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      Review: Thanks to Chick Corea, the Trombone Is a Philharmonic Star

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      The jazz composer wrote a new concerto for the New York Philharmonic’s principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, but died before its U.S. premiere.There are not exactly a wealth of great concertos written for the trombone, that largely unheralded stalwart of the brass section. (Insert sad trombone sound here.) If anyone is going to change this state of affairs, it’s Joseph Alessi, the principal trombone of the New York Philharmonic. He’s an idol of legions of brass players for his rich tone, exemplary phrasing and virtuosic precision.In 1992, Alessi premiered Christopher Rouse’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Trombone Concerto. Almost three decades later, Alessi asked the widely loved jazz keyboardist and composer Chick Corea, who was enmeshed with classical music throughout his life, to create a trombone concerto. That work received its U.S. premiere at the Philharmonic on Thursday evening, performed by Alessi under the baton of Marin Alsop, another artist who easily code switches between jazz and classical idioms.The premiere was originally scheduled for the orchestra’s 2020-21 season. But with the onset of the pandemic, those plans were abandoned. Corea died of cancer in February 2021, and the concerto stands as his last finished work. (A recording, with Alessi as soloist, is scheduled for release this November on the Parma record label.)The four-movement work features a huge battery of percussion instruments — including gongs, marimba, xylophone and African cowbells — that lend a new palette of shimmering colors to the orchestra. And it shows off the marvel of Alessi’s technique and musicianship: in the first movement’s bluesy slides, in the lyrical tenderness of a second-movement waltz, and in devilish 16th-note runs in “Hysteria,” the third movement, which Corea wrote as pandemic lockdowns were just beginning. A final tango draws together the soloist and orchestra, before allowing Alessi to finish triumphantly on a series of high F sharps, venturing into trumpet territory.Corea had intended to play the prominent piano part in early performances. Instead, John Dickson, who orchestrated the concerto, is performing it with the Philharmonic. As an encore, Alessi introduced Dickson and they played a brief homage to Corea written by Dickson. It was a heartfelt adieu to their mutual friend and collaborator.The program opened with Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1. Written when Barber was just 25, it’s a mature wonder of a work, woefully under-programmed. (The last time the Philharmonic played it was during the Clinton administration.) Among its pleasures are declarative brass, crisp percussion, richly colored string writing and an exquisitely lyrical third movement.The New York Philharmonic musicians have finally relaxed into trusting the acoustics in David Geffen Hall. Gone is their urge to push hard to be heard — a necessity before the renovation. Instead, they now luxuriate in the chance to sculpt sound in space.Alsop celebrated that ability in 12 selected movements from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” Suites Nos. 1, 2 and 3, beginning with the fiery opening blasts of “The Montagues and the Capulets” and ending with the tear-stained “Death of Juliet.” Alsop drew out all the sharp accents and quick turns in “The Death of Tybalt,” and made the most of the silvery charm of the “Aubade.”Her vivid sense of color and rhythmic clarity framed Prokofiev’s ballet music as an exciting complement to the Barber Symphony, written the same year as some of the Prokofiev selections. This kind of creative juxtaposition, in which one piece illuminates another, is the essence of good concert programming.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      China Ramps Up Culture Crackdown, Canceling Music and Comedy Shows

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      Performances across the country were canceled last week after Beijing began investigating a stand-up comedian.The cancellations rippled across the country: A Japanese choral band touring China, stand-up comedy shows in several cities, jazz shows in Beijing. In the span of a few days, the performances were among more than a dozen that were abruptly called off — some just minutes before they were supposed to begin — with virtually no explanation.Just before the performances were scrapped, the authorities in Beijing had fined a Chinese comedy studio around $2 million, after one of its stand-up performers was accused of insulting the Chinese military in a joke; the police in northern China also detained a woman who had defended the comedian online.Those penalties, and the sudden spate of cancellations that followed, point to the growing scrutiny of China’s already heavily censored creative landscape. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has made arts and culture a central arena for ideological crackdowns, demanding that artists align their creative ambitions with Chinese Communist Party goals and promote a nationalist vision of Chinese identity. Performers must submit scripts or set lists for vetting, and publications are closely monitored.On Tuesday, Mr. Xi sent a letter to the National Art Museum of China for its 60th anniversary, reminding staff to “adhere to the correct political orientation.”Mr. Xi’s emphasis on the arts is also part of a broader preoccupation with national security and eliminating supposedly malign foreign influence. The authorities in recent weeks have raided the corporate offices of several Western consulting or advisory companies based in China, and broadened the range of behaviors covered under counterespionage laws. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, sent a letter to the National Art Museum of China on Tuesday reminding staff there to “adhere to the correct political orientation.”Pool photo by Florence LoMany of the canceled events were supposed to feature foreign performers or speakers.It was only to be expected that Beijing would also look to the cultural realm, as its deteriorating relationship with the West has made it more fixated on maintaining its grip on power at home, said Zhang Ping, a former journalist and political commentator in China who now lives in Germany.“One way to respond to anxiety about power is to increase control,” said Mr. Zhang, who writes under the pen name Chang Ping. “Dictatorships have always sought to control people’s entertainment, speech, laughter and tears.”While the party has long regulated the arts — one target of the Cultural Revolution was creative work deemed insufficiently “revolutionary” — the intensity has increased sharply under Mr. Xi. In 2021, a state-backed performing arts association published a list of morality guidelines for artists, which included prescriptions for patriotism. The same year, the government banned “sissy men” from appearing on television, accusing them of weakening the nation.A bookstore in Zibo, China. Literature is closely regulated by the authorities.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesOfficials have also taken notice of stand-up comedy, which has gained popularity in recent years and offered a rare medium for limited barbs about life in contemporary China. The government fined a comedian for making jokes about last year’s coronavirus lockdown in Shanghai. People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, published a commentary in November that said jokes had to be “moderate” and noted that stand-up as an art form was a foreign import; the Chinese name for stand-up, “tuo kou xiu,” is itself a transliteration from “talk show.”The recent crackdown began after an anonymous social media user complained about a set that a popular stand-up comedian, Li Haoshi, performed in Beijing on May 13. Mr. Li, who uses the stage name House, had said that watching his two adopted stray dogs chase a squirrel reminded him of a Chinese military slogan: “Maintain exemplary conduct, fight to win.” The user suggested that Mr. Li had slanderously compared soldiers to wild dogs.Outrage grew among nationalist social media users, and the authorities quickly piled on. In addition to fining Xiaoguo Culture Media, the firm that manages Mr. Li, the authorities — who said the joke had a “vile societal impact” — indefinitely suspended the company’s performances in Beijing and Shanghai. Xiaoguo fired Mr. Li, and the Beijing police said they were investigating him.Within hours of the penalty being announced on Wednesday, organizers of stand-up shows in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and eastern Shandong Province canceled their performances. A few days later, Chinese social media platforms suspended the accounts of Uncle Roger, a Britain-based Malaysian comic whose real name is Nigel Ng; Mr. Ng had posted a video poking fun at the Chinese government on Twitter (which is banned in mainland China).But the apparent fallout was not limited to comedy. Scheduled musical performances began disappearing, too, including a stop in southern China by a Shanghai rock band that includes foreign members, a Beijing folk music festival and several jazz performances, and a Canadian rapper’s show in the southern city of Changsha.The frontman of a Buddhist-influenced Japanese chorus group, Kissaquo, said last Wednesday that his concert that night in the southern city of Guangzhou had been canceled. Hours later, the frontman, Kanho Yakushiji, said a performance in Hangzhou, in eastern China, had been canceled, too. And the next day, he announced that Beijing and Shanghai shows had also been called off.