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      Five Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Jazz

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      We’ve done a lot of listening back. So where is jazz today? Writers and musicians including Sonny Rollins, Melanie Charles and Terri Lyne Carrington share their favorites from this millennium.Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, critics and scholars to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with Duke Ellington? Or Alice Coltrane? We’ve also covered bebop, vocal jazz and the catalogs of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.That’s a lot of listening back. So this month, we decided to explore what’s happening now. Where is jazz today? It’s a good time to be asking. Just a dozen years ago, the music seemed to be having a crisis of self-worth. Where was its center? Could anything guarantee its relevance?But over the past five or 10 years, you could say that jazz has gone through a kind of ego death, and then a rebirth: Today there’s no particular sound or style that young players all want to preserve, but jazz as a general practice — a commitment to taking on musical adventures together, live and in real time; to treating musical instruments as the writing utensils for a narrative — hasn’t been this alive in decades. As a result, all across the jazz spectrum, artists are in comfortable contact with hip-hop, contemporary poetry, the Black Lives Matter movement and visual art.Below, we asked writers and jazz musicians of various generations to recommend their favorite recordings from the new millennium. Enjoy reading their commentary and listening to the excerpts, and find a playlist at the bottom of the article with full tracks. As always, be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Terri Lyne Carrington, drummerDuring the swing era, jazz was a leader in the trends of pop culture and even perceived as dance music, but then there was a seismic shift toward sitting down and listening. I’m encouraged by the emergence of artists today who have pursued “groove” in their jazz without compromising creativity, reminding us that this can be music that makes you want to move. Kassa Overall is such an artist. I love his song “Who’s on the Playlist” because it invites the question, “Is this jazz or is this hip-hop?” Kassa is a pre-eminent style bender and blender, successfully juxtaposing genres through his production expertise and use of melodic and harmonic forms that deftly integrate the new with the old. This track is authentic and unpretentious, blending acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, catchy hooks with improvisation and diverse musical sections, and jazz chords with polyrhythmic raps that express personal stories in hip-hop vernacular. It powerfully exhibits the consistent innovation in the continuum of Black music and encourages us not to draw lines in the sand.“Who’s on the Playlist”Kassa Overall feat. Judi Jackson◆ ◆ ◆Sonny Rollins, saxophonistJ.D. Allen’s got a nice, full sound: It really fills up the room when he’s playing. When I was living in Chicago many, many years ago, there used to be a player called Alec Johnson. Alec had one of these strong sounds that would really captivate you: “Wow, listen to that — to the music, to the volume!” So when I hear J.D., he reminds me of Alec in that way. He’s got a nice, big, fat sound, and he’s got a lot of ideas. He doesn’t sound like he’s ever wanting to find something to play. So I really am struck by that, and I really liked him when I heard him perform live. There’s so much music out here today, I’m glad that he’s keeping the flame.“Sonhouse”J.D. Allen◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerI’ve long admired Luke Stewart’s artistic versatility: You can see him plucking the upright bass as a member of the free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements, playing the electric as one-half of the psych-rock-leaning Blacks’ Myths, or engaging in traditional and free-form hybrids at the helm of his Silt Trio. While it’s tough to single out one Stewart song as my favorite, I always find myself coming back to “Awakening the Masters,” the propulsive opener of his 2020 “Exposure Quintet” album. The bass loop captivates, enticing the reedists Ken Vandermark and Edward Wilkerson Jr., the pianist Jim Baker and the drummer Avreeayl Ra to build upon it with ascendant saxophone wails, escalating cymbals and billowing piano chords suspended gently in the mix. Even as the harmony develops and mutates, Stewart saunters along, his bass keeping the song in a steady rhythmic pocket. I think that’s why I like it so much: It’s a microcosm of Stewart’s centered presence across the spectrum of experimental music. No matter the subgenre, he’s an immovable force guiding the music forward.“Awakening the Masters”Luke Stewart Exposure Quintet◆ ◆ ◆Theo Croker, trumpeterI was thinking about what would honestly bring people to this music, and it’s hearing something young. Because young people have always been the pioneers of this music. People become great masters as they age, but it’s something that they did when they were young that everybody caught onto and connected with. With Domi & JD Beck, they don’t sound jaded by jazz school; they sound like they’re doing their thing. They respect everything else that’s come before and they’re pushing forward with their own thing. It has a lot of integrity, but it’s also playful; it’s very technical, but it’s also fun. And with this track, they gave us a gem: another Herbie Hancock vocoder song! There were always those two classics — “I Thought It Was You” and “Come Running to Me” — but now we’ve got another.“Moon”Domi & JD Beck feat. Herbie Hancock◆ ◆ ◆Billy Hart, drummerImmanuel Wilkins is clearly spending a lot of time on the instrument, just like John Coltrane did. He’s obviously putting the horn in his mouth a lot. There are some other guys that have talent but their desire is to be popular. But Immanuel Wilkins’s music has really got some depth, and it’s going to influence the future, at least the way I see it. That first album of his, “Omega,” really broke some ground. It’s substantial. And it has to do with the tradition.“Grace and Mercy”Immanuel Wilkins◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticWhen you really tune into a piece of music, what are you usually paying attention to? The words? The beat? A line you can go off humming? Nicole Mitchell’s music with the Black Earth Ensemble rewards listening of about any kind, but it’s best received with a sense of surrender. Limit your expectations of what might be coming next. Put your body under the influence. On “Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds,” a 2017 LP influenced by Octavia Butler’s writings, the poet and vocalist Avery R. Young lends Pentecostal flair to lines of earnest recognition — “I want to pick up my blade/But then again there’s gotta be another way,” he hollers — while Mitchell’s flute whips and shivers around him, a well-contained force of nature. Playing a mix of Asian, European and Afro-diasporic instruments, the eight-piece ensemble raises the high-water mark gradually, in splashes, until you’re swept up. Mitchell is calling up the spirit-memories of this music, which are so often grounded in a particular place: Ornette Coleman at Prince Street, Fred Anderson on the South Side, Alice Coltrane in California, Archie Shepp in Algeria. But she’s also reaching toward somewhere unimaginably better — what Saidiya Hartman calls “the nowhere of utopia,” if you like.“Shiny Divider”Nicole Mitchell◆ ◆ ◆Melanie Charles, vocalist and flutistI remember graduating La Guardia High School, hearing this song and feeling liberated and excited about the possibilities of how my generation could interact with improvised music. Renée Neufville’s voice fits perfectly with Roy Hargrove’s playing and singing. Compositionally, the tune appears to be very simple. However, if you try to sing along, you find it may require a bit more out of you. And that’s the fun of it. The song evokes feelings of house parties and underground shows, and you feel like you are in the studio with the band. It’s a very honest and no-frills, in-and-out track that you can’t help but want to play on repeat.“Crazy Race”The RH Factor◆ ◆ ◆Ayana Contreras, criticTranslated as “Tribute to the Old Guard,” this cut is a slinky reimagining of Idris Muhammad’s 1974 jazz-funk classic “Loran’s Dance,” a record that was part of my own initiation as a jazz fan. The combo of Karriem Riggins and Madlib is behind this unit, two multihyphenate producers who’ve unwaveringly bridged the narrow trench between jazz and hip-hop in increasingly electrifying ways. With just the right mix of distortion and dusty synths, crisp boom-bap drum licks and sunshine, the record feels like what Raphael Saadiq classifies as “instant vintage,” and yet fresh as sun on bare shoulders on the first warm day of spring.