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      Barbara Dane, Who Fought Injustice Through Song, Dies at 97

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      She was highly regarded as a folk, blues and jazz singer. She was also ardently left-wing and prioritized social change over commercial success.Barbara Dane, an acclaimed folk, jazz and blues singer whose communist leanings and fierce civil rights and antiwar activism earned her both critical plaudits and a thick Federal Bureau of Investigation file, died on Sunday at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.Her daughter, Nina Menendez, said that after suffering shortness of breath for several years because of heart failure, Ms. Dane chose to terminate her life under California’s End of Life Option Act.Over the course of her long career, Ms. Dane, with her rich, woody contralto, built a reputation in a variety of musical genres.She established her bona fides as a folky of the first order while still in her teens, performing with Pete Seeger. “I knew I was a singer for life,” she recalled in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, “but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then. I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Ms. Dane wore her convictions proudly, belting out worker anthems like “I Hate the Capitalist System” and “Solidarity Forever.” She performed at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan would often sit in with her when she was performing at Gerdes Folk City, the Greenwich Village club.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jack Jones, a Suave, Hit-Making and Enduring Crooner, Dies at 86

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      With his smooth voice, he drew crowds to cabarets and music halls for six decades. He also sang the themes for films and TV shows, including “The Love Boat.”Jack Jones, a crooner who beguiled concert fans and stage, screen and television audiences for decades with romantic ballads and gentle jazz tunes that even in large venues often achieved the intimacy of his celebrated nightclub performances, died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 86. His wife, Eleonora Jones, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was leukemia.While his popularity peaked in the 1960s, Mr. Jones found a new audience in later years singing the theme to the hit television show “The Love Boat.” But even then he seemed always to have stepped out of an earlier generation, one that dressed in tuxedos for the songs of Tin Pan Alley and reminded America of its love affairs with the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.He won two Grammy Awards and recorded numerous albums of American Songbook favorites that hit the upper reaches of Billboard’s charts on the strength of his smooth vocal interpretations. He performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the White House and the London Palladium, and for more than 60 years drew crowds to cabarets and nightclubs around the world.At the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, marking his 52nd year in show business, Mr. Jones opened and closed a two-hour retrospective of his songs with Paul Williams’s “That’s What Friends Are For.” He sang to a packed house of longtime fans:Friends are like warm clothesIn the night air.Best when they’re oldAnd we miss them the most when they’re gone.“Those lyrics evoked the vanishing breed of pop-jazz crooner, of which Mr. Jones and Tony Bennett remain the great survivors,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Jones, now 72, draws the same kind of well-dressed sophisticated audiences that used to attend the annual appearances at the defunct Michael’s Pub of his friend Mel Tormé, who died 11 years ago at 73.”Mr. Jones with his fellow vocalist Tony Bennett in 1972.Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A New Roy Hargrove LP Reminds Us What the Trumpeter Left Behind

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      “Grande-Terre,” recorded in Guadeloupe in 1997, shows off the high-wire, from-the-gut jazz Hargrove played most nights of his life.Unlike most “lost” posthumous jazz albums, “Grande-Terre,” a release from the trumpeter Roy Hargrove and his bebop-goes-Havana band Crisol that arrived on Friday, is no live recording, rehearsal tape or leftover session scraps best suited to die-hard fans. The LP, recorded in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 1998 as a sequel to “Habana” from the previous year, is an ambitious, studio-recorded, global jazz party, sun-kissed and island-hopping.The alto saxophonist Sherman Irby, currently in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, felt a relieved surprise when he recently heard the album for the first time, at a listening party hosted by Aida Brandes-Hargrove, Hargrove’s widow and the co-founder of Hargrove Legacy, LLC. “We were tighter than I thought we were!” he said with a laugh.On “Priorities,” Hargrove’s rousing playing shimmers atop mesmeric Caribbean grooves laid down by four percussionists and two pianists. The album’s ballads are as tender as lovers’ whispers, while sprees like “Afreaka,” a tune by Cedar Walton, swing with such abandon, it feels like the band might spin out of control. It never does, of course, but the very possibility is part of the exhilaration of the high-wire, from-the-gut jazz Hargrove played most nights of his life.Nobody at Verve Records or in Hargrove’s orbit can say precisely why “Grande-Terre” was shelved until Brandes-Hargrove contacted Verve about the sessions in mid-2022. The answer is probably a matter of abundance. “You can only release so many albums at a time,” Brandes-Hargrove said in an interview, and in the late 1990s Hargrove was restlessly productive, planning an album with strings (“Moment to Moment,” from 2000), getting his big band up and running, helping found the nonprofit performance venue the Jazz Gallery, being a father. The “Grande-Terre” blissout “Kamala’s Dance” is named for his daughter, born in 1997.Brandes-Hargrove has overseen two other posthumous Hargrove releases: “In Harmony,” collecting 2016 and 2017 duo performances with the pianist Mulgrew Miller, and “The Love Suite: Mahogany,” Hargrove’s first piece written for a large ensemble. Hargrove was only 23 when he premiered “The Love Suite” at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1993, less than seven years after Wynton Marsalis heard him play as a student at Dallas’s Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and invited him to sit in at a gig that weekend.Hargrove performing with his big band at the Jazz Gallery, the nonprofit venue he helped found in 1995.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A New Venue Celebrates the Sound of the Bronx

