflected in the titles of many of his albums and in the screeds he delivered extemporaneously during his performances.Mr. Gayle also had an alternate musical persona called Streets: He would dress in a torn suit and clown shoes and wear makeup and a red nose. At first it was an occasional diversion, but he later performed as Streets regularly. In a 2014 interview with The New York City Jazz Record, he explained:“It wasn’t a gimmick or anything like that. I looked at myself one day in the mirror and said to myself, ‘Stop thinking about Charles.’ So I put a rubber nose on and said ‘That’ll work.’Mr. Gayle would sometimes dress in a torn suit and clown shoes, wear makeup and a red nose, and perform as an alternate musical persona called Streets.Northern Spy Records“It was really that simple,” he continued. “I saw a lot of clowns when I was young in the circus, but it was so liberating to go out in an audience while the band is playing and give a lady a rose or get rejected by her and everything — I can’t do that with regular clothes on. It helps a person mentally to escape — there’s a purpose in the escape, and it is the same thing as being in the music and trying to get past certain things. In order for me to do that I had to disappear.”Charles Ennis Gayle Jr. was born on Feb. 28, 1939, in Buffalo to Charles and Frances Gayle. His father was a steelworker. He studied numerous instruments in high school and excelled in basketball and track and field.Mr. Gayle in 1994. His recording career did not begin until he was nearly 50, but he steadily released albums as a leader from 1991 onward.Alan NahigianAfter a period at Fredonia State Teachers College, Mr. Gayle returned to Buffalo to begin his music career. He first played trumpet and piano in local clubs before concentrating more on tenor saxophone in self-produced concerts, while also working at a Westinghouse factory and later at a bank providing loans for Black-owned businesses.From 1970 to 1973, Mr. Gayle was an assistant professor of music at the State University of New York at Buffalo (now the University at Buffalo). But, tiring of institutional responsibilities, he left academia and moved to New York City to pursue music exclusively. He had been there for almost a decade when he decided to live on the streets.In the 2014 interview, he recalled: “I just walked out one day and that was it. That was one of the greatest experiences I had in my life, though I didn’t do it for that reason. You have nothing and you’re not asking anybody for anything. We seek security, and you learn about how people perceive you because of what you look like or what they think you’re about.”He had music ready for release by ESP-Disk, Mr. Ayler’s label from 1964 to 1966, but those plans were scuttled when the company went out of business in 1975. (That session has yet to be heard, but the label was revived in 2005 and released a 1994 performance by Mr. Gayle’s trio in 2012.)Mr. Gayle spent more than 15 years homeless, performing on the streets of New York. Then, in 1987, he began his second act.After the promoter Michael Dorf heard Mr. Gayle play, he was booked regularly at Mr. Dorf’s Lower Manhattan club, the Knitting Factory. Music he recorded at sessions in April 1988 became three albums for the Swedish label Silkheart Records. From 1991 onward, Mr. Gayle would steadily release albums under his own name — some as the leader of a trio or quartet, others as a solo performer — among them “Repent,” “Consecration,” “Testaments,” “Daily Bread” and “Christ Everlasting.”In a 2013 interview with Cadence magazine, he reflected on the perils of being outspoken about his religious beliefs in his concerts, delivered with the fervor of a country preacher:“People have told me to shut up and stuff. I understand that I can turn people off with what I say or do. The problem that people have with me is not me, it’s Christ they have a problem with. I understand that when you start speaking about faith or religion, they want you to keep it in a box, but I’m not going to do that. Not because I’m taking advantage of being a musician; I’m the same everywhere, and people have to understand that.”Mr. Gayle also had a notable collaborative group with Mr. Parker and the drummer Rashied Ali and was a guest on two albums by Mr. Rollins. In addition to tenor saxophone, he played alto and soprano saxophones, piano, viola, upright bass and drums. He is seen and heard in an interview and playing with the German bassist Peter Kowald’s trio in a 1985 documentary, “Rising Tones Cross,” produced and directed by his former wife Ebba Jahn.A biography of Mr. Gayle by Cisco Bradley, with all proceeds going to the Gayle family, is scheduled for publication in late 2024.Mr. Gayle’s three marriages all ended in divorce. In addition to his son Ekwambu, from his second marriage, his survivors include two other sons, Michael, from the first, and Dwayne, from his marriage to Ms. Jahn.The drummer Michael Wimberley, who worked Mr. Gayle from the early 1990s well into the new millennium, called him “a father, mentor and friend whom I had the pleasure of creating some of the most adventurous improvised sounds, shapes and musical dialogues with.”“Charles’s intensity on the horn,” he added, “was so powerful in person. I had never experienced anything like music of that intensity before! He pulled me into the sonic center of his sound and raptured me.” More

