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      Louise Tobin, Jazz Vocalist Who Put Her Career on Hold, Dies at 104

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      She stopped performing to raise children, at the request of her first husband, the bandleader Harry James. After remarrying, she resumed singing decades later.With the big band era in full swing in 1939, Louise Tobin, a jazz vocalist with Benny Goodman’s orchestra, was on the cusp of nationwide fame. But she soon put her career on hold at the request of her husband, the trumpeter and bandleader Harry James.Mr. James had begun touring with his own band, leaving Ms. Tobin to care for their two sons, Harry Jr. and Tim. And after the couple divorced in 1943, Ms. Tobin devoted herself to raising them for the next 20 years or so.Over time her melodic voice was largely forgotten — until she was invited onstage for an impromptu performance at a New Orleans nightclub in the late 1950s.A recording of that appearance helped jump-start her career, and she soon joined the band of Michael (Peanuts) Hucko, a clarinetist and bandleader. The two became an item, and married in 1967.Ms. Tobin, who spent the next decades traveling the world and making music with Mr. Hucko, died on Saturday at the home of a granddaughter in Carrollton, Texas, her son Harry said. She was 104.The newspapers of her day often compared Ms. Tobin’s warm voice to that of a young Ella Fitzgerald. She became a professional singer as a teenager, after winning a radio talent contest in Dallas in 1932. She was the fourth youngest of 11 siblings, and she eagerly left behind household chores to tour the state with different jazz ensembles.“I was thrilled,” she told The Dallas Morning News in 2010. “My fulfillment was not to have to wash dishes.”In 1934, she joined a local big band, where she met Mr. James, who played first trumpet. They eloped in 1935, shortly after the orchestra split up, and traveled around the country looking for work.By 1937, Mr. James had joined Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, and in 1939 he left to start his own band, which endured for four decades and was the first orchestra to employ Frank Sinatra.By Ms. Tobin’s account, she heard the young Sinatra sing on a local radio show and suggested that Mr. James visit him at the New Jersey restaurant where Sinatra worked as a singing waiter.Ms. Tobin was performing in New York at the time, and she joined Mr. Goodman’s band after a talent scout saw her perform in a Greenwich Village nightclub.She released hit records with Mr. Goodman’s orchestra, like a rendition of “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” which became one of the most popular songs in the country. But as her career gained momentum, so did that of Mr. James, who became one of the most popular bandleaders of the swing era: In 1942, Columbia Records attributed a shortage of shellac to demand for his records.“We were more trying to establish Harry than we were trying to establish me,” Ms. Tobin said in 2010. “I didn’t juggle it very well.”Mr. James’s success kept him on the road, where he was surrounded by temptation. Shortly after he and Ms. Tobin divorced in 1943, he married the actress Betty Grable.Ms. Tobin was still popular when she quit Mr. Goodman’s band in the early 1940s and returned to Texas with her sons, but music became an afterthought as she raised them. She stayed out of the spotlight until after they had graduated from high school, when she went to see the Dixieland trumpeter Al Hirt play in New Orleans.Mr. Hirt recognized Ms. Tobin and asked her to sing with the band. A recording of the show made its way to the jazz critic and producer George Simon, who asked her to record more songs and sing at jazz festivals.Ms. Tobin was reluctant, but Mr. Simon persuaded her to sing at smaller venues in New York until she felt up to performing before a large audience. In time her confidence returned, and she gave a stirring performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1962.The jazz clarinetist Peanuts Hucko and Ms. Tobin at their wedding in 1967 in Littleton, Colo. He became her most enduring collaborator.Steve Larson/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesWhile she rebuilt her career, Ms. Tobin began singing with Mr. Hucko’s ensemble. Mr. Hucko, who was best known for his stints alongside Louis Armstrong and Glenn Miller and his appearances on Lawrence Welk’s television show, became her most enduring collaborator.After their marriage, they owned and ran a jazz club in Colorado, recorded tribute albums to Mr. Goodman and Mr. Armstrong and toured in Europe, Japan and Australia, where they performed for Prince Charles and Princess Diana. They often sang duets onstage, including a version of “When You’re Smiling,” which was on the 1992 album “Swing That Music,” their final studio recording together.Mr. Hucko died in 2003, after which Ms. Tobin retired.Mary Louise Tobin was born on Nov. 11, 1918, in Aubrey, Texas, north of Dallas, and grew up nearby in Denton. Her father, Hugh, died in a fuel truck crash when she was young, and her oldest brother, Ray, opened a drugstore to help support the family. The children often sang together, but Ms. Tobin was the only one who became a professional singer.She went on the road before completing high school, first traveling with an older sister as a chaperone. Her family was initially shocked by her marriage to Mr. James, but in time they accepted him.After their divorce, Ms. Tobin lived on alimony and what she earned from the occasional show or recording. But she spent most of her time caring for her two sons, including during a worrisome time. Mr. James had received threats that his children could be kidnapped, prompting Ms. Tobin to stay on the move. She lived with her boys in California for a time and enrolled them in military school. She spent two years traveling with them to places like Hawaii, India and Egypt.In addition to her sons she is survived by many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.In interviews, Ms. Tobin expressed little regret about her interrupted career and often said that she felt grateful that she had a part in big band jazz at the height of its popularity.“I feel like that was a real era of contribution to the culture of the world,” she said.Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      A Posthumous Solo Album Reveals a Jazz Star’s Melancholy