“Hommage À La Vielle Garde (Pour Lafarge Et Rinaldi)”Jahari Massamba Unit◆ ◆ ◆David Renard, Times senior editorFive minutes, five hours, five days — once this album-length composition by Natural Information Society sucks you in, it feels like it could flow forever. Joshua Abrams, the group’s leader, was in an early version of the Roots before he moved to Chicago and became part of that city’s indie and jazz scene; he now plays the guimbri, a three-stringed African bass lute that is the most constant element anchoring the ever-shifting “descension (Out of Our Constrictions).” The guimbri’s interplay with Lisa Alvarado’s (vibrating, psychedelic) harmonium, Jason Stein’s bass clarinet and Mikel Patrick Avery’s drumming creates a bed of sound, like a woven pattern, that leaves space for the free-blowing saxophone of Evan Parker, a 20th-century improv veteran still going strong in the 21st, to soar over the top. When Natural Information (minus Parker) performed this piece live at the Woodsist Festival in upstate New York in 2021, slotted between sets by Angel Bat Dawid and Kurt Vile, it felt even more like a loose game of Minimalist musical Ping-Pong — a round robin with no winners, just each player hitting the right spot and falling back as the next stepped up to join the entrancing cascade.“descension (Out of Our Constrictions) I”Natural Information Society with Evan Parker◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Redman, saxophonistOut of an infinite sea of compelling options, stretching all across jazz’s stylistic map, I ended up selecting a track that some might call “straight ahead” (even though I’m not particularly fond of that term), just to try to help make the case that this particular mode of communal expression is still flourishing and forward-moving. It is no small thing to take a chestnut such as “Body and Soul” — one of the most-played standards in the history of recorded music — and make it feel fresh, relevant, interesting and beautiful. The pianist Gerald Clayton, the bassist Joe Sanders and the drummer Marcus Gilmore are, without question, three of the greats of their generation and some of the most active and emulated musicians on the scene today. They have thoroughly absorbed and internalized the evolved vocabularies and common practices of their art and made them wholly and unmistakably their own. Their connectedness — with each other, with their audience, and with this shared musical language — is nuanced, empathic, generous and unforced. They are not trying to prove anything. They are in it for the ride, and what a ride it is: dance music.“Body and Soul”Gerald Clayton◆ ◆ ◆Kris Davis, pianistIf you ever have a chance to see Craig Taborn play solo, go without delay, and you will be transfixed. On this track, “Gift Horse/Over the Water,” you can hear influences of electronic music, Minimalism, contemporary classical music and jazz, specifically from the pianists Geri Allen and Keith Jarrett. Craig has made significant contributions to jazz and solo piano in the 21st century through his unique touch on the piano and seamless synthesis of disparate influences. You can hear his influence among many improvising pianists over the last 20 years, including Vijay Iyer, Marta Sanchez, Matt Mitchell, Micah Thomas and myself.“Gift Horse/Over the Water”Craig Taborn◆ ◆ ◆Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeterI’ve always been under the impression that discovery is the best value of humankind, and when one is fortunate enough to discover something it’s never lost, because it becomes part of them. Whenever I’ve played onstage with Sylvie Courvoisier, I’ve never felt handicapped or abandoned or like I had to look for a way to continue. It’s always been a journey that has been mutual and creative. She’s got courage, and you can see it when she’s at the piano: When she is inspired to go toward something, she doesn’t just go near it, she advances as if she’s going there to save creation. That’s the kind of courage that she has. And she finds every way to express music with that attitude. This is the music of our times that is hidden, like a crown jewel — and only the ones that are really curious and have great fantasies and imagination will find it. Because in darkness everything is dark except the ones that’s got light.“Requiem d’un Songe”Sylvie Courvoisier, Ned Rothenberg and Julian Sartorius◆ ◆ ◆Tomeka Reid, cellistThis whole record, “Like-Coping,” from 2003, is beautiful: from the opening notes of “Miriam” to the last track. This is Parker’s first solo release on Delmark, a label based in our shared hometown, Chicago, with Chad Taylor on drums and Chris Lopes on bass. I can’t believe it is 20 years old this year! It still sounds so fresh. Each member contributes extremely well-crafted earworms that will get stuck in your head, in the best way. Even the way the record is sequenced is brilliant. “Pinecone,” written by Lopes, is the composition that most makes me want to dance.“Pinecone”Jeff Parker◆ ◆ ◆◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Rosalía Issues an English Request, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Fever Ray, Chloë, Cécile McLorin Salvant and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. 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.Rosalía, ‘LLYLM’Just before the first chorus of Rosalía’s airy new single “LLYLM,” the Spanish phenom sings, “Lo diré en ingles y me entenderás” — I will say it in English and you will understand me. There’s a brief moment of silence before Rosalía launches into a lilting, pop-radio-friendly hook, sung, yes, in English: “I don’t need honesty, baby, lie like you love me.” In the context of the song, it’s a plea to an uncaring partner, but in the grander scheme of Rosalía’s career, it’s also a playful wink at the idea of an English-speaking crossover hit. The nimble “LLYLM” pivots restlessly between these two worlds, and finds Rosalía — for now at least — having it both ways. LINDSAY ZOLADZFever Ray, ‘Kandy’The eerily alluring “Kandy” is almost a Knife reunion. Though it’s technically by Karin Dreijer’s shapeshifting solo project Fever Ray, it’s one of four songs on the upcoming album “Radical Romantics” that was co-written and co-produced by Karin’s brother and Knife bandmate Olof Dreijer. (It even features the very same synthesizer Olof used on the pulsating “The Captain,” from the Knife’s classic 2006 album “Silent Shout.”) Still, thematically, “Kandy” is of a piece with the other promising glimpses of “Radical Romantics” that Karin has previously offered, at once dark and hypnotically sensual: “After the swim,” the musician sings in a low croon, “she laid me down and whispered, ‘All the girls want kandy.’” ZOLADZClark, ‘Town Crank’Christopher Stephen Clark, the English musician who records as Clark, has built a huge, polymorphous catalog of instrumental music that ranges from stark, austere techno to exquisite chamber-music soundtracks. But he hasn’t sung lead vocals until now — on “Town Crank” from an album due in March, “Sus Dog,” with Thom Yorke of Radiohead as executive producer. “Town Crank” hurtles into motion, starting with dry, jittery acoustic guitar before mustering a full sonic barrage: a relentless electronic bass line, blasts of drums and distortion, orchestral flurries. Clark’s voice turns out to be like Yorke’s, a high, pensive tenor shading into falsetto; he sometimes multitracks it into Beach Boys-like harmonies, while his lyrics offer stray bits of sage advice: “Nothing comes about without a little tweaking.” JON PARELESCécile McLorin Salvant, ‘D’un Feu Secret’Cécile McLorin Salvant, one of her generation’s finest jazz singers, throws a high-concept curveball on her coming album, “Mélusine.” It retells a European folk tale — about love, a curse, broken promises and reptilian transformations — in songs new and old. “D’un Feu Secret” (“Of a Secret Fire”) is indeed old. It was composed in 1660 by Michel Lambert. “I could be cured If I stopped loving/But I prefer the disease,” it vows. McLorin sings it like an early music performer, poised and delicate with feathery ornaments. But the accompaniment, from her longtime keyboardist and collaborator Sullivan Fortner, is on synthesizers, savoring the anachronism. PARELESChlöe, ‘Pray It Away’The Beyoncé protégé Chlöe — of the sisterly R&B duo Chloe x Halle — goes full church girl on the fiery “Pray It Away,” the first single from her upcoming debut album, “In Pieces.” An unfaithful lover brings Chlöe to her knees and makes her wrestle with cravings for vengeance but, as she puts it in breathy vocals stacked to heaven, “I’ma just pray it away before I give him what he deserves first.” ZOLADZASAP Rocky, ‘Same Problems?’ASAP Rocky mourns the many rappers who have died young by questioning himself: “Am I a product of things that I saw?” he sings. “Am I a product of things in my songs?” His self-produced track is a haunted waltz, seesawing between two perpetually unresolved chords, with ASAP Rocky’s doleful voice cradled and answered by vocal harmonies from Miguel. “How many problems get solved if we don’t get involved?” he wonders. PARELESKimbra featuring Ryan Lott, ‘Foolish Thinking’Kimbra, a singer and songwriter from New Zealand, had her global triumph in 2011 as the duet partner (and comeuppance) for Gotye in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which won the Grammy for record of the year. Since then, she has persevered with her own kind of electronic pop, and in “Foolish Thinking” she collaborates with Ryan Lott, a.k.a. Son Lux. It’s a clear pop structure with an eerie refrain — “thought I could remove the pain/but that’s my foolish thinking” — delivered in an echoey, shadowy production, full of furtive keyboard patterns and variously miked vocals, sketching the longings of a partner who’s loyal but utterly confounded. PARELESRickie Lee Jones, ‘Just in Time’Rickie Lee Jones takes on jazz standards on “Pieces of Treasure,” an album due April 28. Her version of “Just in Time” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne, a song about last-chance romance — “The losing dice were tossed/My bridges all were crossed” — is simultaneously thankful and teasing. With Mike Mainieri’s vibraphone scampering around her voice, Jones places her phrases slyly behind the beat, pausing to land each note just in time. PARELESJobi Riccio, ‘For Me It’s You’“Everyone has a person they sing their love songs to,” Jobi Riccio sings in “For Me It’s You,” a slow, terse, old-fashioned country waltz complete with a plaintive fiddle. It just gets torchier as that love goes unrequited. PARELESSamia, ‘Breathing Song’Deep trauma courses through Samia’s “Breathing Song,” from her new EP, “Honey.” Over stark, sustained keyboard chords, she sings “Straight to the ER/While I bled on your car”; the driver asks, “It wasn’t mine, right?” The chorus, sharpened by Auto-Tune, is “No, no, no” — it’s simultaneously denial, reassurance and proof of life. PARELES More

