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      Paramore Steps Into a New Era, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Dram 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.Paramore, ‘This Is Why’Paramore has regrouped after Hayley Williams’s 2020 and 2021 solo albums showed how far her music could stretch beyond punk-pop and new wave. On the title song of its first LP since 2017, “This Is Why” (due in February) Paramore goes for wiry syncopation, not punk drive and power chords. “If you have an opinion, maybe you should shove it,” Williams sings, with biting mock-sweetness, over a backbeat and a hopping bass line. Choppy, clenched guitar chords — with more than a hint of INXS — goad her as she sneers an irritated response to a sourly divided national mood: “This is why I don’t leave the house.” JON PARELESYeah Yeah Yeahs, ‘Fleez’For much of their smoldering new album, “Cool It Down,” the once hyperactive Yeah Yeah Yeahs effectively reinvent themselves as purveyors of lush, slow-burning art-rock (see: the apocalyptically gorgeous, almost “Disintegration”-like leadoff single “Spitting Off the Edge of the World”). “Fleez,” however, harkens back to the barbed sound of their 2003 debut, “Fever to Tell,” and to the glory days of the indie sleaze sound the New York trio helped pioneer. Ironically — or perhaps as a reminder of how indebted that aesthetic was to the echoes of downtown past — the Yeah Yeah Yeahs do this by interpolating the funky groove and titular refrain of the South Bronx greats ESG’s 1983 single “Moody.” “I make my transformation, and it feels ni-i-i-i-i-ce,” Karen O vamps atop a chunky Nick Zinner riff and a shuffling Brian Chase beat — still, after all these years, a chemistry experiment that produces singular sparks. LINDSAY ZOLADZLCD Soundsystem, ‘New Body Rhumba’LCD Soundsystem’s first new song since 2017, for the soundtrack of Noah Baumbach’s film of the Don DeLillo novel “White Noise,” is the band’s latest jaunty, motoric complaint about money and mortality. “I need a new love and I need a new body/to push away the end,” James Murphy proclaims. LCD Soundsystem digs in, once again, to the late-1970s moment when punk, minimalism and dance music found a common stomping ground. “New Body Rhumba” is brawny and discordant, juggling sarcasm and sincerity, taunts and yearnings. Its final stretch, tootling and pounding over an insistent drone, may be a deathbed revelation, as Murphy belts, “Go into the light!” PARELESCaitlin Rose, ‘Nobody’s Sweetheart’It’s been nearly 10 years since the country-influenced indie musician Caitlin Rose’s most recent album, the whip-smart 2013 release “The Stand-In.” Later this year, she’ll break that long silence with her third record, “Cazimi,” out Nov. 18. The latest single, the stomping, sassy “Nobody’s Sweetheart” finds the silver lining in the single life, with Rose musing in her knowing drawl, “When you’re nobody’s sweetheart, you make the rules.” Even better, she adds, you’re “nobody’s fool.” ZOLADZFrankie Cosmos, ‘F.O.O.F.’Robert Smith was in love on Friday, Rebecca Black had to get down on Friday and now Greta Kline — leader of the indie-pop project Frankie Cosmos — freaks out on Friday. That’s what the playful acronym “F.O.O.F.” stands for and, accordingly, the latest single from Frankie Cosmos’s forthcoming album “Inner World Peace” is alive with Kline’s signature wry, muted humor. “It’s still Wednesday, I have to wait two more sleeps ’til I can freak,” Kline sighs, while a mildly noodly guitar solo saves up its most raucous energy. That the brief song ends before that promised freakout is the point: Kline is more interested in capturing that hopeful, anticipatory feeling — usually a comforting fiction — that everything will be all right once the weekend comes. ZOLADZNisa, ‘Sever’“How many breaks will it take until we can’t fix it?” Nisa Lumaj sings in “Sever” from her new EP, “Exaggerate.” The modest, bedroom-pop-like production stays patient and contained until it isn’t. Nisa muses, at first just above a whisper, about a deteriorating relationship; her voice is cushioned by synthesizer chords while guitar lines poke at her like unwanted realizations. But when the distorted strumming starts, the explosive breakup is inevitable. PARELESDram, ‘Let Me See Your Phone’The digital era enabled countless new avenues for surveillance and jealousy, and the R&B songwriter Dram sings about one in “Let Me See Your Phone.” The track uses slow-rolling, vintage soul chords, and Dram switches between earnest soul tenor and falsetto as he details an accusation — “When I look in your eyes/they don’t shine as bright as they used to” — and demands a forensic investigation: “Type in your passcode so I can see inside your soul.” Cheaters, by now, should understand that they should keep certain communications offline. PARELESOren Ambarchi, ‘I’“I” is the first and most austere segment of the 35-minute composition (and album) “Shebang” by the guitarist, composer and digital manipulator Oren Ambarchi. Although he’s joined by other instruments in the rest of the piece, most of “Shebang I” is guitar alone: restless staccato picking that’s multitracked, looped and digitally edited, building hypnotic polyrhythms around an unchanging chordal root. In the last minute, cymbals and other sounds join him, only hinting at what the rest of the piece will become. PARELESBill Frisell, ‘Waltz for Hal Willner’The guitarist Bill Frisell’s tribute to a longtime friend, the high-concept producer Hal Willner, brings the lightest possible touch to an elegy; it’s from his new album, “Four.” The harmonies are a slow, transparent cascade of clusters from Gerald Clayton on piano, while the drummer Johnathan Blake scatters cymbal taps against the waltzing lilt. Frisell shares the melody with Clayton and Gregory Tardy on tenor saxophone; each of them departs from the tune in brief, conversational asides before returning to what sounds like a fond, shared reminiscence. PARELES More

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      Sue Mingus, Promoter of Her Husband’s Musical Legacy, Dies at 92

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      Charles Mingus was among the greatest bassists in jazz. She worked tirelessly to ensure that he was known as a great composer as well.Sue Mingus, the wife of the jazz bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus, whose impassioned promotion of his work after his death in 1979 helped secure his legacy as one of the 20th century’s greatest musical minds, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her son, Roberto Ungaro, confirmed her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.Though Charles Mingus’s reputation as a brilliant if volatile performer was secure by the time he died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, at 56, Sue Mingus made sure he was also elevated to the pantheon of great jazz composers, alongside the likes of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.She organized three bands, each with different strengths, to wrestle with the more than 300 compositions he left behind, including his posthumously discovered masterpiece, the two-hour orchestral work “Epitaph.” He had despaired of seeing it performed in his lifetime, hence its title, but Ms. Mingus managed to bring the piece to the stage in a landmark performance at Lincoln Center in 1989.Mingus had exacting ideas about how each note from each member of his band should sound. But his wife saw that he had left his compositions supple and wide open to interpretation, allowing generations of musicians to return to them again and again. What resulted was a fresh, alluring texture rarely found in legacy bands playing the music of Ellington, Glenn Miller and others.