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      Why Nina Simone Was Always Ahead of Her Time

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      A recently unearthed live version of “Blues for Mama,” written by Simone and Abbey Lincoln in the 1960s, took on domestic abuse in a momentous way.Nina Simone was always ahead of her time. And in the mid-1960s she found a fellow musical innovator and ideal feminist collaborator in the jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, whom she teamed up with to write the song “Blues for Mama.” When Simone performed it at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, she introduced it as “a gutbucket blues.”“It will appeal to a certain type of woman,” she said, “who has had this kind of experience.”That experience was domestic violence, a trauma that the titular Mama endured and that others blamed her for causing. “They say you’re mean and evil/Don’t know what to do,” Simone sang. “And that’s the reason that he’s gone/And left you black-and-blue.”I’ve been intrigued by “Blues for Mama” since I first heard it on Simone’s 1967 album “Nina Simone Sings the Blues.” And now, thanks to Verve Records’ recent issue of the previously unreleased recording of her Newport performance — packaged as the album “You’ve Got to Learn” — we have an even earlier version of the song out in the world.“Blues for Mama” signified a new moment. Rather than accept the abuse and the negative rumors, Nina tells Mama to set the record straight: “It wasn’t you that caused his bitter fate.”The track appears at the album’s midpoint, before the politically trenchant “Mississippi Goddam,” a song Simone wrote in response to two tragedies in 1963: the assassination of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the murder of four African American girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.Her fans are likely to have appreciated “Blues for Mama” as further proof of her musical dexterity and ability to seamlessly move across genres. And it stands out as one of few songs from the era to explicitly take on gender-based violence, actively refusing to blame the victim. “They say you love to fuss and fight/And bring a good man down,” Simone narrated. “And don’t know how to treat him/When he takes you on the town.”At the time, Lincoln, too, was known for both her vocal virtuosity and her radical politics, including her collaboration as the lead singer on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” the civil rights jazz album from the bebop drummer Max Roach, whom she later married. Though “Blues for Mama” is one of Lincoln’s earlier songwriting credits, it isn’t so surprising that she and Simone chose to embed their critique of sexism within a blues format.“Violence against women was always an appropriate topic for the blues,” the activist Angela Davis wrote in the book “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.” Davis goes on to say that this is because the blues, as a genre, often blurred the boundaries that separate the “private sphere from the public,” making the violence that Black people experience in their homes as lyrically and politically relevant as what happened to them outdoors and on the road.Lincoln and Simone were, in some ways, extending a tradition that dated back to the early 20th century, when classic blues singers recorded songs about domestic violence, among them Ma Rainey in “Black Eye Blues” (written by Thomas A. Dorsey) and Bessie Smith in “Outside of That” (by Jo Trent and Clarence Williams).Later, Billie Holiday sang, “Well, I’d rather my man would hit me/Than for him to jump up and quit me” in her cover of the blues standard “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do.” (It’s worth noting that Dianne Reeves changed those lyrics in her 1997 take on the song to, “I’d rather my man quit me/Than for him to even rear up and think about how he might even try to hit me.”) Except for Rainey’s “Cell Bound Blues,” about a woman jailed for shooting her violent lover, most blues songs presented abuse against women matter-of-factly and as one of many experiences that led to their feeling the blues.“Blues for Mama” was the rare protest song that could galvanize multiple social justice movements — civil rights, women’s liberation and Black Power — at once. It would take a quarter century for Simone to reveal in her memoir, “I Put a Spell On You,” that her marriage in the 1960s to Andy Stroud was rife with violence, while Lincoln would later allude to the tumult in her relationship with Roach.“He was a great big drummer, but he was a gorilla,” Lincoln told The Chicago Tribune. “I got tired of him ‘gorilla-ing’ me and telling me what I had to do.” She also revisited the themes in the later part of her career when she, divorced from Roach, established herself as a consummate songwriter. She recorded “Blues for Mama” as “Hey, Lordy Mama” in 1995, and addressed abuse in the ballad “And It’s Supposed to Be Love” (1999).Perhaps Simone sensed even back then that “Blues for Mama” would have to be rediscovered to be more fully appreciated. That July evening at the Newport festival, she broke midsong to admonish her audience and declared, “I guess you ain’t ready for that.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Miles Davis’s Electric Period

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      Navigate the trumpeter’s snaky, endless grooves with picks from Flying Lotus, Cindy Blackman Santana and Terence Blanchard, among other musicians, writers and critics.For the past year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz — one artist, instrument and subgenre at a time. We’ve covered Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, New Orleans music, jazz vocalists and much more.Now, we’re turning to the man known as the Prince of Darkness, who gave us the “Birth of the Cool” and never stopped redefining it: Miles Davis. Since the trumpeter’s shape-shifting career encompassed so many phases and styles, we’ve decided to focus on just one: the era known as “Electric Miles,” starting in 1968 and continuing for more than 20 years, when he embraced electric instruments and stubborn, snaky grooves, in the process basically drawing up a blueprint for the genre now known as jazz-rock fusion.“I have to change,” Davis once said. “It’s like a curse.” And as he changed, so did American music. For much of the 1950s and basically all of the ’60s, any time Davis released an album, the center of gravity in jazz shifted a bit.In the late 1960s, urged on by his young wife, the singer Betty (Mabry) Davis, and impressed by funk and rock musicians like Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, the trumpeter disbanded his acoustic quintet and put aside his tailored business suits. (It bears noting that his marriage to Betty was part of a toxic pattern: He frequently drew creative inspiration from the women in his life, but he was often physically abusive and ruthlessly controlling, as he was toward her.) With Betty as a kind of creative adviser, he bought a psychedelic wardrobe, started running his trumpet through a wah-wah pedal — like Hendrix’s guitar — and convened enormously long jam sessions with hordes of musicians: With multiple guitarists, keyboardists, drummers, bassists and percussionists playing together, he would build collective improvisations that took on lives of their own.About that: When you’re dealing with Electric Miles, you aren’t going to get very far in five minutes. So we’ve got to beg a little forgiveness for the name of this piece. But if you’ve got a little more than five, read on to see the picks of musicians, critics and writers who share a deep love for Davis’s electric period; a playlist is at the bottom of the article, and you can leave your own favorites in the comments. We’re sure you’ll find yourself happily immersed in Davis’s “brew.”