“I was writing a set list, but I stopped in the middle,” Mr. Yakushiji, whose management company did not respond to a request for comment, wrote on his Facebook page. “I still don’t understand what the meaning of all this is. I have nothing but regrets.”Organizers’ announcements for nearly all of the canceled events cited “force majeure,” a term that means circumstances beyond one’s control — and, in China, has often been used as shorthand for government pressure.Stand-up show organizers did not return requests for comment. Several organizers of canceled musical performances denied that they had been told not to feature foreigners. An employee at a Nanjing music venue that canceled a tribute to the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto said not enough tickets had been sold. A Chinese rock band concert in Qinhuangdao, China, last year. Scheduled musical performances have been canceled, with organizers citing “force majeure.”Wu Hao/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of the foreign musicians whose shows were canceled have since been able to perform in other cities or at other venues.But a foreign musician in Beijing, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said his band was scheduled to play at a bar on Sunday and was told by the venue several days before that the gig was canceled because featuring foreigners would bring trouble.Lynette Ong, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto, said it was unlikely that the central government had issued direct instructions to spur the recent cultural crackdowns. Local governments or venue owners, conscious of how the political environment had changed, were likely being especially cautious, she said.“In Xi’s China, people are so scared and fearful that they become extremely risk-averse,” she said. “Overall, it’s a very paranoid party.”In the past, when nationalism has gone to extremes, or local officials overzealously enforced the rules, the central government would eventually step in to cool down the rhetoric, in part to preserve economic or diplomatic relationships. But Professor Ong said Beijing’s current emphasis on security above all would give it no reason to intervene here.“If people don’t watch comedy, there’s no loss for the party,” she said.Joy Dong More

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      Bill Lee, Bassist and Composer of Son Spike Lee’s Films, Dies at 94

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      He accompanied a wide range of jazz and folk musicians and scored “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists and was a prolific sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and others, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 94. Spike Lee confirmed the death.Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.Mr. Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge that called for capturing the independence of a romantic Black woman in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical look at life at a Black college in “School Daze” (1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and the poignant hardships of a Black jazz musician in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990).Bill Lee had small parts in all but “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, had roles in all four. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the first student film to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, in 1983.The feature films won largely positive reviews and reaped sizable profits. Bill and Spike Lee had a falling-out in the early 1990s, over family matters, money and other issues, that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee films — he has directed more than 30, appearing in many of them himself — were scored by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard.Mr. Lee, right, on bass, at the Five Spot in New York in 1960 with the saxophonist John Handy’s quartet. Don Friedman was on piano and Joe Hunt on drums.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesBorn into an Alabama family of musicians and educators who instilled a passion for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated small-town public schools and studied music at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating to New York City in 1959.Over the next decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between numbers, performed often in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village, squeezed among meatpacking houses and trucking depots on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and founded and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, sometimes accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile harmony of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s folk operas at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.His numerous operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot” and “Baby Sweets,” were based on people and events from his early life in the South. They sometimes drew on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent color to the tales.In a review of a performance by the Violin Choir at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, singer and narrator of his sketches of small-town life in Snow Hill, Ala., building both his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists, bending over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by turns gorgeously warm and singing or so surprisingly light and airy that one suspected a couple of flutes might be hiding among them.”Mr. Lee in an undated portrait. His numerous operas were based on people and events from his early life in the South.David LeeIn the 1970s, when the electric bass became an instrument of choice in many jazz ensembles because its thumping tones suited the commercial sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go along and lost work as a result. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. “Just thinking about doing it, my gut reaction hit me so hard in the stomach. I knew I could never live with myself.”Spike Lee explored the problem of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times when the film opened. “It’s their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They have an understanding only of the music, not of the business, so they get treated any old way.”Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”Bill Lee in front of his brownstone across from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 2013. The house was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWilliam James Edwards Lee was born in Snow Hill on July 23, 1928, to Arnold Lee, a cornet player and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical concert pianist and teacher. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four other siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded a log-cabin arts school for Black students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr. Edwards died a few years later, but the institute survived as a segregated public school until 1973, when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there in the mid-1940s.Mr. Lee and his first wife, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an art teacher, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s death in 1976, Mr. Lee married Susan Kaplan. They had one son, Arnold. Christopher died in 2013. Mr. Lee’s sister Consuela died at 83 in 2009.In addition to Spike Lee, he is survived by his wife; his sons David, Cinque and Arnold; his daughter, Joie; a brother, A. Clifton Lee; and two grandchildren.After arriving in New York, Mr. Lee settled in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood that became a magnet for Black musicians and other creative artists who took pride in their lifestyles and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta Have It.”Mr. Lee with his son Spike in 2009 for a 20th-anniversary screening of the Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing,” for which Bill Lee wrote the soundtrack.Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan via Getty ImagesThe Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all but banished television but was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night, prompting noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sounds in the heart of Brooklyn.During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee played piano and double bass. “His music has the complex harmonies of bebop and hard bop, but it also has a sincere, down-home, churchy feel,” the reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote. “His passages move in interesting and unexpected places, but they resolve before long in a way that is simple and sincere, earthy and somehow very satisfying.” More

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      Kassa Overall Knows Artists Feel Pressure. His New Album Explores It.