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      Bobby Schiffman, Guiding Force of the Apollo Theater, Dies at 94

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      Taking over for his father in 1961, he transformed a former vaudeville house in Harlem into a pre-eminent R&B showcase.Bobby Schiffman, who guided the Apollo Theater in Harlem through the seismic cultural and musical changes of the 1960s and early ’70s, cementing its place as a world-renowned showcase for Black music and entertainment, died on Sept. 6 at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his son, Howard.In 1961, Mr. Schiffman inherited the reins of the storied neoclassical Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Manhattan from his father, Frank Schiffman. The elder Mr. Schiffman, along with a financial partner, Leo Brecher, had taken over the theater — a former burlesque house that opened in 1914 as a whites-only establishment — in 1935.Frank Schiffman transformed the theater from a vaudeville house hosting acts like Al Jolson and the Marx Brothers into an epicenter for Black artists performing for largely Black audiences in an era of de facto cultural segregation. During the 1930s and ’40s, the elder Mr. Schiffman provided early exposure to countless African American luminaries, including Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington.Frank Schiffman was respected and feared for his fierce competitiveness. “In Harlem show business circles he was God — a five-foot-nine-inch, white, Jewish, balding, bespectacled deity,” the music writer Ted Fox observed in his 1983 book, “Showtime at the Apollo.”Bobby, the younger of his two sons, was more affable and easygoing, but lacked none of his father’s drive or ambition.“I don’t think Bobby Schiffman gets enough credit for being a great impresario,” Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. “Through enormous changes in musical tastes, styles and culture in general, he kept the theater going, doing 31 shows a week, seven days a week, year after year for decades, in a way that no other theater has ever been able to do.”His father had run the theater along the old vaudeville model, as a venue for variety shows. “Frank was old school,” Howard Schiffman said of his grandfather in a phone interview. “He was like Ed Sullivan. He thought that there should be a juggler and an animal act on every show.”Mr. Schiffman, second from left, with his father, Frank Schiffman; the tap dancer Honi Coles, who worked for many years as the Apollo’s production manager; and, standing, Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son and later the leader of the Ellington orchestra. Mr. Schiffman took over the Apollo from his father in 1961.via Apollo Theater“My father,” he added, “turned the Apollo into the R&B showcase that it became.”Faced with keeping the lights on at a compact 1,500-seat theater with little financial cushion, Bobby Schiffman “made it his business to find out what the people in the streets were listening to,” Mr. Fox said.“He would go into the bars and see what was on the jukebox,” he added, “he would talk to local D.J.s and record store owners to find out what was coming out, and book them while they were still unknown.”Winners of the theater’s famous and long-running Wednesday Amateur Night during Mr. Schiffman’s tenure included Gladys Knight, Ronnie Spector, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5.By providing support and exposure, he nurtured young stars “before they became superstars,” Mr. Fox said, “and would later appeal to them to appear, at great financial sacrifice, to come back and play for the people who made them.”During the years Mr. Schiffman managed the Apollo, it became a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said.Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesDuring Mr. Schiffman’s tenure as manager, the Apollo served not only as a launching pad to fame but also, eventually, as a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said. “It was the most important theater in the world. Once you could say you had played the Apollo, you could get in any door anywhere.”The Apollo’s reputation went global, thanks in part to hit live recordings made there by stars like James Brown, an Apollo regular, who recorded the landmark album “‘Live’ at the Apollo” in October 1962. Widely regarded as one of the great live albums, it hit No. 6 on the Billboard chart in 1963 and remained in the Top 10 for 39 weeks.The Apollo’s reputation went global thanks in part to albums like James Brown’s “‘Live’ at the Apollo,” which spent 39 weeks in the Billboard Top 10 in 1963.King“For years,” Mr. Schiffman said in a 2014 interview with The Daily News in New York, “you could write ‘Apollo Theater’ on a postcard, drop it into a mailbox anywhere and it would be delivered. How many theaters can you say that about?”Robert Lee Schiffman was born on Feb. 12, 1929, in Manhattan, the youngest of Frank and Lee Schiffman’s three children.He grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a suburb north of the city, where he attended A.B. Davis High School with Dick Clark, the future host of “American Bandstand.”After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from New York University, Mr. Schiffman spent the early 1950s working his way up the ladder at the Apollo. “He did every terrible job in the place, from cleaning bathrooms to taking tickets,” his son said.During Mr. Schiffman’s heyday at the Apollo in the 1960s, his office functioned as a nerve center for Black culture. Local politicians like Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and sports stars like Muhammad Ali would drop by for a chat.By the 1970s, however, Harlem was being increasingly buffeted by drugs, crime and economic decline, and the live-music business was changing. With color barriers in music breaking down, the Apollo was unable to maintain its lure for artists who had become arena-packing juggernauts.“The big stars would say, ‘We love you, Bobby, but we can play the Apollo and sell 1,500 tickets or play Madison Square Garden and sell 18,000,’” Howard Schiffman said.Mr. Schiffman finally shuttered the theater in 1976. The Apollo reopened under new management in 1978 but closed again the next year. In 1981, the media and technology executive Percy E. Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president, purchased the theater with a group of investors. It was declared a state and city landmark in 1983, and in 1991 it was taken over by the Apollo Theater Foundation, a nonprofit organization.Mr. Schiffman later oversaw the Westchester Premier Theater in Tarrytown, N.Y., before retiring to Florida.In addition to his son, from his marriage to Joan Landy, which ended in divorce in 1973, he is survived by his fourth wife, Betsy (Rothman) Schiffman; his stepsons from that marriage, Barry and Michael Rothman; six grandchildren; and two great-grandsons. His marriages to Renee Levy and Rusty Donner also ended in divorce.While the Apollo became famous for its stars and spectacle, Mr. Schiffman never forgot its unique role as a locus for Harlem life.“We were in the business of pleasing the Black community,” he said in an interview for the book “Showtime at the Apollo.” “If white folks came as an ancillary benefit, that was fine. But the basic motto was to bring the people of the community entertainment they wanted at a price they could afford to pay.”When he overstepped his bounds, the community let him know. “The highest price I ever charged was six dollars,” Mr. Schiffman added. “I tried seven for Redd Foxx once, and they stayed away in droves.” More

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      Maren Morris Revels in a Fresh Start, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Cat Power, Chris Stapleton, Loraine James 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.Maren Morris, ‘The Tree’Maren Morris forcefully pulls free of a bad relationship in “The Tree,” an arena-scale waltz full of botanical imagery: “The rot at the roots is the root of the problem/But you wanna blame it on me.” Buttressed by a massive drumbeat, power chords and a choir, Morris has clearly made up her mind: “I’ll never stop growing.” JON PARELESMitski, ‘My Love Mine All Mine’Mitski’s seventh album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” — out Friday — is suffused with a luminous warmth and an easy confidence that are both on ample display on the single “My Love Mine All Mine.” “Nothing in the world belongs to me but my love,” Mitski sings in a clarion croon, as a chorus of backing singers fill out the atmosphere around her. Tinkling barroom piano and the occasional whine of pedal steel give the song a nocturnal country flair, while Mitski leads the way at an unhurried tempo that seems to slow time itself. LINDSAY ZOLADZCat Power, ‘She Belongs to Me (Live at the Royal Albert Hall)’Last year, Chan Marshall, who records as Cat Power, played a full performance recreating Bob Dylan’s fabled 1966 “Royal Albert Hall” concert (which actually took place at the Manchester Free Trade Hall). On Nov. 10, she’ll release a live album of the full 15-song set, including this stirring rendition of “She Belongs to Me.” A prolific and intuitive interpreter of other people’s songs, Marshall brings the right balance of