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      Esbjörn Svensson found fame in Europe with his group E.S.T. But a newly released solo album, discovered by his wife, unveils more intimate piano work.Following the death of Esbjörn Svensson, a pianist and one of Europe’s most influential jazz musicians, in a scuba diving accident in 2008, his wife, Eva, spent some time in the family basement, backing up all of his tapes. Among them, she and the sound engineer Åke Linton found a corrupted Logic file and a scratched CD, both named “Solo.”Svensson recorded 11 studio albums with his trio E.S.T. over a 15-year recording period, but never solo work. It’s a different experience to hear her husband’s music outside of the trio, Eva said in a recent video interview.“It’s a new landscape to explore. And of course, a new landscape inside too,” she said, pointing to her heart.Both the intriguingly named CD and file were initially unusable, but in 2017, following Eva’s decision to revisit the tapes, Linton rescued the audio files, revealing nine near-pristine solo piano tracks, recorded a few weeks before Svensson’s death. The record, “Home.s.,” was released Nov. 18, and is just one of a recent series of projects exploring Svensson’s legacy as a genre-bridging artist.In 1993, Svensson and his childhood friend Magnus Öström, a drummer, met the bassist Dan Berglund, and formed the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. The group added the initials E.S.T. on its early albums, to shift the focus from Svensson and project a sense of equality among the three players.“It became a cooperative,” said the jazz journalist and author Stuart Nicholson in a telephone interview, adding “that is partly how the sound of the trio developed in such a distinctive manner.”From left, Magnus Öström, Esbjörn Svensson and Dan Berglund, of E.S.T.Tobias RegellThe trio was best known for its international breakthrough albums “From Gagarin’s Point of View” and “Good Morning Susie Soho,” which synthesized pop, rock and Nordic folk influences, and approached that blend “in the spirit of jazz” (the motto adopted by their label, ACT). Svensson may have wanted to share the spotlight, but E.S.T. gigs were high-production performances, combining tasteful light displays and smoke machines with accessible melodies to create an atmosphere closer to a rock gig.“You didn’t need to be a jazz lover to like their tunes,” said Linton, who was E.S.T.’s longtime sound engineer, in a recent video interview. The instrumental trio’s success meant jazz-based music became popular in the European mainstream. The 2005 record “Viaticum” charted on the German and French pop charts, and went platinum in Sweden, where it debuted at No. 5, just above U2 and John Legend.In 2006, the group’s first DownBeat Magazine cover bore the headline “Europe Invades!”, evidence of the slightly frosty reception the trio received from the jazz establishment in America, where it never had a high profile.No one around Svensson knew he was working on “Home.s.,” which was named by Eva. It was clear that tracks weren’t simply ideas destined for later exploration with the trio because of the files’ labeling, and the precise compositional structures. “He was a private person,” Linton said, adding that he “didn’t talk to anyone about it, not even his wife.”The album — which offers a handful of reference points from classical music and Nordic jazz, including Chopin and Shostakovich, as well as Jan Johansson’s popular 1963 album “Jazz På Svenska”— finds Svensson alone, in a melancholic musical space and has the distinct feeling of an artist delving into his private, interior language. “We’re almost privy to his innermost musical thoughts,” Nicholson said.But the sound of “Home.s.” was still familiar to those close to Svensson. Eva described the album’s music as “kind of the soundtrack to our daily lives.” After E.S.T. was done with a soundcheck, Svensson “would always stay playing stuff in the hall,” Linton said. “And now when I think of it, probably what was going on is that he was practicing this stuff without knowing it, but he would never talk about it.”Nicholson remembered spending time at an E.S.T. recording session in Stockholm, when Svensson warmed up with music by Shostakovich that demonstrated the full extent of his classical education, in a way he didn’t show with E.S.T. “When we met, I said, ‘How come you don’t reveal that part of you?’” Nicholson said. “He said, ‘That’s not me. I can do it, but that’s not how I feel things, and how I understand music.’”Despite the intimate feel of Svensson’s solo work, “when I found the album, I had this strong feeling that I wanted to share it,” Eva said.Esbjörn Svensson performing at a Spanish jazz festival in 2003. His trio E.S.T.’s popularity brought jazz-based music into the European mainstream.Rafa Rivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo premiere “Home.s.,” she wanted to create a shared experience, like an album listening party. It was first played in September at Stockholm’s Sven-Harry’s Museum, in surround-sound and accompanied by a new hanging sculpture by Jennie Stolpe, and later paired with visuals conceived by David Tarrodi (the director of the 2016 documentary, “A Portrait of Esbjörn Svensson”) and Anders Amrén (E.S.T.’s regular lighting designer) as part of an online event.The visuals arranged by Tarrodi and Amrén pick up on the melancholic tone of Svensson’s solo album. The pair’s 36-minute video piece began with small piles of sand, contorted kaleidoscopically through different lenses; then, sun-bleached footage of a family emerged; next, grainy footage of America, all soundtracked by the album. The sound was melancholic, the visuals muted, but the combination never descriptive or poetic.Andrew Mellor, the author of “The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture,” described melancholy in the region “as a discipline. It’s also a kind of pastime in Scandinavia.”One way to survive the “brutal” winter is through art, he added: “There’s literature from Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, films by Lars von Trier, and there’s music by Bent Sørensen.”On “Home.s.,” the melancholy twists inward. “It says ‘this is about me looking into myself, more than it is about me telling you a story,’” Mellor said.When Eva first heard the album, she thought “‘wow, this is his voice,’” she said. “It couldn’t be anybody else’s.” More

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      Jovan Adepo and Thundercat on Jazz, Superheroes and Ego Death

