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      Ahmad Jamal, Jazz Pianist With a Measured Approach, Dies at 92

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      He was known for his laid-back style and for his influence on, among others, Miles Davis, who once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal, whose measured, spare piano style was an inspiration to generations of jazz musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Ashley Falls, Mass. He was 92.The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter, Sumayah Jamal, said.In a career that would bring him a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters, Mr. Jamal made his mark with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music. That approach stood in marked contrast to the challengingly complex music known as bebop, which was sweeping the jazz world when Mr. Jamal began his career as a teenager in the mid-1940s. Bebop pianists, following the lead of Bud Powell, became known for their virtuosic flurries of notes. Mr. Jamal chose a different path, which proved equally influential.The critic Stanley Crouch wrote that bebop’s founding father, Charlie Parker, was the only musician “more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal.”A young Mr. Jamal at the piano, circa 1942. He was only 14 when he joined the musicians’ union.Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art, via Getty ImagesIn his early years, Mr. Jamal listened not just to jazz, which he preferred to call “American classical music,” but also to classical music of the non-American variety. “We didn’t separate the two schools,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things.”Mr. Jamal’s laid-back, accessible style, with its dense chords, its wide dynamic range and above all its judicious use of silence, led to more than his share of dismissive reviews in the jazz press early in his career; Martin Williams’s canonical history “The Jazz Tradition” described his music as “chic and shallow.”But it soon became an integral part of the jazz landscape. Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett are among the prominent jazz pianists who looked to Mr. Jamal as an exemplar.Probably the best-known musician to cite Mr. Jamal as an influence was not a pianist but a trumpeter and bandleader: Miles Davis, who became close friends with Mr. Jamal, recorded his compositions and arrangements and would bring his sidemen to see Mr. Jamal perform. He once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930. Fritz, as he was called, began playing piano at age 3 and began studying with Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, a few years later. By the time he joined the musicians’ union at age 14, the celebrated jazz piano virtuoso Art Tatum had hailed him as “a coming great,” and he began touring with George Hudson’s big band after graduating from high school.In 1950 he moved to Chicago, where he converted to Islam, changed his name to Ahmad Jamal and assembled a piano-guitar-bass trio known as the Three Strings. During an extended stay at the Manhattan nightclub the Embers in 1951, the trio came to the attention of the noted record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who signed them to the Okeh label.Mr. Jamal performing in San Francisco in 1976. He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1955 Mr. Jamal recorded his first full-length album, “Ahmad Jamal Plays,” with the guitarist Ray Crawford and the bassist Israel Crosby, for the small Parrot label. Tellingly, when the album was acquired and rereleased the next year by Argo, a subsidiary of the seminal blues label Chess, it was retitled “Chamber Music of the New Jazz.”Mr. Jamal received his first major national exposure with the Argo album “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” recorded at a Chicago nightclub in 1958 with Mr. Crosby and the drummer Vernel Fournier. It spent more than two years on the Billboard album chart, an all but unheard-of stretch for a jazz album.The success of “At the Pershing” stemmed in part from Mr. Jamal’s ambling yet propulsive interpretation of the standard “Poinciana,” still his best-known recording. But he received some criticism for not including any original compositions on the album, which he later said spurred him to focus on writing his own music.Mr. Jamal’s output was as prodigious as his light-fingered style was economical: He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and more than 60 in his career. He also founded a handful of record labels, a management company and a Chicago nightclub and restaurant called the Alhambra, although that venture lasted less than a year. In keeping with his religious beliefs, the Alhambra did not serve alcohol, which presumably hastened its demise.The Alhambra’s financial difficulties marked the beginning of a dark period of Mr. Jamal’s life, in which he walked away from performing for almost three years. The club closed in December 1961; three months later, he filed for divorce from Maryam Jamal, formerly named Virginia Wilkins, whom he had married when he was 17. Five years of court action followed, during which Mr. Jamal was arrested and charged with nonpayment of child support for their daughter. (He was later cleared.) He was hospitalized in 1963 after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Not until 1964 did he begin touring and recording again.He married first as a teenager, and that marriage ended in divorce. He married Sharifah Frazier, the mother of Sumayah, in the early 1960s, and they divorced in 1982. He married Laura Hess-Hay, his manager, the same year, and they divorced in 1984, though she continued to represent him until his death. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.Live recordings often captured Mr. Jamal at his nimblest, and many jazz connoisseurs rank such albums as “Freeflight” (1971), recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and “Chicago Revisited: Live at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase” (1993) among his best. In 2011, Mosaic Records released a nine-CD boxed set consisting of the 12 albums he recorded for Argo between 1956 and 1962. His album “Blue Moon,” a well-received collection of originals and standards, was released in 2012 and nominated for a Grammy Award. His album “Marseille” was released in 2017 and “Ballades” in 2019.Last year Mr. Jamal released two separate double-disc collections: “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1963-64)” and “(1965-66),” consisting of previously unreleased live recordings made in Seattle. A third set, “(1966-68),” is planned. Mr. Jamal in 2011 at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Rob Verhorst/RedfernsThe reverence with which Mr. Jamal was held stretched well beyond the jazz world. Clint Eastwood used two tracks from “But Not for Me” on the soundtrack of his film of “The Bridges of Madison County.” But the more extensive tributes have come from the world of hip-hop. Tracks like De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” and Nas’s “The World Is Yours,” along with dozens of other rap songs, have sampled Mr. Jamal’s piano riffs.As infectious as those riffs were, it was ballads that held the strongest appeal to Mr. Jamal. Like many other interpreters of the standard repertoire, he made a point of learning the lyrics to the songs he played. He spoke approvingly to The Times in 2001 about a conversation he once had with a great jazz saxophonist who was also known for his way with a ballad.“I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad,” he said. “All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, ‘Why did you stop, Ben?’ He said, ‘I forgot the lyrics.’”Alex Traub More

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      Solange Curates Powerful Performances of Black Joy and Pain at BAM