◆ ◆ ◆Kalamu Ya Salaam, poet“Mademoiselle Mabry (Miss Mabry)”And the music cried Miles. So much was going on. Many of us turned significant corners during the decade after M.L.K. was murdered, April 1968. “Filles de Kilimanjaro” was the gone song. Nothing would any longer be the same. Miles went electric. Clothes and all. The concept was new directions. Miles responding to the killing fields. Post-funeral drug. After this, he had no more memorable bands. (Most of us could not even name the new members — only one great musician, Kenny Garrett, would graduate from that post-60s academy de Miles.) But, oh my, Miss Mabry had us enraptured. This was a way to meditate, to think about what was unthinkable, a new era, a realm most of us did not see coming. Miles knew the music had to change because the times they were a-changing, and the sound of the “Filles” album in 1968 was a lonely goodbye. If you listen to this late at night with the lights out, you will be able to deal with both the death of what was and the birth of things to come.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Cindy Blackman Santana, drummer“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” from “Bitches Brew” (1970), has got a really slinky, cool, funky groove that’s very inviting. It’s easy for people to feel where it’s at. I love the way the song progresses and starts to fill in, with the guitar and the keyboards. And as Miles develops into playing inside of that groove, you hear that big, gorgeous trumpet sound that everybody’s used to. All of the phrasing is just so meaningful and so heartfelt. When Miles first heard Tony Williams’s Lifetime, he wanted to make that band his band — but that wasn’t going to fly with Tony, so Miles took the guitarist, John McLaughlin, and the organist, Larry Young, and he recorded with them. A lot of people don’t give Tony the credit he deserves for that beginning. But at the end of the day, Miles had the openness of mind and the foresight to see how incredible that was, and to take his version of that and keep progressing with his ideas.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Flying Lotus, electronic musician“Lonely Fire”“Lonely Fire” happens to be my favorite Miles Davis tune. People always describe Miles as sounding like the voice of “the outsider” or “the loner,” and this track breathes life into those labels, a testament to his unparalleled spirit. I’ve listened to this song countless times through many phases of my life and moods, and I still don’t know what kind of configuration it takes to create a moment like this. And to be honest, I kinda don’t want to know. To me, it’s magic.I hadn’t thought of it until now — but this song really does sound like what it’s like to stare into a fire. For a moment, nothing else exists. There’s that same feeling of being lost and suspended in time, mesmerized by some destructive beauty.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter and composer“Prelude, Pt. 1”My favorite pieces from Miles’s electric era are the live recordings he made in Japan in 1975 for the “Agharta” and “Pangaea” albums. The band develops a certain kind of tapestry that allows each performer to have individuality, but measured by the whole: Everything is equal. And the only thing that really stands out from that tapestry are the comments that Miles Davis makes on his horn. In this era, he chose to make shorter phrases than he had in his acoustical music — not disconnected from each other, but just shorter phrases with more space in between them — and he blurred the palette that dealt with tone or pitch. With the guitars and electric keyboards and all those extra components in play, he would shape whatever was coming out of the band based off what I would call his unspoken philosophy of what the music should be. It would all depend on whether he looked at somebody, or he played something, or he changed the mute on his trumpet, or he went over to the keyboards. All of those things were the components of his composition.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Lakecia Benjamin, saxophonist“Human Nature” (live)This cover of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” was actually the first music of Miles Davis’s that I heard. I had a teacher who was like, “You guys like Michael Jackson? Michael Jackson and jazz are the same.” And we were like, yeah right. But then they played us Miles’s version of “Human Nature.” Because of the time period, I knew that song really well, and to hear somebody so famous playing that melody on a trumpet was really inspiring. I can’t tell you how motivational it was. I started exploring videos online and saw all the different ways he might solo on that song; this also was the first time I saw how Miles dressed and how he looked, how he interacted with his band, how the audience interacted with him. An instrumentalist operating at a rock-star level was something that I had never seen before in my life.On live performances, like this one from 1991, there would be a huge Kenny Garrett solo at the end of the tune, and that helped me understand the role that the alto saxophone was playing in a modern era, too. We all know Kenny Garrett is kind of like the god of the alto, and this was my first experience of knowing who he is: completely ripping “Human Nature.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Terence Blanchard, trumpeter“Filles de Kilimanjaro”“Filles de Kilimanjaro,” to me, marks the start of the fusion period in Miles’s career. His moment in time was filled with experimentation, so his being open to new sounds and approaches was not a shock. Using those electric elements seems to come from a need to find new sounds and colors. I think what made it so useful is how their use didn’t result in him watering down his musical approach, it only enhanced it. Which reminded all of us how the music was always the most important thing, not just the use of those elements. Miles Davis’s entire career was based on a pursuit for truth and discovery. With his electric period, this constant pursuit of new ideas and sounds brought us an entire genre of music.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Teebs, electronic musician“In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time”“In a Silent Way” is just magical. The song’s beginning gives me a sense of sustained stillness within the air before moving into a full groove and returning back again into a still space. I find a lot of value in spacing and timing in music, and Miles seems to capture these sensibilities with purpose. This record, from 1969, was around the beginning of his step into more electric sounds, and I enjoy how confidently it was made. I am forever grateful for this song and the records that followed.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elena Pinderhughes, flutist“He Loved Him Madly”On “He Loved Him Madly,” a tribute to Duke Ellington from 1974, you can hear every musician really searching: taking their time, searching for the collective sound and vision. There’s so much patience, it’s almost meditative, even though it’s so electric: three guitars, and then all these different layers of electricity on top of them. At many times, you wouldn’t even know how many people are on the song, but if you listen and break it down, it’s amazing. It grows into this groove; you start getting this beautiful alto flute moment with the guitars, and then around halfway — which is 16 minutes in! — Miles comes in with his perfect trumpet voice and opens it up again completely.“He Loved Him Madly” encapsulates one of my favorite things about Miles, which is that he’s so intentional with everything. Every note and every change that’s happening with the rhythm section matters to how it feels collectively, with this simple slow groove that’s almost 30 minutes long. And then in the last section, you get a little more edge — that grittier, funkier side that comes out — and it’s just the most incredible evolution. For anyone that’s not as familiar with Davis’s work, I think it would be rewarding to just sit with the evolution of this one song, sit with the intention and the patience that it takes to create something like this.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Tony Bolden, Black Studies scholar“Yesternow”While listening recently to Maurice White playing drums on “The Mighty Quinn,” Ramsey Lewis’s 1968 cover of the Bob Dylan classic made popular by Manfred Mann, I heard inklings of jazz-funk. (Of course, White became better known as the founder and lead singer of Earth, Wind & Fire.) However, Miles Davis’s 1971 album “Jack Johnson” is an early example of genuine jazz-funk. Recorded in 1970, “Jack Johnson” features Davis’s characteristically pensive sound on trumpet, while Michael Henderson’s head-nodding bass lines are classic funk. Also notable are John McLaughlin’s bluesy licks on guitar and the actor Brock Peters’s interpretation of Jack Johnson’s unreconstructed Blackness (heard in a voice-over at the end of the 25-minute “Yesternow”). The album foreshadows Davis’s increasing fascination with funk and its broader impact on Black music and culture in the 1970s.