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      Eleanor Collins, Canada’s ‘First Lady of Jazz,’ Dies at 104

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      A singer known for her mastery of standards, she found stardom in Canada on TV and in nightclubs. But she was virtually unknown in the United States.When the singer and pianist Nat King Cole’s 15-minute variety show debuted on NBC in November 1956, he made history as the first Black American to host a television program. But just over the country’s northern border, another Black entertainer had him beat: In the summer of 1955, Eleanor Collins had her own show on the CBC, Canada’s national broadcasting network.Though her show was a landmark in TV history — she was both the first woman and the first Black person to host a program in Canada — her selection was hardly a surprise.By the mid-1950s, Mrs. Collins was already widely regarded as Canada’s “first lady of jazz,” known for her mastery of the standards and her commanding performances on radio, early TV specials and in nightclubs around Vancouver, where she lived.“As a young man in the 1950s, having just started my radio career, I was mesmerized by Eleanor Collins,” the Canadian broadcaster Red Robinson wrote in The Vancouver Sun in 2006. “To me, she was Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan all rolled into one. She had electric eyes and a voice to melt the hardest heart. I was in love with her.”Mrs. Collins was at home in the intimate environs of the jazz club. She had a knack for reading the room — she could easily be the center of attention, but if audience members were more interested in one another than in her, she was equally adept at providing background music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Don Cherry

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      Listen to favorite songs by an adventurous musician who pushed the boundaries of jazz, selected by writers and musicians including Nailah Hunter, Kieran Hebden and the artist’s son Eagle-Eye Cherry.Of all the musicians we’ve featured in this series, Don Cherry might be the most adventurous. From his early days in the late 1950s playing with the saxophonist Ornette Coleman to his tinkering with electronic funk and R&B in the ’80s, Cherry proved himself a worthy anarchist, broadening the depth of his art through the wind of his pocket cornet, an instrument he popularized. Though with Cherry, there was a sense that he didn’t want to shift the genre as a whole. Instead, his music felt innocent and voyeuristic, like he colored outside the lines just because.Cherry grew up in a musical family; his grandmother played piano for silent films, and his mother played piano at home. His father owned a jazz club in Tulsa, Okla., then worked as a bartender at the Plantation Club, a jazz venue in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Cherry met Coleman around the mid-50s and started working with the bandleader; it was a creative partnership that spanned several albums. Coleman’s sound was so jarring that some called it “alien music.” But Cherry identified with Coleman’s atonality and dissonance, even if he himself played tight, expressive notes that didn’t inflict much chaos. When paired with Coleman’s saxophone, the whole thing felt tumultuous. “Some people loved it and some people hated it, didn’t like it, and there would be arguments and fights,” he once told NPR’s Terry Gross, referencing a famed 1959 show at the Five Spot Cafe that drew Leonard Bernstein and Thelonious Monk to the venue.Though Cherry earned favor as a member of Coleman’s band and a featured player on the albums “Something Else!!!!” and “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” he soon established himself as a formidable bandleader or co-leader. In 1960, he and John Coltrane recorded a number of Coleman’s compositions as a homage to their peer. Six years later, Atlantic Records released this collaborative LP under the title “The Avant-Garde.” As the ’60s became the ’70s, Cherry turned his attention to funk and other cosmic soundscapes, much like other jazz musicians of the time.In 1975, he released what might be the high-water mark of his solo discography, “Brown Rice,” a slight yet exhilarating blend of Indian raga and African rhythm with subtle electronic flourishes. Cherry spent the ’70s in Sweden with his partner, Moki, where the two would create what they called “organic music” with like-minded local artists. Then, on the 1985 album “Home Boy (Sister Out),” Cherry turned his attention to Paris. A downtown funk record influenced by that city’s sound, it achieved cult status there until the label WeWantSounds released it more widely in 2018.By the time of Cherry’s death in 1995, he was considered a torchbearer for avant-garde jazz. Here, we spotlight his work with 13 selections that tell the story of his free-spirited brilliance. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Joy Guidry, musician“Hope”When thinking about Don Cherry’s music, his album “Organic Music Society” is always the first to come to mind. I often come back to this entire album for how it can always slow my breathing and open my soul to the other side. The colors he uses in this album paint a picture of many different forms of praise and worship, especially in the seventh track, “Hope.” There’s so much warmth and comfort throughout this entire song. I always see a ton of deep oranges, purples and yellows when listening to “Hope.” The singing, different percussion instruments, and the rhythm of the piano and flute come together to make an oasis of sounds for dancing, screaming or giving thanks and praise. “Hope” is a song that brings a lot of my deep emotions to the surface, and I come back to it a lot when I need to have a big release or when I’m feeling spiritually blocked up. “Organic Music Society” is one of the best master classes in improvisation I’ve ever run across.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kahil El’Zabar, Spiritual Jazz’s Dapper Bandleader, Keeps Pushing Ahead