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      Through Saint Heron, the musician brought Angélla Christie and the Clark Sisters for a night exploring Black religious music, and Linda Sharrock and Archie Shepp for a show that felt anything but safe.When the alto saxophonist Angélla Christie strode onstage on Friday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she was joined only by a piano player. But Christie, one of the more prominent instrumentalists in contemporary gospel, was at full throttle from the very first note — playing in high-gloss, reverb-drenched ostinatos — and within moments, the crowd had become her rhythm section, clapping along on every off-beat.An usher got swept up while walking a couple to their seats, and on her way back up the aisle she shimmied a bit, her right hand flying into the air in a testifying motion. A woman sitting at the end of Row H reached out for a high five, and their palms gripped each other for a moment.It was just a few minutes into “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” — part of BAM’s multidimensional “Eldorado Ballroom” series, brilliantly curated by Solange via her Saint Heron agency — and already something was hitting different.After Christie, the concert continued with two more sets: selections from Mary Lou Williams’s religious suites, delivered by the 14-person Voices of Harlem choir and a pair of virtuoso pianists, Artina McCain and Cyrus Chestnut; and a roof-raising show from the indomitable Clark Sisters, the best-selling band in gospel history and a fixture of Black radio since the 1980s.The Clark Sisters onstage at BAM on Friday, as part of a bill celebrating Black American religious music.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat’s a lot already: a stylistic tour of Black American religious music, mostly in the hands of women, going back more than 50 years. But “Eldorado Ballroom” was aiming for even more. Rarely does a single series pull together so many strands — not just of Black music, but of Black creativity writ large — into an open-ended statement, speaking to what might be possible as well as making a comment on how Black creative histories ought to be remembered.“Eldorado Ballroom” is an extension of the work Solange has been doing for the past 10 years under the auspices of Saint Heron. As she told New York magazine’s Craig Jenkins recently, her aim with Saint Heron — whether you call it an agency, a studio, a brand or simply a creative clearinghouse — is “to centralize and build a really strong archive that in 20 years or 30 years can be accessible by future generations to be a guiding light in the same way that so many of my blueprints guided me.”Thanks to Saint Heron, Solange has managed to put her cultural capital to use while keeping her own celebrity mostly out of view. On Friday, the singer and songwriter sat beaming from an opera box near the stage while the Clark Sisters motored through a 40-plus-year catalog of danceable gospel hits, but she never took a bow.Saint Heron surfaced in 2013 with the release of a mixtape that helped set the standard for a new wave of outsider R&B. Some of its contributors, like Kelela and Sampha, became stars. Since then, Saint Heron has served as a flexible play space for Solange and her creative community, crossing lines between fashion and design, visual art, publishing, music and dance. Mid-pandemic, Saint Heron released a free digital library of books by Black writers and artists.Solange, middle, attends “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” at BAM on Friday night. The singer and her Saint Heron agency curated the series, “Eldorado Ballroom.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd clearly, Solange has gained the attention of a broad, young, literary community of color. The capacity crowd at “Glory to Glory” on Friday was — unlike at most events in such spaces — about 90 percent Black, and as diverse in age and attire as Flatbush Avenue on any spring afternoon. Twenty-somethings in custom streetwear stood cheering next to older women in their Sunday finest.On Saturday, the crowd again skewed under 50 and majority Black for “The Cry of My People,” a night devoted to poetry and experimental jazz. If “Glory to Glory” was a celebration of how “triumphant and safe” gospel music can make a person feel, as Solange put it to Jenkins — a night devoted to joy, basically — then “The Cry of My People” was a confrontation of pain.The show began with a reading from the poet Claudia Rankine, who stood at center stage as the curtain came up, then read two poems: “Quotidian (1),” about inner turmoil, and “What If,” about a kind of exhausted rage. The second included the line: “in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?”Rankine had put words to something that the next performer, the vocalist Linda Sharrock, would express without them. Sharrock has been heavily respected in jazz circles since the 1960s for her raw and riveting use of extended vocal techniques: Moans, breaths and cries have been her musical units. But like so many women in jazz, she spent the peak years of her career in the shadow of a more famous husband, the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, and ultimately quit the scene. Before Saturday, her last show in New York City had been in 1979. In more recent years she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke that left her aphasic, and has performed only rarely.Linda Sharrock sang as part of “The Cry of My People” on Saturday night at BAM. Her last show in New York City before this past weekend was in 1979; she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAt BAM, backed by a signal-scrambling, free-improvising, eight-piece band, Sharrock sat in a wheelchair beside an upright piano (that she often touched but hardly played) and sang in big, open vowel sounds. They felt confounding, yet clear. Most of the time, the sounds came in wide, billowing arcs; when she held a single, steady note — sometimes spiked with a growl — it brought the urgency to an almost unbearable level. Often there were hints at a secondary feeling (surprise? anger? wonder? all possible) but the main message was consistent: pain.The backstage crew seemed to have difficulty following the band’s cues, and after the curtain had been down for a solid three minutes following Sharrock’s set, it came back up. The band was still playing. Sharrock performed another mini-set before an awkwardly long wait for the curtain to come down once again. Maybe a clean ending wouldn’t have fit. The crowd — dazed, moved — gave Sharrock a warm response, but there was little that felt “triumphant and safe” about this night.It concluded with a set from Archie Shepp, the luminary tenor saxophonist, composer, vocalist and writer. A disciple of John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, Shepp became a leading advocate for Black musicians’ right to self-determination in the 1960s and has hardly quieted his voice ever since. At 85, his saxophone chops have faded, and he needed help from other band members to bring the instrument into playing position, but the whispered notes he did get out of the horn carried fabulous amounts of weight.Archie Shepp, center, performs at “The Cry of My People,” backed by a nine-piece ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBacked by a nine-piece ensemble featuring three excellent vocalists (Amina Claudine Myers, Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Pyeng Threadgill) and a pithy, three-man horn section, Shepp pulled from across his broad repertoire. He revisited his classic cover of Calvin Massey’s stout, dirgelike “Cry of My People,” and the swiveling rock beat of “Blues for Brother George Jackson” from the “Attica Blues” LP. On Duke Ellington’s gospel standard “Come Sunday,” Shepp sang in an earnest baritone while Myers, who briefly took over the piano chair from Jason Moran, splashed him with generous harmonies. As Shepp sang the line, “God of love, please look down and see my people through,” the house erupted in a wave of support.His set, like his six-decade-long career, was a reminder that the walls that divide spiritual music, popular music and art music can often be arbitrary. “Where did they come from, anyway?” he seemed to ask. This, you could say, was the message of “Eldorado Ballroom” writ large.The series takes its name from a once-legendary venue in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood, where Solange grew up. At the ’Rado, as it was known, jazz, gospel and soul — art, spiritual and popular — all appeared on the same stage, until an economic downturn and a pattern of police repression forced the venue to close in 1972.The night that Solange’s series kicked off — March 30, with a show featuring the outsider-R&B trifecta of Kelela, keiyaA and Res — the actual Eldorado Ballroom was celebrating its grand reopening in Houston, after a nearly $10 million restoration project. With a little luck, Houston may have its own “Eldorado Ballroom” soon, too. More

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      5 Minutes to Make You Love Jazz

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sun Ra

      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.