“None of those leaders posthumously had the advantage of a Sue Mingus,” the jazz critic and journalist Nat Hentoff, a close friend of the Minguses, told The Boston Globe in 2004. “She’s got players who really dig into that music and remember that Mingus used to say, ‘You can’t play your own licks. I want you to play the music, but be yourself.’”Ms. Mingus with her husband’s basses in the late 1980s.Mingus ArchiveCharles and Sue made an unlikely couple: He was a temperamental Black bohemian raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles; she was a white Midwestern former debutante. And yet they clicked almost immediately after a chance encounter in 1964 at the Five Spot, a club in Lower Manhattan.He was playing his regular gig; she was there to soak in the city’s jazz scene, having recently appeared in “OK End Here,” a short film by the photographer Robert Frank with a score by the saxophonist Ornette Coleman.“My life had been one of order and balance, founded on grammar and taste and impeccable manners,” Ms. Mingus wrote in “Tonight at Noon: A Love Story” (2002), her memoir of their relationship. “And yet something about the man across the room seemed oddly familiar, like someone I already knew.”By the end of the 1960s they were more than lovers: She was his manager, his agent, his confidante and emotional support system. She booked his shows, arranged grants and teaching positions, and helped keep him levelheaded and relatively clean of the prescription drugs and alcohol that had disrupted his earlier career.And when, in the mid-1970s, he received his A.L.S. diagnosis, she hunted down experimental surgeries. They were in Mexico for one such treatment when he died; following his wishes, she spread his ashes in the Ganges River in India.It was after his death that Ms. Mingus showed the true strength of her commitment. She arranged for a two-day festival of Mingus’s music at Carnegie Hall, and soon afterward oversaw the creation of Mingus Dynasty, a seven-piece band that played both old Mingus standards and pieces he never brought to life, often arranged by Mingus’s longtime collaborator Sy Johnson, who died in July.The Minguses at their home in the Manhattan Plaza complex in Midtown Manhattan in 1978.Sy Johnson/Mingus ArchivesMs. Mingus had her husband’s compositions cataloged and donated to the Library of Congress, one of the largest gifts ever of a Black musician’s work. When one of the catalogers found the 200-page, 15-pound score for “Epitaph,” she wrangled 31 musicians to perform it, under the direction of the composer and conductor Gunther Schuller.That concert, a decade after Mingus died, revived interest in his music and led to the creation of two more repertory bands.In any given week in New York, a jazz fan might head to the Fez, a basement club on Lafayette Street, to hear the Mingus Big Band, then shuffle over to the City Hall Restaurant in TriBeCa to catch the Mingus Orchestra, which put more focus on composition and featured exotic instruments like bassoon and French horn. In between, one could pick up any number of recordings released under her record labels, Revenge and Sue Mingus Music.Revenge, which released music previously available only on bootleg recordings, demonstrated just how dedicated Ms. Mingus was to her husband’s legacy.By the late 1980s she had grown exasperated with the high volume of bootleg recordings of Mingus concerts. She got in the habit of taking as many as she could from record stores, not bothering to hide her antipiracy vigilantism and daring clerks to stop her.On a trip to Paris in 1991, one clerk did. She was whisked off to see the manager, who berated her before picking up the phone to call the police.“I told him to go right ahead,” she wrote in the liner notes to “Charles Mingus: Revenge,” a 1996 concert album. “I also suggested he call the daily newspapers as well as the television crews for the evening news and also the principal French jazz magazines whose offices happen to be across the street, so that I could explain everything to everyone at once.”The manager put down the phone and let her leave, with the records in hand.Sue Graham was born on April 2, 1930, in Chicago and raised in Milwaukee. Her family was musical: Her father, Louis Graham, was a businessman and amateur opera singer, and her mother, Estelle (Stone) Graham, was a homemaker and harpist.After graduating from Smith College with a degree in history in 1952, she moved to Paris, where she worked as an editor at The International Herald Tribune.A later job editing for an airline magazine called Clipper took her to Rome, where she met and married the artist Alberto Ungaro. They had two children, Roberto and Susanna, and moved to New York City in 1958. She worked for New York Free Press, an alternative weekly, and in 1969 founded Changes, a cultural magazine.She later separated from Mr. Ungaro, who died in 1968. Along with her children, Ms. Mingus is survived by four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.For all her decades of effort, Ms. Mingus remained unwilling to take full credit for burnishing her husband’s legacy.“It keeps itself alive,” she told The Boston Globe in 2002. “I just happen to be a passenger.” More

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      The Syncopated Sounds of Old San Juan Hill at the New Geffen Hall

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      Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Before there was Lincoln Center, there was San Juan Hill — a diverse neighborhood located in the West 60s in Manhattan. The “hill” refers to a peak at 62nd Street and Amsterdam.To some, the neighborhood’s reputation was synonymous with racial conflict. In a Page 1 article, in 1905, The New York Times reported that, on a weekly basis, the “police of the West Sixty-eighth Street Station expect at least one small riot on the Hill or in The Gut,” a stretch of the neighborhood on West End Avenue, involving the area’s Black and white rival gangs.But beyond the notoriety of the police blotter, a different American cultural story was taking shape on San Juan Hill. Around 1913, James P. Johnson could be found playing piano at the Jungles Casino, on West 62nd Street; the dances he witnessed there, which he described as “wild and comical,” would inspire “The Charleston,” his syncopated Roaring Twenties-defining hit, a decade later.During a recent interview at Lincoln Center, the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles noted that the musical legacy of San Juan Hill was particularly rich throughout the first half of the 20th century.“Thelonious Monk is from here,” Charles, 39, said. “And Benny Carter — to me Benny Carter is one of the most influential arrangers because he’s one of the first people to do a five-saxophone soli in big band, right? And he’s a great bandleader, a great improviser.”The musical aspect of the San Juan Hill story long predates the era in which the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, led by Robert Moses, razed the neighborhood to make way for the sprawling Lincoln Center arts complex. (Using eminent domain, Moses’ “urban renewal” project displaced more than 7,000 economically vulnerable families, nearly all of them Black and Hispanic.)It was the lack of a broader appreciation for this history, Charles said, that made him excited to propose a work about San Juan Hill when Lincoln Center approached him in 2020 for a piece to celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall. Turns out, the organization had been thinking along similar lines.