reverence and invention to this 1965 Dylan classic, slowing the original’s tempo and conveying a coziness through the crackling, bonfire warmth of her voice. ZOLADZChris Stapleton, ‘Think I’m in Love With You’The stolid backbeat, laconic guitar hooks, stealthy organ chords and hovering string arrangement of “Think I’m in Love With You” come straight out of 1970s Memphis soul. So do Chris Stapleton’s vocal choices; his leaps, quavers and evasions of the beat can be traced to Al Green. But Stapleton brings his own drama and grit to the style; his homage carries an emotional charge. PARELESParchman Prison Prayer, ‘Break Every Chain’Inmates at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm prison sing at weekly church services. Like the folklorist Alan Lomax in the 1940s, earlier this year the producer Ian Brennan visited Parchman to record. In one Sunday session, he gathered fervent gospel performances, most of them solo and unaccompanied, from prisoners, collectively billed as Parchman Prison Prayer. Proceeds from the album, “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning,” will benefit the Mississippi Department of Corrections Chaplain Services. One is from M. Kyles, a prisoner in his 50s, whose voice sails aloft as he extols the power of Jesus’s name to “Break Every Chain.” PARELESNas, ‘Fever’Nas, like hip-hop itself, turns 50 this year, and in “Fever” he’s “celebrating years of flows and crazy wordplay/Seasoned, I’m leaving my 40s, I’m a griot.” Backed by minor-chord loops of guitars, strings and distant voices, his raspy voice is both proud and generous: “I wish at least 50 on all my good people,” he declares. PARELESLoraine James featuring Morgan Simpson, ‘I DM U’The electronic producer Loraine James teams up with the indefatigable muscle power of Morgan Simpson — Black Midi’s drummer — in “I DM U” from her album out next week, “Gentle Confrontation.” She dispenses sustained chords and sporadic bass lines at a stately tempo; he’s all over his kit, barreling ahead at quadruple speed, impulsive where she’s measured. But they’re working in tandem, moving forward together. PARELESJenn Champion, ‘Jessica’Grief and anger roil in “Jessica,” a quietly devastated ballad about a friend’s fatal overdose. Jenn Champion, who has been making music since she was a member of Carissa’s Wierd in the 1990s, double tracks her voice over a cycle of three basic, echoey piano chords as she mourns “stupid dead Jessica,” a friend she loved, who couldn’t overcome her addiction: “Honestly, who OD’s in their [expletive] 40s,” she sings, even as she recognizes, “Our friends die but we keep getting older.” PARELESSnail Mail, ‘Easy Thing (Demo)’Lindsey Jordan’s recordings as Snail Mail have increasingly reveled in the possibilities of studio production. But songs have to start somewhere, and “Easy Thing” — an unreleased song that will be included on an EP of demos from the 2021 album “Valentine” — harks back to Jordan’s sparse early recordings. It’s a waltz backed by just a few home-recorded tracks — guitars, flutelike synthesizer and an occasional harmony vocal — as Jordan sings about still longing for an ex who moved on. “Forget about that girl,” she urges, though not exactly confidently. “We’ll always have that easy thing.” PARELESKavita Shah and Bau, ‘Flor de Lis’On her quietly riveting new album, “Cape Verdean Blues,” the vocalist and folklorist Kavita Shah teams up with Bau, a guitarist and one of Cape Verde’s best-known musicians, to explore the island nation’s repertoire of traditional ballads and dance songs. But on “Flor de Lis,” Shah and Bau take a detour to Brazil, playing this popular samba by the MPB musician Djavan. Shah’s vocals maintain pitch-perfect clarity even as she arcs a high melody over the chorus. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSteve Lehman, ‘Chimera’How Steve Lehman gets music to sound the way he does is both an object of fascination and, to some degree, a mystery we must accept. To unpack it, you’d have to understand how he uses spectral harmony — a computer-assisted approach that treats the shapes and contours of sound waves as the basis for harmony — and that’s before you even begin to decode his densely scribbled, tone-smearing saxophone lines. Indeed, “Chimera” is an apt name for a piece of his. This version of the tune (which has been in his repertoire for years) begins with two minutes of Chris Dingman’s vibraphone mixing with other mallets and chimes, thickening the air before Lehman’s alto saxophone enters, joined by a full horn section, playing in pulses and stabs. Drums and bass put their weight into a tensile, halting rhythm. The tune comes from Lehman’s new album, “Ex Machina,” which he recorded with the Orchestre National de Jazz in France (the birthplace of spectral composition, by the way). Lehman’s music, always flooded with ideas, has rarely felt so fully fleshed out and exposed. RUSSONELLO More