      Background Image: A colorful animated illustration of a musician with a loose resemblance to Sun Ra playing a keyboard with one hand raised and their eyes closed. Planets float in the background. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mary Lou Williams

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      We asked a dozen musicians, scholars and critics to help take us on a tour of the music and mind of a pianist whose decades-long career made her a Mount Rushmore figure in jazz.Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked experts to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with jazz? We’ve gotten plenty of answers, with selections of favorites for artists like Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra and styles from the bebop era to the modern day.This time, we’re turning to Mary Lou Williams, who fell in love with music as a toddler, sitting on her mother’s knee at the organ and learning by ear. Williams’s grandfather liked Western classical music, so she learned to play sonatas with an elegant touch; her stepfather liked boogie-woogie, so she developed a steam-engine left hand; her uncle liked Irish folk songs, so she memorized that repertoire, too.Soon the “little piano girl” of Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood was a local celebrity, renowned among musicians even in the piano-player-packed city and in demand as an entertainer of wealthy white families. As a teenager she joined Andy Kirk and His 12 Clouds of Joy, a Kansas City big band on the make; her compositions and arrangements — not to mention her bravura playing style — helped make it one of the era’s leading bands.In the coming decades, Williams stayed abreast of the major developments in jazz, following her ear and leading by example. She wrote briefly for both Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, then became a mentor to the young bebop musicians rising up in Harlem.But as artistically successful as she was, life for Williams never really got easy. Things have rarely been simple for genius Black musicians in America, but for a woman in jazz, things were especially tough. She wasn’t signed by a major label, and rarely received star billing. In 1954, while living in Paris, she stepped away — literally, midperformance — from jazz. She converted to Catholicism and stayed away from the music for three years. When she returned, she was as an activist and an educator as much as a pianist and composer.Today, Williams is a Mount Rushmore figure in jazz, possibly the greatest multiplier of openness and mastery the music has yet known. Below, we asked a dozen musicians, scholars and critics to help take us on a tour of the music and mind of Mary Lou Williams. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Helen Sung, pianistIt is fascinating to hear this live performance (from one of Williams’s last recordings) of “Roll ’Em,” a composition from early on in her career. One hears a broad swath of jazz history in her playing: boogie-woogie, swing, big-band riffs, subtle chromaticism in her left-hand chords when the band settles into a more modern trio format. Williams’s artistry is steeped in the blues and full of sass and rhythmic swagger. Her soloistic approach here recalls folks like Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Erroll Garner, where the bassist and drummer simply come along for a thrilling ride with the piano maestra.◆ ◆ ◆Courtney Bryan, pianist and scholarIn 1945, Williams, a pathbreaking genius composer, recorded her first extended composition, “Zodiac Suite.” Soon afterward, she presented chamber and full orchestra versions of the suite. The 12 movements are based on zodiac signs, each honoring creative people and friends.Williams, a Taurus, dedicated this movement to Duke Ellington, Joe Louis and Bing Crosby. “Taurus” takes you on an adventure — starting with the solo piano opening statement in major and minor alternating with open tempo whole-tone figures, to the trio swinging in time with chromatic and bluesy themes with exciting detours, and then ending, as Williams explains in the liner notes, “with the same theme to indicate the personality that ‘only changes when it is forced to do so.’”Following a music sabbatical and conversion to Roman Catholicism with a focus on charity, her return to music was in 1957 with Dizzy Gillespie at Newport Jazz Festival, where she performed movements from “Zodiac Suite.” She went on to compose several jazz-inspired Masses. The afterlife of “Zodiac Suite” can be heard in contemporary takes by a range of artists.◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, ethnomusicology professorI learned who St. Martin de Porres is through Williams’s 1964 album “Black Christ of the Andes.” The album opens with a (mostly) a cappella choral piece named for the saint. It is part chant and part hymn but is rife with a reverence that reveals Williams’s expansive bebop and blues harmonic ingenuity. My favorite moment happens over three minutes after the song begins. It is right where I’m tempted to slip into the contemplative world Williams creates, but then she begins her brief piano solo with an awakening glissando and a habanera rhythm that reminds me that she’s not honoring just any saint, but St. Martin de Porres, an Afro-Peruvian priest who represents social justice and interracial harmony. This is soul music. “St. Martin de Porres” and all of “Black Christ of the Andes” is Williams’s spiritual offering to her chosen patron saint, and it is a gift of hope and reflection to our listening ears.◆ ◆ ◆Jason Moran, pianistWilliams’s “Night Life” is a blistering three-minute dance. It’s the kind of song that raises your heart rate because Mary Lou creates so much drama by pressurizing the syncopation between her perfect hands. In those hands we hear the drama of a night: A scene seems to unfold here with laughter and clinking glasses, and we can almost hear the dancers emerge onto the floor. (I practice my Lil Uzi Vert dance to this track.) This is an excellent example of her vocal quality as a pianist, describing a night out. Midway through, around 1:42, the scene changes; it’s as if someone had come in to rob the patrons of the club, but heard Mary Lou’s playing and changed their mind, joined the dance and bought everyone a round. By the end, Mary Lou is shoulder-dancing us all out into the street at daybreak. Time for work. I’ll always love Mary Lou.