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic“Hannibal”Hear me out on this. With Davis’s 1980s stuff, there will always be things you need to get over. Let’s call it the “Law & Order”-theme aesthetic, for short, and leave it at that. But if some of the choices on “Hannibal” can feel superficial (Marcus Miller’s slap-happy bass, the strings-adjacent synth sound, the misfit steel pan), they also make the track’s major achievement all the more impressive: It preserves the sense of darkness and danger that has always run just below the surface through Davis’s best work. You can’t miss how tightly plotted and produced this tune is — it’s far from his sprawling funk jams of the 1970s — but it still bristles and skulks mysteriously. You can’t pin it down. “Hannibal” comes from “Amandla,” a masterful 1989 LP whose name, meaning “power” in Zulu, expressed solidarity with the revolutionaries fighting apartheid in South Africa. Let your expectations go, and it’ll win you over.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Harmony Holiday, poet“Two Faced”Miles Davis is the “hero with a thousand faces,” the one Joseph Campbell reveals as the muse of all myths and legends that arrive in his realm, beyond the West, beyond life and afterlife, beyond evil and virtue, what Ellington might call “beyond category.” On the sessions that would become his album “Water Babies” (1976), he gave us two of those faces, halved to the precision of divine union and returning as one. “Two Faced” as in Gemini, along with fellow heroes who attempt to pierce the electroacoustic farce like Kendrick Lamar, like Tupac, like Ye — like stars, like years, like numerals. At times they draw their own blood in search of sound’s life force. It makes logical sense that this album, composed of outtakes from “Nefertiti” and “In a Silent Way,” would also harbor what I believe is one of the only autobiographical moments in Miles’s catalog. He tells on himself for the 18-minute relay between ballad and blues, upbeat and adagio. He admits the excess of vision that he cannot help, retraces it slowly, retracts it with urgency, back and forth in perfect and signature ambivalence. He once said he played ballads so well he had to stop playing them, to get better, or to master himself. On “Two Faced,” recorded in 1968, he blurs a ballad so well you think he succeeded; he hides his restrained saunter in the piano’s frenetic sprint. He takes himself back. In a bit of humor, the album also has a song called “Capricorn.” He knows his foils. He knows himself.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Graham Haynes, trumpeter“Lonely Fire”I remember something Miles said in an interview, right around the time this piece was released: “Don’t write about the music. The music speaks for itself!” I’ve always agreed with this opinion, particularly with Miles’s music and particularly from this period. So, with that in mind, I’m hoping that Miles doesn’t get too angry with me here, wherever he is. “Lonely Fire” is a beautiful piece of music. The performance is as fresh today as it was in 1974, when it was released. The orchestration is something that classes in conservatories need to make a part of their curriculums. The song is essentially a sketch. The melody is played by Miles several times, then Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, then Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet, then back to Miles, who keeps embellishing more. There are no solos. In that way it is also like the Wayne Shorter piece “Nefertiti,” because there are no “solos,” only the melody, over and over with embellishments. The choice of colors with the rhythm section is stellar, with sitar, tamboura, Fender Rhodes piano, bass, drums and percussion. Miles’s sound here is hauntingly beautiful. In an interview Greg Tate did with Wayne Shorter several years ago, Wayne referred to Miles’s trumpet sound as “Excalibur.” Here we see why. This music is beyond any words I can think to give it. I would give it 10 stars!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆David Renard, Times senior editor“Rated X”It’s a little perverse to choose a song where Miles Davis plays the organ, not the trumpet. That alone would set “Rated X” apart, even on an album (“Get Up With It”) brimming with experiments and stylistic shifts. But “Rated X” delivers a singular jolt, one of those “this was recorded in which decade?” moments. (It’s the ’70s.) The drums sound more programmed than played — crisp and frantically precise, completely modern — and they’re both a backbone and a destabilizing force, cutting off abruptly into silence and pulling the rug out from under the droning organ, only to drop back in just as quickly. Propelled by galloping bass and heavily wah-wah’d guitar, the track sets a mood that’s anxious and tense but exhilarating, an unsettling rush into the future.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Jlin, electronic musician“Pharaoh’s Dance”I have so many Miles Davis favorites, but one track that just does it for me every time is “Pharaoh’s Dance,” from his album “Bitches Brew,” which is insanely genius. “Pharaoh’s Dance” for me just screams the word “fulfilled.” I can hear how in-tune Miles is with himself each time I play this. He never misses a chance to play, but also never overplays his chance, either. Miles has this striking beauty of balance he creates with his eclectic approach each time he decides to pop in and out of the track. It’s never the same; he never repeats a phrase or sequence.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Ibrahim Maalouf, trumpeter“Turnaround”The first time I listened to this box set, “The Complete On the Corner Sessions,” I was in my 30s. I had just played with Marcus Miller on the French Riviera, and I felt the urge to revisit all of Miles Davis’s work. I realized that the entire electric part had eluded me. It was “On the Corner” and specifically “Turnaround” that helped me understand his approach. His desire never to be bound by the norms that often turn success in jazz into a curse. He embraced his history while resonating with the evolution of his time. This album, for me, is the pursuit of that sound. And on “Turnaround,” he found it.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆George Grella Jr., music critic“Sivad”One of the vital revelations about music came to me as a teenager, sitting in a friend’s basement, listening to his parents’ LPs. The move from Miles’s quintet albums to “Live-Evil” (1971) was drastic; the reward was understanding that groove and details of space, placement and articulation were profound and masterful. Even more, during the heyday of album-rock radio and the singer-songwriter stars, it was thrilling to feel music that wasn’t about anything but its own sound, saying so much more than words could. And that the sensuality of music in the body could carry Miles’s rich, complex intellect.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      A Trumpeter Stretches Past the Bounds of Jazz