“It had already been in conversation, here,” Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said; the organization was “starting to really think about: What was our history? How do we talk about our history?”They agreed that Charles would compose a piece evoking the old neighborhood — and that it would use the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center’s first-ever commission for a full orchestra. “San Juan Hill,” a 75-minute multimedia work, will have its premiere on Oct. 8, when Charles and his group, Creole Soul, join the New York Philharmonic for two performances.“We want to celebrate it and make sure as many people as possible see this as their first piece in the hall,” Thake said. (Tickets for the performances, which will be at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., were made available on a choose-what-you-pay basis; a limited number of free tickets will be distributed that morning at 10 a.m. at Geffen Hall’s Welcome Center.)The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Thake said Charles’s new work “speaks volumes about what the future can look like” at Lincoln Center, adding that she couldn’t “imagine that it just won’t get deeper with time and that you’ll see more like this.”Charles at the piano. His score for the Philharmonic has a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesAt the Kaplan Penthouse in Lincoln Center’s Rose Building, Charles was seated next to a piano and his score for “San Juan Hill” as he rattled off a roll-call list of all-stars with roots in the neighborhood, including, for a time, the writer Zora Neale Hurston. And he recalled learning about the neighborhood’s cultural legacy shortly after arriving, in 2006, to pursue a master’s degree in jazz studies at Juilliard.During preparations for a concert of Herbie Nichols’s music, the pianist and educator Frank Kimbrough gave Charles his first lesson on the topic — and pointed out a connection to Charles’s background. “He was like, ‘You’re from Trinidad?’” Charles said. “‘Well, Herbie’s parents were from Trinidad, and he was born right there.’ And he pointed to San Juan Hill.”It didn’t take long for that dual message — of local import, and of a broader tie to the West Indies — to be reinforced. When the pianist Monty Alexander stopped by the apartment Charles was sharing with another student, Aaron Diehl, he schooled Charles on a fresh way to hear the music of Monk. “Listen to Monk’s music and you hear that Caribbean bounce,” Alexander told Charles.On the Kaplan Penthouse’s piano, Charles played an appropriately bumptious figure from Monk’s “Bye-Ya” as punctuation for that anecdote. “It’s almost like dancehall,” he said.For Charles, one challenge of “San Juan Hill” was its scope. His first thought was: “I’ve never composed for orchestra,” he said. But thanks to his training at Juilliard, he had studied orchestration and completed some arrangements for orchestra. “So yeah,” he said to himself. “Let’s go.”

      Kaiso by Etienne CharlesWhile reflecting on the music that filtered into and out of San Juan Hill, Charles also went on fact-finding missions — looking through archives and speaking with people who lived in the neighborhood before 1959, including a former leader of one of its many gangs. (Charles said he couldn’t specify which leader or which gang.)Thake said such efforts were emblematic of how “deeply researched and how curious” Charles is as a performer. “He has a deep investment in this place, coming from Juilliard, moving through Jazz at Lincoln Center,” she said, noting that he was one of the first musicians to play a free concert in the organization’s Atrium space.That civic impetus is familiar to Charles’s former Juilliard roommate Diehl — a pianist who has also memorably collaborated with the New York Philharmonic. In a phone interview, Diehl remembered fondly Charles’s way of schooling him on the connections between Caribbean traditions and American jazz.“Spending time with him really revealed an entire world of Afro-diasporic music that I hadn’t even encountered,” Diehl said. “He will be very quick to tell you if you’re not playing one of those grooves correctly.”For the Oct. 8 performances, “San Juan Hill” will open with a mini-set by Creole Soul. While the group plays, images of the neighborhood, past and present, will be projected inside Geffen Hall. But the bulk of the piece involves the Philharmonic players and their music director, Jaap van Zweden, in dialogue with Creole Soul. Then, the images will be projected only between movements. (The multimedia aspects involve film elements directed by Maya Cozier, graffiti by the visual artist Gary Fritz (known as Wicked GF), and 3-D imagery by Bayeté Ross Smith.)The movements with the Philharmonic — there are five, representing about 55 minutes of the 75-minute performance — feature a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Charles: “I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”Josefina Santos for The New York Times“A lot of it is heavily influenced by what James P. Johnson was doing, what Fats Waller was doing,” Charles said. “And then I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”The historical record is also fodder for Charles’s musical imagination. The first movement with the orchestra, titled “Riot 1905,” refers to one of those infamous street altercations in San Juan Hill. That front-page story in The Times, from July 1905, had to do with a race riot that broke out when a Black man stepped in to assist a local ragman who needed help making his way through the neighborhood.But toward the end of “Riot 1905,” a rhythmic indication in the score name-checks the work of the hip-hop producer J Dilla, who died in 2006. It’s a playful fillip — and perhaps anachronistic, at first glance. But for Charles, it’s a way to draw a parallel between eras, since “people are still dealing with senseless acts of violence.”A movement for his group and the orchestra, “Negro Enchantress,” paints a portrait of Hannah Elias — at one point a courtesan and, later in life, a landlord and property owner and one of the richest Black women in New York City.Around the turn of the 20th century, Elias received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from a lover, John R. Platt, a white man. “I don’t know if you want to call it like an 1895 version of ‘The Tinder Swindler,’” Charles said. “But he sued her. And they put it all in the papers. She had a mansion on Central Park West. Seven-bedroom mansion! And this whole mob showed up outside her house. She won the lawsuit; he lost the lawsuit. She bought property all over New York.”The music of this movement begins softly and seductively, before taking on a suspenseful tinge. “It gets really out,” Charles said. “It’s like Jekyll and Hyde. You thought this person was one thing — but it’s also really that you’ve been convinced by your family that you shouldn’t be giving this person money.”The third and fourth movements — “Charleston at the Jungles” and “Urban Removal” — address the sharply divergent legacies of the pianist James P. Johnson and Robert Moses. But Charles didn’t want to end the piece on a downer, so the final movement for the orchestra, “House Rent Party,” is a delirious fusion of ragtime, Afro-Venezuelan waltzes and turntablism.“What is it like being a DJ in a party with people from everywhere?” Charles asked, rhetorically, after I pointed to the profusion of styles in this portion of the score. “You’ve got to give them a little taste.” More

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      For the Saxophonist Zoh Amba, Free Jazz Is Gospel