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      A Car Accident Couldn’t Halt the Saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin’s Rise

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      In 2020, she released a lauded album exploring the Coltranes’ music. The next year, she broke her jaw in a crash and turned the harrowing experience into inspiration for a new LP, “Phoenix.”In mid-September 2021, the saxophonist and bandleader Lakecia Benjamin was driving home from a performance in Cleveland when her car slid off the highway, careened through a wooded area and flipped into a drainage ditch.“I woke up the first time to somebody pulling me out of the car, trying to break it open,” Benjamin, a bright light on the New York scene since the early 2010s, said through two masks on a recent Saturday morning at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. “Then I woke up in the hospital on a surgical table and them telling me, ‘You’re going to be OK.’ I didn’t know what happened or what was going on.”The accident left the Washington Heights native with three broken ribs, a fractured scapula, a perforated eardrum, a concussion, neurological damage and — worst of all — a broken jaw, a severe blow to any horn player, let alone one with her intensity. Undeterred, Benjamin went to Europe just three weeks later, somehow summoning the strength to play songs from her 2020 album, “Pursuance: The Coltranes,” a project dedicated to the astral jazz of the creative soul mates John and Alice.How did she get through it? “A little bit from the Heights,” she said, alluding to her toughness. “A little bit of clamping down and staying clamped on the mouthpiece. And I really think I was lucky that I was playing the Coltrane music. That energy, and that message; that was what I was supposed to be doing.”Though Benjamin has been a rising star in jazz for more than a decade, she reached a new gear in 2020 following the release of “Pursuance: The Coltranes,” an album lauded for its refreshing take on bebop and spiritual jazz. The car accident couldn’t dim her determination. Hustle and ingenuity have defined Benjamin’s career, and her strong will, warmth and down-to-earth persona come through in the music. Equally melodic and assertive, her sound feels rooted in tradition, yet broad enough to encompass R&B and Latin music; its pronounced funk suggests allegiances to hip-hop and dance.The trauma of Benjamin’s crash anchors her new album, “Phoenix,” out Friday, a vast, labyrinthine set of arrangements that opens with “Amerikkan Skin,” a propulsive song that features the wail of emergency vehicle sirens. “Instead of starting musically only, I’m trying to put the audience in a state of mind, of the type of frenzy and frantic, the hecticness I felt getting out of the car,” she explained.By incorporating sampled gunfire into the mix, the song also recollects wider tensions of recent years. “Black people are going through it,” Benjamin said. “Lower class people are going through it. Everyone is going through something.”Featuring the civil rights activist Angela Davis, the poet Sonia Sanchez, the pianist and R&B singer Patrice Rushen and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the album both examines the nuances of Blackness and emphasizes the contributions of women to American culture. “Revolutionary hope resides precisely among those women who have been abandoned by history,” Davis declares on “Amerikkan Skin.” “I truly believe, and men should applaud this, that this is the era of women.”Benjamin started her own journey in jazz, long a male-dominated form, when she told an art teacher at her elementary school that she wanted to play alto sax before she even knew what it was. Actually getting her hands on the instrument involved persuading a classmate to switch from sax to art. “I think I negotiated a couple Oreos or something,” Benjamin deadpanned.She attended the Harlem School of the Arts, then the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she studied saxophone under the multi-reedist Patience Higgins. Later, as a student at the New School, she went to concerts after class and saw players like Gary Bartz whenever they were in town. Benjamin said she talked Bartz into giving her “one little lesson,” which led to his teaching her how to play classical music. From there, she studied under other noted saxophonists — Vincent Herring, Bruce Williams, Jerome Richardson and Steve Wilson — and tried to absorb everything she could about the instrument: “I was calling Kenny Garrett, everybody, ‘Hey, can you teach me?’”The drummer Terri Lyne Carrington met Benjamin around 2010, when she was touring to support her album “The Mosaic Project,” and Benjamin joined to play a few shows. “She came in and I was like, ‘Wow, this is really electrifying,’” Carrington said in a telephone interview. “I could hear her spirit, her soul, everything was right there on the line.” She commended Benjamin for playing with emotion without losing the technical aspects of playing the blues.“We all have to heal from the pandemic,” Benjamin said. “We all have to rise from these ashes.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“We as jazz musicians can be musically intellectual and worried about playing hip and all those things,” Carrington said. “I was so happy to hear someone of her generation connect to the blues and to the origins of jazz in the way that she did.”Carrington produced Benjamin’s new album, tweaking compositions while adhering to the saxophonist’s own vision for the LP. “She wanted to involve people that she has called elders in some ways,” Carrington said. “I think that’s really an important element with young musicians to recognize or not recognize: to want to exchange. All of us have to, including her, pass on what we know to the people that are coming up behind us. That’s the only way the music survives.”The song “Basquiat” — a scorching arrangement dedicated to that artist — has a shape-shifting rhythm that pivots between calm and tranquillity. And the rapper, singer and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow appears on the title track, offering celestial coos for its spiritual-minded intro. The slow-rising arrangement purposefully depicts Benjamin’s resurgence in the wake of her accident.“I’ve seen her transform,” Muldrow said over the telephone. “The most beautiful thing about ’Kecia is that she is just more of herself. She’s more open with sharing the ideas that are within her. She’s become absolutely fearless in what it is — a compositional value, performance value, all these things. If you know ’Kecia, she ain’t gonna tell you nothing but the truth. She ain’t gonna give you nothing but what’s on her mind.”Benjamin said the perseverance she’s put into her career, and into recovering from her accident, are the backbone of “Phoenix,” which she hopes shows others “that anything is possible.”“I think I’m starting to see that I can accomplish more with the help of God than I thought I could,” she said. “I keep thinking this is the ceiling for me. And then I keep pressing it and pushing it. I’m growing; I feel like a phoenix. But I also feel we’re all out here the same way. We all have to heal from the pandemic. We all have to rise from these ashes.” More

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      At 80, the Saxophonist Billy Harper Is Still a Towering Force