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      The drummer whose genre-crossing work has brought acclaim here and abroad returns with “Animals,” an LP of jazz, rap and soul inspired by the struggle to be OK.On a cloudy afternoon, the drummer Kassa Overall strolled past his first New York City apartment, a second-floor room in a Fort Greene brownstone. He had moved to Brooklyn after graduating from Oberlin in 2006 to play in the local jazz scene while improving his chops as a beatmaker. To help him make ends meet, the drummer Billy Hart got him a gig playing the djembe for a physical therapy dance class at a nursing home in Harlem.“So I came into the game with a consistent paying thing, low rent, and it was just like, ‘Damn, I’m here,’” Overall, 40, said as he toured his old neighborhood in March. “So I just stayed.”Fast-forward to 2020: Overall had built himself into a noted musician here and abroad, with a multifaceted sound synthesizing jazz, rap and R&B, and an album called “I Think I’m Good” — on the British tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label — poised to push him into wider circles. Or so he thought. “It really felt like this was about to pop,” Overall recalled. “We did Japan, then we did the West Coast, and we were selling out merch every show.”But the pandemic shut down the possibility of further touring. Overall flew back to his native Seattle and wondered what was next. “I went from being a touring musician and always having extra income to barely having enough,” he said over lunch, opening up about his hard times without any apprehension. “I felt like I wasn’t as successful as it felt like I was on the internet.”The anguish led him to start work on a new album, “Animals,” out May 26, about the struggles of surviving as an entertainer, and how the pressure to stand out can push an artist too far. “I’m one of those people that’s like, I had mental illness stuff back in the day, and I have a sensitivity,” he explained. “I can’t just walk through the world normal. I got to do a lot of [expletive] to keep my train on the track.”“I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it,” Overall said. “So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Michael Tyrone DelaneyOverall had challenges throughout college, while he was studying jazz performance; he couldn’t sleep and had bouts of what he called “super high energy.” Then he’d be depressed for days. “I remember even telling my mom one day, ‘I think I’m bipolar,’” he said, recalling a moment when he was in high school. “I had this period where I was getting real isolated.” He described a manic episode where he began seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. “I started seeing stuff on me.”“I Think I’m Good” unpacked the experience of living with bipolar disorder through scant electroacoustic backing tracks and heavily modulated vocals. “Animals” takes a different approach, inspired by Overall’s feeling of kinship with unconventional musicians like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix — “artists that you could tell were special, but also couldn’t really handle the pressure,” he said.The album’s vigorous jazz, rap and soul blends live instruments with electronic drum tracks. Its formidable roster of collaborators includes the rappers Danny Brown, Lil B and Ish of Shabazz Palaces; the vocalists Nick Hakim and Laura Mvula; and the jazz instrumentalists Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer. “The Lava Is Calm” features chilling piano; “Maybe We Can Stay” spotlights sweeping strings and flutes darting across a bouncy backbeat.“It feels like you’re in a zoo — you can’t go full animal, you know?” Overall said. “I was feeling like, within this machine and within this whole organism, I can see within myself, I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it. So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Overall’s childhood in Seattle was filled with music and life lessons from his free-spirited parents. (His mother worked for the local PBS station, and his father did odd jobs and stayed at home with the children.) “Everybody else had Kraft singles and Coca-Cola,” he quipped, “we had soy milk and tofu.”He was a quick study who learned how to play drums as a young child, exploring a living room full of instruments that his father collected. There was a piano, saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, a broken violin, a four-track recorder and a beat machine that he said no one knew how to use. But Overall learned how to manipulate the electronic equipment; by fourth grade, he and his older brother, Carlos, started playing jazz songs like “Autumn Leaves” and “A Night in Tunisia.”“I’m coming home with a lot of dollar bills and ironing them,” he remembered of their early performances. “And my dad was super hands-on with us. He would take us to the spot and set up, we’d find a corner and make bread.”Overall grew up listening to a wide array of artists — John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, Public Enemy and DJ Quik — which gave him a natural feel for all kinds of sounds. A turning point in his relationship to music came when he was a sophomore in high school and landed a $9 an hour job sweeping peanut shells and taking out trash at the Major League Baseball stadium in Seattle. After he and some friends were fired for smoking marijuana, he had a realization.“Wait a minute. I’m doing jazz gigs, getting a hundred a night, 150, sometimes 200 on a good gig,” Overall remembered thinking. “So I could either level this up or I could get better at sweeping peanuts and stuff. And I haven’t had a real job since then.”Hart, a mentor and one of Overall’s Oberlin professors, was taken by his student’s assertiveness. “I knew he had a certain amount of self-confidence that was obvious when he got there,” said Hart, who is also a noted Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner collaborator. “As far as I’m concerned, Kassa is a jazz musician who has excelled in the pop field,” he added. “He’s found a unique direction all his own. If he keeps going the way he’s going, he’s going to be a major star.”Peterson, the Brownswood Recordings founder, was one of Overall’s early supporters, and he said he was struck by Overall’s curiosity for sounds outside jazz. “He’s kind of incorporated all these elements and made something fresh and new, but with all the aspects of traditional music,” he said. “He has a really great sense of being able to push the audience to a point where they can’t take anymore before bringing the beat back in — it’s brave.”Speaking and writing candidly about his own struggles requires its own bravery, but Overall says the new album isn’t simply about one person’s trials.“We’re all aspiring to reach a higher place. And we’re all aspiring to do better,” he said. “But also have empathy for those who don’t. Because I know how hard it is. I know how hard it is to just do OK. There’s a large percentage of us that are not going to do OK. So maybe those are the people we consider animals. But it could have been you, could have been me. May have been me in the past life, or in the next life.” More