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      The 22-year-old musician grew up in Tennessee idolizing tenor iconoclasts like Albert Ayler. Now she’s working with New York’s avant-garde masters.The saxophonist Zoh Amba recently led a guest into the Upper West Side brownstone that houses the Vedanta Society of New York. Removing her shoes, she made her way upstairs to a cozy library, where she has spent hours studying Hindu philosophy since arriving in town last fall. She darted among the shelves and offered nutshell biographies of the Holy Trio, sacred figures in her discipline of Advaita Vedanta.Later, sitting on a bench in nearby Central Park, she held forth on a different pantheon: a lineage of fiery, uncompromising free-jazz saxophonists she first heard during deep YouTube dives as a teenager, including Albert Ayler, Frank Wright, Frank Lowe and David S. Ware. Speaking each name, she pressed her hands to her heart and assumed the same reverent tone she used when holding forth on the Trio.Reflecting on the winding route that’s taken her from a troubled childhood in Tennessee to her current position as a ubiquitous presence on New York’s avant-garde jazz scene, Amba, 22, stressed that the twin passions in her life aren’t distinct.“Something as intense as the music led me to Advaita Vedanta,” she explained. “But also, the music is that, you see? It’s both things: The music is God; God is the music. Hand in hand.”Hearing Amba play, it’s clear that her passion comes from somewhere deep inside. In the first few minutes of a recent concert at the Stone in Manhattan, alongside the pianist Micah Thomas, the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and the drummer Billy Drummond, she erupted with low-register blasts, then worked her way up to the altissimo range of her tenor sax, her cheeks puffing as she summoned harsh multiphonic squeals.But her music also has a soft and prayerful side, beautifully captured on “O, Sun” from March, one of three albums she’s releasing this year as a bandleader. “Bhakti,” a new collaboration with Thomas and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey captures the full range of her expression, from fervid to lullaby soft. On its Tuesday release day, Amba will perform at Roulette with Thomas, the bassist Thomas Morgan, the guitarist Matt Hollenberg and the drummer Marc Edwards. (In the spring, she’ll debut at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn.)“Anytime I enter the space,” Amba said, referring to music itself, “I look at this as a moment for me to get closer to God.”Scott Rossi for The New York TimesThe 73-year-old Edwards — a percussive dynamo who has worked with free-jazz titans including Ware, Cecil Taylor and Charles Gayle across a nearly 50-year career — was struck by his musical chemistry with Amba from their first performance together. “She was the perfect partner for me,” the drummer said. “It reminds me of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, how they dance so well together.”Sorey described Amba as a “fearless” improviser. He explained that while first-time free-improvised sessions often begin tentatively, theirs for “Bhakti” quickly reached peak intensity. “With Zoh, the way that started off — where it’s just, ‘OK, here it is. This is who I am. Let’s go there,’” he said, “that’s something that I don’t really encounter too regularly.”For Amba, collaborating with luminaries like Edwards and Sorey — as well as the trailblazing saxophonist-composer John Zorn, who produced “O, Sun” and cameos on the record; the eminent bassist William Parker, who plays on “O Life, O Light, Vol. 1,” another of Amba’s 2022 albums; and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase — once seemed unlikely. She grew up in Kingsport, Tenn., near the Virginia border, with a single mother who had Amba and her twin brother at 18.“Kingsport is, like, middle of nowhere,” Amba said. “We have a big chemical plant that explodes once a year. I went to a high school, 12 people in the class, very tiny, and the mascot was the Rebels; the school flag was the Confederate flag.”“I love straight-ahead,” Amba said, referring to the mainstream of jazz. “But unfortunately, it’s just not the song in my heart.”Scott Rossi for The New York TimesShe played guitar and wrote songs, but switched to alto saxophone after seeing a video of Charlie Parker in middle-school band class. “My mother hated the saxophone,” Amba said, so she developed a daily routine of practicing in the woods near her house. Eventually, she swapped the alto for a tenor, and at that point, “It felt like everything completely vanished, and I was living in this world that I always dreamed of.”Amba started browsing YouTube, devouring the work of tenor greats like John Coltrane, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. But she sensed that there might be a more obscure strata of players who would speak to her even more.A web search led her to Albert Ayler, whose roaring, quavering tone and palpable thirst for transcendence have made him an icon to generations of freethinking tenor players. Amba immediately identified not just with his music but also with the resistance he faced in his own home.She heard an interview where Ayler recalled practicing saxophone in his parents’ house. “He comes downstairs and his mother tells him, ‘I don’t think you’re my child; I think they made a mistake at the hospital,’ and he just cried, just feeling like, people aren’t accepting me,” she said. “I really understood that.”After high school, Amba attended the San Francisco Conservatory, where her allegiance to free jazz put her at odds with her teachers. “I love straight-ahead,” she said, referring to the mainstream of jazz. “But unfortunately, it’s just not the song in my heart.” After two years, she dropped out.Growing up, Amba was intensely drawn to religion, but the absolutism of Christianity turned her off. In San Francisco, a fellow musician gave her a book on Advaita Vedanta, a tradition that embraces all faiths as equally valid. “As soon as I found it,” she said, “it was a huge turning point for every single thing in my life.”She dropped out of the conservatory and spent time at Vedanta centers on the West Coast. Within the community, she was given the name “Amba,” a Sanskrit word meaning mother. (She has added her given middle name, Zoh.) She moved back to Tennessee, but in the fall of 2020, after being invited by a mutual acquaintance, she made daylong drives from Kingsport to Harlem to meet and eventually study with David Murray, the master saxophonist who has reconciled the whole history of jazz tenor, from swing to free, during a wildly prolific career.“We would play really high together and just scream on the horn together in our lessons, and he’s like, ‘Come on, give me more,’” Amba said. “He’s the one who encouraged, like, ‘Don’t stop, keep pushing, let me hear it, go farther.’”In an interview, Murray said Amba reminds him of himself when he was her age. “She’s trying to find her voice now, which is when I tried to find my voice when I got to New York, when I was 20 years old,” he said. “And to find your voice early is a rare thing.”Her mother hated the saxophone, Amba said, so she developed a daily routine of practicing in the woods near her house. Scott Rossi for The New York TimesAfter another brief music-school stint, this time at Boston’s New England Conservatory, Amba made the full-time move to New York in fall 2021 and played gigs with the pianist Vijay Iyer and a trio with Parker and the drummer Francisco Mela. But tensions also arose between her and some members of the scene.“One musician who’s older said that I was aggressive and pushy,” she said, and she began connecting with new collaborators, including the genre-spanning multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and expanding her range of listening, delving into noise and metal. (She cited a 2018 collaboration between the Japanese improv extremist Keiji Haino and the bruisingly heavy trio Sumac as a recent favorite.) In February, she recorded “Bhakti” — the title means “devotion to God” — which she sees as her strongest statement to date, and the one most closely aligned with her life’s purpose.“Anytime I enter the space,” she said, referring to music itself, “I look at this as a moment for me to get closer to God.” That idea guided the “Bhakti” session: “I prayed before and I said, ‘OK, God, let me get closer to you.’ Then we stepped in there, turn off the lights, and it was just like, boom.” More