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      Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah’s new album, “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning,” is his first on which he doesn’t touch the trumpet. Instead, he extends the legacy of Black masking Indians in New Orleans.Growing up in New Orleans, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah was raised at the corner of two traditions. He learned to play the trumpet at the elbow of his uncle and mentor, the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., whose career took off after a stint in Art Blakey’s band. Harrison was a true-blue jazz musician, and Adjuah — who was born, and first introduced to the listening public as, Christian Scott — seemed destined to become one, too.But their family was also prominent in New Orleans’s tradition of Black masking Indians, rooted in the city’s history of Black and Indigenous resistance in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Africans fleeing slavery often joined with Native Americans in maroon communities. While professional musicians laid down the roots of American jazz in the late 1800s — mixing African styles with European repertoire at parades and society functions — groups of so-called Mardi Gras Indians dressed in bright regalia performed songs with a more unbroken connection to West and Central Africa, and little relationship to a commercial audience. To this day, Black masking Indians sing those old songs on Mardi Gras Day.Adjuah now carries that history. He has become a big chief of a Black Indian group, the Xodokan Nation, just as his uncle and grandfather were before him. On July 1, in a ceremony at historic Congo Square, the Ashé Cultural Arts Center named Adjuah the Grand Griot of New Orleans.Adjuah has worked for years to convince the world that he’s not a “jazz” musician at all: The word’s racist history is now widely acknowledged; he says “stretch music” is a more appropriate catchall for the alloy of African influences, Black American improvisation, hip-hop, indie rock and more that he has been polishing for the past two decades. But it has always been tough to hear the music he makes with his bands, and not think immediately about where it fits in the cosmology of (what most of us know as) contemporary jazz.Until now.Adjuah’s new LP, “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning,” is his 14th studio album, and the first on which he doesn’t touch the trumpet. Instead, he sings and plays a handful of self-made instruments: Chief Adjuah’s Bow, which blends the West African n’goni and kora with the European harp; a custom n’goni; and a Pan-African drum kit. Adjuah mixes in the odd SPD-SX drum machine or other synthesized percussion, but the album features almost nothing but acoustic percussion, vocals and the occasional sound of trees rustling or birds cawing.Instrument-building, he said in a recent conversation with the Africana studies scholar Joshua Myers, is part of his effort to “find instruments that could work as 21st-century bridges to the older styles, so that we could go back and grab those things.”“Bark Out Thunder” connects to a lineage of Black Indian recordings made over the past 50 years: by Bo Dollis’s Wild Magnolias; the Wild Tchoupitoulas; and Donald Harrison Jr., whose 1992 album “Indian Blues” (featuring Dr. John) did its best to marry straight-ahead jazz aesthetics with the Black Indian repertoire.Adjuah’s LP amounts to a paean to this legacy, and an announcement of how he plans to carry the torch forward. Joined by about a dozen longtime collaborators and close family members, he leads the ensemble in a few traditional songs and a handful of originals built on gnostic, historically grounded lyrics and drifting, driving rhythms. He doesn’t condescend to the folklore. It is his source of strength: a book of oral histories and battle rhythms, to be used in a contemporary way.This is Adjuah’s first album that simply cannot be construed as contemporary jazz — and it’s the most compelling, undiluted LP he has made yet.From the Black Indian canon, he covers the rousing call-and-response of “Shallow Water,” offered here in tribute to his uncle; an up-tempo version of the traditional song “Iko,” here titled “Xodokan Iko — Hu Na Ney,” with a refrain in Black Indian Creole set against Adjuah’s original verses full of references to the Orishas and American Indian iconography; and “Golden Crown,” on which the chorus’s voices salute the chief: “Adjuah got the golden crown.”As “Golden Crown” nears its end, Adjuah’s voice fades down to sing a hopeful verse:Meet the hunter that mornin’ gold shining brightSay a riot this mornin’ I might incite, nowA riot of love, a riot of lightOn the digital LP, an up-tempo bonus track reprises the hazy title tune. Adjuah plucks his bow in a slightly distorted pattern while the percussionist Elé Salif Howell joins him in a charging, six-beat rhythm redolent of Wassoulou music: an ancient-but-alive West African style, played mostly by women, not far from what’s known as “desert blues.” True to form, as Adjuah sings he name-checks his sources — shouting out the Wassoulous’ history of resistance to French colonization while placing them alongside a dozen other groups (“Haitian, Cheyenne and Mande, too”) that fought the same fight. “There was a man who took a stand,” he sings, “did what he can to build the world anew.”Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah“Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning”(Ropeadope) More

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      A Thrilling, Rediscovered Nina Simone Set, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Snoh Aalegra, DeYarmond Edison, Explosions in the Sky and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Nina Simone, ‘Mississippi Goddam’Just a week after performing at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., supporting James Meredith’s March Against Fear, Nina Simone was on fire as she strode onstage to play for a very different audience at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1966. Her interactions with the bourgeois New Englanders at Newport were hardly warm: In the middle of an acid-rinsed version of “Blues for Mama,” she dismisses them — “I guess you ain’t ready for that” — and later she hushes them: “Shut up, shut up.” But she pours every ounce of vitriol she’s got into the performance, especially on “Mississippi Goddam.” She’d first released the song in 1964, and two years later it felt as topical as ever. Meredith had just been shot while marching across Mississippi, and unrest was overtaking redlined Black neighborhoods across the country. At Newport, she amends one of the verses to address the oppression of Los Angeles’s Black community: “Alabama’s got me so upset/And Watts has made me lose my rest/Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn!” The entire Newport performance is now available for the first time as an album titled “You’ve Got to Learn.” It’s spellbinding, heartbreaking stuff, reminding us just how much Simone would still be lamenting today. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSnoh Aalegra, ‘Be My Summer’Snoh Aalegra sings about not being able to let go in the forlorn, slowly undulating “Be My Summer.” She confesses, “I can’t change how I feel/Tried moving on but I’m right here where we left off.” The song arrives with a tangle of voices — some harmonizing, a few straying — and they return in choruses that are never quite unanimous, hinting at misgivings behind her pleas to “protect me from the rain.” JON PARELESAma Lou, ‘Silence’“Bring me silence till you start hearing sounds,” the English R&B songwriter Ama Lou instructs in a song that veers between sorrow and spite. The production isn’t silent but it feels sparse and hollow. Her vocals pour out over two chords implied by sustained bass notes and a hollow, stop-start drumbeat. With bursts of vocal melody that hint at prime Janet Jackson, Ama Lou mixes accusations and regrets, making it’s clear that she wasn’t the betrayer. “I believe I was convinced that you were actually all right,” she sings, quivering with disbelief. PARELESBlur, ‘The Ballad’“I just looked into my life and all I saw was that you’re not coming back,” an exquisitely mopey Damon Albarn sings at the beginning of “The Ballad,” a clear highlight from Blur’s new album, “The Ballad of Darren.” Lush backing vocals from the guitarist Graham Coxon and punchy percussion from the drummer Dave Rowntree provide a buoyancy, and layers of sonic details give “The Ballad” a kind of dreamy, weightless atmosphere. LINDSAY ZOLADZbeabadoobee, ‘The Way Things Go’The Filipino-English songwriter beabadoobee keeps a light touch as she whisper-sings about crumbling relationships like the one in “The Way Things Go.” Bouncy, folky guitar picking accompanies her as she claims the romance is only “a distant memory I used to know.” But later she gets down to accusations — “Didn’t think you’d ever stoop so low” — while a faraway orchestra with scurrying flutes floats in around her, a fantasy backdrop for her pointed nonchalance. PARELESDeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’Before Bon Iver, Justin Vernon was a member of DeYarmond Edison, which also included Brad Cook, Phil Cook and Joe Westerlund, who would form the band Megafaun. “Epoch,” recorded in 2005 and 2006, is the title