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      Don Sebesky, Arranger Who Helped Broaden Jazz’s Audience, Dies at 85

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      He won Tonys for his orchestrations and Grammys for his compositions and arrangements. But he was best known for his genre-straddling work at CTI Records.Don Sebesky, who in a wide-ranging musical career played with leading big bands, was a behind-the-scenes force at CTI Records and other jazz labels, won Grammy Awards for his own compositions and arrangements, and orchestrated some 20 Broadway shows, died on April 29 at a nursing home in Maplewood, N.J. He was 85.The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter Elizabeth Jonas said.Mr. Sebesky’s musical interests ranged far and wide. He created arrangements not only for jazz musicians but also for a diverse range of pop vocalists, including Nancy Wilson, Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow. To jazz aficionados, though, he was best known — and sometimes criticized — for the work he did as a sort of house arranger for Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI, a jazz label that was a major force in the 1970s.From the beginning, Mr. Taylor and CTI were on a mission to broaden the audience for jazz by exploring intersections with pop, rock and R&B, and by making music that was more accessible to mainstream audiences than some of jazz’s more esoteric strains. It was an approach that displeased some purists, but it sold records, and Mr. Sebesky’s arranging skills were pivotal to that success.Mr. Sebesky arranged the saxophonist Paul Desmond’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970), an album of interpretations of Simon & Garfunkel songs. He arranged the guitarist George Benson’s “White Rabbit” (1972), an album anchored by Mr. Benson’s rendition of the title track, the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane hit. Pairing Mr. Benson with that song was an idea Mr. Sebesky had proposed to Mr. Taylor, but with a twist.“I suggested we do ‘White Rabbit’ in a Spanish mode,” Mr. Sebesky told Marc Myers for the website JazzWax in 2010. “He agreed. George Benson doesn’t read music. He just heard the song and automatically fell into the groove.”Mr. Sebesky in the studio with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the guitarist Wes Montgomery in 1967, working on Mr. Montgomery’s album “A Day in the Life.” The album would be one of the most successful Mr. Sebesky arranged.Chuck StewartThose were just two of the countless records on which Mr. Sebesky worked for CTI from the late 1960s (when it was a subsidiary of A&M) through the 1970s. He also made his own albums as a bandleader, for CTI and other labels. These, too, often merged jazz and rock.His debut album, “The Distant Galaxy” (1968), included versions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna.” “Don Sebesky and the Jazz-Rock Syndrome,” released the same year, included his version of the Peter, Paul and Mary hit “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” as well as other covers.In 1984 Mr. Sebesky made his nightclub debut as a bandleader, bringing a 12-piece band to Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan to play selections from “Full Cycle,” an album he had just released on the Crescendo label that featured his arrangements of Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” John Lewis’s “Django” and other jazz standards.“At Fat Tuesday’s, a low-ceilinged, narrow room in which the 12 musicians must be strung out in a line, instrumental separation and clarity are a far cry from the possibilities of a recording studio,” John S. Wilson wrote in a review in The New York Times. “But what may be lost in this respect is made up for in the vitality and involvement projected by the musicians and the visual razzle-dazzle of the variety of instruments brought into play.”The next year, reviewing a return engagement at the same club, Mr. Wilson wrote, “This is a band full of fresh ideas and fresh sounds that set it apart.”By then, Mr. Sebesky had begun working on Broadway as well. His first credit was for some of the orchestrations for “Peg,” a 1983 autobiographical one-woman show starring the singer Peggy Lee.That show was short-lived, but many of his other Broadway shows did better. The 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” ran for more than two years and won him a Tony Award for best orchestrations. “An American in Paris” in 2015 also had a long run, and he shared a second Tony, with Christopher Austin and Bill Elliott, for the orchestrations of that show.His one attempt at writing the score for a Broadway show was less successful. “Prince of Central Park,” for which he wrote the music and Gloria Nissenson wrote the lyrics, closed after four performances in 1989.In 1999 Mr. Sebesky, after many nominations, won his first Grammy Award, for his arrangement of the pianist Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby” on his album “I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans.”The next year was a career highlight: He became one of the few people who could say that he didn’t lose a Grammy to Carlos Santana.Mr. Santana, thanks to his album “Supernatural,” was a Grammy juggernaut that year, winning eight awards. In the category of best instrumental composition, Mr. Sebesky won for “Joyful Noise Suite” — beating out, among others, Mr. Santana.