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      The Bronx Music Hall is the first new independent music venue in the borough in more than 50 years.Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll get a look at the Bronx Music Hall, the first brand-new music performance space to open in that borough in more than 50 years.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesThe 250-seat music performance space that is opening tonight in the Melrose section of the Bronx began with a cassette recording that was played at a staff meeting of a nonprofit organization. This was in the early 2000s, when cassette tapes were still a thing.The tape was a sampling of the musical legacy of the Bronx — music that had been written or performed there.“Everyone’s eyes lit up,” recalled Nancy Biberman, who at the time was the president of the nonprofit, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation.She remembers telling herself after the meeting that “maybe we are thinking too narrowly about what community development could mean — it’s not just bricks and mortar.” That realization morphed into thinking about what tenants would want besides basic needs like food, health care and education. What would make them happy?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tim Berne, a D.I.Y. Jazz Institution

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      The saxophonist and composer has spent 50 years in the New York scene. As he turns 70, he’s commanding gigs at a Brooklyn bar and continuing to inspire.For the saxophonist and composer Tim Berne, the Brooklyn bar Lowlands is a favorite neighborhood hangout. Lately, it has also become his musical laboratory.During the past two years, Berne has regularly walked the block and a half from his Gowanus home to the cozy establishment on a sleepy stretch of Third Avenue. Tall, with a moseying gait and a mop of gray hair, he blends in easily. There is no stage, so he and his bandmates, a rotating cast of newer and longtime associates, set up on the floor, amid purple Christmas lights and an illuminated Miller High Life sign.Passers-by might expect a classic-rock covers gig, but that changes when Berne begins warming up. His alto sound, chiseled and neon-bright, cuts through the space like a laser beam. It’s an instant reminder that one of the true thought leaders in progressive jazz — an unassuming yet undeniable force in the music for more than four decades — is still operating at peak strength as he approaches his 70th birthday on Wednesday. (He returns to Lowlands on Oct. 22.)“That Lowlands gig, he takes it as seriously as if he was going to be playing at Carnegie Hall,” the guitarist Bill Frisell, a frequent Berne collaborator in the ’80s who has re-entered his orbit, said in a video interview. “It’s like his life is on the line.”Frisell said that after their early work together, he didn’t keep close tabs on Berne’s music. “I heard him again, and it was like, ‘Man alive,’” he said, going on to describe “how these germs of ideas that were there at the beginning had blossomed and expanded, and his sense of all the parts — the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, the counterpoint — all of that had just kept on getting richer and richer.”“I’m not an artist; I’m just playing music,” Berne said.Malike Sidibe for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Wildly Subversive Music of Soviet Ukraine