track of a boxed set due in August and a harbinger of Bon Iver. It’s a resigned, measured ballad, with cryptic lyrics contemplating mortality and technology: “Out with the new in with the old/The wavelength rests at its node.” And behind the stately melody, the folky acoustic instruments that open the song — a banjo, a tambourine — face surreal echoes and incursions of noise. PARELESThe Mountain Goats, ‘Clean Slate’In 2002, the Mountain Goats — then the solo project of John Darnielle — released one of the most beloved albums in its vast catalog, “All Hail West Texas,” a collection of wrenching character studies bleated into a boombox accompanied by just an urgently played acoustic guitar. More than two decades later, and now with a full band behind him, Darnielle will revisit those same characters on the forthcoming album “Jenny from Thebes.” The first single, the lively “Clean Slate,” suggests that he won’t be returning to the previous album’s lo-fi sound; the new track has a rock operatic grandeur and a ’70s AM radio brightness. The lyrics are full of closely observed desperation and stubborn glimmers of hope — which is to say they’re classic Darnielle. “It’s never light outside yet when they climb into the van,” he sings. “Remember at your peril, forget the ones you can.” ZOLADZGrupo Frontera and Ke Personajes, ‘Ojitos Rojos’There are worse misfortunes than having no space left on a cellphone because it’s filled with photos of an ex. But that’s the situation in “Ojitos Rojos” (“Little Red Eyes”), the latest collaboration by the well-connected Mexican American band Grupo Frontera, from Texas — this time with another cumbia band, Ke Personajes from Argentina. Over hooting accordion and a clip-clop cumbia beat, the singers trade plaints about maxed-out memory capacity and lingering, near-stalker-ish devotion: “Although you tell me no and deceive yourself with another baby/I know I’m the love of your life,” sings Emanuel Noir of Ke Personajes. Is it heartache, or would cloud storage help? PARELESTravis Scott, Bad Bunny, the Weeknd, ‘K-Pop’One beat, three big names and an SEO-optimized title are the makings of “K-Pop,” a calculated round of boasting and come-ons from Travis Scott, Bad Bunny and the Weeknd. The track, produced by behind-the-scenes hitmakers — Bynx, Boi-1da, Illangelo and Jahaan Sweet — hints at crisp Nigerian Afrobeats, and it spurs three distinct top-line strategies. Travis Scott is quick, percussive and melodically narrow; Big Bunny leaps and groans; the Weeknd is sustained, moody and on brand, crooning “Mix the drugs with the pain” and promising vigorous, alienated sex. As in K-pop, hooks are flaunted, then tossed aside when a new one arrives. PARELESExplosions in the Sky, ‘Ten Billion People’The Texas band Explosions in the Sky has been playing instrumental rock — “post-rock” — since the late 1990s, relying on patterns, textures and dynamics to make up for the absence of lyrics. “Ten Billion People” is one of its perfectly paced wordless narratives: clockwork and skeletal to start, swelling with keyboards and guitars, seesawing with stereo dueling drum kits, pausing the beat and then rebuilding toward something more majestic and reassuring. It’s both minimalist and dramatic. PARELES More

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      The Amiable, Unswerving Tony Bennett

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      In an 80-year career, he stuck with one mission: illuminating songs he cherished.Has there ever been a more purely likable pop figure than Tony Bennett?Throughout a career that began in the 1940s, Bennett, who died on Friday at 96, maintained one mission, amiably and unswervingly. He didn’t chase trends; he didn’t get defensive, either. Instead, he let listeners — and, in recent decades, much younger duet partners — come to him, generation after generation. He welcomed them to a repertoire of songs he admired, knew intimately and was happy to share.Bennett sang vintage pop standards, the pre-rock canon sometimes called the Great American Songbook. They’re songs mostly about grown-up love, about courtship, yearning and fulfillment, with elegant rhymes and ingenious melodies that invite a little improvisation. He recorded with orchestras, with major jazz musicians, with big bands and, for more than 50 years, with the pianist and arranger Ralph Sharon and his trio. He was always unplugged — a simple fact that cannily recharged his career when he played “MTV Unplugged” in 1994.Bennett’s voice made the technical challenges of his songs evaporate. As a young man, he showed off his near-operatic range and dynamic control in early recordings like “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” from 1950. But he wasn’t an old-fashioned crooner; his sense of swing was just as strong. And he understood that pure virtuosity can keep listeners at a distance. He soon revealed a grain in his voice that made it earthy and approachable, downplaying his precision. Very often, there was a jovial savvy in his phrasing; he’d punch out a note ahead of the beat, as if he couldn’t wait to sing it.Bennett onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1976. His long career had its share of commercial ups and downs and transient record-company pressures.D. Gorton/The New York TimesThere was always an easy strength, a self-confident baritone underpinning, in his singing. When he had a big band behind him, he was easily brassy enough to hold his own. But he didn’t steamroller through his songs. He was ever attentive to lyrics. His signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” has two melodic peaks near the end. The first is on the line “When I come home”; he sustains “home” and tapers it off with longing in his vibrato, as if he’s feeling the distance. Soon afterward comes “Your golden sun will shine for me,” and he sings “sun” as if he knows he’ll be basking in it.Bennett’s long, long career had its share of commercial ups and downs and transient record-company pressures. As the 1960s ended, he was persuaded to record recent pop hits on the album “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!,” though he maintained some dignity by putting lush orchestral arrangements behind songs like George Harrison’s “Something.”After changing labels — and, in the mid-1970s, starting his own short-lived but artistically rewarding label, Improv — Bennett returned to what he did best: singing standards with musicians who brought out their jazz possibilities. Two albums he made with the harmony-probing pianist Bill Evans — “The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album” (1975) and “Together Again” (1977), both just piano-and-voice duets — are luminous testaments to the way Bennett never took familiar songs for granted.He was 67 when he recorded “MTV Unplugged” with Sharon’s trio and a guest appearance by Elvis Costello. It was a shrewd and satisfying move; Bennett became pop’s cool grandpa. Rock-hating Grammy voters seized their chance to give him his second album of the year award (after “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”), and current rock and pop performers embraced the chance to sing with him and learn from him. Duet albums (with K.D. Lang, Diana Krall and Lady Gaga) and individual duet tracks (with, among many others, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Bono, Christina Aguilera, Queen Latifah and Amy Winehouse) made clear how admired, durable, companionable and game he was; even the awkward moments are endearing.In later years, as his voice lowered and thickened, Bennett used those qualities to bring out mature perspectives. The slow-motion version of Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight” that appears on the 2007 compilation, “Sings the American Songbook, Vol. 1,” is latter-day Bennett: a little raspy, a little tremulous and gloriously fond, an affirmation not only of “tonight” but of a longtime love. There’s a rueful chuckle as he sings, “That laugh that wrinkles your nose/Touches my foolish heart.” Those lyrics were written in 1936, and Bennett was still listening through every line, still getting closer to the song. More

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      João Donato, Innovative Brazilian Musician, Is Dead at 88