◆ ◆ ◆Tammy Kernodle, musicologistThis performance of “A Grand Night for Swinging” is taken from a 1976 live album of the same name. Written by her close friend and fellow pianist Billy Taylor, the tune became a staple in Williams’s repertory after 1957. She first recorded it in 1964 for the “Black Christ of the Andes” album, and it is featured on a few of the live albums she recorded during the last five years of her life. This rendition, however, is my absolute favorite as it displays how the richness of her artistry as a pianist had deepened during this late chapter of her career. It is funkier and grittier than the others that precede it, no doubt because of the chemistry that existed between Williams, the bassist Ronnie Boykins and the legendary drummer Roy Haynes.Mary Lou had a reputation for pushing bass players and drummers. She wanted a particular kind of rhythmic drive and often coached her sidemen in real time by stomping her left foot or moving her head. But it is clear from the opening motive to the last chord that Boykins and Haynes knew exactly what Mary Lou wanted. They established a rhythmic pocket that allowed Williams to effortlessly weave line after line of blues-tinged improvisation. It is a reminder that when Mary Lou said she had played through every era of jazz, that she indeed had played and mastered many of the different iterations of jazz piano. This performance situates her squarely in the sonic genealogy of the East Coast hard bop aesthetic. But the unique hallmarks of Williams’s style are also very evident, especially her driving left hand, and the strong chord clusters she would periodically bang out in the lower register of the piano to break up the continuity of her comping. This is Mary Lou at her best!◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times music criticOne mark of an influential artist is the ability to speak through modern-day disciples. When latter-day pianists on the level of Geri Allen and Aaron Diehl offer us informed and inventive takes on Williams’s 1940s “Zodiac Suite,” that’s a sign of its own. But what was Williams herself thinking about, when completing that ambitious composition in its various editions for small combo and chamber orchestra alike? On the evidence of sides cut for the Asch label, she was enjoying a wide range of styles — including Harlem stride and the beginnings of bop. A solo approach to W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” from this period reflects her composer’s sense of proportion as well as her wide-ranging ear; she starts at a stately pace, and adds delirious ornaments as she goes — eventually throttling into a thrilling, boogie-woogie gear.◆ ◆ ◆Carmen Staaf, pianistOne of the astonishing things about Williams is the number of musical eras during which she continued to break new ground. “Olinga” (from 1974’s fascinating “Zoning” album) exemplifies her ability to sound fresh, even after mastering so many earlier styles. Williams’s version of this Dizzy Gillespie composition is relaxed, soulful and grooving, yet constantly surprising. Her touch remains beautiful and lush across a wide dynamic and textural range. By bringing out individual notes within voicings and contrasting big chords with single-note lines, she creates a topography of sound, the music alive in multidimensional space. In the improvisation, her right hand freely pushes and pulls against the time over funky left-hand chords. Bluesy licks, long a central part of her sound, lead fluidly into bebop lines and more modern language; her soloing seems to encapsulate the history of jazz piano while looking ahead into its future.◆ ◆ ◆Daphne Brooks, Black studies scholarThe genius of Williams’s take on the Gershwins’ “It Ain’t Necessarily So” lies in both the context of this recording as well as its rich, ambling and contemplative content. Appearing as track No. 2 on her pivotal “Black Christ of the Andes” album, her post-Catholic conversion masterpiece, Williams’s cover of the “Porgy and Bess” trickster-villain Sportin’ Life’s ode to religious skepticism eschews the original’s vaudevillian flash in favor of offering a brooding ramble, a gently swinging peregrination that traverses hills and moves in and out of dark valleys to the rhythm of philosophical questioning and questing. Less Cab Calloway and Sammy Davis Jr. and more midnight Mary at the altar working out the complexities of faith, her reading of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” expands the lexicon of jazz spirituality.◆ ◆ ◆Ethan Iverson, pianist and writerA fast piano blues is usually a “boogie-woogie.” That’s a rhyme, “boogie” and “woogie.” Rhymes repeat sound, and the musical characteristics of boogie-woogie include riffs and rhythms that constantly replicate. On the glorious 1939 side of “Little Joe From Chicago,” Williams suavely varies both the top and bottom patterns in a notably carefree fashion. Musicians call that kind of initiative “mixing it up.” Williams mixes it up, but her performance still has more than enough hypnotic, danceable repetition to make it classic boogie-woogie. (On the full band version with Andy Kirk, the lyrics turn out to be a sardonic appraisal of Louis Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser: “Little Joe from Chicago wears a big blue diamond ring. Little Joe from Chicago never wants for anything. He handles plenty money and he dresses up like a king.”)◆ ◆ ◆Cory Smythe, pianistIt’s hard to top the opening of “Lonely Moments” — the way its spare octaves, separated at first by bewilderingly long silences, gather momentum and burst into rousing, syncopated harmonies. I imagine solitude might have been something like this for Williams, whose lonesome moments yielded so much thrilling invention. But I might like what comes next even more: a glissando that swings up past the “right” note and sounds, magically, like the piano in its exuberance is singing just a little sharp. The whole track is like this, suffused with flourishes that transform the solo piano into the sounds of an entire band. Notice the chords in her right hand that begin and end with little tremolos, perfectly calibrated to make the decaying piano tones do something they should not — shake, flutter, growl.◆ ◆ ◆Damien Sneed, pianist and professorI first heard Williams’s recording of her original song “What’s Your Story Morning Glory” in my first year at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I immediately fell in love with her piano playing and was mesmerized by her voicings as well. This track showcases her effervescent melodic content combined in her right hand and her passionate comping in her left hand. Williams was a pianist, composer and arranger well ahead of her time. One of the things that stands out to me about her pianistic excellence is the subtle yet virtuosic quality in the development of her solos.◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticOK. Now that you’ve gotten to know Mary Lou Williams’s brilliance, her generosity and her range, let’s learn a bit about how she sparred. Williams and the great avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor were mutual admirers until she organized a joint concert at Carnegie Hall in 1977. So-called “free jazz” was one style of the music she never embraced, but the depths of Taylor’s talent and knowledge of musical traditions won her over. When the time came for the concert, however, he revolted: Taylor hated that she had chosen the rhythm section without him, and he felt she wasn’t giving his 12-tone approach enough room to run. The concert was titled “Embraced” (as was the resulting album), but the actual affair felt more like a joust. And yet, by the end, Williams had managed to establish some balance; on “Back to the Blues,” their last tune together, she digs a deep trench of boogieing rhythm and challenges Taylor in the upper register, where he often lit his brightest fires. As the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Mickey Roker lock in with her, around the 11:00 mark, Taylor’s two-handed flurries finally start to sound like they fit.◆ ◆ ◆Brandee Younger, harpistThis bass line pulls you right in. It’s grooving, it feels really good, and then the melody comes in and instantly makes your head turn. It makes you wonder, too, because harmonically it is sort of peculiar against the bass, yet still fits perfectly. It’s almost like the blending of two different worlds. The drummer and composer LaFrae Sci introduced me to “Ode to St. Cecile” while on the road with her band, the 13th Amendment. Learning how Williams composed this after converting to Catholicism, retreating and returning to music was a real eye-opener. It made me think about what the melody may have represented in her life at that moment. And musically, just the contrast between the thick, consistent groove and the contemplative melody is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat.◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Nun With a Musical Gift, Dies at 99

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      Born in Ethiopia, she seemed headed for a career as a concert pianist before she chose a monastic life. Her intricate piano recordings gained a cult following.“Honky tonk” and “nun” are words not often seen in combination, but in 2017, when the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about the pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, “The Honky Tonk Nun” was the title of choice.It was a testament to the music she made, both before and after she became a nun in the 1940s, music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”The documentarian Garrett Bradley used Sister Guèbrou’s music in the soundtrack of “Time,” her acclaimed 2020 film about a New Orleans woman’s fight to get her husband out of prison. Alex Westfall, writing in Pitchfork about that movie and its soundtrack, called the music “the sonic equivalent to infinity — untethered by conventional meter or rhythm, as if Guèbrou’s instrument holds more keys than it should.”Fana Broadcasting, Ethiopia’s state-run news agency, announced on March 27 that Sister Guèbrou had died in Jerusalem. She was 99. The announcement did not specify when she died.“Hers were some of the most extraordinary 99 years ever lived on this earth,” Kate Molleson, who made “The Honky Tonk Nun” and wrote about Sister Guèbrou in her book “Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the 20th Century” (2022), said on Twitter.Sister Guèbrou (the title emahoy is used for a female monk) was born Yewubdar Guèbru on Dec. 12, 1923, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. (She changed her name when she became a nun.) Her father, Kentiba Gebru Desta, held several titles, including mayor of Gondar, and her mother, Kassaye Yelemtu, was socially prominent as well. At age 6, Sister Guèbrou was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. There, she said in the BBC documentary, she saw a concert by a blind pianist that made a strong impression.“It remained in my mind, in my heart,” she said. “After that, I was captivated by music.”She studied violin and piano and then returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to attend the Empress Menen secondary school. After Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and forced its emperor, Haile Selassie, into exile, Sister Guèbrou and her family were deported to the Italian island of Asinara and then were relocated to Mercogliano, east of Naples.When the Italian occupation ended and Selassie was restored to power in 1941, Sister Guèbrou, still a teenager, accepted an offer to further her music studies in Cairo, though the Cairo climate did not agree with her. She eventually returned to Ethiopia, working for a time as an assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Ms. Guèbrou in an undated photo. After studying music in Italy and Cairo, she underwent a spiritual reassessment and became a nun, joining a monastery in Ethiopia. “I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she said. via Buda MusiqueShe had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.Sister Guèbrou came to much wider attention in 2006. The French musicologist and producer Francis Falceto, who had been releasing albums of Ethiopian music from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in a series called “Éthiopiques” on the Buda Musique label, made a collection of her solo pieces No. 21 in that series.“While the sound of this musician’s pensive, repetitive drawing-room études owes something to Beethoven, Schumann and Debussy — although they are studded with little arpeggios special to Ethiopian music — there is a dusky, early-blues quality to much of it,” Ben Ratliff wrote in a review in The Times. “If you’ve heard some jazz, you could think it was written by Mary Lou Williams or Duke Ellington in their own moments of making their own quiet, original drawing-room music.”Ilana Webster-Kogen, an ethnomusicologist at SOAS University of London with an expertise in Ethiopian music, broke down one track from the “Éthiopiques” album, the inviting yet complex “The Story of the Wind,” which is less than three minutes long.“First, there is a lot of classical technique in there, particularly in the interplay between the right and left hands,” she said by email. “You might think you’re listening to a sonata for those first few seconds because there is so much harmony between the right and left hand. But then it becomes immediately clear that she’s improvising, so the genre signals jazz.”And then there’s the meter of the piece.“Most Ethiopian music is written in 6/8, which you can count either as duple meter or triple meter (1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-1-2-3),” Dr. Webster-Kogen wrote. “If you try to count, you’ll see that she really fluctuates between duple and triple pulse. This would be innovative coming from any musician, and sure, there are other Ethiopian musicians who do this — now — but the idea that they got it from a woman who has dedicated her life to prayer and charity … anyone can see that this is unusual.” More