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      Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the “Watchmen” actor and the musician.The anime-loving singer and jazz-trained bassist known as Thundercat occupies such a specific place in popular music, it’s easy to forget how ubiquitous he is: Apart from his own funk- and jazz-inflected R&B releases, the 38-year-old artist (born Stephen Bruner in Los Angeles) has collaborated over the years with everyone from Erykah Badu to Kendrick Lamar to the California crossover thrash band Suicidal Tendencies.The 34-year-old actor Jovan Adepo, born in England but raised mostly in Maryland, is also approaching his own left-of-mainstream breakout: He first gained notice in the 2016 film version of August Wilson’s “Fences” (1986), acting opposite Viola Davis and Denzel Washington, the latter of whom directed the movie and became something of a mentor. After appearing in HBO’s “Watchmen” in 2019 as the masked vigilante Hooded Justice, Adepo will next be seen in the director Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” (out Christmas Day), in which he plays the fictional jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer in a historical epic set in 1920s Hollywood, as it transitioned from silent films to talkies.Having just played a trumpeter — he first tried his hand at the instrument in middle school — Adepo’s been thinking a lot about musicians he admires, and Thundercat topped the list: Both have tattoos honoring the goofy 1980s cartoon that inspired the latter’s mononym, and they also have overlapping interests in jazz, superheroes and the power of faith in making art, all of which informed a conversation in October at a studio in Los Angeles, in the middle of the city they also share.Jovan Adepo: Thundercat, we’ve actually met before — we have a mutual friend, and you were playing in England and I came to see you, but we missed the set because my friend and I stopped for food.Thundercat: You can’t ever let him live that down.J.A.: We stayed and watched the rest of the show: The Red Hot Chili Peppers were performing, and then I had a couple of drinks and was like, “I may never meet this dude, so I’m going to say what’s up.” My dad told me, “Be cool about it. You’re a grown man. Shake his hand.” That’s exactly what I hope I did, but I was mad awkward.T.: I remember it, it’s cool. You should always say something, always give the person their flowers while they’re alive. But I’ve definitely been cussed out a couple of times for trying to say hi: once with Drake’s security team — nobody has put hands on me like that other than my dad.T Magazine: Does being in the business and knowing how it works make it harder to form close relationships with other artists?T.: You attract what you are, but Los Angeles is the epitome of turned-on-its-head: Whatever you thought, it can change at the drop of a hat. You can go from being poor to the richest man in the world. Your life can end within five minutes of you touching a substance. You meet a lot of fake people — a lot of people who can’t wait to project and let you know who they think they are. But when the real ones come around, it’s timeless.Adepo as Sidney Palmer in “Babylon” (2022), directed by Damien Chazelle.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesT Magazine: Jovan, when did you start following Thundercat’s work?J.A.: I first got introduced to his music in college — I was obsessed. And then I got this tattoo [inspired by the 1985-89 “ThunderCats” cartoon] in 2020. Mine was a gift from a tattoo artist in Los Angeles after my Emmy nomination [for “Watchmen”].I grew up with music: My dad was big on jazz, and that’s partly why I wanted this part in “Babylon.” One of my favorite songs is John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’s “Lush Life” (1963). It’s incredibly depressing, but a beautiful song. I have it on vinyl, and that’s played in my house all the time.T Magazine: Thundercat, you were in a jazz band in high school. What’s your relationship to the genre now?T.: For me, it’s about composing and writing. The act of improvisation, it’s built into my DNA. That’s the only way I can describe it. Jazz can be a shade or hue of something — and it’s important to always express the jazz in the music, because that’s not only our history [as Black people and Americans] but it also represents the want for something different, the stab in different directions.But it’s always in relation to what’s going on in pop culture at the time. Everyone loves what Kendrick did [with 2015’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” to which Thundercat contributed]. That’s one of the highest points of jazz music, but it always takes something new to remind people what jazz is.T Magazine: It goes back to the fundamentals. Jovan, how did you develop yours with acting?J.A.: I was playing football in college, but I was trash. If you ever have a dream of going pro, you’re sometimes the last to realize if that’s not an attainable goal. I was also doing church plays, and there was a lady who came up to me and said, “You’re so good. You should get into acting. I have a sister in Los Angeles who’s doing her thing.” Fast-forward, I decide I want to come out to L.A. just to write screenplays, and her sister was Viola Davis. That’s how I met her, in 2013, and she told me, “You need to study everything. You didn’t go to Juilliard. So you need to go to every acting class. And if there’s anything that you can do better, make a living doing that.”My first job was “The Leftovers” [from 2015-17]. That was with no résumé, but the creator of the show, Damon Lindelof, saw my audition and was like, “That guy.” He took me out of Inglewood, working at Sunglass Hut.T.: Being a musician is also its own terror — there was never a point in my life where I wasn’t one, but there were a couple of summers that I worked at the comic store.J.A.: Being discovered doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a collection of small happenings. When I met with Viola and her husband [Julius Tennon], it wasn’t like, “We’re gonna put you in our next gig.” It was like, Get to work. And maybe we’ll run into each other in line.T.: In the great words of Floyd Mayweather: “Hard work.”J.A.: Heart first.T.: For me, I look at my albums more like snapshots or photos of where I am. I don’t like talking about this, but I spent many years as an alcoholic. There were different degrees, but it was very cloudy for me for a long time. Even with the album “Drunk” (2017), there came a moment where I had to be honest with myself about what that was. It served a purpose. If I was still dealing with those