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      A prolific pianist, composer and arranger who began recording in the 1950s, he was a pioneer of bossa nova but didn’t confine himself to any genre.João Donato, a Brazilian composer, musician and producer who was a pioneer of bossa nova and who went on to cross-pollinate music across the Americas, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. Brazilian news media reported that the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Donato was in the coterie of Rio de Janeiro musicians — among them Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and the guitarist Luiz Bonfá — who developed the subtle swing and harmonic sophistication of bossa nova in the mid-1950s.But Mr. Donato didn’t confine himself to any genre. In a recording career that extended from the 1950s into the current decade, he released some three dozen albums as a leader and collaborated with a wide range of artists on many more. Although he was best known as a keyboardist, he was also a singer, accordionist and trombonist.As a pianist, Mr. Donato was known for his blend of a frisky, restlessly syncopated, harmonically intricate left hand with relaxed, sure-footed right-hand melodies. As a composer, producer and arranger, he constantly — and playfully — fused and stretched idioms and production styles. He once said he had a “sweet tooth for funky ideas.”Mr. Donato played MPB (as Brazilian popular music is widely known; the letters stand for “música popular brasileira”), jazz, funk, salsa, American pop and pan-American hybrids that were entirely his own. He worked with generations of Brazilian musicians, including the singer and movie star Carmen Miranda; the singers Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte; and the rapper Marcelo D2.He also recorded with Eddie Palmieri, Michael Franks, Mongo Santamaría and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. Throughout his life, he sought new grooves.The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Twitter: “João Donato saw music in everything. He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forró, and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique. He kept creating and innovating until the end.”Mr. Donato’s debut album, released in 1956, was produced by Antonio Carlos Jobim, another innovator of bossa nova.João Donato de Oliveira Neto was born on Aug. 17, 1934, in Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre. He began playing accordion and writing songs as a child. In 1945, he moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro, where he began performing professionally in his teens.Mr. Donato began leading his own groups in the early 1950s while also working as a sideman. He played accordion on Luiz Bonfá’s first album, released in 1955, as part of a studio band that also included Antonio Carlos Jobim. Mr. Jobim produced Mr. Donato’s debut album, “Chá Dançante” (1956), and Mr. Donato wrote songs with João Gilberto, including “Minha Saudade,” which became a Brazilian standard.But by the end of the 1950s, Mr. Donato’s preferred style had grown so complex that audiences complained that they couldn’t dance to it, and he had difficulty finding work in Brazil. He accepted a job backing Carmen Miranda at a Lake Tahoe resort, and relocated to the United States.As the 1960s began, he was welcomed by Latin and jazz musicians. He recorded with Cal Tjader, Astrud Gilberto (who died in June), Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría and Eddie Palmieri. (He played trombone in Mr. Palmieri’s La Perfecta, a brassy salsa band Mr. Palmieri called a “trombanga.”)The vibraphonist Dave Pike recorded an entire album of Mr. Donato’s compositions, “Bossa Nova Carnival,” in 1962, and the saxophonist Bud Shank put Mr. Donato in charge of his 1965 album, “Bud Shank & His Brazilian Friends.” “This is João Donato’s baby,” Mr. Shank wrote in the liner notes. “I’ve turned all the problems over to him and I just relax and play.”On his own albums for U.S. labels, Mr. Donato drew on jazz and Caribbean influences as well as Brazilian ones. His pivotal 1970 album, “A Bad Donato,” was a radical turn toward funk, merging Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. The keyboardist and arranger Eumir Deodato, who worked with Mr. Donato on that album, went on to have a worldwide Brazilian funk hit with his version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001).”Mr. Donato’s album “A Bad Donato,” released in 1970, merged Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. Mr. Donato returned to Brazil in 1973. There, a friend persuaded him to record songs with lyrics rather than solely instrumentals, including his own modest but earnest vocals. His tuneful, easygoing 1973 album, “Quem É Quem,” was not an immediate hit, but it has been widely praised over the years; in 2007, Brazilian Rolling Stone placed it among the 100 greatest Brazilian albums.Mr. Donato’s new lyricists included two of the leading figures in the determinedly eclectic Brazilian cultural movement known as tropicália: Caetano Veloso, who put Portuguese lyrics to “O Sapo” (“The Frog”) to turn it into “A Rã,” and Gilberto Gil, who supplied lyrics for many of the songs on Mr. Donato’s 1975 album, “Lugar Comum.” Mr. Donato also wrote songs with lyrics by his younger brother, Lysias Ênio Oliveira.For the next two decades, Mr. Donato recorded almost entirely as a sideman. The singer Gal Costa recorded “A Rã” for her 1974 album, “Cantar,” and hired Mr. Donato as an arranger and bandleader for that album and her subsequent tour.Mr. Donato also recorded extensively with important Brazilian musicians like Jorge Ben, João Bosco, Chico Buarque and Martinho da Vila. He continued to perform his own music and released a live album, “Leilíadas,” in 1986. But he didn’t return to making his own studio albums until “Coisas Tao Simples” (“Such Simple Things”), released in 1994, even as he continued to do session work with songwriters including Bebel Gilberto and Marisa Monte.The albums Mr. Donato made after resuming his solo career were unpredictable and diverse. Some returned to his bossa nova-jazz fusions; some featured singers, including Wanda Sá, Paula Morelenbaum, Maria Tita and Joyce. Others had titles reflecting Mr. Donato’s fondness for musical hybrids, like “Bluchanga” (2017) and “Sambolero” (2010), which won a Latin Grammy Award for best Latin jazz album. He also received a Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2010.In 2017, Mr. Donato made an album of synthesizer-centered funk, “Sintetizamor,” with his son, João Donato, known professionally as Donatinho, who survives him. Other survivors include his wife, Ivone Belém, and his daughters, Jodel and Joana Donato. He lived in Rio de Janeiro.In 2021, Mr. Donato collaborated with Jazz Is Dead, the Los Angeles-based project of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, on the album “Jazz Is Dead 7.” In 2022 he released “Serotonina,” an easygoing pop-jazz album featuring his electric piano and clavinet.On Twitter, Mr. Veloso summed up Mr. Donato’s music admiringly. It was, he wrote, “the highest achievement of extreme complexity in extreme simplicity.”Ana Ionova More

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      Peter Nero, Pianist Who Straddled Genres, Is Dead at 89

