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      Christian McBride, Revered in Jazz, Is Playing the Long Game

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      At 50, the bassist is always focused on the next gig and fresh collaborations. His 18th album as a band leader is due this month.On a Friday night in late January, it was almost showtime at the Village Vanguard, but Christian McBride, the eminent jazz bassist, had not yet arrived.Earlier that evening, he had enthused about the gig — part of a week of sold-out shows with a new quintet led by the pianist Brad Mehldau — in between sips of Sandeman port and puffs of Mac Baren pipe tobacco at the Carnegie Club, a Midtown smoking lounge. “It’s starting to sound like a band,” he said.As the set time approached, he was navigating heavy Times Square traffic in his Lincoln S.U.V., air-drumming along to Bernard Purdie fills on the SiriusXM station Soul Town. Slipping into the venue just a few minutes late, he demonstrated what he’d said earlier, in his smooth rumble of a voice, about not requiring any preshow rituals: “I can show up and hit.”McBride’s assurance now seems like a given. At 50, he boasts one of the most impressive résumés of any jazz musician in his age bracket: eight Grammy wins; hundreds of recording credits alongside names such as Willie Nelson, Paul McCartney, Abbey Lincoln, Queen Latifah and his high school classmate Questlove; and prominent roles such as the host of NPR’s Jazz Night in America and the artistic director of the Newport Jazz Festival.He leads a portfolio of groups, including a brassy, hard-swinging big band, the elegant hard-bop quintet Inside Straight and the quartet New Jawn, which is heard on the freewheeling “Prime,” McBride’s 18th album as a leader, out later this month. And among fellow musicians, he’s cultivated a level of intergenerational good will that few other artists, inside or outside jazz, can claim.“Christian is among the cats who are sure about things,” the guitarist Pat Metheny, a collaborator on and off since the early 1990s, wrote in an email. “There isn’t a moment of indecision or waiting around with Christian. He’s on it and aware of everything that is happening and adjusting and allowing for the moment, but always with a vision of the tune, the changes, the time, and most importantly, the spirit of it all.”The drummer Savannah Harris works with McBride in a new, not-yet-named project that the bassist has called his Gen Z band. “There’s a few people of his generation that are key folks in that they both hold the respect of the arts institutions and hold the respect of their peers and the generations beneath them in the streets,” she said, characterizing McBride as one of those “bridge” figures. “And of the people that I’m thinking of,” she continued, “he might have the most traffic on his bridge.”Though he began garnering wide notice in the early to mid-90s, McBride stresses that his ascent was gradual. “Revisionist history says that my career started with a bang,” he said with a laugh. “No, it started with a very slow burn.”His prospects were shaky in the spring of 1990, when, on the cusp of his 18th birthday, he dropped out of the Juilliard School after two semesters, in part to pursue a gig with the vocalist Betty Carter that ended up falling through. He began working with older masters such as the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard but had to contend with the hazing that was then a rite of passage within jazz. He retains numerous stories of humiliations endured when he was first establishing himself on the scene, like the time a veteran saxophonist pop-quizzed him during a jam session, calling out chords from what turned out to be a nonexistent tune.But McBride had a sturdy inner core. Growing up in Philadelphia, he’d often been the target of bullying. “I was always getting teased about my size, my teeth — ’cause I had big teeth — ‘fat boy,’ all that kind of stuff,” he recalled in the kitchen of his Montclair, N.J., home, while Ella Fitzgerald, his 15-year-old beagle and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel mix, snored peacefully in her bed and pregame coverage of that week’s NFC Championship matchup played silently on ESPN. “But the thing that made it bearable was basically my family,” a loving, tight-knit unit centered on his mother, grandparents and uncle.