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      He spent years playing with Art Blakey, Lee Morgan and Max Roach, earning praise for his sax’s piercing cry. He’s still composing and turning heads live.Billy Harper grew up in front of an audience. Every Sunday, his family buttoned him into a suit and tie with a freshly starched shirt and drove to Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Houston, where his grandfather preached and young Billy sang. “They were having me onstage when I was 3, singing solos,” he said. “The music was getting inside me.” Surrounded by great vocalists, he thought he was going to be a singer, too: “Until I got the horn.”Harper moved to New York in 1966, when he was 23, and began turning heads with the piercing and songful cry of his saxophone. It didn’t take long for him to become a prized collaborator for members of the jazz pantheon like Art Blakey, Max Roach and Lee Morgan. One of the last standing from his generation, Harper, who turns 80 on Tuesday, is still revered in the jazz world as both saxophonist and composer.Earlier this month, he played four nights at Smoke, the Manhattan jazz club, where attendees got a blast of his singular sound, which summons the urgency of John Coltrane and the power of the Black church. A charismatic presence onstage, dressed entirely in black leather, Harper calls his listeners to attention. His improvisations are torrential, dance-like and swinging, spiraling upward to mountaintop pronouncements that can leave listeners in a sweat.“His music is bracing,” said the pianist Francesca Tanksley, who has performed in Harper’s bands since 1983. She credits him with opening doors of inspiration, so that the music “becomes less of a craft and more of an adventure. He’s a man on a mission, he always has been — a knight of sorts.”The drummer Billy Hart, who plays with Harper in the all-star hard bop group the Cookers, said Harper’s music reflects the divine. “I’ve known Harper for 50 years, and we don’t even talk that much,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what he believes, but I can hear it. It’s rhapsodic. He’s praying on the bandstand.”Harper said that music comes to him in his sleep or while walking down the street: “Suddenly I’ll hear a tune in my head, and sometimes I’ll hear a whole choir of voices, singing it.”Scott Rossi for The New York TimesHarper shrugs off praise. “I just want to be a pure musician,” he said, speaking by phone from his apartment in Harlem, where he lives with his wife, the singer Morana Mesic, and their 11-year-old son, Prince. His mission at 80 is the same as when he was 25: “The idea is to make a mark in the creative music world — not anything commercial — just add something to what has already been done by the guys who came before me. If I can just do that, then I’ve done my part. I’m doing it.”He has long flown under the media’s radar, perhaps because his career took off as rock grew dominant in the music industry and independent jazz labels struggled. His debut album, “Capra Black,” recorded 50 years ago with a hotshot band and a choir, is a classic of what’s come to be known as spiritual jazz. Harper has never played anything but spiritual jazz. You can hear it in his stirring tunes, stretching back to the 1970s: “Cry of Hunger,” “The Awakening,” “Trying to Make Heaven My Home.”As a composer, he bears comparison with more famous musicians like Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner. Some of his compositions seem to unfold across vast landscapes, majestic and haunting, as if Harper were traveling through epochs of time. “Billy is a griot, a storyteller,” said T.K. Blue, the saxophonist and flutist who performed with Harper for 30 years in bands led by the pianist Randy Weston. “I can hear the history of where he comes from in that music. It’s regal. I hear Africa. I hear Texas. I hear the blues.”Harper spent much of his childhood in Houston’s Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood filled in those days with blues joints. Walking past a music shop when he was 11, he spotted a shiny tenor saxophone in the window and was intrigued by its complexity — its multitude of buttons and keys. Returning home, he announced that he wanted either a pony or a saxophone for Christmas. (He got the horn.)Harper’s Uncle Earl, an old schoolmate of the bebop trumpeter Kenny Dorham, introduced him to albums by Dorham, Horace Silver and Sonny Rollins. Harper, self-taught, played along with the records and in school marching bands, and soon began sitting in with blues bands around town.By 1961, when Harper arrived at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), his playing “had the soul stuff, the feeling,” he said. “But I had to get the technical stuff, and they made me get it together.” Enrolled as a music major, he took his first-ever saxophone lessons and developed a grueling regimen. Holing up in a practice room for 10 or 12 hours at a time, daily, he garnered a reputation: “People thought I was crazy — or that I was going crazy,” he recalled, with a laugh.Harper has recorded 20 or so albums with the quintet, and is planning a new one. He’s been writing songs inspired by his 11-year-old son.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesToward the end of his junior year, Harper won a seat in the school’s prestigious One O’Clock Lab Band, known for its polish and professionalism. It was 1964, and Harper became the first Black student ever accepted into the ensemble: “It was a big thing to get in, though I hadn’t really thought about it back then,” he said. The other musicians “were open and warm, and the band was off the charts. After that, I was ready for anything.”After graduating in 1965, he spent a year or so in Dallas, jamming with big-time saxophonists like James Clay and Claude Johnson, veterans of Ray Charles’s band. Then in 1966, Harper jumped into his black Mustang fastback and drove to Manhattan. His second night in the city, he parked in front of the Five Spot Cafe on St. Marks Place and rushed inside with his horn to hear Thelonious Monk. He forgot to lock the car, and was robbed of nearly everything he owned. That first year in New York was a challenge. He tried sitting in nightly at Slugs’ Saloon, a jazz mecca on the Lower East Side, but rarely got a paid gig.But in 1967, a chance meeting on Broadway with Gil Evans, the composer, arranger and Miles Davis collaborator, led to an invitation to rehearse with Evans’s big band. Harper would become one of its important soloists. Word spread and his résumé grew.Harper — himself an accomplished drummer — spent years playing with the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He was a member of the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s final band and was at Slugs’ the night Morgan was fatally shot there in 1972. He spent much of the ’70s in a quartet led by the drummer Max Roach, and held the first tenor chair in the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. Its leaders would keep him glued to his seat until the end of a set — at which time, like a pent-up thoroughbred leaving the gate, he would rise to deliver a scarifying blizzard of a blues-drenched solo.His A-list collaborations continued over the decades; since 2010, Harper has recorded half a dozen albums and toured widely with the Cookers while also maintaining his own group, which he described as authentic: “We have a soul-heart-mind connection when we play together,” he said.Typically, members stick with the quintet for years, if not decades, as in the case of Tanksley. To this day, she said, when the band plays one of Harper’s compositions, the musicians seem to enter “a small universe with its own state of being.”Harper has recorded around 20 albums with the quintet, though it’s been a while — the group’s most recent disc, “Blueprints of Jazz Vol. 2,” came out in 2008. His recordings can be as hard to find as they are musically definitive.He plans to make a new album this year and has been composing a set of tunes inspired by his son. He said that music comes to him in his sleep or while walking down the street: “Suddenly I’ll hear a tune in my head, and sometimes I’ll hear a whole choir of voices, singing it. So I run home and write it down, fast.”Not every 80-year-old maintains this level of creativity; playing a tenor saxophone for hours at a time requires a serious degree of physical conditioning. But Harper — who used to jog miles daily and trained as a martial artist — finds that his energy doesn’t flag much.“Inside, I feel 25, maybe 26,” he said.And he’s still turning heads with the singing sound of his saxophone. His friend Hart compares him to the Pied Piper of Hamelin: “People want to hear that sound. Charlie Parker had it. John Coltrane certainly had it. It’s a sound that doesn’t change the notes, it makes the notes, and that’s the sound that Billy has.” More

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      Jazz’s Year of Reckoning With Tradition

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicFor the last few years, jazz around the globe has been in a creative renaissance. Scenes in Chicago, London and Los Angeles have pushed the genre in novel creative directions, and reinvigorated the music as nightlife.But is it quietly radical to re-embrace the songbook? How much history does a musician have to imbibe to be properly heretical? In 2022, questions like these were addressed, implicitly and explicitly, by singers like Samara Joy and Cécile McLorin Salvant and instrumentalists like Immanuel Wilkins and Jaimie Branch.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about jazz’s rites of passage, the ways in which freedom is expressed even amid convention, and artists who are agitating against history.Guests:Harmony Holiday, a poet and essayist who writes about music for Frieze and othersGiovanni Russonello, who writes about jazz for The New York TimesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      75 Years Ago, Latin Jazz Was Born. Its Offspring Are Going Strong.