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      He soared to popularity with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz. He later conducted the Philly Pops, often with one hand while the other played piano. Peter Nero, the concert pianist who soared to popularity in the 1960s with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz and kept the beat for nearly six decades with albums, club and television dates, and segues into conducting pops orchestras, died on Thursday in Eustis, Fla. He was 89.His daughter, Beverly Nero, said he died at the At Home Care Assisted Living Facility, where he had lived in recent months.It was not quite accurate to say, as a New York newspaper, The World-Telegram and Sun, did in 1962, that Mr. Nero played classical music with his left hand and pop-jazz with his right. But that was only a paraphrase of his own primer for audiences.“We shall play ‘Tea for Two,’” he would say. “Since our arrangement is complex, we’d like to explain what we’ll be doing. My right hand will be playing ‘Tea for Two,’ while my left hand will play Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. My left foot will be fiercely tapping out the traditional rhythm to the Tahitian fertility dance. My right foot will not be doing too much. It will just be excited.”To generations of fans, Mr. Nero was a national treasure. He appeared with Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and other headliners; released 72 albums; conducted the Philly Pops for 34 years, often with one hand while the other played a piano; and delivered a nostalgic mix of jazz and classics that let listeners reconnect with the soundtracks of their youth.A remarkable interpreter of Gershwin, he was also a natural showman — bantering with audiences, making up the program as he went along, tearing through medleys of Liszt, Prokofiev, the American songbook and mesmerizing variations of “I Got Rhythm,” and pounding home with a blowout finale of “An American in Paris.”In midcareer, Mr. Nero quit smoky piano lounges for the concert stage and reinvented himself as a player-conductor of the Philly Pops and other orchestras. He wrote a cantata based on the diary of Anne Frank, marked national holidays with patriotic musicales in Philadelphia, and for decades packed them in at symphony halls, college unions and small-town community centers.Mr. Nero rehearsing before a BBC telecast in 1965.Central Press, via Getty Images“Still touring the country at 80, Nero presented a dazzling display of talent and showmanship,” The Times-Enterprise of Thomasville, Ga. (population 18,000), said in a 2015 review. “Nero’s stamina was incredible, his nimble fingers dancing gracefully, then racing madly, then dancing gracefully again across the keys to sublime effect.”A child prodigy from Brooklyn, he mastered the classical keyboard at 7 and at 11 performed Haydn concertos. He won a talent contest run by the New York radio station WQXR, impressing Vladimir Horowitz, one of the judges. He made his national television debut at 17, playing “Rhapsody in Blue” on a special hosted by the bandleader Paul Whiteman.In 1955, uncertain if he wanted to be a classical pianist, he heard recordings by the great jazz pianist Art Tatum. Hooked, he began performing at nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas, and gradually evolved the fluid Nero métier of classical and jazz.His name was still Bernie Nierow at the time. But when he signed a recording contract in 1960, it was as Peter Nero.He had a hit with his first RCA album, “Piano Forte” (1961), which showcased his stylistic range. “One was Mozartean, the next one was in the style of Rachmaninoff, the next was a straight ballad and another was a jazz approach,” he told The Daily Oklahoman of the selections on the album. “The idea was to see what came out of this, and the response was that everybody liked something different.”He won Grammys in 1961 (best new artist) and 1962 (best performance with an orchestra, for “The Colorful Peter Nero”) and was nominated for eight more. He appeared often on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” In 1963, he wrote the score for the film “Sunday in New York,” a romantic comedy starring Jane Fonda, Rod Taylor and Cliff Robertson. (Mr. Nero appeared briefly as himself.)His career took off. He had a million-selling single on Columbia Records with an instrumental version of the theme from “Summer of ’42,” the 1971 blockbuster film, with a score by Michel Legrand, about the end of one young man’s adolescence as America plunged into World War II. His album of the same name also sold a million copies.In the 1970s Mr. Nero quit nightclubs and turned to composing for, and conducting, orchestras.Anne Frank’s posthumously published “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which told of two years of hiding during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, provided lyrics and scenario for Mr. Nero’s first composition for a full orchestra. He used her words for 15 songs and vividly recalled his collaboration with a girl who had died in a concentration camp a quarter of a century earlier.“Writing ‘Anne Frank’ was perhaps the most emotional experience of my musical life,” Mr. Nero said in a 2018 interview for this obituary. “I was so moved by the diary, I wanted to do something almost biblical. I wrote the bulk of it in just three weeks. Once I got on a roll, I couldn’t stop. Everything just fell into place.“Anne was way advanced for her years,” he continued. “She was not just religious or spiritual. What came through was her faith in the goodness of man.”Mr. Nero’s was the first musical treatment of a story widely known from film, television and theatrical dramas, and from books in many languages. A blend of rock, symphonic and traditional Jewish music, it had its debut at a synagogue in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, in 1971, and was performed under his baton in several cities. In 1973, he conducted the Greater Trenton Symphony in a version that featured his 15-year-old daughter, Beverly, in the title role.In 1979, Mr. Nero was named musical director and player-conductor of the Philly Pops. He moved to Media, Pa., near Philadelphia, and for 34 years was the Pops’ star attraction. Audiences marveled at his ability, standing up, to play the piano with one hand while seamlessly conducting the orchestra with the other. He also conducted orchestras in Tulsa, Washington, South Florida, St. Louis and other cities, often performing 100 concerts a year.Mr. Nero conducting the Philly Pops at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 2005. He was the orchestra’s musical director for 34 years.Marc Andrew Deley/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesHe had his detractors. Some deplored the liberties he took in blurring the lines between classical and jazz, although what he did was hardly new; the Gershwins had done it, as had, among others, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. Mr. Nero made light of his critics.“I did an arrangement that mixed the ‘1812’ Overture and ‘Over the Rainbow,’” he recalled. “Somebody called and said, ‘How can you do that to “Over the Rainbow”?’”He was born Bernard Nierow in Brooklyn on May 22, 1934, one of two sons of Julius and Mary (Menasche) Nierow. His father was a deputy commissioner of the New York City Youth Board. His mother taught Spanish at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.Bernard began piano lessons at 7 and showed extraordinary ability. His parents bought him a used Steinway. “It was $1,100, which was a lot of money back then,” he recalled. “It was the only time they borrowed money.”He attended the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), studied part time at the Juilliard School of Music and took private lessons from the esteemed pedagogues Abram Chasins and Constance Keene. He attended Brooklyn College — he studied psychology but not music, he said, because he didn’t need to — and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956.That year he married Marcia Dunner. They had two children, Jedd and Beverly, and were later divorced. His 1977 marriage to Peggy Altman and his later marriage to Rebecca Edie, a Philly Pops pianist, also ended in divorce.Besides his daughter, Mr. Nero is survived by his son, Jedd; three grandchildren; and his brother, Alan.Mr. Nero left the Philly Pops in 2013 in an acrimonious dispute over his $500,000-a-year salary. The orchestra, whose fading audiences prompted it to file for bankruptcy, asked him to take a big pay cut, but he refused. Despite its shaky finances, the orchestra has survived, although it was recently evicted from its longtime home and its future looks uncertain.Mr. Nero returned to the concert circuit with his longtime bassist, Michael Barnett. They played their last gig on Valentine’s Day 2016 at a Central Florida retirement community, the Villages. Mr. Nero had lived there since 2018. More

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      Taylor Swift Revises a Lyric on ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’