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      Chloë Tangles With Future, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bettye LaVette, Abra, Tyler, the Creator 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.Chlöe and Future, ‘Cheatback’Chloe Bailey contemplates getting even for infidelity — “pulling a you on you” — in “Cheatback,” an almost-country ballad like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” from her debut album, “In Pieces.” Backed at first by basic acoustic guitar chords, she thinks through the details. “Say I’m with my girls while he spendin’ the night,” she sings, and “I might make a video.” Future semi-apologizes — “Should’ve never let you down, feelin’ embarrassed/Temptation haunting me” — and asks her to “Make love, not revenge,” knowing he hasn’t lost her yet. JON PARELESGeorgia, ‘It’s Euphoric’“You don’t have to say nothing when you start to feel something,” the British pop musician Georgia sings on this dreamy, upbeat reverie, co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij, which captures the buzz of new love. She settles for a simple, repeated refrain of “it’s euphoric,” giving that last word a prismatic luminosity. LINDSAY ZOLADZAbra, ‘FKA Mess’Save for recent, one-off collaborations with Bad Bunny and Playboi Carti, the self-proclaimed “darkwave duchess” Abra has been quiet since her head-turning 2016 EP “Princess.” The throbbing, six-minute “FKA Mess,” though, is a promising return to form: The bass-heavy track is murky and echoing but cut through with infectious melody and a kinetic beat. It sounds, in the best way possible, like a strobe-lit, after-dark dance party in an abandoned mall. ZOLADZBettye LaVette, ‘Plan B’Bettye LaVette taps into deep blues and the anxiety of age in “Plan B,” a Randall Bramblett song from her coming album, “LaVette,” produced by the drummer and roots-rock expert Steve Jordan. “Plan B” is wrapped around a minor-key guitar riff and a production that harks back to both Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” and, yes, Pink Floyd’s “Money.” LaVette, as always, is raspy and indomitable. Even as she sings “My mojo’s busted and I ain’t got a spare,” it’s clear she’s tough enough to keep going. PARELESKassa Overall featuring Nick Hakim and Theo Croker, ‘Make My Way Back Home’The drummer, singer and rapper Kassa Overall wishes for the “family that I never knew” and a place “where the love is real” in “Make My Way Back Home,” a dizzying jazz-hip-hop production that never finds a resting place. Multitracked trumpets, flutes, keyboards and voices cascade across the drummer’s light, ever-shifting beat, building chromatic harmonies that continually elude resolution — a structure of endless longing. PARELESTyler, the Creator, ‘Sorry Not Sorry’Repentance turns to belligerence in “Sorry Not Sorry,” a new song from “Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale,” the expanded version of Tyler, the Creator’s 2021 album. At first, over a sumptuous 1970s soul vamp (from “He Made You Mine” by Brighter Shade of Darkness), Tyler admits to mistakes: “Sorry to my old friends/the stories we could’ve wrote if our egos didn’t take the pen.” But he’s definitely not abandoning that ego; as the track builds, remorse turns to pride and sarcasm: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” PARELESMadison McFerrin, ‘God Herself’In “God Herself,” Madison McFerrin — like her father, Bobby McFerrin — revels in all the music that can be made without instruments: vocals, breaths, percussive syllables, finger snaps. “God Herself” is a multitracked, close-harmony construction that draws on gospel to equate carnality and spirituality: “Make you want to come inside and pray to stay for life,” McFerrin vows. “You gonna see me and believe in God herself.” It’s meticulously calculated to promise delight. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too)’Kelsea Ballerini promises to give a friend an alibi — paying attention to both the physical and the digital — in “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too).” It’s a foot-stomping country tune about friendship and perjury. “Hypothetically, if you ever kill your husband/Hand on the Bible, I’d be lyin’ through my teeth,” Ballerini sings, with bluegrassy fiddle and slide guitar backing her up. It’s a successor to songs like the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” but it’s no direct threat, just a contingency plan. PARELESJess Williamson, ‘Hunter’The Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson — who released a collaborative album last year with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, under the name Plains — yearns for connection on the bracing, country-tinged “Hunter,” the first single from her upcoming album, “Time Ain’t Accidental.” The song oscillates between muted disappointment and, on a surging chorus, defiant hope: “I’ve been known to move a little fast,” Williamson sings. “I’m a hunter for the real thing.” ZOLADZ More

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      53 Years After Miles Davis’s Album, a Fresh Spin as ‘London Brew’