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      At 70, he is releasing his 18th album with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble to celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary and his role in the music’s lineage.Upon first glance, you might not think Kahil El’Zabar, 70, is a spiritual jazz musician. Tall and sprightly with taut skin and a thick mustache, wearing dark sunglasses and a stylish black suit on a January afternoon, he looked more like a fashion model or a recently retired athlete. That’s not to say avant-jazz guys can’t be chic, but rarely do they look this dapper.“My mother owned a bridal formal-wear business, so fashion was always a part of my life since I was a little kid,” he said over cups of green tea at the Moxy Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I have friends that are 70, and they’ll look at me and say, ‘Why you got those little silly clothes on?’ It’s like, ‘We wore wingtips and khakis in ’69. This is 2023, and just because I’m a senior citizen does not mean I can’t be current.’”For the past 50 years, El’Zabar has toed the line between fashion and music, the present and the future, American jazz and West African compositional structure. In 1974, he founded the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble as a quartet blurring the edges of traditional jazz, Afrocentric rhythms and cosmic expanse. Much like the Pyramids, the Ohio-based band that wore African finery and played polyrhythmic arrangements lifted from the continent, El’Zabar’s group wasn’t fully appreciated by American listeners. The quartet came at a time when jazz musicians started blending their sounds with stadium-sized funk and rock, and psychedelic African jazz was considered a bridge too far.El’Zabar has been sewing his own clothes since he was 11. Today, he runs an invite-only resale shop in Chicago.Lyndon French for The New York TimesAs a result, El’Zabar has been underrated in the pantheon of spiritual jazz luminaries, despite his healthy résumé. For someone who’s played with Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, his name doesn’t ring like those of Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane and Sun Ra.It’s because “he’s a percussionist,” said the film director Dwayne Johnson-Cochran, who’s made five documentaries on El’Zabar, during a phone interview. “With Kahil as a drummer, it’s kind of discounted because he’s the guy keeping the beat. He has melodies that are simple yet complex in the counterpoint; in a lot of ways, he’s a genre within himself. People are not in tune with what he’s putting out, but it’s really quite spectacular.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis in Close-Up at Jazz Concerts

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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis, recent pioneers at the Metropolitan Opera, returned to earlier works in a pair of performances over the weekend.In the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which just had an acclaimed revival in the New York City Center Encores! series, Jelly Roll Morton, a pianist and composer who claims he invented jazz, pays for his hubris. But while the show occasionally excoriates him, its fictionalized tale revels in his real-world achievements.On Saturday, during the final weekend of the run, Nicholas Christopher summoned wave after wave of electricity as Morton — not only during the song and dance numbers, but also during scenes in which he managed to create an affecting portrait of a figure who needed to hustle to receive his due credit.Morton’s biography resonated in two other concerts presented in New York on Friday and Saturday. These performances likewise featured the music of composers who have cut significant profiles in jazz, but with a privilege never afforded to Morton: Their works have made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Met, where it will be revived in April. At Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday, he began a two-night retrospective with a program that delved into his early experiences playing with Art Blakey as well as his later work scoring films for Spike Lee.Then, at the NYU Skirball on Saturday, some early, sizzling early chamber music by Anthony Davis — whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” arrived at the Met last fall — received a rare airing from the International Contemporary Ensemble in a performance that also featured Davis playing some ferociously elegant solo piano.With their Met premieres, Blanchard and Davis have attained a status for Black jazz artists that would have made Morton, an opera lover, envious. But as these concerts demonstrated, there is much more in each composer’s catalog for audiences to mine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Louis Armstrong Musical ‘A Wonderful World’ Set for Broadway