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      An archival label in the United States was going to release a huge compilation of records from the U.S.S.R. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.Eugene Hutz still owns his copy of “Slayed?,” a 1972 album released the year he was born by the British bad boys Slade that his father purchased on the Ukrainian black market. Its spine is now lined with tape, its cover deeply ringed by the record inside. But for Hutz, 52, it remains a powerful talisman of rock ’n’ roll’s transformative potential, even amid oppressive regimes.“Enthusiasts knew their way to the black market, and my dad was an extreme enthusiast — a translator of Western culture, a spiritual seeker,” Hutz said of his father, the musician Sasha Nikolaev, during a recent phone interview. “My dad played it endlessly. I was born and raised to the sound.”Hutz emigrated to the United States in 1990, and played in various groups before the raucous band Gogol Bordello made him a rare stateside emissary of Ukrainian rock. The scene in his homeland is getting a bigger spotlight on Friday with “Even the Forest Hums,” an 18-track compendium of wildly diverse Ukrainian sounds (including Hutz’s minimalist teenage band, Uksusnik) that pulls back the curtain on a quarter-century of pop, post-punk, disco and experimental music largely made under Soviet control.The set is part of an ongoing rediscovery of Ukraine’s musical heritage, catalyzed in part by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its western neighbor.“When the war started, I had phone calls from international journalists: ‘Who are you, Ukrainians? What is your music?’ Nobody was interested before,” the journalist, filmmaker and record store owner Vitalii Bardetskyi said in a video interview from Kyiv. “Ukrainians were asking themselves the same questions. In the past two and a half years, Ukrainians found out more about ourselves than in the previous 30.”Cukor Bila Smert sounds like the band David Lynch might have tapped for an especially sinister “Twin Peaks.”via Cukor Bila Smert’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charli XCX’s Starry ‘Brat’ Remixes, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Victoria Monét, Samara Joy, the Linda Lindas and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Charli XCX featuring Ariana Grande, ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’Now that her “Brat” album has given Charli XCX her long-deserved mass pop audience, she has recharged it with a follow-up album of remixes: “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” On the first version of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” she sang about personal insecurities and a rivalry she couldn’t help feeling, “’Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” The remix has the same two-note synthesizer riff but a new lyric about the vicious precarity of 21st-century stardom: “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top/’cause magically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom.” Ariana Grande, who has been through her own fame roller coaster, makes a natural ally.Obongjayar, ‘Tomorrow Man’Obongjayar, a songwriter from Nigeria who’s now based in London, connects the call-and-response and social exhortations of Fela Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat to the samples, loops and layering of contemporary computerized African pop in “Tomorrow Man.” Over a deep, thumping beat, he denounces laziness: “If you no work you suffer,” he rasps. Meanwhile, percussion clatters around him and other sounds go whizzing by — flutes, piano, distorted guitar — like career obstacles to be batted away.Victoria Monét, ‘The Greatest’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jazz Has a New Home in Seattle. One Caveat: The Place Is ‘For Lease.’

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      The nonprofit Seattle Jazz Fellowship has carved out a performance space in the historic Globe Building — for now — and is putting its economic model to the test.The Pacific Northwest might be synonymous with grunge rock, but Seattle’s music scene has historically maintained a rich undercurrent of jazz. Even in the 1990s, with plaid-clad darlings riding high on barre chords, the trumpeter Thomas Marriott recalls an ideal downtown scene for budding improvisers to “pay dues,” a sort of low-cost, low-pressure musician’s utopia where rent could be made in a single weekend’s worth of gigs, and “you could just take your horn, walk up and down the street and see people you knew.”Marriott, 48, is a longtime fixture in the area’s jazz community and knows better than most what makes an operable scene. “Bandstands and elders and youngsters,” he said. “The whole cycle.” Soft-spoken but fiercely opinionated, often wearing his signature orange-tinted glasses, Marriott won the prestigious Carmine Caruso Trumpet Competition in 1999 and used the prize money to move to New York. After several years, he returned to Washington State to build a livable career.But two decades later, art is barely sustainable in Seattle. Small and midsize jazz venues are floundering. Marriott calls the city’s musical pay scale “abysmal.” “The whole crux of the problem,” he said, “is that economically, local jazz is not really much of a commercial enterprise.” Rent is too high. Tables don’t turn over enough. Tastes have shifted.Tired of watching the scene ebb, Marriott plotted a solution: the Seattle Jazz Fellowship, a nonprofit he founded in 2021 with the goals of building community, increasing mentorship and reducing barriers to entry for performers and listeners. The Fellowship entered a new phase this year when it moved into historic Pioneer Square, a waterfront neighborhood that originated as a Gold Rush-era den of vice and still endures exacerbated booms and busts. The landscape architect Ilse Jones, a Pioneer Square advocate with an ownership stake in the rustic 1891 Globe Building, was searching for a new tenant last winter and thought the struggling block would benefit from jazz artists. Someone to “enliven the place,” as she put it.“We’re an ideal tenant for a less than ideal space,” went Marriott’s pitch. “We really only need four walls and a bathroom.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More