“‘I’m going to be better than you,’” McBride recalled thinking of those who mocked him. “‘I’m going to work hard and I’m going to have good grades and I’m going to get out of school and do something.’ So I think there was a part of me that knew to play the long game.”Once he picked up the electric bass at age 9 — inspired by his father, Lee Smith, a bassist for acts such as the Delfonics and Mongo Santamaria, and encouraged by his great-uncle, Howard Cooper, who worked with avant-garde musicians around town — McBride began treating it as a life’s calling. Soon moving on to the upright, studying classical technique and performing in a local big band, he arrived in New York in 1989 with an unimpeachable work ethic that has never wavered.“Say what you want to,” he said at the Carnegie Club, “you can’t get me on the hours put in.”McBride’s dedication still impresses even his closest collaborators. The drummer Brian Blade has played with him since the early ’90s, notably in a quartet led by the saxophonist Joshua Redman, also including Mehldau, that has reactivated during the past few years. “I still wonder every time we play together — rather, I look in wonder as a witness to Christian’s gift working, and the care and attention which he has obviously given much time to cultivating,” Blade said. “He’s not resting on what he did yesterday; he’s still pushing forward. And in turn, it gives me that same spark and fire.”Early on, McBride was pegged as a so-called Young Lion, a diligent acolyte of time-tested, bebop-derived jazz. But while he established himself through work with esteemed elders like Hubbard, the saxophonist Joe Henderson, the drummer Roy Haynes and the pianist McCoy Tyner, he revealed the breadth of his personal pantheon on his own albums: On “A Family Affair” from 1998, he played as much funky electric bass as woody upright, nodding to an elemental James Brown obsession, while the sprawling “Live at Tonic” from 2006 found him staking out territory somewhere between the Meters, Herbie Hancock’s early-70s Mwandishi band and Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.New Jawn is one of McBride’s most satisfying bands. Featuring Marcus Strickland on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, Josh Evans on trumpet and Nasheet Waits on drums, it’s a quartet without a chordal instrument that convincingly encompasses elastic post-bop, dirge-like abstraction and strutting funk, sometimes uniting diverse strategies within the same piece. McBride credits Waits, best known for his role in the pianist Jason Moran’s acclaimed, long-running Bandwagon trio, with fueling the quartet’s adventurous spirit.“Sometimes we’ll be swinging really hard,” he said, “and the next thing I know, ohhh, here we go — and then we’re gone.”That love of collaboration has brought him wildly different opportunities. He spoke admiringly of a recent first performance alongside Billie Eilish at a 2022 tribute to the singer Peggy Lee. (“She knew that material like the back of her hand, so I’ve got nothing but big-time, hard-core dap for her.”) And he reflected on the “torturous” but ultimately rewarding task of reconciling the disparate approaches of the saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins from behind the bass when Coleman sat in at Rollins’s 80th birthday concert in 2010.For a musician like McBride, who has seemingly played with everyone by age 50, who’s left?“I have three people left on my bucket list,” he answered without hesitation. “Gladys Knight, Dolly Parton and Mary J. Blige.”“I want to write for them,” he added. “I would want to do a big-band project with each of them.” Then he doubled back to clarify his answer, showing the combination of determination and nonchalance that’s become a trademark of his. “I mean, it kind of wouldn’t matter,” he said. “I want to just play some notes with them.” More