things, I would probably be dead.T Magazine: How do you get around your ego when first collaborating with folks like Washington and Lamar, and still make great art?J.A.: My ego was nonexistent.T.: Ego death is a real thing.J.A.: It behooves you to come in with your palms open and be able to learn. And that’s served me well. I’ve always been good at confiding in older actors, and I just like hanging around older people better. They make fun of you: Denzel called me “peanut head.”T.: I toured with Erykah Badu for many years, recording on the [2000s “New Amerykah”] albums. Once, we were in prayer before going onstage. And she had this moment where she was like [to the rest of the band], “I don’t know if any of y’all knew, Thundercat is an artist. I just want you to understand he’s different.” She used to put me right up front with her and we would dance. That woman changed my life. She showed me what it means to be an artist.T Magazine: You both have a deep fondness for comics. There’s an argument that, in a more secular world, superheroes act as our gods. Do you think of them like that?J.A.: That’s a hard question to answer —T.: Superheroes have attributes that are otherworldly for sure. Art is meant to inspire, and you’ve got different generations when it comes to comics: “Superman” was [originally] important [in the 1930s] because it made kids’ minds wander. A lot of times — even when you read things like the Bible — you hear these stories, but you’re wanting to touch and feel them. Comics create a tangibility.This is not me saying God is or isn’t real. I grew up Christian. You get different versions and different iterations, but those connections create respect at a young age. It stays with you.J.A.: That’s also my upbringing. My mom was a missionary in our church, and my dad is a deacon. They would always call when I was going in for little roles and I’d say, “I don’t know why I’m an actor, I’m not that great,” to which they responded, “When was the last time you prayed?” That question makes you feel awkward, like, you know you’re gonna lie. But then they’re always like, “I’m praying for you, a lot of hands are praying for you.” You gotta have something like that to keep you centered.T.: Oh, yeah. This world will kill you.T Magazine: How do you define success?J.A.: It’s funny because I feel like a lot of actors, when they get questions like that, say that they do this solely for the art. But if that were the consensus for all actors, we could just do monologues in our basement, you know? I want people to see me.T.: It’s multifaceted.J.A.: You want to be able to vibe with your music, but then you also want to be able to feed your family and see the fruits of your labor. But I think, for me, it just starts with wanting to be remembered.This interview has been edited and condensed.Grooming: Simone at Exclusive Artists Management. Photo assistant: Jerald Flowers More

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      Myra Melford Builds Anew With an All-Star, All-Woman Quintet

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      The pianist’s latest group fills its recent album “For the Love of Fire and Water” with idiosyncratic life.Draft up a list of today’s most inventive and respected players in the realm of what tends to be called improvised music (or creative music or free jazz) and you’ll inevitably name the players in the pianist Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet: the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, the guitarist Mary Halvorson, the cellist Tomeka Reid and the percussionist Lesley Mok.These are restless artists, mostly a generation or so younger than Melford, who have built a collaborative scene and individual legacies in the fertile cracks between improvisation and composition, between jazz and other musics, between the club and the academy — cracks that Melford has spent her 30-plus-year career widening.“It’s wonderful to play with them,” Melford, 65, said in late October in a video interview from her home in the Bay Area, where she is a professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices at the University of California, Berkeley. In conversation, she pairs thoughtfulness with a peppery exuberance, a mix that reflects her pianism. “Each is such an important individual voice, and I love to hear what discoveries they make.”Melford thinks of her composing as architectural, as structures to be explored, an approach that seems natural for a musician who grew up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Illinois, relishing its curious nooks and crannies. For the Fire and Water Quintet, which comes to Roulette in Brooklyn Monday night to celebrate the release of its album “For the Love of Fire and Water,” Melford provides the structure and the players, together, fill it with idiosyncratic life.Melford’s respect and admiration for her bandmates is mutual, of course. If it weren’t, crucial elements of improvised music — trust, deep listening, empathetic responsiveness — would prove impossible.“Myra is a great composer and conceptualist, and her piano playing is fearless and creative,” Laubrock said in an interview. Halvorson noted that she first became aware of Melford in college, and has admired her ever since: “The intensity, clarity and fearlessness of her improvising, plus her ability to integrate the melodic and rhythmic with the textural and experimental seamlessly, has always been an inspiration.”Mok added, “Working with Myra has given me a framework for how to think about composition, especially when writing for strong improvisers, and how to make simple choices that allow the music to shine.”Melford’s music draws on a host of influences and traditions, including her mentors Don Pullen and Henry Threadgill, and a variety of global musics: She studied harmonium in Calcutta, spent a year in an upstate ashram and has participated in a cultural exchange program with the Huichol people of Mexico. She celebrates what inspires her — her “Snowy Egret” quintet album from 2015 grew from her reading of Eduardo Galeano’s “Memory of Fire” trilogy — but the music stands alone. (Sadly, Melford confirms that with the death of the trumpeter Ron Miles in March, that band is done.)“I realized early on that I wanted to synthesize all the ideas or things that have had an impact on me and my life,” Melford said. “But I don’t want to be didactic. I like ambiguity. I want a world of possibilities suggested by the music.”From left: Melford, Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, Tomeka Reid and Lesley Mok. “Each is such an important individual voice, and I love to hear what discoveries they make,” Melford said of the quintet.