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      A concert at Town Hall this week that will be led by Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra celebrates the legacies of Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and Chico O’Farrill.In the fall of 1947, Dizzy Gillespie called on his friend, the trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauzá, in search of a conga player for an upcoming Carnegie Hall concert where he planned to debut songs exploring the connection between Afro-Cuban music and jazz. Bauzá suggested Chano Pozo, a swaggering master of Yoruba rhythms, who had just arrived from Cuba.It was a wildly fortuitous introduction: Dizzy and Chano’s team-up would mark a watershed moment in jazz history, what many refer to the birth of Latin jazz. Although neither musician could communicate in the other’s language, they shared a cultural connection, and suddenly bebop, Gillespie’s rebellious jazz experiment, became Cubop.Arturo O’Farrill, leader of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which he formed in 2001 for Jazz at Lincoln Center, has long contemplated that meeting. It was a collaboration that united African diasporas, north and south, reconstructing ties broken by the slave trade. “There’s a saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it,” he said in a recent video interview, “where Dizzy says, ‘I don’t speak Spanish and Chano doesn’t speak English, but we both speak African.’”This Saturday at Town Hall, O’Farrill will commemorate that moment, just over 75 years ago, when Dizzy and Chano bonded over their ancestral past and took the music into the future, as well as the role his father, Chico, played in that evolution. The concert, which pays tribute to “The Original Influencers,” celebrates a Town Hall show similar to the Carnegie performance that took place in December 1947, and will feature O’Farrill’s 18-piece orchestra, as well as special guests Pedrito Martínez on percussion, Jon Faddis on trumpet, Donald Harrison on saxophone, the singers Daymé Arocena and Melvis Santa, and O’Farrill’s two sons, Adam and Zack, on trumpet and drums.The Cuban-born Chico O’Farrill was the son of Irish and German immigrants to the island and was so taken with the fusions previously explored by Bauzá as musical director of Machito and His Afro-Cubans, that he convinced the impresario Norman Granz to commission and record his “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” featuring Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich and Flip Phillips, in 1950.“My father was fully European, living in an African country — because, you know, Cuba’s basically an African country — and also falling in love with jazz,” O’Farrill said. “He was the perfect person to be in all three worlds.”The elder O’Farrill joined up with Gillespie in the following years and became one of Latin jazz’s chief arrangers and orchestra leaders. Gillespie became Faddis’s mentor soon after he arrived in New York as an 18-year-old aspiring trumpeter. On Saturday, he will perform the “Manteca Suite,” Chico’s elaborate rearrangement of the Gillespie-Pozo classic written with Gil Fuller, “Manteca.” Faddis’s close association with Gillespie made him privy to Chico’s relationship with Pozo, who was tragically murdered in Harlem in 1948.“Mario Bauzá would take Dizzy up to Spanish Harlem to hear bands like Alberto Socarrás’s, and sit in,” Faddis said in an interview. “The collaboration with Chano was really important — I know there are many things that Chano taught him and the musicians in his band.”Pozo clued in Gillespie’s band to the dense polyrhythmic patterns that permeate the Afro-Cuban music that he learned as a street drummer in the Black Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana. In his autobiography “To Be, or Not … to Bop,” Gillespie expressed a desire to recapture lost elements of African tradition, writing that he “always had that Latin feeling” but that his musical ancestors remained “monorhythmic,” because drums were not tolerated by U.S. slave masters, while the Afro-Cubans “remained polyrhythmic.”Gillespie and Pozo shared other cultural bonds, too. “I think when you hear Dizzy and Chano play the Afro Cuban Suite, you hear the pattern of call and response,” Faddis added. “One of the main connectors between that Afro-Cuban lineage and American jazz is what you hear in the work songs, the prison songs and even the spirituals — the call and response in the church.”Gillespie and Pozo’s reunion of different diasporic African traditions through jazz had many antecedents, particularly in New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when King Oliver and Lorenzo Tio visited Havana with a military band and absorbed Cuban influences. The ragtime pianist Jellyroll Morton famously referenced “tinges of Spanish” in his playing, and in New York, Bauzá had been steadily absorbing jazz techniques and sharing Cuban rhythmic tradition as musical director of the Chick Webb orchestra in the 1930s.Both Gillespie and Bauzá had yearned to escape the predictability of danceable Latin ballroom and big band music, and in 1947, just as Gillespie was perfecting his notion of bebop, Pozo’s intervention helped jazz became an international genre. It would put Gillespie on a path that defined the rest of his musical career. By 1988, Dizzy founded the United Nations Orchestra, which over the years featured Latin jazz stars like Paquito D’Rivera, Giovanni Hidalgo, Arturo Sandoval, David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón among many others.Pedrito Martínez, who will be performing two songs from his 2013 self-titled debut at the Town Hall concert, is evidence of Cubop’s internationalist legacy. He was inspired by Pozo, and even grew up in the same neighborhood in Havana. “I learned to play rumba in the street, like Chano did,” Martínez said in an interview. “He was someone from the marginal world who didn’t speak English, but he opened up doors for all of us.”Martínez had collaborated with Faddis in Steve Turre’s “Sanctified Shells” band, and had Faddis guest on his most recent album, “Acertijos.” He sees the connection between Afro-Cuban and jazz music as a kind of mystical fusion of spirit worlds. “I’ve seen a lot of Thelonious Monk videos, and he looked like a rumbero,” Martínez said, referring to the way Monk would sometimes perform a spinning dance that suggested Yoruban dance and spirit possession. “He stood up to dance and played the piano with one hand and then the other. Jazz has a very spiritual connection to Afro-Cuban music, because it’s a way of feeling, of giving reverence to the ancestors.”The rediscovery of common spiritual roots between African Americans and the Afro-Latin American diaspora is what keeps the Afro-Cuban jazz concept grounded and coherent. While there have been many debates about whether American jazz’s melodic and harmonic traditions and Afro-Caribbean rhythmic techniques dominate, it’s always been a back-and-forth conversation, an inter-hemispheric musical negotiation. It’s no surprise that Pérez Prado and Tito Puente’s mambo rose quickly in the wake of Gillespie and Pozo’s Cubop, and that it’s possible to hear Prado mambo elements in the early work of the Afro-futurist pioneer Sun Ra.What’s clear is that there’s no going back. “There are a lot of purists who want to keep jazz, jazz as jazz, they don’t want to mess with it,” O’Farrill said. “But I’ve been fighting this battle for 30 years, and I’m like, no, no, no. Jazz and Latin are the same trunk of the same tree. But it looks like we can never resolve this discussion. It can only go on and be explored to the end of time.”“Dizzy, Chano and Chico: The Original Influencers, 75 Years Later at Town Hall,” featuring Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, runs at Town Hall on Saturday at 8 p.m.; thetownhall.org. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sun Ra

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      Questlove, Dawn Richard and a range of other musicians, writers and critics share their favorites from the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader’s wide-ranging catalog.Lately The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane, bebop, Ornette Coleman and jazz vocals.Now we’re putting the spotlight on Sun Ra, the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader whose idiosyncratic blend of jazz imagined life on other planets. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., he wore ornate robes and Egyptian headgear, and composed progressive music meant to commune with Saturn, a place he said he felt a connection with after an out-of-body experience in college. “My whole body was changed into something else,” Sun Ra once said. “I could see through myself.” He said aliens spoke to him: “They would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.” In turn, Sun Ra’s music centered on space travel as a form of Black liberation. He believed Black people would never find freedom on Earth, and that real emancipation resided in the cosmos. Over the course of his career, Sun Ra recorded more than 200 albums with his band — called the Arkestra — before his death in 1993 at 79.Sun Ra’s music can be challenging — both artistically and through the intimidating size of his discography. So while this isn’t a comprehensive list (what could be?), the songs chosen here by a range of musicians, writers and critics represent a cross-section of swing, fusion and free jazz. Enjoy listening to the excerpts or the full playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own Sun Ra favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nicole Mitchell, creative flutist“El Is a Sound of Joy” has a symphonically blue, melodious, laid-back vibe that expresses the core of Sun Ra’s soul — his incredible love for Black folks. His piano solo knocks with grace through the changes that life puts us through in a mellow tempo that resists the stressful segregation and poverty that the Black community faced in Chicago in 1956, when this song was recorded. Just as Ra’s founding of the Saturn record label was a model for self-determination, “El Is a Sound of Joy” — a central track on this first Saturn album, “Super-Sonic Jazz” — is a mission statement that sings of our audacity to be beautiful. “El,” meaning “might, strength and power” in Hebrew, and a distinction of wisdom for the Moors, ties philosophical wisdom with sound intended to liberate. Climbing effortlessly through whole tones, on the backdrop of baritone blues shouts, we levitate into ethereal pleasantries. It’s the sound offered for our saving.