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      Jason Moran Pays Tribute to an Early Jazz Ancestor

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      The album “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” puts the music of James Reese Europe through a contemporary prism.In the 1910s alone, the composer, pianist and bandleader James Reese Europe seemed to do enough living for multiple lifetimes.He started that decade at the Clef Club in Harlem, an organization that fielded its own group and worked to improve labor conditions for Black musicians throughout New York. Not long after, Europe brought his 125-member Clef Club Orchestra — and the syncopated styles of Black American composers — to Carnegie Hall. In 1914, Europe provided new music for the star dancing couple Vernon and Irene Castle while also taking his group into the studio to record for the Victor Recording Company.During World War I, he was Lieutenant Europe: Along with other members of the all-Black 369th Infantry, he pushed to be allowed to fight while also leading a regimental band — known as the Harlem Hellfighters — that amazed audiences abroad. After a triumphant return to New York, in early 1919, his war-drilled ensemble recorded material for the Pathe label, including a vivacious take on Carl Bethel and Sandy Coffin’s “That Moaning Trombone.” Later that year, one of Europe’s band members stabbed him with a knife during an intermission. (He thought Europe had disrespected him.) The bandleader died later that night.All this took place long before Louis Armstrong’s first recordings with King Oliver, which helped to codify and claim the “jazz age” for the Roaring Twenties. But a new, Europe-focused recording by the pianist and composer Jason Moran — titled “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” — rewinds jazz’s history a bit and brings Europe’s sound into a relationship with successive waves of jazz and contemporary music.“They talk about ‘jazz is dead,’ like it’s not everywhere or there’s something wrong with it,” Moran said in a recent interview. “But if you’re listening, the music is everywhere.”Moran cited a riff — synthetically rendered yet clearly big band-derived — that powers the Harry Styles song “Music for a Sushi Restaurant.” “That swing is still associated as the rhythm of this country,” Moran added. And for him, that tradition is greatly indebted to James Reese Europe’s bands in the 1910s.“What isn’t mentioned enough about Europe’s band is, they are incredible technicians,” Moran said. “When I show this music to people and say, ‘Can we get it like they do on the record?,’ inevitably they are like, ‘No, we can’t.’”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times“It’s hitting the stage, and hitting the mass of our people in New York City. But it’s also tied up in the vaudeville era, you know — and blackface. It’s emerging right at that time, and it’s scary,” Moran said. “So, I think he’s having that push-pull with it. And I think he reaches the other side of the conversation by claiming: ‘This is a Black music that we have to cherish. And we should be looking at our own kind of ensembles to manage that.’”On the new recording, Moran’s band channels some of that original Europe energy, and deploys herculean efforts during Moran’s own arrangement of “That Moaning Trombone.” That track, in its hard-charging refinement — and finely judged inflections of tempo and dynamics — proves a worthy modern testament to Europe’s handling of large ensembles.

      From the Dancehall to the Battlefield by Jason Moran“What isn’t mentioned enough about Europe’s band is, they are incredible technicians,” Moran said. “When I show this music to people and say, ‘Can we get it like they do on the record?,’ inevitably they are like, ‘No, we can’t.’” (Moran allows that his take on “Trombone” is his attempt to reach that summit: “Kudos to the horns for really working together on that.”)Elsewhere, Moran deviates strategically from recorded history. During Europe’s “Ballin’ the Jack,” Moran fuses the song with motifs from the post-bop pianist Geri Allen’s “Feed the Fire,” before executing an elegant pivot back to “Jack.”

      From the Dancehall to the Battlefield by Jason MoranThat mash-up format reflects Europe’s own taste in medleys, as well as the real-time remixing that Moran has long executed with his trio, the Bandwagon. (“Thank god for the Bronx, and figuring out that two turntables can work this way,” he said, when asked whether “Ballin’ the Jack / Feed the Fire” was indebted to turntablism.)Elsewhere, Moran embellishes the up-tempo tune “Castle House Rag,” filling it with nervy rhythmic repetitions — and pianistic lines that are, by turns, soulful and avant-garde in nature (and sometimes both at once). “It’s very Threadgill, the way it opens up,” he said, referring to the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and performer Henry Threadgill, who is also a Europe aficionado. (The tuba player Jose Davila, a regular in Threadgill’s bands, lends a sense of drive to Moran’s new album.)Other modern sounds show up for cameos on the recording: The breathing meditation “Zena’s Circle” comes from the composer and conceptualist Pauline Oliveros. Moran once invited her to lead a Deep Listening session during his first season of programming at the Park Avenue Armory. “Selfishly, I wanted to give it to the Bandwagon,” he said. “But I also wanted people to experience it.”Jazz isn’t dead, Moran said. Rather, “if you’re listening, the music is everywhere.”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times“Zena’s Circle” leads directly into “For James” — a collaged, multitake document of a Moran original. It is initially interpreted by his own group, as well as a German crowd singing it back to the players; then, in the final moments, Moran’s tribute is heard — in a majestic, impromptu take — as it was performed by members of Stephany Neal’s The 369th Experience. (That organization encourages bands at historically Black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.’s, to gather and study Europe’s music.)“They not only scaled it up,” Moran said, “but they made it better.”If the range of references on this album seems vast, that’s also a testament to Europe’s capaciousness, and his influence on Moran. Since departing from the Blue Note label to produce his own recordings on the Bandcamp platform, Moran has become a master of the unexpected feint. The sounds of “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” consistently surprise and delight; backward-masked percussion on a performance of “St. Louis Blues” might send you reeling back in more ways than one. The studio effect suggesting time travel — heard prominently in the cymbals — feels like something out of a 1970s Funkadelic stew; the W.C. Handy tune is, itself, of even deeper vintage. (Connecting all this is playing that feels utterly contemporary.)But Moran is being more than simply clever; he is an artist with an eye for connections among the past, present and future. On “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours,” Moran bends the end of one motif so that it ends in a less celebratory fashion than it does on Europe’s recording. (Moran’s version sounds like a phrase out of Thelonious Monk.)“I imagine that when they talk about ‘No Man’s Land,’ it’s with mystery,” Moran said, thinking about Europe and his players. “What do enslaved people think about what ‘no man’s land’ means? I want to go forward and backward on the idea. Where do we feel our boundaries are?” More