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      Hear tracks by Prince, Rauw Alejandro, First Aid Kit and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Taylor Swift, ‘Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)’“Speak Now,” from 2010, was Taylor Swift’s third album, and it is now the third to be rereleased as a rerecorded “Taylor’s Version.” But all along, the album was a declaration of independence: It was the first she wrote entirely on her own, as a rebuttal to critics — perhaps like the one she cuts down on the sugary, spicy “Mean” — who suggested that Swift’s co-writers had a bigger hand in her previous successes than she’d let on. “Speak Now” remains one of Swift’s best and most sharply penned albums: The line “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” from the chorus of the great opening track “Mine,” is often held up as an example of Swift’s lyricism at its most expertly concise.But “Speak Now” is an album of excesses, too; some of them are glorious — like the epic kiss-off “Dear John” or the romantic grandiosity of “Enchanted” — and some of them are the authentic artifacts of a 19-year-old’s somewhat myopic sensibility. “Mean,” which punches down, is guilty of that, and so is the acidic rocker “Better Than Revenge,” which has the most significantly revised lyrics in a “Taylor’s Version.” “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches,” Swift sings on this 2023 update, a clumsier and less direct lyric than the original: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.” The change is unfortunate, and perhaps the beginning of a slippery slope of self-editing. The previous lyric was sanctimonious and nasty, yes, but it was also a historical document of Swift’s point of view at 19, and that of many young women who, being raised in a misogynistic society, are taught to blame the other girl before they learn how to curse “the patriarchy.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFirst Aid Kit, ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn’First Aid Kit is a duo of Swedish sisters, Johanna and Klara Söderberg, whose vocal harmonies are so perfect they can seem unreal. They have thoroughly studied 1970s Laurel Canyon folk-pop, with its gleaming, precisely blended electric and acoustic guitars. “Everybody’s Got to Learn,” from the expanded version of the 2022 album “Palomino,” sounds like parental advice from Fleetwood Mac. Over earnest folk-rock guitars and what grows into a hefty girl-group beat, the song reflects on the missteps that lead to maturity — “The blues and the bliss/you’ll hit and you’ll miss” — and promises, “You’re gonna see this through.” JON PARELESPrince, ‘All a Share Together Now’The latest find from Prince’s vault is “All a Share Together Now,” a song he recorded in 2006 but never released in any form. Prince sings about generational responsibilities — “the debt of the ones before us must be paid” — in a taut, bare-bones funk workout built around a jumpy bass riff. Live drums kick the beat around and a note-bending guitar teases out terse licks that are simultaneously lead and rhythm. It’s a homily disguised as a jam. PARELESRauw Alejandro, ‘Cuando Baje el Sol’Rauw Alejandro’s new album, “Playa Saturno,” eases back on the electronic experiments of his 2022 album, “Saturno,” in favor of earthy, party-ready reggaeton. But in “Cuando Baje el Sol” (“When the Sun Goes Down”), Alejandro and his fellow producers complicate the reggaeton thump with plenty of spatial and sonic mischief. Sampled and warped vocals, echoey synthesizers, turntable scratching and eruptive percussion all ricochet around his promises of hot times after sunset. PARELESKaisa’s Machine, ‘Gravity’Is “Taking Shape” — the latest album by the bassist Kaisa Mäensivu and her quintet, Kaisa’s Machine — a journal, or a workbook? Original tunes like “Shadow Mind” (a listless ballad) and “Eat Dessert First” (the LP’s eager, clattery final track) bespeak a confessional urge, but they can’t help spotlighting Mäensivu’s conservatory chops and wily compositional tactics. When wizardry takes the wheel — especially in jazz, and especially today — the voice underneath it can end up muffled in the trunk. Mäensivu deserves credit for seeking a healthy balance. “Gravity” is the album’s only track without a piano, slimming down this band of young aces to just bass, drums, guitar and vibraphone. Moving at a fast, nine-beat clip, Mäensivu’s bass line squares up firmly in a minor key, easing you into a space of feeling before the tune’s harmonic center starts shifting around. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAnohni and the Johnsons, ‘Why Am I Alive Now?’The title is a plain-spoken survivor’s lament, ostensibly about living through a time of environmental collapse: “I don’t want to be witness,” Anohni wails, “seeing all of this duress, aching of our world.” But within the context of Anohni and the Johnsons’ piercing new album “My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross” — which features a photo of the band’s namesake, the gay activist Marsha P. Johnson, on its cover — that question is also haunted by the ghosts of the queer community. By the end of this loose, mournful soul song, Anohni finds a hopeful answer to that titular inquiry: She’s here to tell these stories, to draw attention to these causes, to sing this song. ZOLADZLittle Dragon featuring Damon Albarn, ‘Glow’Surrounded by swirling, twinkling, glimmering arpeggios, Little Dragon’s Yuki Nagano sings about sheer rapture: “Glowing in the dark to find streams of stars to taste.” Midway through, and inexplicably, Damon Albarn arrives from a different, bummed-out dimension, with apologies for being “Under the spell of the eyes that paralyze.” Having provided a little ballast, he vanishes in a download spiral and Nagano returns, still glowing and utterly unperturbed. PARELESFito Páez featuring Mon Laferte, ‘Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba’Fito Páez, Argentina’s most celebrated — and perpetually eccentric — rocker, decided to remake all the songs on his definitive 1992 album, “El Amor Después el Amor” (“Love After Love”), three decades later for the album “EADDA9223,” joined by duet partners including Elvis Costello, Nathy Peluso and Marisa Monte. “Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba” — a tale of passion and crime — used busy disco-funk guitar back in 1992. But the new version — trading vocals with the dynamic, torchy Chilean belter Mon Laferte — uncovers the retro bolero underlying the song. With reverb-laden guitar and a trumpet obbligato, Páez and Laferte revel in the drama together. PARELESTkay Maidza & Flume, ‘Silent Assassin’The Australian electronic music producer Flume usually juxtaposes bouncy, consonant chords with a little noise. But the track he brought to the Australian rapper Tkay Maidza is pure irritation: buzzes, distortion, wavery tones, a drone that bristles with dissonance. Maidza tops it with a speedy, shifty, percussive boast, racing through lines like “I’m a jigsaw, not a quick fix” and “I’m tactical, no attachments/I’m doing it for the passion.” From any angle, it’s combative. PARELESPJ Harvey, ‘Lwonesome Tonight’Polly Jean Harvey meticulously constructed a narrative, a sound and a language — based on the local dialect in Dorset, where she grew up — for “I Inside the Old World Dying,” her first album since 2016. The music is folky but fringed with electronics; her vocals are high and eerie, nearly disembodied. In “Lwonesome Tonight,” she sings about encountering a mystically charismatic figure: “Are you Elvis? Are you God?/Jesus sent you, win my trust,” she sings, and at the end she’s left wondering: “My love, will you come back again?” PARELESBrian Blade & the Fellowship Band, ‘God Be With You’Over the past quarter-century, Brian Blade’s Fellowship has come to feel more like a brotherhood than an ensemble, accruing a repertoire of original music that will stand the test of time along with an unmistakable sound: a mix of country, jazz and gospel that exudes a feeling of choral warmth, despite not using any vocals. But beyond that, they’ve stood up against (and basically outlived) a few insidious trends in jazz: When so many fine improvisers seemed be reconciling themselves to a future where the audience might become an afterthought, Blade and Fellowship had no time for that. The group’s fifth album, “Kings Highway,” begins with “Until We Meet Again,” a slowly seductive Blade original that makes reference to a William G. Tomer hymn; it ends with “God Be With You,” a short and elegant rendition of the Tomer piece itself. We can only hope that those valedictory titles aren’t telling us something about Fellowship’s future. RUSSONELLO More