“El Is a Sound of Joy — a.k.a. El Is the Sound of Joy”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, musicianMost of this song is a chant: “You made a mistake. You did something wrong. Now make another mistake and do something right.” This is a mantra I live by, and also a destination I arrived at even before I knew this song. I have made my art, and also made a career, and also made a living by developing a musical style that seems like it is a mistake. What Sun Ra is saying is that we shouldn’t think of mistakes in the way that they have traditionally been thought of, that we shouldn’t place a negative value on them but rather a positive one. Prince used to say something similar to Wendy Melvoin: When you make a mistake, repeat it twice so that it looks purposeful. Two lefts (or maybe three) make a right. I believe in this message and this method so much that this song has become one of my rare meditation soundtracks that’s not a binaural beat.“Make Another Mistake”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆John Szwed, Sun Ra biographerKnown mostly for what he called sounds of the future, Sun Ra was also devoted to the music of his youth, and sometimes mixed late 1920s swing into his wildest music. No surprise, then, that when in 1988 the producer Hal Willner asked him to be part of the album “Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films,” he agreed to do it. Willner suggested a song from the 1941 film “Dumbo” during which the little misfit elephant gets drunk. Once Sun Ra watched the film, and saw Dumbo hallucinating elephants leaping into space and traveling over pyramids and past some Egypto-images, he declared that he understood the plight of the misunderstood, rewrote the arrangement he was given, and recorded a strikingly straight performance of “Pink Elephants on Parade” with the whole band singing. It was no joke: a year later he would record his own full-length Disney tribute album, “Second Star to the Right.”“Pink Elephants on Parade”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (A&M)◆ ◆ ◆Dawn Richard, musician“Space Loneliness No. 2” creates a frequency and vibration that sets me afire. The uncomfortable spaces and eerie chord pairings feel like actual bridges to space. It encompasses this black hole of sound while also giving you a vivid picture of isolation. (Before this, the song “The Cosmo-Fire,” with its brightly colored cadence and percussion, gave me that same feeling.) “Space Loneliness No. 2” is a fitting sonic description of the seclusion one feels during a global pandemic and political turmoil. It explains a time we all felt isolated, and this song speaks not only to my personal emotional journey, but to the brilliance and genius of Sun Ra, and his ability to constantly reflect the time while being light years ahead of it.“Space Loneliness No. 2”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Strut)◆ ◆ ◆David Renard, Times senior editorIf I want to clear out the mind’s cobwebs, I’m putting on a long piece like “Atlantis” and letting it blow my hair back. But what if the vibe is more “zipping with the top down through an Afrofuturist spy movie”? Sun Ra has you covered there, too. “The Perfect Man” was released in 1974, on a single on Sun Ra’s own El Saturn label, paired with the jaunty, bluesy chant “I’m Gonna Unmask the Batman.” (No one can accuse the Arkestra of lacking a sense of humor.) On this B side, a simple cymbal-and-snare pattern sets things up for Sun Ra’s space-age explorations on a Moog synthesizer, accompanied by more earthbound, tuneful horns — funky minimalism at its finest.“The Perfect Man”Sun Ra Arkestra (Strut)◆ ◆ ◆Rob Mazurek, musicianSun Ra’s “Disco 3000” was culled from live recordings from Milan in 1978. The title track moves from Ra’s infectious bass lines, to free excursion, to ingenious use of rhythm machine and arpeggiator, creating this outer/inner sound unlike anything else. One gets the impression that Sun Ra is playing the past, present and future in one fell swoop, his mighty organ being played as if it’s some kind of time-travel device. It’s a seeming precursor to future studio cutup technique (although played live!), with stellar solos by the great John Gilmore and Michael Ray, and the colorful, propulsive drumming of Luqman Ali. A quartet performance that is orchestrated perfectly by Ra. We are even treated to a short shouted chorus of Sun Ra’s most famous hymn, “Space Is the Place.” If you are looking for a deep cut to take you somewhere else, frequencies to expand the mind, and at the same time absolutely relevant to now, then this is it.“Disco 3000”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆Amirtha Kidambi, musician“Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra” (2019) is the only collection of June Tyson recordings, an odd thing considering her ubiquity in the Sun Ra universe. The inimitable Tyson was the voice of the Arkestra from 1967 until her untimely death in 1992. Now, 30 years later, Tyson is still one of the underrated vocalists of the idiom. I’ve personally been waiting for the June Tyson Renaissance for a while now, having soaked up her influence in my own singing, and in my work with Darius Jones in Angels & Demons, centered on the cosmological writings of Sun Ra. Ra wrote hundreds of poems, a practice serious enough for him to send them to publishers apart from their use as lyrics in his music. I spent much of the early pandemic period studying Tyson’s incisive delivery and analyzing these poems, whose prescient themes resonate even more potently today. “Satellites Are Spinning” is a bizarre, insistent little ditty built on an unstable augmented chord, with dissonant horn swells and an accompaniment that feels disjointed from Tyson’s vocal melody. In this chromatic field, Tyson pierces through with an angular yet characteristically bluesy line, “We sing this song to abolish sorrow.” I think the word “abolish” is key here. Abolition, for a better tomorrow, if only the Earth would awaken.“Satellites Are Spinning”June Tyson (with the Sun Ra Arkestra) (Modern Harmonic)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerSun Ra’s “Shadow World,” from a 1970 concert at Fondation Maeght in the south of France, sounds like a subway car barreling underground, its cascading drums and squealing horns coalescing in turbulent harmony. It’s free jazz and psych-rock, cacophonous and dulcet. Midway through the song, Sun Ra cuts through the din with an organ solo beamed in from Saturn, giving it an otherworldly feel. Equally aggressive and brave, it’s the type of song needed this time of year in a cold-weather city, when the sun fades too soon and nothing shields you from the unforgiving chill. But I think that’s why I love the song: Like much of Sun Ra’s music, it’s uninhibited, and the crescendo reminds me of another personal favorite — Common’s “Jimi Was a Rock Star” — as an orchestral gem conjuring ancestors in the most frenetic way imaginable. That it upholds creative vision while confounding listeners is a plus. Nothing impactful comes from playing it safe.“Shadow World”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Cosmic Myth Records)◆ ◆ ◆Andy Beta, writerAs a punk/alternative kid, noise was what originally pulled me into Sun Ra’s orbit, his use of terrestrial instrumentation to conjure sounds both astral and alien. But as the late Detroit house and techno producer Mike Huckaby once told me: “Most of what he is playing is not noise,” noting instead the man’s uncanny ability to blend chaos and tenderness in his music. Nowhere is that balance better documented than on a run of albums Ra recorded in 1979 for his El Saturn label, capped with “Sleeping Beauty,” which leans slightly toward the latter element. Some 28 musicians in total are credited, but on “Springtime Again,” they move as a single unit. The Arkestra’s sound is airy, dreamy, drifting, voices like a sigh. Here, Ra is not so much concerned with the cosmos, but with that most wondrous earthly delight, the return of spring.“Springtime Again”Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Myth Science Solar Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆Jes Skolnik, writer, editor and musicianThe B-side and title track of the album “Atlantis” isn’t exactly an easy piece, but it is one to which I return frequently. Recorded live at the Olatunji Center of African Culture in Harlem in 1967 — Ra and the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji were good friends, bonded by musical inclinations and similar ideas around the importance of African and broader Black diasporic art — it was condensed down to just over 20 minutes from roughly 45. Ra’s keyboard improvisations here are aggressive and discordant, representing the titular ancient civilization being overwhelmed by the forces of the natural world; as the band finally enters the shattered landscape about 10 minutes in, one can see visions of the future built among the wreckage of the past.