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe release that perhaps best reveals the breadth of her interests and collaborations is “12 From 25,” an album from 2018 that collects performances from shows Melford played with a dozen different ensembles at the Stone during its 2015 celebration of her 25th year of making music. In recent years, trio projects like MZM (with Miya Masaoka and Zeena Parkins) and Tiger Trio (with Nicole Mitchell and Joëlle Léandre) and other collaborations have offered her an expansive palate, a mix of personalities and the chance to make big sounds.The Fire and Water Quintet is a touch more raw, its elbows sharper, suiting the strengths of the players. Its lineup exemplifies how much more open the jazz-adjacent music world is to women than when Melford first played duets with the flutist Marion Brandis in the mid-1980s.“I was so used to being the only woman in bands that at a certain point I sort of stopped noticing,” Halvorson said, referring to projects as late as the 2000s. “I do feel that, in this music community at least, there has been a gradual shift in momentum in that regard over the past 20-plus years.”Jazz critics have long used the term “encounter” to describe musicians playing together. Listen to “For the Love of Fire and Water” and you’ll hear something more like a hyper-creative play date. (On the album, Susie Ibarra plays drums.) Melford composed a suite for improvisers, inspired by a MoMA retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work — abstract art responding to abstract art. It opens with a solo statement, a tart greeting from Melford’s piano, rhythmic pulses and exploratory runs across the keyboard, until Reid’s cello joins in some two minutes later, answering Melford but also pushing someplace new.At intervals, the rest of the band follows, one at a time, pitching in with what the others are building. Eventually, like a destination appearing out of fog, a lopsided groove emerges: a composed passage the band toys with until suddenly lurching to a stop for more free play, pairing off in duets or trios. Once in a while, they ebb to near silence or boil over into collective noise.In her teaching at Berkeley, Melford introduces improvisation and complex music to students, telling them it’s OK not to like it, but asking that they at least truly listen. That’s also what she hopes for in an audience. “What’s being made by improvisers, what’s being said, depends as much upon the listener as the players,” she said.Asked to describe her ideal audience, she responded, “Someone with an open mind and an open heart, with curiosity and a willingness to drop the idea that they’re going to hear an ‘avant-garde’ musician.” (She prefers terms like “creative music,” feeling that “avant-garde” today too often refers to a “genre with expectations and rules rather than an ethos of exploration or surprise.”)However you might care to classify it, Melford’s music is welcoming, suffused with melody and feeling, rooted in both Monk and Bartok, open to plateaus of contemplative beauty, like the final movement of “For the Love of Fire and Water.” When it does boil over, it brings listeners with it. Or maybe “listeners” is the wrong word. Perhaps they’re explorers. More

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      Louis Armstrong’s Last Laugh

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      Private recordings, heard in the new documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” add a further dimension to the artist.The tapes are thrilling, revelatory, wrenching: the warm-gravel voice of Louis Armstrong, perhaps the most famous voice of the 20th century, speaking harsh truths about American racism, about the dehumanizing hatred he and millions of others endured in a world he still, to the end, insisted was wonderful. He tells the stories — of a fan declaring “I don’t like Negroes” to his face; of a gofer on a film set treating him with disrespect no white star would face — with fresh outrage and can-you-believe-this? weariness.He also tells them with his full humor and showmanship, his musicality clear in the rhythm of his swearing.The public can hear these stories, privately recorded by Armstrong as part of his own lifelong project of self-documentation, in the Sacha Jenkins documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” (streaming on Apple TV+). Often, Armstrong recalls getting the last laugh on those who disrespected him — he harangues that gofer, and the studio, too, telling both where to stick their movie.It’s no revelation that a Black man born less than 40 years after the abolition of slavery endured harrowing racism, or that stardom on par with Bing Crosby’s and Frank Sinatra’s offered him no exemption. Armstrong faced blowback in 1957 for speaking against discrimination, and donated to the Civil Rights movement. Usually, though, he avoided controversy.By the 1960s, Armstrong’s reticence — as well as that wide-grinning, eye-rolling performance style that echoes minstrelsy — inspired backlash, most painfully among younger jazz musicians who revered his recordings of the 1920s, the very headwaters of jazz.That backlash has been exhaustively hashed over ever since, with critics often dividing the Armstrong legacy in two. On the one hand: the young genius-artist-virtuoso, who perfected the arts of swing, scat singing, and improvisational solos, hitting trumpet notes so high they tickled God’s toes. On the other: the global entertainer with hits in six decades and a penchant for sentimental pop and discomfiting tunes like “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”Well into this millennium, defenses of Armstrong’s later years have been, well, defensive. But Jenkins’s film, following the lead of Ricky Riccardi’s 2012 biography “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years,” draws deeply on the Armstrong archives to make an assertive argument, often in Armstrong’s own words, that the man called Pops was deeply committed to the cause of racial justice.