“That was very much of a surprise,” Mr. Sebesky, who also won a Grammy that year for best instrumental arrangement, told The Home News Tribune of New Jersey in 2000. “We expected the Santana steamroller to run over everything.”Mr. Sebesky played accordion on the guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli’s 1998 album of Beatles songs. “My mother,” he once said, “thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.” But he had other plans.via Sebesky familyDonald Alexander Sebesky was born on Dec. 10, 1937, in Perth Amboy, N.J. His father, Alexander, was a laborer in a steel cable factory, and his mother, Eleanor (Ehnot) Sebesky, was a homemaker.He studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music but left before graduating in the late 1950s to pursue a nascent career as a trombonist, playing in the bands of Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson.Before studying with the big-band trombonist Warren Covington, his instrument had been the accordion.“My mother was real disappointed” when he switched instruments, he told The Evening Press of Binghamton, N.Y., in 1982. “She thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Sebesky was concentrating on writing and arranging.“There seemed like nothing could be better than taking a group of instruments and seeing what sounds could be made to come out of them,” he told The Evening Press.Mr. Sebesky’s first marriage, to Janet Sebesky, ended in divorce. He married Janina Serden in 1986. In addition to Ms. Jonas, his daughter from his second marriage, he is survived by his wife; another daughter from his second marriage, Olivia Sebesky; two sons from his first marriage, Ken and Kevin; a brother, Gerald; and nine grandchildren. Two daughters from his first marriage, Cymbaline Rossman and Alison Bealey, died before Mr. Sebesky. Before moving to the nursing home in Maplewood, he lived for about 30 years in Mendham, N.J.Jamie Lawrence, an Emmy Award-winning musician and music director who worked with Mr. Sebesky on various projects, including playing synthesizer on demos for commercials Mr. Sebesky worked on, recalled that Mr. Sebesky’s charts could be hard to read — a result, he thought, of his working quickly because he always had so many jobs going on.“But if you could decipher them and get all the notes down,” he said in a phone interview, “they all made sense. They were the right notes. He was a musician’s musician.”Alex Traub More

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      The Bassist Carlos Henriquez Covers All the Latin and Jazz Bases

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      The longtime Jazz at Lincoln Center musician leads a tribute this weekend to his mambo ancestors Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez.As he worked his way through a rice bowl at a Japanese restaurant near Columbus Circle in Manhattan on a recent afternoon, the bassist, composer and arranger Carlos Henriquez reflected on the long history of Latino musicians in the jazz world.“In the 1920s, there was a bassist and tuba player called Ralph Escudero who used to play with W.C. Handy and Fletcher Henderson,” he said, arching his manicured eyebrows for emphasis. “We’ve always been part of this. So, I’m going to say, Hey, I’m from the South Bronx, I’m Puerto Rican and I love jazz.”Henriquez, who will lead an all-star band on May 5-6 in a centennial tribute to the mambo kings Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez at Jazz at Lincoln Center, was about to join a rehearsal for the institution’s annual gala. Dressed down in a gray plaid flannel shirt and dark bluejeans, he took his place at his pivotally placed bassist’s chair as the orchestra practiced standards — the theme this year was “American Anthems” — including Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”“I’ve always visualized the bass as the catcher of a baseball team — we see everything, the whole game,” he said. “That catcher is dealing with everything that’s coming in and calling the plays. We, the bass players, can really determine where the music is going to, where the concept is going.”Over about 25 years as a professional musician, Henriquez has developed a reputation as a grounded but wildly imaginative composer and player. “Carlos has become a master of his instrument and writing arrangements,” said the timbalero José Madera in a phone interview from his home in Colorado. “He’s grown, he’s left the planet, he’s in outer space somewhere.”Henriquez’s path from the streets of 1980s Mott Haven in the Bronx to the Jazz at Lincoln Center stage was sparked in part by an encounter as a teenager with the organization’s director, Wynton Marsalis. “When I was a kid, the Jazzmobile used to come to St. Mary’s Park across the street from the Betances Houses, where I grew up,” Henriquez said, referring to the portable stage that brings jazz to New York neighborhoods. “I remember Clark Terry and David Murray played, and also Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow.”Henriquez said his father, who worked at a V.A. hospital, was given cassettes by his African American friends. “One day he gave me a tape with Bill Evans, Eddie Gomez and Paul Chambers, and I was freaking out — I was like, man, this is killing.”At first, Henriquez played the piano, and then switched to classical guitar, which landed him in the Juilliard School’s music advancement program while he attended the performing arts high school LaGuardia. He switched to bass in his second year‌ at Juilliard, and won first place in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington competition for high school bands. At 19, he joined the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.“I started going to Wynton’s house religiously, and we exchanged information about Latin music, something we do to this day,” Henriquez said. “And vice versa. If I need help with classical music or something, he’ll help me out.”Henriquez onstage with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, featuring its leader, Wynton Marsalis (at right).Tina Fineberg for The New York TimesDuring a question-and-answer session at Essentially Ellington in 2019, Marsalis praised his protégé: “Every night this man is coming to swing,” he said, addressing a roomful of jazz hopefuls. “He gave me a another whole way of understanding music,” Marsalis added. Describing a moment when Henriquez offered a critique on a piece Marsalis had written, the trumpeter recalled the bassist saying, “It’s all on the wrong beat.’”For Henriquez, the key to fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz is finding a way to get the feeling of swing to conform to the five-beat clave rhythm. “It’s not just imagining ‘The Peanut Vendor’ as played by