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      Carol Sloane, Jazz Singer Who Found Success Early and Late, Dies at 85

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      After seemingly being on the verge of stardom, she languished for decades, battered by changing tastes and bad luck, before enjoying a midlife comeback.The crowd had thinned by the time Carol Sloane, then 24, took the festival stage in Newport, R.I., in July 1961. The Saturday afternoon slot was a showcase for new talent, hence the sparse attendance. Ms. Sloane had chosen to sing “Little Girl Blue.” The pianist knew the tune but not the rarely performed introduction, so she sang it a cappella, hitting every ravishing note.“When I was very young/The world was younger than I/As merry as a carousel. …”The audience was transfixed. Though the crowd was small, it included a group of influential music critics and some suits from Columbia Records, who mobbed her after her performance. Within a few weeks she was offered a Columbia contract.Ms. Sloane, the honey-voiced jazz singer who was once considered an heir to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae but who struggled for decades, battered by changing tastes and sheer bad luck, before enjoying a midlife comeback, died on Jan. 23 at a care center in Stoneham, Mass. She was 85. Her stepdaughter, Sharon de Novellis, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Ms. Sloane was not quite an ingénue when she enraptured her Newport audience. She had already been on the road with the Larry Elgart band and spent a year in Germany during a brief marriage to a disc jockey who had been drafted and posted there. Growing up in Rhode Island, she had found her voice in the church choir and her métier on the radio.When she was 14, she began singing professionally with a local band (her uncle was the saxophonist). Jazz had hooked her a few years earlier, when she heard vocalists like Fitzgerald on late-night radio shows, so different from the sock-hop fare that played during the day.When a scout for Mr. Elgart heard her at a club in New Bedford, Mass., she was invited to tour with his band. Born Carol Morvan, she had been performing as Carol Vann. Mr. Elgart didn’t like the name, so she changed it to Sloane, after a furniture store she’d seen in New York City. Sloane (no first name), as she was known to her friends, then came up fast.Ms. Sloane on “The Steve Allen Show” in 1961. She was also a regular guest of Johnny Carson.ABC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesShe became a favorite of the piano virtuoso Oscar Peterson, who had her open for him at the Village Vanguard in New York. When he introduced her to Fitzgerald, she recalled, Fitzgerald said, “You’re the one they say sings just like me!”Jon Hendricks, of the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, hired Ms. Sloane to fill in on occasion when Annie Ross was unavailable. She was a regular on the television shows of Johnny Carson and Steve Allen. She played venues on both coasts, sharing the bill with comedians like Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen.And then her rise ended.The work, never lucrative to begin with, faded away as tastes in popular music shifted. The two albums she made for Columbia in 1962 were well received but didn’t sell, and she was dropped from the roster; she wouldn’t record again for more than a decade. A new era in pop music began in the mid-1960s, and Ms. Sloane was not to be a part of it.By then she was barely getting by, playing the odd gig and writing reviews for DownBeat. Then, in 1968, a nightclub called the Frog and Nightgown opened in Raleigh, N.C. She was invited to perform for a week — and ended up staying in Raleigh for nearly a decade.For the next seven years, until it closed, she performed regularly at the Frog and Nightgown while working as a secretary in the law offices of Terry Sanford, the former governor. Jazz clubs were closing all over the country in the late 1960s, and opening one in 1968 was perhaps overly optimistic, particularly in a town wrestling with segregation — the Frog and