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      Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

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      Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist and composer celebrated for music that was at once spiritual and visceral, purposeful and ecstatic, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death was announced in a statement by Luaka Bop, the company for which he had made his most recent album, “Promises.” The statement did not specify the cause.The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming. He first gained wide recognition as a member of John Coltrane’s groups from 1965 to 1967. He then went on to a fertile, prolific career, with dozens of albums and decades of performances.Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.Gilles Petard/RedfernsMr. Sanders played free jazz, jazz standards, upbeat Caribbean-tinged tunes and African- and Indian-rooted incantations such as “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” which opened his 1969 album, “Karma,” a pinnacle of devotional free jazz. He recorded widely as both a leader and a collaborator, working with Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Joey DeFrancesco and many others.Looking back on Mr. Sanders’s career in a 1978 review, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote, “His control of multiphonics on the tenor set standards that younger saxophonists are still trying to live up to, and his sound — huge, booming, but capable of great delicacy and restraint — was instantly recognizable.”Mr. Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020: “I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark, on Oct. 13, 1940. His mother was a cook in a school cafeteria; his father worked for the city. He first played music in church, starting on drums and moving on to clarinet and then saxophone. (Although tenor saxophone was his main instrument, he also performed and recorded frequently on soprano.) He played blues, jazz and R&B at clubs around Little Rock; during the era of segregation, he recalled in 2016, he sometimes had to perform behind a curtain.In 1959 he moved to Oakland, Calif., where he performed at local clubs. His fellow saxophonist John Handy suggested he move to New York City, where the free-jazz movement was taking shape, and in 1962, he did.At times in his early New York years he was homeless and lived by selling his blood. But he also found gigs in Greenwich Village, and he worked with some of the leading exponents of free jazz, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Sun Ra.It was Sun Ra who persuaded him to change his first name to Pharoah, and for a short time Mr. Sanders was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.Mr. Sanders made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” for ESP-Disk in 1964. John Coltrane invited him to sit in with his group, and in 1965 Mr. Sanders became a member, exploring elemental, tumultuous free jazz on seminal albums like “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Sanders went on to record with his widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, on albums including “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” both released in 1970.Mr. Sanders had already begun recording as a leader on the Impulse! label, which had also been Coltrane’s home. The titles of his albums — “Tauhid” in 1967, “Karma” in 1969 — made clear his interest in Islamic and Buddhist thought.His music was expansive and open-ended, concentrating on immersive group interaction rather than solos, and incorporating African percussion and flutes. In the liner notes to “Karma,” the poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka wrote, “Pharoah has become one long song.” The 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” moves between pastoral ease — with a rolling two-chord vamp and a reassuring message sung by Leon Thomas — and squalling, frenetic outbursts, but portions of it found FM radio airplay beyond jazz stations.During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Sanders’s music moved from album-length excursions like the kinetic 1971 “Black Unity” toward shorter compositions, reconnections with jazz standards and new renditions of Coltrane compositions. (He shared a Grammy Award for his work with the pianist McCoy Tyner on the 1987 album “Blues for Coltrane.”) His recordings grew less turbulent and more contemplative. On the 1977 album “Love Will Find a Way,” he tried pop-jazz and R&B, sharing ballads with the singer Phyllis Hyman. He returned to more mainstream jazz with his albums for Theresa Records in the 1980s.But his explorations were not over. In live performances, he might still bear down on one song for an entire set and make his instrument blare and cry out. During the 1990s and early 2000s he made albums with the innovative producer Bill Laswell. He reunited with the blistering electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock — who had been a Sanders sideman — on the 1991 album “Ask the Ages,” and he collaborated with the Moroccan Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania on “The Trance of Seven Colors” in 1994.Mr. Sanders at the 1996 North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands.Frans Schellekens/RedfernsInformation on Mr. Sanders’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sanders had difficult relationships with record labels, and he spent nearly two decades without recording as a leader. Yet he continued to perform, and his occasional recorded appearances — including his wraithlike presence on “Promises,” his 2021 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points — were widely applauded.Reviewing “Promises” for The Times, Giovanni Russonello noted that Mr. Sanders’s “glistening and peaceful sound” was “deployed mindfully throughout the album,” adding, “He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”Mr. Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-NyströmIn 2016 Mr. Sanders was named a Jazz Master, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States, by the National Endowment for the Arts.In a video made in recognition of his award, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington said, “It’s like taking fried chicken and gravy to space and having a picnic on the moon, listening to Pharoah.” The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin said, “It’s like he’s playing pure light at you. It’s way beyond the language. It’s way beyond the emotion.” More