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      A 12-member collective of noted U.K.-based musicians used “Bitches Brew” as a springboard, improvising a new LP after the pandemic thwarted a 50th anniversary celebration for the original.In 1970, Miles Davis released “Bitches Brew,” an album so musically daring that some critics and listeners didn’t know what to make of it.By then, the trumpeter’s ear had drifted from traditional jazz to edgier blends of funk and psychedelic rock; he wanted to craft an amorphous sound only loosely tethered to any genre. “Instances of subtlety and formal improvisational mastery come thick and fast,” the critic Carman Moore wrote of “Bitches Brew” in The Times upon its arrival. “It is all so strange and new and yet so comfortable.”Others weren’t sold. “With ‘Bitches Brew,’ Davis was firmly on the path of the sellout,” Stanley Crouch wrote in 1990. “It sold more than any other Davis album, and fully launched jazz-rock with its multiple keyboards, electronic guitars, static beats and clutter. Davis’s music became progressively trendy and dismal.”“Bitches Brew” did indeed sell well. It delivered Davis’s first gold and platinum albums, and shifted mainstream jazz from elegant arrangements optimized for cramped nightclubs to bigger, grungier structures tailor-made for stadium speakers. Now it’s the focus of an ambitious jazz album called “London Brew,” out Friday.The LP convenes a 12-member collective of noted musicians in Britain — including the saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, the tuba player Theon Cross, the D.J. Benji B and the guitarist Dave Okumu — and uses “Bitches Brew” as a springboard to a new album informed by the Davis classic without recreating it. The idea was to improvise an album with the same fiery expanse, with samples from Davis’s electric period of the late 1960s and early ’70s as the binding agent.“We wanted to do something that would be our imagination of what it could possibly have been to be in his presence during those sessions,” the guitarist and “London Brew” producer Martin Terefe, 53, said in a video interview. “The kind of freedom that the musicians on that album were given.”Bennie Maupin, 82, the acclaimed reedist and a featured player on “Bitches Brew,” said spontaneity was a key to the original recording. “Everything that happened, happened right in the moment,” he recalled in a telephone interview. “Miles never told anybody what to play, not once. He allowed us to totally be ourselves. He would give us some direction to just kind of start. And when we started something, we might play for 10 minutes, and then he would stop us and go onto something else.”Okumu, on guitar, was part of the group that convened in December 2020 at the Church Studios.Nathan WeberDavis’s double album, with its dark aura, thick acoustic-electric instrumentation and seemingly endless grooves, also made way for like-minded bands to assemble in its wake. Maupin would go on to play with the pianist Herbie Hancock in his Mwandishi and Head Hunters bands; the keyboardist Joe Zawinul and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter formed Weather Report; the pianist Chick Corea and the drummer Lenny White started Return to Forever; and the guitarist John McLaughlin and the drummer Billy Cobham founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra. They all played on “Bitches Brew,” a record that’s still bearing fruit 53 years later.“That was a golden moment,” Maupin said. “Miles is gone. Wayne just left. I just thank my lucky stars that he invited me to come and be myself.”“London Brew” was supposed to be a one-off live event at the Barbican Center in London in 2020 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bitches Brew.” Bruce Lampcov, a 69-year-old veteran producer and engineer who has mixed Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel and Eurythmics and had recently signed a deal to administer Davis’s publishing catalog, happened to be in London in late 2019, and was thinking of ways to introduce the legend’s music to younger listeners. The signing, along with the upcoming anniversary, presented “an obvious sort of launching-off point, a record that in itself built a wider audience at the time for jazz music,” Lampcov said in a video interview. In London, he was introduced to the local jazz scene, and was taken by what he saw there.“I went into a theater, there was a capacity crowd with a reggae sound machine going, and D.J.s playing jazz music,” he said, describing then seeing a live show with “a crowd of like, 18-year-olds and 20-year-olds. It was like being at a rock gig. And I thought, ‘This is amazing. This is perfect. We just need to do something that connects Miles to this audience.’”Cross, Garcia and Hutchings in the studio. “The whole thing was meant to be a mesh,” Garcia said.Nathan WeberIn February 2020, Lampcov started reaching out to musicians to see if they’d want to do the “Bitches Brew” tribute gig. After making some initial contacts, he boarded a plane back to the United States as the world was about to change. “Everyone was wearing a mask and I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’” he recalled. “And that was it. That’s how it fell apart.”Covid-19 lockdowns shuttered venues and canceled the show, leaving any sort of celebration in limbo. But as the pandemic lingered, and it became clear the concert couldn’t be rescheduled, Lampcov put the idea to rest — until Terefe called with another idea: Get everyone in the studio and record an album.“I couldn’t really let go of it, it felt like such an exciting project,” Terefe said. “There was a point when I kind of suggested to Bruce, ‘Listen, when it’s so rough out there, what’s better to do than to find a good studio and self-isolate with all these musicians and make a record together?’”On Dec. 7, 2020, the group convened at the Church Studios in North London, with Covid testing personnel in place and a scaled-down technical crew, to record what would become “London Brew,” an eight-song, almost 90-minute LP of genre-hopping experimentation that blurs the lines between rock, jazz and ambient, sometimes within the scope of one song.At the beginning of the three-day session, Terefe asked the collective to play a single note for as long as it could hold it, “just expressing their frustration with the pandemic.” Where the two-part title track on the new album centers hard-thumping drums, breakneck electric guitar riffs and squealing wind instruments, “Raven Flies Low” is a methodical collage: Raven Bush plays the violin through effects pedals (a nod to Davis running his trumpet through tape delay on “Bitches Brew”), slowly bringing the track to a volcanic peak, with crashing drum cymbals and undulating saxophone.While “London Brew” is foremost a nod to one of Davis’s most famous albums, songs like “Bassics” and the title track’s midpoint evoke the cosmic Afrocentricity and tightly coiled funk of Davis’s “Live-Evil,” released in 1971, and “On the Corner,” from the following year. Toward the end of “London Brew Pt 2,” the producers sample the wafting guitar and subtle organ of the ambient-leaning “In a Silent Way,” from 1969, a direct repurposing of Davis’s music.