“Atlantis”Sun Ra and His Astro Infinity Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆keiyaA, musicianIf jazz is a language, then Sun Ra’s Arkestra was my introduction to the practice of speaking freely, intentionally objecting to traditional notions of form and communicating outside of them. Conscientious objection is something in which June Tyson is an expert, especially shown in my favorite tune of theirs, “Somebody Else’s World.” The opening organ line is the opening of a grand ceremony. June enters haunting and assured, a lesson in Southern Gothic. She sings a translucent “ah,” a melody, and then the lyrics:“Somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world is not my idea of things as they are. Somebody else’s idea of things to come need not be the only way to vision the future.”June continues to bellow, with pulsating “ah”s, the band expanding and retracting. It’s so beautiful and consuming! She ends by humming the melody, giving us room to meditate on what’s been said. Hearing this for the first time felt like holding a ton of bricks; it’s heavy as hell, to be reminded and assured that we can (must?) shape the world to be what we believe it to be and not inherently what it is. I’d always known (and been intimidated by) Sun Ra’s work to reference life outside of this world, but June’s voice alongside his gave me a framework on what to do with this world. Long live Sun Ra and the Saturnian Queen — I am truly, truly thankful for them.“Somebody Else’s World — a.k.a. Somebody Else’s Idea”Sun Ra and His Astro Infinity Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Notable Boxed Sets of 2022: Pop, Rap, Soul, Jazz and More

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      Anniversary editions (from Norah Jones and Neil Young), a dive into the hip-hop underground (via C.V.E.) and rediscovered live jazz (from Elvin Jones and Charles Mingus) arrived in 2022.In the archives of recorded music — and now video — there’s always more to discover (or exploit). This year’s boxed sets revisit blockbuster albums and go nationwide with local scene stars. The New York Times has already featured some major archival collections from bands like the Beatles, Blondie and Wilco. Here are more deep dives.Albert Ayler, ‘Revelations’(Elemental Music; four CDs or download, $58)Albert Ayler’s mid-60s work, once controversial, is now jazz canon. But the later phase of the saxophone radical’s brief career, when he experimented with funk and blues, and incorporated vocals from his partner Mary Maria Parks, is still overlooked. This set, the first complete issue of two July 1970 concerts at the French modern-art center the Fondation Maeght, expands prior versions by more than two hours — and makes a strong case that Ayler was in peak form here, just months before his death at age 34. On the ballad-like “Spiritual Reunion,” he caresses and adorns a prayerful melody atop gorgeous accompaniment from the pianist Call Cobbs, making even his quavering shrieks on the horn sound loving, while on “Desert Blood,” Ayler, the bassist Steve Tintweiss and the drummer Allen Blairman artfully frame a Parks song before embarking on an improvisation that suggests a softer yet still-incandescent version of the flame the saxophonist lit on his early classics. HANK SHTEAMERThe Beach Boys, ‘Sail On Sailor — 1972’(Capitol; six CDs, $150; five LPs and 7-inch EP, $179.98)1972 was a year of upheaval for the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson, the group’s mastermind, had grown withdrawn, leaving most of the songwriting to the other band members while Carl Wilson largely took over production. Two South African musicians, Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, officially joined the band. The two Beach Boys albums that were completed in 1972, “Carl and the Passions — ‘So Tough’” and “Holland” — still got their singles (“Marcella” and “Sail On, Sailor”) from Brian Wilson. But the other members’ broad and sometimes confused ambitions were clear in songs with elaborate structures and lyrics about topics like spirituality and colonial genocide — determinedly grown-up songs, not would-be hits. The much expanded boxed set includes an exhilarating full-length 1972 Carnegie Hall concert, songs in progress, a cappella mixdowns and a worthy, much-bootlegged “Holland” outtake, “Carry Me Home,” that laments mortality with lush harmonies. JON PARELESC.V.E., ‘Chillin Villains: We Represent Billions’(Nyege Nyege Tapes; LP, $20)The unrelenting weirdness of the Los Angeles hip-hop underground in the mid-1990s gave birth to an almost unending variety of techniques and characters. Among the most signature was C.V.E. — Chillin Villains Empire — a relatively unheralded crew affiliated with the fertile scene at the Good Life Café. This anthology collects songs from 1993 to 2003, some released and some not, that show off just how experimental C.V.E.’s primary members Riddlore?, NgaFsh and Tray-Loc were. With their bizarre cadences, unusual word pairings and unexpectedly punchy storytelling, they sound like close cousins to the freaky styles of Freestyle Fellowship, the scene’s pre-eminent eccentrics. JON CARAMANICAGuns N’ Roses, ‘Guns N’ Roses — Use Your Illusion I & II Super Deluxe’(UME/Geffen; 12 LPs, one Blu-ray and a book $499.98; seven CDs, one Blu-ray and a book $259.98)In 1991, no band was bigger than Guns N’ Roses, and on the two albums it released that year, “Use Your Illusion I” and “II,” it showed. Here was a group grappling with ambition using several different, sometimes competing tactics — songs that had the feverish intensity of metal, songs that touched on politics, songs that ran nine minutes long. These multiplatinum albums are epically unkempt, for better and worse — it doesn’t get much blowzier, and it doesn’t get much more rollicking, or arrestingly melodramatic. This doorstopper release is a sprawling boxed set for a sprawling pair of albums (remastered for the first time from the original stereo masters). There’s a book rich with ephemera, oodles of trinkets, recordings of two live shows, and a Blu-ray of one of those: from a bruising, chaotic jam at the Ritz in New York in 1991, a warm-up show for the Use Your Illusion Tour (even though the group hadn’t yet finished recording the albums). For capturing this era of this band, this excess is appropriate, but also telling. Implosion was around the corner — these albums would be the last full-length releases of original music it would put out for 17 years. CARAMANICAElvin Jones, ‘Revival: Live at Pookie’s Pub’(Blue Note; digital album, $12.99 to $17.98; two CDs, $29.98; three LPs, $54,98; three LPs and test pressing, $224.98)Elvin Jones’s elemental brand of swing, bashing yet balletic, propelled John Coltrane’s band for five magical years in the early to mid-60s. As Coltrane’s music grew more abstract, and, according to Jones, “hectic,” the drummer took his leave in 1966. The New York club gigs documented on “Revival” — recorded the following year, less than two weeks after Coltrane’s death — play like a manifesto of the bandleading philosophy that would define the rest of Jones’s lengthy career: Assemble a sturdy group — here featuring the saxophonist and flutist Joe Farrell; the obscure pianist Billy Greene, with Larry Young subbing on one tune; and the bassist Wilbur Little — put together a well-balanced set list of standards and originals and get down to business. Jones’s turbulent drive on Farrell’s “13 Avenue B” and way-behind-the-beat lope during “On the Trail” demonstrate why many consider him jazz percussion’s all-time heavyweight champ. SHTEAMERNorah Jones, ‘Come Away With Me (20th Anniversary)’(Blue Note; three CDs, $39.98; four LPs, $179.98)The hushed jazz-country-folk-pop amalgam of “Come Away With Me,” the debut album that became a blockbuster for Norah Jones, didn’t come out of nowhere. She had to home in on it along a winding path that led through music school, New York City jazz-brunch gigs that people talked through, homesickness for country music from her childhood in Texas, demos she made with songwriter friends in New York City and all-star recording sessions in a mountainside mansion near Woodstock, N.Y. Those sessions, rejected by Blue Note Records before Jones tried again with her friends and made her hit album, are unveiled on the expanded reissue of “Come Away,” and they reveal an artist quietly finding her own voice: one of elegant modesty. The rejected sessions, newly released, offer a lesson in musical chemistry. With musicians who were skillful but not her regular collaborators, Jones both deferred too much to her better-known accompanists and pushed her voice a little too hard. Although there are luminous moments, like her versions of Horace Silver’s “Peace” and Tom Waits’s “Picture in a Frame,” the results were capable but not quite right. PARELESPeggy Lee, ‘Norma Deloris Egstrom From Jamestown, North Dakota (Expanded Edition)’(Capitol; CD, $13.98)Peggy Lee aficionados know that one of the hidden gems in her vast discography is her 40th record, and her last for her longtime label Capitol, “Norma Deloris Egstrom From Jamestown, North Dakota.” (Yes, that’s Lee’s civilian name and her place of birth.) “Norma” is a mature work, born of the same lived-in ennui that had made “Is That All There Is?” an unexpected hit in 1969, when Lee was almost 50. “Norma” flew under the radar and remained out of print for decades, but half a century