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      Red Hot Chili Peppers Honor Eddie Van Halen, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Margo Price, Jamie xx, the Comet Is Coming 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.Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘Eddie’Red Hot Chili Peppers memorialize Eddie Van Halen and 1980s Los Angeles with what sounds like an old-fashioned, real-time studio jam in “Eddie.” Anthony Kiedis sings biographical snippets — “My brother’s a keeper/I married a TV wife” — while Flea’s bass and John Frusciante’s guitar chase each other all the way through the song, in an ever-changing counterpoint of hopping bass lines and teasing, wailing, shredding, overdriven guitar — the sound of a band in a room, still pushing one another. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘Muscle Memory’In “Muscle Memory,” Kelsea Ballerini orchestrates an instinctive reunion with an old flame — “my body won’t forget our history” — with classic tools: two chords, a backbeat, a lead guitar with wordless caresses. “How long will you be back in town?” she asks, concealing her eagerness. PARELESMargo Price, ‘Change of Heart’Margo Price reaches toward the 1960s and the confrontational side of psychedelia with “Change of Heart.” A wiry blues guitar riff and jabs of organ hint at the Doors as Price delivers a breaking-away song that toys with paradoxes: “You run from danger/straight into trouble,” she sings, adding, “Way down deep you’re as shallow as me.” Just to keep things off- balance, every now and then the band adds an extra beat, while a long, gradual fade-out suggests she’s still a little reluctant to move on. PARELESJamie xx, ‘Kill Dem’It’s now been seven long years since the D.J., producer, and longtime xx member Jamie xx released his beloved solo album “In Colour,” but this year he’s put out two rousing new singles: first the ecstatic “Let’s Do It Again” and now the elastic “Kill Dem.” Built around a sample of the dancehall great Cutty Ranks’ “Limb by Limb,” Jamie minces his source material into barely discernible syllables and launches it into hyperspace, leaving its component parts to ping off one another with a bouncy, exuberant energy. ZOLADZThe Comet Is Coming, ‘Pyramids’The British jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who lived in Barbados from ages 6 to 16, is at the core of multiple groups with different lineups. In the Comet Is Coming, he works with the synthesizer player Dan Leavers, or Danalogue, and the drummer Maxwell Hallett, a.k.a. Betamax, in a zone where electronic dance music and jazz collide. “Pyramids” is from the trio’s new album, “Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam”; the title of this track might allude to “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead, which shares some of the same ascending yet foreboding chords. Danalogue uses 1980s synthesizers for plump bass tones and upward swoops; Betamax mixes drums and drum machines, constantly accenting different offbeats. And with his meaty tone on tenor saxophone, Hutchings plays a jumpy, dissonant line that’s equally mocking and party-hearty, a bent Carnival shout. PARELESWitch, ‘Waile’In the 1970s, the Zambian rock band Witch — an acronym for We Intend to Cause Havoc — fused garage-rock, psychedelia and funk with African rhythms, spurring a movement called Zamrock. The wider world discovered them with the release of a 2011 collection, and surviving members of the band — the singer Emmanuel (Jagari) Chanda and the keyboardist Patrick Mwondela — returned to the studio in 2021 backed by international musicians, including the Dutch neo-psychedelic songwriter Jacco Gardner. “Waile,” written in 1978 but not previously recorded, addresses “sorrow and suffering” and the separation of a family. It moves through a percolating xylophone-and-guitar riff, blasts of fuzztone, some brisk African funk and, midway through, a slower lament carried by women’s voices before the beat picks up again and hard-nosed guitar riffs push ahead — undaunted. PARELESFlo, ‘Not My Job’On “Not My Job,” the British girl group Flo update the glittering sound of Y2K pop-R&B with a little modern-day therapy-speak: “It’s not my job to make you feel comfortable,” the trio asserts on the chorus. “If you ain’t being vulnerable, that says it all.” The blingy sheen, skittering beat and synthesized strings all conjure an aesthetic you may have not even realized you were nostalgic for — it’s giving “Case of the X”; it’s giving “The Writing’s on the Wall” — albeit enlivened with a fresh, contemporary twist. ZOLADZLil Nas X, ‘Star Walkin’If Lil Nas X continues to play jester, expertly, on social media — this week, he posted impishly hilarious videos of himself sending pizzas to protesters outside of one of his concerts, and of his newly minted wax figure FaceTiming his confused friends — his new single “Star Walkin’” suggests that he is still interested in using his music as an outlet for feelings that complicate that persona, like anxiety, light melancholy and self-doubt. “They said I wouldn’t make it out alive,” he sings defiantly on this gleaming, synth-driven track, which serves as the theme song for this year’s League of Legends World Championship. The one-off certainly doesn’t rank among his most memorable singles, but it’s further proof that he’s figured out a reliable sonic formula to turn personal apprehension into steely braggadocio; by the end of the song, he asks, “Why worship legends when you know that you can join them?” ZOLADZEmiliana Torrini & the Colorist Orchestra, ‘Right Here’Emiliana Torrini attests to the reassurance of a lasting relationship in “Right Here”: “Here’s to all the roads that we’ve been down,” she sings with a smile. “I’m right here by your side.” She’s backed by the Colorist Orchestra, a happily quirky Belgian chamber-pop ensemble that mixes standard instruments with homemade ones — including, for this song, the sound of stone scraping stone. Torrini and the Colorist Orchestra rearranged some of her older songs on an album they shared in 2018, while “Right Here” previews an LP of new collaborations due early next year. There’s pointillistic syncopation from marimba, glockenspiel and pizzicato strings, with a backdrop of sustained chords: the ticktock of everyday minutiae held together by the promise of constancy. PARELESShannen Moser, ‘Oh My God’Shannen Moser recreates a community sing and a hometown band concert in “Oh My God,” from an album arriving next week. In “The Sun Still Seems to Move,” Moser offers theological and existential musings — “I know that life’s not one linear seamless destination” — over fingerpicking and woodwinds, muscles and hands and breath. The music is thoughtful but determinedly physical. PARELESAnna B Savage, ‘The Ghost’The London-based artist Anna B Savage’s devastating new single, “The Ghost,” derives its power from a gradual accumulation of small, intimate details. “We used to notice the same things: His toenails, that little bug,” she sings to an old flame in a trembling low register. “But that changed, you couldn’t see the grave we dug.” Long after the breakup, though, the memory of her ex still lingers. “Stop haunting me, please,” she begs on the chorus, as the austere, piano-driven arrangement suddenly fills up with an eerie atmosphere. It sounds like an exorcism — or at least a yearning, last-ditch attempt at one, in desperate hope that it works. ZOLADZ More

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      Abel Selaocoe Finds a Home in Improvisation