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” Jenkins said in a Zoom interview. “America’s going through something. In many ways, things haven’t changed, and in many ways things have gone backward.”Armstrong at home. Apple TV+At the same time of the film’s release, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, is preparing for its 20th anniversary and the opening this spring of its new Louis Armstrong Center. The museum’s executive director, Regina Bain, said that the center will exponentially increase the museum’s educational outreach, a core mission with roots in Armstrong’s own development — he was given his first formal musical training as an adolescent at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys in New Orleans. The center also will host concerts, exhibit the Armstrong archives and showcase its Armstrong Now program, which puts artists in dialogue with Armstrong’s legacy.Bain acknowledged that legacy’s complexity. “When you look at him,” she said by phone, “you should see what most people see: an icon and a musical genius with a gorgeous smile and an effusive personality full of joy. And you should also see the racial terror that he and the people around him went through, and affected his life and body, and that he was still able to move through.”“It’s extremely important to tell your story in a way that doesn’t have any tainting or tampering,” said Jeremy Pelt, one of today’s top trumpeters, composers and bandleaders, in a phone interview. He’s published two books of interviews with Black jazz musicians (“Griot” volumes 1 and 2) for just this reason. “To be able to expose yourself, and deal with what you’ve gone through — it’s essential and freeing, even in the last chorus of your life.”For 23 years, David Ostwald has led the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, playing weekly gigs at Birdland. Ostwald has long championed Armstrong as a pioneer of civil rights, making the case in a 1991 New York Times guest essay that Armstrong, as early as 1929, actually did address race in his music. His example: “Black & Blue,” the song on which Jenkins’s film title riffs. On it, Armstrong sings, “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case / ’cause I can’t hide what is in my face.”Asked how he feels to see that argument going mainstream, Ostwald released a whoop. “Finally,” he said.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” said the documentary’s director, Sacha Jenkins.Apple TV+Ostwald credited Wynton Marsalis with having made Armstrong “OK again” in the jazz world. In the film, Marsalis describes growing up hating “with an unbelievable passion” the “Uncle Tomming” that Armstrong has often been accused of. But listening closely to Armstrong’s trumpet jolted Marsalis, the future artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who has since championed Armstrong. In the documentary, he says that Armstrong “was trying to use his music to transform and reform and lead the country closer to his ideals.”Armstrong’s musical legacy has likewise been contested. His solos, especially from the 1920s, have long been celebrated — in one of Pelt’s “Griot” interviews, the saxophonist J.D. Allen says that for jazz players, “all roads lead back to Pops.” But Ostwald recalled being regarded as “weird” for playing traditional and old-time jazz in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. “People were saying the music’s going to die, but I always felt that Armstrong was too powerful a force to ever go away, even if some people did misunderstand him.”Today, young musicians feel increasingly free to find inspiration throughout Armstrong’s career. Like most Juilliard jazz graduates, the up-and-coming trombonist, composer and bandleader Kalia Vandever studied Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings of the 1920s. But she also prizes his 1950s duets with Ella Fitzgerald: “I love the way that he transitions from singing into playing,” she said. “It’s seamless and sounds like one voice.” Listen to Vandever’s playing on her “Regrowth” album, and you may feel the connection, though the music sounds nothing like “Heebie Jeebies.”With each fresh look at Armstrong’s life and influence, perhaps the old artist/entertainer distinction is fading. In a video introduction shown before the deeply moving tour at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Bain offers, with welcome precision, a third way to think about Armstrong: as “one of the founding figures of jazz and America’s first Black popular music icon.” The message: He’s both. And both matter. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ornette Coleman

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      We asked writers, critics and musicians including Kamasi Washington, Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings to tell us how they connect with Coleman’s fearless artistry.Over the past three months, The New York Times has asked musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with jazz — starting with Duke Ellington, then moving on to Alice Coltrane and bebop.This month, we focus on Ornette Coleman, the iconoclastic saxophonist and bandleader whose style prioritized atonal chords over traditional rhythm and harmony, which helped establish the subgenre of free jazz in the late 1950s. Though the rules of what jazz entailed would soften a decade later, as musicians like Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis began mixing the genre with elements of funk and rock, Coleman’s approach was controversial at first, leading to ridicule or even violence. Davis once said that Coleman was “all screwed up inside.” In 1959, the drummer Max Roach punched him in the mouth after hearing him play. “In New York, I’m telling you, guys literally would say, ‘I’m going to kill you. You can’t play that way,’” Coleman once said.Yet you don’t become legendary by doing the same old thing, and Coleman was confident and fearless in his artistry. Through albums like “Something Else!!!!,” “The Shape of Jazz to Come” and “Free Jazz,” Coleman stuck to his vision and earned respect in the long run. In 2007, his album “Sound Grammar” won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Coleman is now considered a pioneer in avant-garde jazz.Enjoy listening to excerpts from these tracks selected by a range of musicians, writers and critics. You can find a playlist with full-length songs at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own Coleman favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nubya Garcia, musicianI felt a true sense of freedom when I first listened to the album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” This was my first experience with free jazz; the tracks “Peace” and “Lonely Woman” truly resonated with me. The title of the album was also incredibly bold and decisive — this really pulled me in and I was pretty intrigued. I’d never heard anything like it before!What struck me on “Peace” was the clear, incredibly melodic theme. In each listen I kept hearing things I hadn’t before: the hookup between the horns and rhythm section, the intricacies throughout; the rhythmic motifs in Ornette’s solo; the bebop language; his instantly recognizable sound and tone, with melodic lines full of questions and answers. The driving groove and walking bass line keeps you locked in and wondering where it’s going to go. Both Coleman and Don Cherry just soar through the tune.I am so grateful to have seen Ornette play when I was very young, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. It’s pretty crazy to think I’ve been listening to this record on and off for almost 20 years!