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      “A Wonderful World,” featuring Armstrong’s songs, is set to begin previews at Studio 54 in October after previous runs in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago.“A Wonderful World,” a new musical about Louis Armstrong, will have a run on Broadway starting in the fall.The musical, which has previously been staged in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago, will star James Monroe Iglehart, who a decade ago won a Tony Award for originating the role of the Genie in “Aladdin,” and who is now starring as King Arthur in a Broadway revival of “Spamalot.”The show is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 16 and to open Nov. 11 at Studio 54, where the musical “Days of Wine and Roses” is now playing a limited run.When Armstrong died in 1971, the trumpeter and singer left a legacy as one of the most important figures in the history of jazz. The show examines his life through the eyes of his four wives.The score is made up of Armstrong songs including the classic that gives the show its title, along with “When You’re Smiling,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and others. The book is by Aurin Squire, and Christopher Renshaw is directing; Renshaw and Andrew Delaplaine are credited with conceiving the musical.“A Wonderful World” is being produced by Thomas E. Rodgers Jr., Renee Rodgers, Martian Entertainment (Carl D. White and Gregory Rae), Vanessa Williams and Elizabeth Curtis. More

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      Amaro Freitas Takes His Jazz Somewhere New: The Amazon

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      For his latest album, “Y’Y,” the Brazilian composer looked to inspirations in nature and experiments with prepared pianos.In the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco — a narrow, humid stretch of land where the South American coastline juts out into the Atlantic — fables endure the test of time. “There’s one about the Pajeú, the river which runs through the state,” the jazz composer and pianist Amaro Freitas said on a recent morning, video-calling from his sun-drenched living room in Recife. “It goes like this: Once upon a time, a Brazilian viola was buried in the riverbed. From that moment on, anyone who drank from the stream would become a poet.”Freitas, 32, who was born in Pernambuco and grew up surrounded by stories like this, never became a poet (though he is now married to one). But his work — which weaves traditional Northeastern musical styles such as baião and frevo into the language of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk — has always drawn from the cultural traditions and history of his homeland. Part of a new generation of Brazilian jazz artists looking to democratize and inject fresh life into the genre, Freitas and his trio first garnered critical acclaim with albums including “Sangue Negro” (2016), “Rasif” (2018) and “Sankofa,” a 2021 work he has described as a spiritual journey into the forgotten narratives of Black Brazil.His new solo record, “Y’Y,” out Friday, sees him travel out of Pernambuco and into the Amazon, where the sounds of birds, water and rustling leaves lend themselves to polyrhythmic compositions reminiscent of the rainforest. Drawing from Freitas’s encounters with the Sateré-Mawé Indigenous community, these new songs pay homage to the natural world.“National media here don’t cover the Amazon in depth,” said Freitas, speaking in Portuguese, wearing a graphic T-shirt printed with Nelson Mandela’s face. “So when I went there, and I saw the floating houses, saw the hammocks on boats, visited a tribe for the first time, and looked at the place where the straw-colored waters of the Amazon River meet the black Rio Negro, I felt like I was accessing another Brazil.”It was around the same time that Freitas became more interested in playing prepared, or modified, pianos. The technique — popularized by the 20th-century American composer and musical theorist John Cage — refers to placing items like bolts or screws between the instrument’s strings to create unique, unconventional and often more rhythmic sounds. “The difference is, unlike Cage, I didn’t want to use any metal — that damages the instrument, which would make touring really difficult. People would be like, ‘You’re putting a nail in my piano?’” Freitas said, laughing. “So I use wood, among other things: Amazonian seeds, clothes hangers, dominoes.”“There are times where I’m splitting myself between the Amazonian seeds, the African rhythms, and, on the other hand, European melodies,” Freitas, center, said. “It’s as though my left hand is Africa and my right hand is Europe.”Carlos BarneyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Beyoncé Jolted the Cuban Singer Daymé Arocena Into a Fresh Era