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      The classically trained South African cellist draws on musical traditions from across the globe for his debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae).”MANCHESTER, England — On a recent evening at the Bridgewater Hall here, Abel Selaocoe surveyed the audience from his cello podium. Holding his bow aloft like a staff, the musician asked attendees to add their voices to the strutting groove sweeping the auditorium.This was The Oracle, a touring program built around Selaocoe’s multiplicity: During the concert, the South African artist, 30, best known for his work on the cello, moved swiftly between roles as a singer, improviser, section player and master of ceremonies. During the evening, Selaocoe performed with the chamber group Manchester Collective, covering Stravinsky, Vivaldi and Mica Levi, and with his trio, Chesaba, adding influences from groove-centered improvisation and sounds from across the African continent. In a classical music industry that encourages performers to be either/or, Selaocoe has chosen both — and more.Themes of belonging, journey and history punctuate Selaocoe’s debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae),” which arrives Friday on Warner Classics. The genre-blending album harnesses an intimate emotional energy that is disrupted by regular fiery outbursts, as on the hymn-like “Ibuyile I’Africa / Africa is Back” and the spiky “Ka Bohaleng / On the Sharp Side.” (The album’s name and many of the track titles include translations in African languages, including Sotho and Zulu.)In recent years, Selaocoe’s ability to float above rigid genre categories has resulted in a growing influence among a classical music community increasingly conscious of its deference to longstanding traditions. In 2021, he curated a concert at the BBC Proms, one of the world’s largest classical music festivals, and he is an artist in residence at London’s Southbank Center for its upcoming season. Even as he is embraced by these British institutional spaces, his additive approach is deeply rooted in his homeland’s rich musical traditions.“South African tradition doesn’t draw these hard lines between performance music, participative music, music for daily activities,” Gwen Ansell, the author of “Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa,” said in a recent video interview. Instead, music is “just part of what happens,” she added.Born in 1992 in Sebokeng, a township south of Johannesburg, Selaocoe’s journey with the cello began when he followed his older brother, Sammy, to Saturday school at the African Cultural Organization of South Africa in Soweto, another township around 30 miles away.Traveling to class on a packed train, on which passengers resorted to standing in the spaces between carriages, Selaocoe would remove the bridge of his cello, take off the endpin and put both parts in his pocket, standing with the instrument flat against his chest to take up as little space as possible. He began playing on a shared instrument, before teachers spotted his potential and gifted him his own.In a classical music industry that encourages artists to be either/or, Selaocoe has chosen both, drawing on his homeland’s rich musical traditions even as he is embraced by institutional spaces.Leon BarkerGrowing up, his brother, who also works as a musician, “had a philosophy that, if you’re living in a township, in a place that doesn’t have a lot of sustenance, and employment, you have to start looking really early,” Selaocoe said. Selaocoe listened — though he would later come to realize the townships’ own unique artistry — and at 13 won a scholarship to St John’s College, a prestigious boarding school in Johannesburg.At St John’s, Selaocoe dreamed of a move to Europe, and his classmates romanticized the continent as “the mecca of classical music, of musical expression,” he said. After studying with the teacher Michael Masote, who was one of the most influential voices in South African classical music, Selaocoe eventually took the leap in 2010, when he enrolled at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester at 18.Despite his classical training in the cello, everything stems from singing for Selaocoe. “The voice does things my body cannot imagine, but my musicality can,” he said over lunch near his home in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a suburb south of Manchester.Selaocoe learned to sing the same way one might pick up a language in childhood: “by seeing adults do it and copying them.” Growing up, his parents, a domestic worker and a mechanic, taught him cultural ceremonies and church. About six years ago, a friend gave Selaocoe a grounding in umngqokolo, a form of South African overtone singing, he said, which added a new dimension to the musician’s already charismatic performances.His onstage request at Bridgewater Hall for the audience to join in the performance is typical of Selaocoe’s belief in the connective power of the voice. In rehearsals for a 2018 Manchester Collective show, “Sirocco,” Selaocoe “would sing things to demonstrate to other ensemble members,” Adam Szabo, the chief executive of the group, said in a recent phone interview. “We pushed him to do it in the show, something he hadn’t done much before at all.” Now, Szabo said, he’s refined that singing in his practice, “which is this amazing melting pot of different influences.”Over lunch, Selaocoe returned frequently to idea that “singing is so universal.” But that universality has its limits. For the music journalist and author Ansell, “the song is universal, the fact that people sing is universal, but in fact the language, the meaning, the discourse of that song, isn’t.”Selaocoe said he wanted his work to offer routes to universally felt experiences. “There are things that go beyond language, the things that are just part of the human instinct,” he said. “The first one is movement — the idea of expressing with your body. Then we go even deeper into things like faith.”Selaocoe’s relationship to faith is multifaceted: In addition to attending Methodist and Apostolic churches, he was brought up around traditional medicinal, healing and spiritual practices. “My heart has always stayed with appeasing my ancestors — seeing if I can get in touch with them, to ask for advice,” he said.Themes of belonging, journey and history punctuate Selaocoe’s debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae),” which was released Sept. 23. Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesAt Bridgewater Hall, Selaocoe channeled this history through aphoristic pronouncements, telling the audience: “The future is in the past.” Connecting with the past — in and out of his music — is one way Selaocoe has explored the question posed by his album’s title.“‘Where is home?’ is no longer [just] a question of the geographical space,” he said. “It can be an ideology, within artistic practice, or the people I surround myself with.”Artistically, Selaocoe’s current home is in improvisation, a shift confirmed when he was invited to perform with the renowned Art Ensemble of Chicago at the 2019 London Jazz Festival. That concert was a key moment “in understanding that my expression doesn’t always have to be prepared‌,” he said. “Coming from a classical music background, preparation is almost everything.” But with an improvised performance, he added, “I leave the moment on‌ ‌stage and be like, ‘I can never recreate what we did.’”Still, Selaocoe spends a lot of time with classical ensembles, introducing fresh approaches to groove, including techniques informed by Africa’s wealth of stringed instruments. Does he meet resistance to his ideas? “Yes,” he said, “but I think it’s important that you choose your collaborators well. As soon as you have curiosity in the room, that’s 70 percent of the job done.”Selaocoe has also paid attention to how his performances are marketed. “If I’m coming to play a sonata, they’ll call me a classical cellist,” he said. “But if I play something else, I’m no longer that — I’m just, like, an African musician.”His dream, he said, is for his mixed-genre, groove-orientated approach to become intuitive. To be able “to walk into a room, set a groove and people understand what to do with their bows, rather than be told,” he said.“When you put it on a piece of paper, it looks dead simple,” he added. “And it really isn’t.” More