John Coltrane,” he said. Henríquez credits Manny Oquendo’s Conjunto Libre and the Fort Apache Band, which was headed by the Bronx brothers Andy and Jerry González, as “spiritual leaders.”As a session bassist, Henriquez has played with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Lenny Kravitz, Natalie Merchant, the bachata group Aventura and the Cuban jazz pianists Chucho Valdés and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. He has even toured with Nuyorican Soul, the dance-music project led by the D.J.s Little Louie Vega and Kenny (Dope) Gonzalez. “We had DJ Jazzy Jeff spinning records onstage while we were playing Latin grooves,” he said.Since 2010, when Henriquez served that year as musical director of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s cultural exchange with the Cuban Institute of Music, he has been integrally involved in the group’s Latin jazz programming. In the past decade, he’s been at the helm for a show featuring Rubén Blades singing jazz and salsa standards, a Latin spin on the work of Dizzy Gillespie, and last year’s scintillating “Monk con Clave” tribute to Thelonious Monk.“I was telling them, look, there’s a bigger picture to this,” Henriquez said of his message to the orchestra’s leadership. Musicians from earlier eras who are meaningful to the New York scene are “not getting credit,” or opportunities to perform. “We need to hire these people so that we could at least let them know that we didn’t forget about them.”“We, the bass players can really determine where the music is going to, where the concept is going,” Henriquez said.Dana Golan for The New York TimesFor this week’s Puente and Rodríguez tribute, Henriquez, who played with the Tito Puente orchestra when he was in his late teens, enlisted longtime Puente collaborators like the bongo player Johnny (Dandy) Rodríguez Jr. and Madera, and crafted a set list that combines both well-known and somewhat obscure tracks from the two luminaries.One of Henriquez’s charms is his ability to ad-lib nuggets of Latin music and jazz history between songs, in quips that land somewhere between stand-up comedy and a TED Talk. Asked over lunch about the rumored rivalry between Puente and Rodríguez, who vied for top billing at shows at the Palladium and other venues, he coolly demurred in deadpan comic tone. The song “El Que Se Fue” (“The One Who Left”)? “Rodríguez was trashing a guy,” Henriquez said, “but it wasn’t Tito Puente.”The Puente centennial has also occasioned a tribute and art exhibit at Hostos Community College in the Bronx; a vinyl reissue on Craft Recordings of “Mambo Diablo,” Puente’s 1985 jazz album, which featured “Lush Life” and other jazz standards; and an event at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts on May 20. Yet as much as the mambo era burns brightly in the spirit of Latin New York, Henriquez, whose 2021 solo album “The South Bronx Story” mined 1970s lore of widespread arson and street gang truces, continues to dig deeper into other neglected histories.“I’m working on my next album and I realize, we’re right in the middle of this neighborhood that used to be called San Juan Hill,” he said, referring to the area that was demolished to build Lincoln Center. “And then I find out, we used to live here, with African Americans, and Benny Carter wrote a suite called Echoes of San Juan Hill, and Thelonious Monk used to play here. I came to realize how valuable this neighborhood was, and I found this out because I was yearning to find my connection to jazz.“It’s the spirits of our ancestors, and they’re calling, you know?” More

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      Karl Berger, 88, Who Opened Minds of Generations of Musicians, Is Dead

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      A vibraphonist, pianist, educator and musical thinker, he co-founded the Creative Music Studio to bring all kinds of musicians together to foster cross-pollination and improvisation.Karl Berger, a musician, composer, educator and author who taught improvisation and his concept of an attentive, collaborative “music mind” to generations of musicians and artists at his Creative Music Studio near Woodstock, N.Y., died on April 9 in Albany, N.Y. He was 88.Billy Martin, the studio’s executive director, said the death, at Albany Medical Center, was caused by complications following gastrointestinal surgery.Mr. Berger was a pianist and vibraphonist who performed and recorded with leading jazz musicians including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John McLaughlin, Carla Bley, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Pharoah Sanders, Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz, among many others.Mr. Coleman, Mr. Berger and his wife, the singer Ingrid Sertso, founded the Creative Music Foundation in the early 1970s, to focus on improvisation and musical cross-pollination. The foundation ran the Creative Music Studio, in various locations in and near Woodstock, where Mr. Berger and other artists performed and taught. There, internationally known musicians from jazz and other traditions worked with musicians at all levels of skill, from amateur to virtuoso.Through the years, Mr. Berger played with small and large ensembles, recorded extensively, led university music departments, wrote arrangements for rock and pop albums, taught schoolchildren and adults, and developed his own techniques to unlock and encourage individual and collaborative musical thinking. His compositions often made connections with non-Western styles, and his musical practices drew on Eastern spirituality and meditation.“It’s not what you play, it’s how you play,” he often said.Mr. Martin said Mr. Berger’s musical approach was “not about genre.”“It’s about listening and making sound together,” he said, “starting from that fundamental place and building from there.”The jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, a frequent collaborator with Mr. Berger, with students at the Creative Music Studio in 1978.In his book, “The Music Mind Experience,” written with Rick Maurer, Mr. Berger insisted that “everyone is born with an abundance of musical talent,” and that all music shares fundamental common elements: rhythm, sound, space and dynamics. He sought to teach both players and listeners to escape routine and to concentrate their attention “fully in the moment.”Mr. Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg, Germany. He began studying classical piano at 10, but at 14 he heard a jazz jam session that made him decide to play his own music. In 1953, he joined a group that included Ms. Sertso, whom he would soon marry. She survives him along with their daughter, Savia.In the 1950s, as the house pianist at the Heidelberg club Cave 54, Mr. Berger learned modern jazz in late-night jams with American musicians from military bands stationed nearby. He earned a Ph.D. in musicology and philosophy in Germany in 1963 and held philosophy professorships at two universities in Germany. But by the mid-1960s he had turned to music.He moved to Paris and joined a group led by the trumpeter Don Cherry, who had been learning world-music melodies from shortwave radio broadcasts. In 1966, Mr. Cherry invited Mr. Berger to New York City to play on “Symphony for Improvisers,” a landmark free-jazz album.Mr. Berger made his debut album as a leader, “From Now On,” in 1967, and recorded with Mr. Cherry and others in the late 1960s. He went on to make more than two dozen albums as a leader and many others as a sideman. His lean, linear, freely melodic vibraphone playing repeatedly made him the top vibraphonist in the Down Beat magazine musicians’ poll.In 1971, Mr. Berger started the Creative Music Foundation with Ms. Sertso, Mr. Coleman and an advisory board that included John Cage, Gil Evans, Buckminster Fuller and Willem de Kooning. He moved to Woodstock in 1972 and inaugurated the Creative Music Studio, which settled into a nearby mountain lodge with residences and performance spaces.Leading musicians including Mr. Braxton, Mr. DeJohnette, Cecil Taylor and Dave Holland joined students in improvising groups. More than 550 performances were recorded and later digitized for an archive that was purchased by the Columbia University Library in 2012.During the 1980s, grant funding dwindled, and the studio curtailed its programs in 1984. But Mr. Berger remained active as a performer, touring Europe, Asia and Africa with Ms. Sertso.In the 1990s, he was also in demand as a string-section arranger. After working on Jeff Buckley’s 1994 album “Grace,” he wrote arrangements for albums by Natalie Merchant, Angelique Kidjo and others.Mr. Berger in 2008. The Creative Music Studio lost funding and curtailed its programs in the 1980s, but he continued to teach, perform and compose.Phil Mansfield for The New York TimesMr. Berger was a professor of composition and dean of music education at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts in Germany, and chairman of the department of music at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth during the early 2000s — although he objected to the department’s emphasis on classroom study rather than performance.He and Ms. Sertso opened Sertso Recording Studio in Woodstock in 2004. In 2010, with the help of musicians who had studied at Creative Music Studio decades earlier, they revived the organization. Mr. Berger led concerts in New York City and elsewhere by an Improvisers Orchestra, and in 2013 the studio restarted intensive semiannual workshops in the Catskills with musicians including Vijay Iyer, Henry Threadgill, Steven Bernstein and Joe Lovano.Mr. Berger relinquished the leadership of Creative Music Studio in 2017. But he continued to record and perform. His most recent release, in 2022, was a trio album, “Heart Is a Melody,” with Kirk Knuffke on cornet and Matt Wilson on drums. The album reached back to Mr. Berger’s free-jazz inspirations, with an Indian-inspired Don Cherry piece, “Ganesh,” and a tune called “Ornette.”“We all are infinitely more talented than we’ll ever realize in one lifetime,” Mr. Berger wrote in “The Music Mind Experience.” He continued, “Once we get in touch with our own voice, our own ways, we simply have to stay with it.” More

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      10 Tito Puente Essentials for the Mambo King’s Centennial

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      A Harlem-born New York original, the percussionist, composer and bandleader helped define Latin jazz and lay the groundwork for 1970s salsa.Ernest Anthony Puente, known as Tito, was born in Harlem on April 20, 1923, and went on to create an enormous body of work (over 100 albums) while earning a reputation as a tireless performer. His irresistible swirl of energy helped make his main instrument, the timbales, emblematic of Latin music in the mid-20th century.In a career that stretched over six decades, Puente was a clever innovator and a prized collaborator. He got his start playing with Machito and his Afro-Cubans, the band led by Frank (Machito) Grillo that pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz fusion. He then went on to headline, becoming one of the stars of the glitzy Palladium mambo era — named for the club on West 52nd Street in Manhattan that attracted diverse crowds to dance to mambo orchestras with elaborate horn and percussion sections. When stripped-down salsa bands of a new generation began to steal his thunder, he persisted by hiring both La Lupe and Celia Cruz — two brilliant and beloved Cuban singers — as his lead vocalists. In the 1980s, he found new ways to evolve Latin jazz by spotlighting the work of unheralded instrumentalists, and at the end of the century, he teamed with younger singers like La India and Marc Anthony.Growing up in New York, decades before the “Great Migration” in the 1950s of Puerto Ricans to the United States, Puente was a prototypical Nuyorican. He was just as comfortable speaking in English as in Spanish, and he idolized big-band jazz icons like Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa while studying piano with Victoria Hernández, a sister of the famed Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Hernández. Like Krupa, Puente moved his percussion kit to the front of the band, a move that centered the rhythm as the driver of the dance beat and came to define the mambo sound — big-band jazz fused with Afro-Cuban rhythms and featuring extended improvisational breaks that fueled dancers’ energy — much in the way Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón would later feature trombones to define salsa.When Puente died in June 2000 at 77, it was a great blow not only to fans of mambo, cha-cha-cha, bugalú, salsa and Latin jazz, but also to New York itself. Yet his sound lives on and concerts celebrating his era resonate in the city he called home and beyond. (Jazz at Lincoln Center will present its “Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez Centennial Celebration” on May 5 and 6 at the Rose Theater.)Here are 10 examples of how Puente became known as the King of Latin music.“Abaniquito” (1949)The song that started Puente’s ascent was released as a 78-r.p.m. single with a hyperactive piano vamp and frenetic rhythm section that showcased the unrestrained dance floor energy of what was then an emergent Palladium scene. Featuring the beloved vocalist Vicentico Valdés as well as Graciela Pérez, Machito’s sister, on the chorus, the track exemplifies the strong influence of the Machito band on Puente’s jazz-mambo fusion.“Babarabatiri” (1951)Arriving at the dawn of the mambo era, this song is a riveting immersion in Puente’s rapidly coalescing sound. It’s flush with jazz swing, irresistible syncopation and a call-and-response between a repetitive vocal chorus, the horn section and percussion. Seizing on the momentum created by an earlier version — by the Cuban vocalist Beny Moré fronting Pérez Prado’s orchestra — the Puente rendition, with the vocalist Santos Colón, comes off as a cooler jazz reinterpretation.“Mamborama” (1955)By the mid-1950s, Puente had emerged as one of the dominant performers on the Palladium scene, engaged in his famous rivalry with the bandleader and vocalist Tito Rodríguez, who responded to the “Mamborama” album with his 1956 release “Mambo Madness.” Puente’s LP features the loping yet propulsive rhythmic figures of “Ran Kan Kan,” another classic, but the anthemic “Mambo Inn” makes perhaps the album’s strongest statement with its triumphant melodic theme, bruising horn section and the powder-keg pummeling of Puente’s timbale-conga attack.Tito Puente & His Orchestra, “Top Percussion” (1957)Taking a short break from Palladium mambo, Puente dug deep into the African roots of Cuban dance music on this album, bringing together the percussionists Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo with the vocalist Merceditas Valdés to re-create the feeling of rumba and ritual toque de santo, a practice designed to communicate with the pantheon of Yoruban deities. The album closes with the seven-minute “Night Ritual,” an Afro-Cuban jazz suite featuring Johnny Carson’s bandleader, the trumpeter Doc Severinsen. Puente revisited the concept in 1960 with “Tambó,” which repeated the deep percussion theme while using more mambo orchestra instruments.“Dance Mania” (1958)Perhaps Puente’s most famous and most listened to album, “Dance Mania” began the shift from mambo to what would become known as salsa by including some tracks identified by their Cuban-derived genres. While the track list is populated with standard mambos, “Cuando te Vea,” is listed as a guaguancó, a Cuban groove quintessential to the future evolution of the salsa sound, with Santos Colón doing an early take on the soneo, or lead vocal improvisation. The album also includes an early appearance from Ray Barretto, who would become one of salsa’s most renowned congueros and bandleaders.“Oye Como Va” (1962)At once tracing the roots and routes of Latin music in the 20th century, the song “Oye Como Va,” while not exactly a Puente masterpiece, tells the story of how Afro-Cuban music found its way into the American mainstream. Its opening riffs are based on the Cuban bassist Israel “Cachao” López’s classic “Chanchullo,” and the track is formally a cha-cha-cha that celebrates dance floor flirting. It was famously covered in 1970 by Santana, and the band’s leader, Carlos Santana, was said to have been convinced to do the song by the rock promoter Bill Graham, who had spent much of his youth in the 1950s dancing to mambo at Puente’s Palladium.La Lupe and Tito Puente, “Tito Puente Swings/The Exciting Lupe Sings” (1965)While an argument can be made that “El Rey y Yo (The King and I)” from 1967 is the peak of Puente and La Lupe’s collaboration, their album “Tito Puente Swings/The Exciting Lupe Sings” seems more spontaneous while capturing Puente’s peak cha-cha-cha grooves. It also marks Puente’s attempts to reconcile the end of the Palladium era with the emergence of the Cuban/African American R&B hybrid of bugalú.Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, “Cuba y Puerto Rico” (1966)As Puente’s working relationship with La Lupe became more contentious, he began to turn to Celia Cruz, another Cuban vocalist who had made her mark as the lead singer of the legendary Sonora Matancera orchestra. Cruz seized the opportunity to become a solo star in her own right, ultimately becoming la Reina de la Salsa (the Queen of Salsa), largely as a result of her magisterial performances with Puente. “La Guarachera,” from the album “Cuba y Puerto Rico,” became one of her signature tracks.Tito Puente, India and the Count Basie Orchestra, “Jazzin’” (1996)Toward the end of his career, Puente became a prominent member of the promoter Ralph Mercado’s stable of salsa and merengue acts that proliferated in New York’s Latin club scene. He became El Rey (the King) for young people who were trying to reconnect with their parents’ music by learning to dance at clubs like the 14th Street Palladium and S.O.B.’s. This era included his team-up with La India, a salsa vocalist who began her career singing house music, on “Jazzin’” (which also featured the Count Basie Orchestra); and a collaboration with Marc Anthony that began on ‌a 1991 album Anthony recorded with the Paradise Garage D.J. Little Louie Vega (“When the Night Is Over”), making Puente’s sound a rediscovered staple of the ’90s downtown Latin scene.Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, “Masterpiece” (2000)Going back to “Puente Goes Jazz” (1956), an underrecognized tour de force that also features Ray Barretto, and “Herman’s Heat & Puente’s Beat,” a 1958 collaboration with Woody Herman, Puente excelled at making records that strongly connected with his first love: jazz. Beginning with “On Broadway” in 1982, Puente embarked on a nine-album relationship with the jazz label Concord Records, doing covers of John Coltrane’s “Afro Blue,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” and Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco,” among an avalanche of original material that redefined Latin jazz as a genre, particularly through the spirit of underrecognized collaborators like the Dominican saxophonist Mario Rivera. His jazz period reached its peak with his 2000 collaboration with Eddie Palmieri, “Masterpiece.” More