“His recordings are so special and so unique that to actually try and repeat something that’s very much so improvisational wouldn’t do it justice,” Lampcov said. “We really didn’t feel like it would be a celebration of the record, and it never would be as good.” On purpose, there’s no trumpeter on the new album: “Because how could you do that?”Garcia, 31, the saxophonist, gave herself a directive in the studio: Just be free and in the moment; don’t interrupt anything going on between other musicians. “If there’s something special happening between the flute and drum kit, why would I get in the way of that?” she said over the phone from London. “I don’t need to be talking all the time.”Still, her voice persists, much like everyone else in the collective, much like the large ensemble Davis convened all those years ago. A half-century after Davis brought the likes of Maupin, Hancock and Shorter into one room for one common goal, that same sense of community dots “London Brew,” an album built on the same organic principles, scanning as the same inscrutable jazz. Like “Bitches Brew,” it’s an album that just is.“The whole thing was meant to be a mesh,” Garcia said. “We were in the room together, we played things, then we left. I hope it conveys the necessity and beauty of community. I hope it conveys that we need each other.” More

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      Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro’s Love Trilogy, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks from Meshell Ndegeocello, the Japanese House, Hannah Jadagu 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.Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Beso’“Beso” (“Kiss”) quivers with fear of separation, as Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro tell each other that “Being away from you is hell.” The song is part of a three-track collaborative project called “RR” the couple released on Friday; the “Beso” video hints at an engagement. They keep their voices high, small and tremulous over a brusque beat topped with quasi-Baroque keyboards and strings, a genteel backdrop for deep neediness. PARELESMeshell Ndegeocello, ‘Virgo’“They’re calling me back to the stars,” Meshell Ndegeocello declares in “Virgo” from her coming album, “The Omnichord Real Book.” It’s a funky march that revels in cosmic imagery, cross-rhythms and multifarious vocals: singing, chanting, making percussive sounds, high harmonies, husky low confidences and an occasional “la-la.” Morphing through nearly nine minutes, the track struts on Ndegeocello’s synthesizer bass lines; twinkles and hovers with Brandee Younger’s harp; and sprints toward the end with double time drumming, headed somewhere new. PARELESMoor Mother featuring Kyle Kidd, Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, ‘We Got the Jazz’Moor Mother seethes about Black achievements met with disrespect in “We Got the Jazz”: “We ain’t ’bout to stand for no national anthem,” she declaims. “When we was swinging they couldn’t even stand in attention.” Her testy voice is surrounded in a rich, polytonal murk: multiple tracks of Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet, Keir Neuringer’s saxophone and Kyle Kidd’s vocals over a slowly heaving bass line, burdened but determined. PARELESThe Japanese House, ‘Boyhood’The British musician Amber Bain, who records as the Japanese House, reckons with her past and present on the flickering synth-pop track “Boyhood,” which pairs smooth sonic surfaces and effervescent electronic flourishes with her yearning, achingly human vocals. “For a moment there, I swear I saw me,” Bain sings, her 20-something growing pains palpable as she yearns — in vain — for a stable, unchanging sense of self. ZOLADZRina Sawayama, ‘Eye for an Eye’The British-Japanese pop musician Rina Sawayama makes her film debut on Friday in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” and has released a new song from the soundtrack, the slinky “Eye for an Eye.” The track splits the difference between Sawayama’s gloriously bombastic debut album, “Sawayama,” and the softer, more recent “Hold the Girl.” Propelled by a mid-tempo, industrial chug, Sawayama vamps with the confident menace of an action star. “A life for a life,” she sings. “I’ll see you in hell on the other side.” ZOLADZBully, ‘Days Move Slow’“Days Move Slow,” from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy indie-rock project Bully, is a song about being caught in the muck of grief — she wrote it after the death of her beloved dog, Mezzi — but it also has a propulsive, bouncy energy that promises eventual forward motion. “There’s flowers on your grave that grow,” Bognanno sings in her signature holler, battling her buzzing guitar. “Something’s gotta change, I know.” ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Woe (I See It From Your Side) (Björk Remix)’Björk’s remix of Shygirl’s “Woe” is equal parts endorsement and disruption. Shygirl, born Blaine Muise in England to parents from Zimbabwe, has worked with pop experimenters like Sophie, Arca, Tinashe and Sega Bodega, and she was a founder of the label Nuxxe. “Woe,” from her 2022 debut album, “Nymph,” was a smoldering counterattack to a toxic partner: “Smiling faces fade just to leave a shell,” she charged. Björk, playing fourth-dimensional chess, offers both sympathy — agreeing with Shygirl that “I see it from your side” — and outside perspective. The new track lurches from the dark groove of “Woe” to something else: Björk’s vocal harmonies, warped keyboard vamps and mystical life lessons. “Forever we shoot for the sublime,” she advises. PARELESHannah Jadagu, ‘Warning Sign’“Warning Sign” is a hushed, hazy song that maps interpersonal tensions onto musical contrasts: quiet and loud, sustained and rhythmic, dulcet and distorted. Jadagu is an N.Y.U. student who grew up in a Texas suburb and recorded her first EP, in 2021, entirely on an iPhone. She has more resources since signing to Sub Pop. “Warning Sign” could have been an easygoing R&B vamp, but Jadagu has other imperatives; the song coos with keyboard chords and airborne harmonies, then crashes or glitches. What she hears goes with what she feels: “I can’t stand to hear your voice when it’s oh so loud/Could you quiet down?” PARELESLucinda Chua featuring Yeule, ‘Something Other Than Years’The songs on “Yian” (Chinese for “sparrow”), the new album by the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua, are meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings. In “Something Other Than Years,” she sings, “When all I fear is all I know/Show me how to live this life,” and she’s answered by the higher voice of Yeule, who promises, “There’s more in this life/Angel being of light.” PARELES More