Nightgown was often targeted by the Ku Klux Klan — but it thrived for a time, and so did Ms. Sloane.Then she was introduced to Jimmy Rowles, a gifted jazz pianist who had played with the greats but who had a drinking problem. They fell in love, and she followed him back to New York. Before long, she found herself starting the morning with a drink. She attempted suicide and finally left him, moving in with friends.There were more setbacks in store: An old friend lured Ms. Sloane back to North Carolina when he opened a club in Chapel Hill, but it quickly failed. By the mid-1980s, she was broke again. She lost her car, and her apartment.In a last-ditch effort to find work, she called a few club managers, including Buck Spurr, a kindhearted man who was running a jazz room in a Howard Johnson’s in Boston called the Starlight Roof. They married in 1986 and settled in Stoneham.By 1987, Ms. Sloane was working steadily again. She found a new audience in Japan, and continued to enthrall critics at home.In 2001, when Ms. Sloane was performing at the Algonquin in Manhattan, Stephen Holden, in a review for The New York Times, wrote, “There are no shortcuts to the serene autumnal grove from which the jazz singer Carol Sloane spins out songs of experience in a warm, slightly husky voice that swings steadily while projecting a reassuring calm.” He added, “As much as any singer of her generation” — she was then in her 60s — “Ms. Sloane understands the value of restraint.”She conveyed “with a quiet authority,” Mr. Holden said, “the assimilated wisdom of a woman who has been there, done that and moved on.”That same year Ms. Sloane released an album, one of nearly 30 she recorded over her lifetime. Its title: “I Never Went Away.”Ms. Sloane, with Peter Bernstein on guitar and Ray Drummond on bass, at a concert of Duke Ellington’s music in New York in 2006.Hiroyuki ItoCarol Anne Morvan was born on March 5, 1937, in Providence, R.I., and grew up nearby in Smithfield, one of two daughters of Frank and Claudia (Rainville) Morvan. Her parents worked in a textile mill.In addition to Ms. De Novellis, her stepdaughter, Ms. Sloane is survived by a stepson, David Spurr, and five grandchildren. Her brief marriage to the Providence disc jockey Charlie Jefferds ended in the late 1950s. Mr. Spurr died in 2014.In 2019, Ms. Sloane made what would be her last album, “Carol Sloane: Live at Birdland,” which was released last year. She was anxious about doing it, and also a bit anxious about the film crew that had been following her on and off for a year to make a documentary about her.Directed by Michael Lippert, “Sloane: A Jazz Singer” is set to premiere at the Santa Fe Film Festival this month. One of its executive producers is Stephen Barefoot, once a bartender at the Frog and Nightgown (and the owner of the ill-fated club in Chapel Hill), who talked her into the project.“There is no such thing as an easy song to sing,” Ms. Sloane said in the film. “There isn’t! You chose it because it says something to you, about love and loss. Jazz singing is so personal. It’s a very intimate conversation in a way. It’s really, ‘I’m going to tell you this story, and I’m going to tell it to you very quietly, but it’s going to have so much impact.’“And,” she continued, “it’s to be able to convey to the audience that I have been through this. I can still remember the heartbreak, and I can tell you that it’s right here, where it was when it was fresh. And somehow I’ve survived.” More

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

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

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      Rosalía Issues an English Request, and 9 More New Songs

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

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

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

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

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

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      Jazz’s Year of Reckoning With Tradition

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