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      The prodigious jazz singer came to embrace her inner pop star on a new album made with Visitante from Calle 13.Running her fingers through her dreadlocks in an outdoor cafe overlooking San Juan’s grittily trendy Calle Loiza strip, Daymé Arocena reflected wistfully on an old flame.“There’s a song on the album, ‘American Boy,’ that I wrote 10 years ago,” she said, discussing a track from her latest LP, “Alkemi,” due on Feb. 23. “He was a serious bass player from New York, the first person who introduced to me free jazz. But I felt the song was so simple, so easygoing, so … pop, that it didn’t fit what I wanted” at the time.“American Boy,” which oscillates between a Yoruban ñongo rhythm and an ’80s-style funk groove replete with Earth, Wind & Fire-style horns, distills the essence of Arocena’s new direction: a move from serious jazz to what she calls “pop” — with a focus on Afro-Latina pride. It’s a major shift for an artist who has made four eclectic albums that combine complex jazz arrangements with Yoruban spirituality and an occasional love song with English-language lyrics.Arocena, 32, grew up in Santos Suárez, a neighborhood in Havana, with a family immersed in rumba folklore so passionately that they turned household objects into musical instruments. She entered the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory at age 10. “I had that double world of rumba at home and Bach at school,” she said and smiled.As she grew into adolescence, Arocena became the lead singer of the big band Los Primos, then created Alami, a jazz band made up of all women. (It later was reformed as Maqueque with the Toronto-based saxophonist and bandleader Jane Bunnett.) In 2014, the French D.J. and producer Gilles Peterson, who founded the London indie label Brownswood Recordings, invited Arocena to participate in “Havana Cultura Mix — The Soundclash,” a collaboration between international electronic artists and Cuban musicians.In some ways, Arocena’s tendency to mix Afro-Cuban folkloric music, post-salsa “timba” music and outside influences like R&B reflected the mid-2010s Havana scene that Peterson encountered, one that produced the funk master Cimafunk. He sang in Interactivo, a crucial band from this period that was “the soundtrack of an entire generation,” Arocena said. “Every Wednesday, all the cool kids would go to see them at the Bertolt Brecht” cultural center, she added, peppering her speech with an occasional English word or phrase.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Returns, Bringing a Jazz Tale to a New Generation

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      Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he wants audiences at the musical about Jelly Roll Morton to experience “a time period that does not exist anymore.”The team behind the Encores! revival of “Jelly’s Last Jam” is not looking to reinvent George C. Wolfe’s ambitious 1992 Broadway show. But they do hope that this rendition, opening on Wednesday at New York City Center, will introduce the musical to a new generation.Taking that idea a step further, Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he also wanted audiences “to immerse themselves in a joy in a time period that does not exist anymore.”That joy comes via the story of jazz and the works of Jelly Roll Morton, a ragtime pianist who said he invented the genre in 1902. In “Jelly’s Last Jam,” Morton is portrayed as a conflicted soul, a mixed-race man of Creole descent whose light hue gives him privilege in his hometown, New Orleans. He rebels against his heritage and soaks in the music of economically disadvantaged Black people, stirring up dissension in his family. He goes out on the road and becomes a well-known musician. Yet as jazz music’s popularity swells, Morton’s impact on it is forgotten. He’s a pioneer but isn’t given proper credit for it.John Clay III and Nicholas Christopher rehearsing last week at New York City Center before the show’s two-week run, which begins Wednesday.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesWhile Morton’s music is the centerpiece here, the show also features lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and additional compositions by Luther Henderson. In his review of the production, which starred Gregory Hines and Savion Glover as the older and younger versions of Morton, the Times critic Frank Rich called the first act “sizzling,” adding, “at once rollicking and excessive, roof-raising and overstuffed, you fly into intermission, high on the sensation that something new and exciting is happening.”The Encores! production features slightly tweaked arrangements by Webb, a Broadway veteran and Tony Award nominee for his orchestrations for “MJ the Musical.” Nicholas Christopher (“Sweeney Todd”) and Alaman Diadhiou take on the older and younger Morton roles, respectively, and other cast members include Billy Porter, Joaquina Kalukango, Leslie Uggams and Okierete Onaodowan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More