after its initial release, it can at last be properly appreciated. It is a stirring and remarkably melancholic album that gives voice to grief and isolation through Lee’s wrenching performances of “It Takes Too Long to Learn to Live Alone” and “Superstar,” at the time a recent hit for the Carpenters. Artie Butler’s arrangements are sublime, giving Lee’s anguish plenty of dramatic flourish. The seven bonus tracks are illuminating if not revelatory, largely alternate vocal takes, though Lee’s poignant song from the 1972 movie “Snoopy Come Home” is included. The rerelease’s main aim, though, is not to excavate old material but to introduce new listeners to “Norma Deloris Egstrom,” and one of her great works. LINDSAY ZOLADZGalcher Lustwerk, ‘100% Galcher’(Ghostly International; CD, $14; two LPs, $27)The most rewarding aspect of “100% Galcher,” the breakout mix by the house music producer Galcher Lustwerk, is its utter patience. On tracks like “I Neva Seen” and “Enterprise,” it’s clear the body is in motion, but there’s an overlay of deep soothing and pensiveness, an almost new age energy. This decade-old mix, which had its premiere in the Blowing Up the Workshop series in 2013 and is completely made up of his original productions, is being properly reissued as individual tracks for the first time now. It’s womb-like and astral, and Lustwerk’s talk-raps, which he casually ladles throughout, are like reassuring commands. CARAMANICACharles Mingus, ‘The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott’s’(Resonance Records; three CDs, $29.99; three LPs, $74.99)The Charles Mingus sextet featured on these two beautifully captured 1972 live sets from the venerable London club Ronnie Scott’s, intended for official release but shelved because of label limbo, was only intact for a brief stretch. But its chemistry rivals that of the bassist’s greatest groups. On a stunning 35-minute version of the “Mingus Ah Um” classic “Fables of Faubus,” the drummer Roy Brooks and the under-documented pianist John Foster skillfully steer the band between playful abstraction and crackling swing, while on the then-new “Mind-Readers’ Convention in Milano (AKA Number 29),” the saxophonists Charles McPherson and Bobby Jones and the trumpeter Jon Faddis show how fully they’d internalized Mingus’s signature blend of ornate writing and joyous collective improv. SHTEAMERNeu!, ‘50!’(Groenland; four CDs, $54.99; five LPs, $129.99)Among the creators of kosmiche, a.k.a. krautrock, Neu! was probably the most anti-pop of all. Alongside Can, Faust and Kraftwerk — which included the founders of Neu!, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, in an early lineup — Neu! embraced repetition, drones, found-sound noise and studio collaging, creating music in the early 1970s that would influence punk and industrial rock very soon afterward: sometimes raucous, sometimes meditative. The vinyl box collects the three Neu! studio albums from the 1970s; the CD collection also includes “Neu! 86,” which sounded less radical and more jovial, but still contentious. Both sets add a group of newly recorded tributes and remixes from fans including the National and Mogwai — who, try as they might, can’t quite sound as austere or cantankerous as Neu! in its prime, though Idles and Man Man come close. PARELESNancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, ‘Nancy & Lee’(Light in the Attic; CD, $14; LP, $27; cassette, $12; 8-track, $35)After last year’s excellent Nancy Sinatra compilation “Start Walkin’ 1965-1976” comes the first official reissue of what is perhaps the highlight of her discography: the beloved 1968 duet album she made with her frequent collaborator Lee Hazlewood. Lush, cinematic and alluringly strange, “Nancy & Lee” still possesses every bit of its oddball charm; more than 50 years on, it makes the argument not only for Hazlewood’s boundless imagination as a producer, but for Sinatra’s open-mindedness and risk-taking, as she followed Hazlewood down avenues — the trippy “Some Velvet Morning,” for one — less adventurous pop stars would have avoided. The bonus material is scant, but fun: a lounge-y, sultry take on the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and a hammy rendition of the Mickey & Sylvia hit “Love Is Strange.” Of their enduring, opposites-attract sonic chemistry, Sinatra quips in a lively new interview included in the liner notes, “We used to call it beauty and the beast!” ZOLADZ‘John Sinclair Presents Detroit Artists Workshop’(Strut; download, $9.99; CD, $13.99; two LPs, $26)The MC5 manager and White Panther co-founder John Sinclair steps into the role of smooth-voiced jazz D.J. on the intro track to this compilation, the first sampling of live recordings from the archives of the Detroit Artists Workshop, a collective he helped start in 1964 to present local concerts and poetry events. The set, which encompasses 1965 through 1981, features nationally recognized names (including the trumpeter Donald Byrd and the saxophonist Bennie Maupin, both heard in righteously funky settings), but it’s the local luminaries who make this an essential document of a regional scene. The pianist and longtime Supremes musical director Teddy Harris combines big-band-style horns and a hard-grooving R&B rhythm section on “Passion Dance”; the Detroit Contemporary 4 serves up elegant, impassioned post-bop on “Three Flowers”; and the organist Lyman Woodard’s Organization digs into fierce jazz-funk in 5/4 time on “Help Me Get Away.” SHTEAMER‘The Skippy White Story: Boston Soul 1961-1967’(Yep Roc; CD, $15.99; LP, $24.99)Beginning in the early 1960s, Skippy White was — and still remains — an all-purpose cheerleader for Boston’s soul and gospel music scenes: record store proprietor, radio D.J., and when necessary, record label owner and producer. This anthology of long-lost sides captures just a little bit of the music he helped usher into the world, and is accompanied by an extensive historical essay on White’s life and career by Noah Schaffer and Eli (Paperboy) Reed. White’s sonic interests were wide-ranging — there’s dizzying doo-wop from Sammy and the Del-Lards, and also a stretch of intriguing gospel singles including Crayton Singers’s desperate, almost unsteady “Master on High.” That rawness is there, too, on “Do the Thing” by Earl Lett Quartet, an instruction song for the dance floor, or maybe somewhere else. CARAMANICAHorace Tapscott, ‘The Quintet’(Mr. Bongo; download, $5; CD, $10.99; LP, $25.99)Horace Tapscott was a movement unto himself, a pianist and composer who spent decades advocating for Black artists in Los Angeles and mentoring up-and-coming musicians through his Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Documents of his early work are scarce, making this previously unreleased set — recorded at the same session as Tapscott’s thrilling 1969 debut, “The Giant Is Awakened” — especially noteworthy. The music sometimes recalls earlier work by East Coast piano progressives like Mal Waldron or Cecil Taylor (both heard on fine archival releases this year), but Tapscott presents his own unique agenda. On “Your Child,” one of three lengthy, equally excellent tracks here, he plays dramatic, knobby lines that sometimes spiral off into jagged shards, ‌while the alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe‌ shows off the swooping agility and strong emotional charge that would earn him wide acclaim upon his move to New York in the mid-1970s‌. SHTEAMERMarvin Tate’s D-Settlement, ‘Marvin Tate’s D-Settlement’(American Dreams; three CDs, $30; four LPs, $75; four clear vinyl LPs, $85)Marvin Tate, who got his start as a slam-poetry champion, channeled his storytelling skills and multifarious voice — singing, preaching, narrating, taunting, shouting — into D-Settlement, a far-reaching band whose reputation should have extended well beyond its Chicago hometown during the 1990s and early 2000s. This boxed set collects the three albums D-Settlement made before breaking up in 2003, revealing a musical collective that easily vamped its way toward funk, rock, jazz, blues, gospel, reggae, punk, cabaret and more. Tate’s lyrics and delivery could be ferociously direct or sardonically barbed, as D-Settlement’s songs confronted poverty, racism and violence even as they summoned the joys of family and community — echoed in the communal improvisations of an ever exploratory band. PARELESNeil Young, ‘Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition)’(Reprise; deluxe CD boxed set, $49.98; deluxe LP boxed set, $149.98)The mythos of Neil Young’s fourth solo album still looms large in the popular imagination. “Harvest” is the record he made in retreat from fame at his newly acquired rustic Northern California ranch; thanks to its blockbuster success and its No. 1 hit “Heart of Gold,” it subsequently made Young even more uncomfortable with fame than ever before. Fans looking for a trove of demos or unreleased recordings may be slightly disappointed with this 50th anniversary edition, as it contains only three studio outtakes (“Bad Fog of Loneliness,” “Journey Through the Past” and “Dance Dance Dance”) all of which have been floating around in some variation for years. What makes the set worth it, though, are the DVDs, especially “Harvest Time,” a two-hour documentary (directed by Young’s alter ego, Bernard Shakey) that serves as an indelible time capsule of the record’s creation. Also fantastic is the 1971 BBC television recording, included in audio and video versions, of a solo Young, in especially fine voice, debuting some of his works in progress — and a stunned studio audience hearing “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold” for the first time. ZOLADZ More