“Peace”Ornette Coleman (Rhino Atlantic)◆ ◆ ◆James Brandon Lewis, musicianThe first time I listened to Ornette Coleman as a young person I was like, what’s the problem? Like really, what’s the controversy? I honestly don’t get it. Of course this could have been my own nature relating to his vibe or my naïveté according to my own taught understanding concerning the way jazz is “supposed to be played,” but the way he played it sounded natural, organic and of the earth and womb.“Broken Shadows” is a composition of Coleman’s I often play in his memory and that of a fellow jazz great, the bassist Charlie Haden, his dear friend, collaborator and my teacher while I was a student at the California Institute of the Arts. Haden, upon showing us this tune, would describe meeting Ornette at his house and depicting a scene so vividly, saying music literally covered everything — the floors, the walls, the doors. As a young student this was inspiring. Like most Ornette Coleman tunes, “Broken Shadows” is lyrical, speech-like and hymn-like in nature, as well as melodically sophisticated. I would hear “Broken Shadows” not on the record with that name but on the album “The Complete Science Fiction Sessions,” which features a whole host of amazing musicians and another influence of mine, Dewey Redman.“Broken Shadows”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Piotr Orlov, writerOrnette Coleman’s influence over the American century is as much philosophic as it is musical — and on occasion his worldview was central to the fabric of a recording. The Double Quartet of “Free Jazz” was one occasion; and “Friends and Neighbors,” a distinctive recording in Ornette’s catalog, is another. It’s a mass singalong (there’s also an instrumental version) performed by a crowd gathered in the building he co-owned at 131 Prince Street in SoHo (soon to become known as Artist House, helping initiate Manhattan’s loft jazz era), accompanied by the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Ed Blackwell leading a funky swing, the tenor Dewey Redman’s sweet melody and Coleman on violin, thrashing about noisily. “Friends and neighbors/that’s where it’s at,” the choir intones, its living intentions represented by the ditty and its lo-fi recording — four minutes of almost punk simplicity. Recorded on Feb. 14, 1970, it was also synchronized with the universal aspirations of two other musical events taking place in Lower Manhattan that night: Six blocks away, at 647 Broadway, David Mancuso was hosting his own initial loft gathering, a dance party called Love Saves the Day, which went on to define the fellowship potential of D.J. culture. And the Grateful Dead, who adapted Ornette’s free jazz lessons for the psychedelic rock crowd, was at the Fillmore East, engaged in a historic New York City stand.“Friends and Neighbors” (Vocal Version)Ornette Coleman (Ace Records)◆ ◆ ◆Idris Ackamoor, musicianThe jazz outlaw dancing, weaving, bopping, singing with alto plastic full of human feeling, full breath-propelled runs: a serenade for “a very pretty girl.” The jazz outsider scorned by the insiders as he blows a change of the century in 4/4 time. When walls come tumbling down, earth-shattering notes explode and blast the unbelievers with his “outsider” gang. Cherry playing barrages of spit-induced embraces, sun-drenched round sounds from the depths of Haden’s repetitive pizzicato — dum did di dum da di dum di dum — announcing “Una Muy Bonita,” as Billy the Kid’s rat-ta-tat-ta drum rolls on the swinging saloon gate announce the change of the century north and south of the border, way down Mexicali way, escaping the jazz establishment — the jazz Ayatollahs who say “no dogs or cats or outlaw music allowed in this cantina.”“Una Muy Bonita”Ornette Coleman (Rhino Atlantic)◆ ◆ ◆Shannon J. Effinger, writer“Lonely Woman” was never one of my favorites among Ornette Coleman’s prolific output. Much to my chagrin, I didn’t give it a real chance. Back in college, I felt its title alone had trivialized and belittled one’s experience based on gender.Then one day, while at a cafe in the Village, I heard this incredible piece of music, brimming with fervor and tension. That moment made me a lifelong fan of the Modern Jazz Quartet and convinced me to give Coleman’s composition a good, honest listen. Having lived with this tune, and its many renditions, for some time now, I am finally beholden to its archetype. The impetus for “Lonely Woman” reportedly came from a portrait of a wealthy white woman. What struck Coleman most was how withdrawn she looked, despite her affluence.As the drummer Billy Higgins maintains a calm, steady ride pattern, Charlie Haden sets the mood with an elegiac bass line, denoting a harrowing turn. More than 60 years later, the lamenting cries of Coleman’s alto sax and Don Cherry’s pocket trumpet, in unison, are an allegory for the disillusionment we all feel.“Lonely Woman”Ornette Coleman (Rhino Atlantic)◆ ◆ ◆David Hajdu, writerYes, there is chaos in this world, and it’s hard to process, this song reminds us. But listen: There is also beauty, and the two things can coexist in exquisitely clashing equilibrium. A rare vocal composition with words and music by Ornette, “What Reason Could I Give” was the first track on “Science Fiction,” the 1972 album that marked its creator’s new phase as an unfettered musical-spiritual hybridist. A quartet of free-jazz virtuosos (Dewey Redman, Carmine Fornarotto, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell, along with Ornette) howls and squeals in deranged fury while Asha Puthli, an Indian vocalist making her jazz debut, sings a languid melody in ethereal tones. “What reason could I give to live,” she asks, answering, “Only that I love you.” And what explanation could Ornette offer for this music? Only that he loves it.