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      Ramsey Lewis, Jazz Pianist Who Became a Pop Star, Dies at 87

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      His 1965 recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” brought him to a place few jazz musicians reached in that era: the Top 10.Ramsey Lewis, a jazz pianist who unexpectedly became a pop star when his recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” reached the Top 10 in 1965 — and who remained musically active for more than a half century after that — died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 87.His death was announced on his website. No cause was given.Mr. Lewis, who had been leading his own group since 1956, had recorded with the revered drummer Max Roach and was well known in jazz circles but little known elsewhere when he and his trio (Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums) recorded a live album at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington in May 1965. The album included a version of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which had been a hit for the R&B singer Dobie Gray just a few months earlier, and which was released as a single.Instrumental records were a rarity on the pop charts at the time, jazz records even more so. But its infectious groove, Mr. Lewis’s bluesy piano work and the ecstatic crowd reaction helped make the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s rendition of “The ‘In’ Crowd” a staple on radio stations and jukeboxes across the country. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — eight points higher than the Dobie Gray original had reached.Two more singles in a similar vein quickly followed: covers of “Hang On Sloopy,” which had been a No. 1 hit for the McCoys in 1965, and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” “The ‘In’ Crowd” won Mr. Lewis the first of his three Grammy Awards. (The others were for the 1966 album track “Hold It Right There” and a 1973 rerecording of “Hang On Sloopy.”)Mr. Young and Mr. Holt left in 1966 to form their own group and had hit singles of their own. Mr. Lewis carried on with Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White, later a founder of Earth, Wind & Fire, on drums. That trio had a Top 40 hit in 1966 with a version of the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”That record proved to be the end of Mr. Lewis’s career as a purveyor of Top 40 singles, but it was far from the end of his career as a jazz musician. Over the years he would record scores of albums, in contexts ranging from trios to orchestras to collaborations with his fellow pianist Billy Taylor and the singer Nancy Wilson, and he was a constant presence on the Billboard jazz chart.There was always more to Mr. Lewis than his soulful hits suggested; he was a virtuoso with a thorough grasp of the harmonic complexity of modern jazz and a smooth touch reminiscent of earlier jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. But his success on the pop and R&B charts — where he returned in 1974 with “Sun Goddess,” an album partly written and produced by Mr. White and featuring members of Earth, Wind & Fire, on which Mr. Lewis played electric keyboards — led some jazz purists to view him with skepticism.That skepticism was long gone by 2007, when the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor for a jazz musician.Mr. Lewis in an undated photo. He once said he had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.” Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesCommenting on the perceived conflict between “jazz as entertainment and jazz as art” in a 2007 interview with DownBeat magazine, Mr. Lewis noted, “Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians.” He himself, he said in another interview, had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.”In announcing his Jazz Master honor, the N.E.A. pointed to Mr. Lewis’s eclecticism, praising him for a style “that springs from his early gospel experience, his classical training and a deep love of jazz.” It also acknowledged him as “an ambassador for jazz,” citing his work both in academia (he had taught jazz studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago) and in the media: In the 1990s he began hosting a syndicated weekly radio program, “Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis,” and in 2006 he hosted a public television series of the same name, which featured live performances by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Tony Bennett and many others.At around this time he also began composing large-scale orchestral works. His “Proclamation of Hope,” written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, where he was artistic director of the jazz series, and performed there by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009.Mr. Lewis found the challenge of composing that work daunting, he told The Associated Press, until he “threw away the thought of Tchaikovsky and others and sat at the piano and started improvising.” As a result, he said, “I was able to compose from my spirit rather than from my intellect.”In 1995, Mr. Lewis formed Urban Knights, an all-star ensemble with an ever-changing lineup of musicians who, as he himself had long done, straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. The group, whose lineup at various times included the saxophonists Grover Washington Jr., Gerald Albright and Dave Koz, released seven albums, the most recent in 2019.Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Chicago, one of three children of Pauline and Ramsey Lewis. His father worked as a maintenance man.Ramsey began taking piano lessons when he was 4 — he recalled his teacher telling him, “Listen with your inner ear” and “Make the piano sing” — and was soon playing piano at the church where his father, who encouraged his interest in jazz, was choir director.He attended DePaul University in Chicago but did not graduate; his career as a professional musician had already begun before he enrolled. While still a student at Wells High School, he had joined a local seven-piece jazz band, the Clefs. When four members of the band were drafted, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young became the Ramsey Lewis Trio.The trio signed with Argo Records, a subsidiary of the Chicago-based blues label Chess, and released their first album, “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentle-Men of Swing,” in 1956. The trio became a fixture on the Chicago nightclub scene, and many other albums followed, as did engagements at Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York City and at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. But the group remained relatively unheralded beyond Chicago.That changed with “The ‘In’ Crowd.”Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Janet; his daughters, Denise Jeffries and Dawn Allain; his sons, Kendall, Frayne and Bobby Lewis; 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His sons Ramsey Lewis III and Kevyn Lewis died before him.During the pandemic, Mr. Lewis presented a monthly series of livestream performances. An album drawn from those performances, “The Beatles Songbook,” is slated for release in November.While in lockdown he also wrote a memoir, “Gentleman of Jazz,” in collaboration with Aaron Cohen. It is scheduled for publication next year. More