“What Reason Could I Give”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Kamasi Washington, musicianThe way the super haunting strings bending their notes interact with Ornette Coleman’s tone on “Sadness” is so beautiful to me. Ornette always creates the most interesting and beautiful colors with his music, and this piece is such an amazing example of that. It feels really sad, but somehow also comforting, like the moment when you learn how to cope with a great loss. He is such a master at creating music that is able to express complex ideas and feelings with sound. It’s like the strings represent the pain that we all experience in life and his alto saxophone is the resilience of the human heart. Because some pains never go away, we just have to become strong enough to carry them.“Sadness”Ornette Coleman (ESP Disk)◆ ◆ ◆Mark Richardson, writerThe magic of Ornette Coleman’s music lies in his mix of the familiar and the strange. He was steeped in music history and his work was fundamentally grounded in blues, but Ornette often put himself in situations where he had to come up with new solutions to thorny problems. In almost all his music, there’s a feeling of risk: This could go wrong. On the title track from the 1966 LP “The Empty Foxhole,” he’s working with two potentially worrying limitations: One, he’s on trumpet, an instrument he’d only started studying in the past few years. And two, the other member of his trio, along with his frequent collaborator, the bassist Charlie Haden, is his 10-year-old son, Denardo. But everything comes together beautifully on this mournful cut, which is drenched in blues and oozes feeling. It’s brief, mysterious and deeply moving, and once again Ornette’s fearless desire to put himself in a tough spot led to brilliance.“The Empty Foxhole”Ornette Coleman (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Stephen Thomas Erlewine, writer“Faces and Places” can be seen as Ornette Coleman’s exploratory mid-1960s in microcosm. Opening the first volume of “At the ‘Golden Circle’ Stockholm,” a live set recorded in December 1965 with the bassist David Izenzon and the drummer Charles Moffett, the song opens tentatively yet hungrily: there’s a yearning growl in Coleman’s tone, a nervous edge that focuses attention. As “Faces and Places” stretches out over the course of 11 minutes, the trio goes further afield, with Coleman and Moffett growing increasingly manic, cramming in notes into a short bar and, in Ornette’s case, pushing his saxophone into amelodic refrains. The momentum of the performance is the key: It’s the sound of the band gaining confidence, simultaneously discovering their shared strengths. Other Ornette music may be further out, but listening to this trio in the process of ascension is exhilarating.“Faces and Places”Ornette Coleman Trio (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Shabaka Hutchings, musicianThe language we decide to use collectively in relation to art can shape how we listen, teach and see its relevance to our culture as a complete cosmological structure. What is “free” jazz? In Ornette Coleman I hear a musician who understands that the musical idea isn’t to be limited by the notion that a song’s structural integrity is sacrosanct; freedom not as a fixed conceptual space, but as a term denoting actions relative to a pre-existing system which is limiting in some capacity. “Compassion” is set upon a somewhat conventional set of chord changes, so we are able to clearly see Ornette’s poetic and harmonic logic guide his melodic intent as it would throughout his career.“Compassion”Ornette Coleman (Contemporary Records)◆ ◆ ◆Hank Shteamer, writerEven for the listener fully indoctrinated into the revolutionary sounds of the Ornette Coleman Quartet’s early work, the opening seconds of “Street Woman” — a standout of the 1971 studio sessions that reunited the saxophonist with the pocket-trumpeter Don Cherry, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Billy Higgins — still have the power to startle and delight: the supercharged, Spanish-sounding theme that keeps rising to new peaks of urgency; Higgins’ furiously locomotive ride-cymbal barrage; Haden’s huge, elemental bass throb. It’s hardly surprising that when Coleman launches into his solo, with an extended wail that trails off into a series of clipped phrases, it plays like an eruption of joyous laughter. Or that Haden and Cherry sound like they’re swept up in ecstatic trances during their respective features. There’s a high-wire exhilaration that this group achieved in 1959, braiding together virtuosity and utter fearlessness, that was fully intact 12 years later — and again in 1987 when these players reconvened for Coleman’s half-acoustic, half-electric “In All Languages.”“Street Woman”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Phil Freeman, writerThough it wasn’t released until 1982, “Of Human Feelings” was recorded live in the studio in April 1979, on a two-track Sony PCM-1600 with almost no production effects. Sharp-edged and thorny, it was the most clattering, urban-jungle-like album since Miles Davis’s “On the Corner.” The guitarists Charles Ellerbee and Bern Nix were panned hard to left and right, with Denardo Coleman and G. Calvin Weston’s drums rattling along in loose unison; Jamaaladeen Tacuma’s thick, sproingy bass filled up the middle, and Coleman’s alto sax keened the earwormish melodies, his trademark exuberance newly streetwise and deeply funky. “Jump Street” has an almost disco beat at times, and Ornette, Tacuma and the guitarists are on fire throughout.“Jump Street”Ornette Coleman (Island Records)◆ ◆ ◆Camae Ayewa, poet and musicianI cry writing this. Because I am so thankful for Ornette Coleman.Just last week I was championing his masterful work “Science Fiction,” released in 1972, a brilliant expansive experience. Inspiring me to claim intergalactic space within the avant-garde, his symmetrical arrow of time created the conditions for Irreversible Entanglements to continue in his sonic tradition with improv. The art of improvisation laid down the foundation for us to stretch and create our own temporal conditions. A true African futurist, not Hollywood’s futurism or Bank of America corporate futurism. This is a futurism of heart and mind. A futurism that doesn’t rely on sight but only on feeling and knowing. A Black quantum futurism can be shared with your neighbors and friends, and the only requirement is a heart and a brain, and the only question is tomorrow, the shape of jazz to come.“Science Fiction”Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆ More