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      Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz

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      A group of artists are reimagining the 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come” for Bang on a Can’s Long Play festival.Bang on a Can had big plans for 2020.Before the pandemic started, this classical music collective was busy planning its most ambitious festival yet in New York City: a three-day event called “Long Play,” with acts stretched across multiple venues in Brooklyn.In moving beyond their storied, single-day marathons, Bang on a Can was signaling new ambitions, and was going toe-to-toe with other major avant-garde bashes like the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee.Of course, those designs were plowed under. So Bang on a Can reacted nimbly and quickly by commissioning artists from those scuttled dates to write solo pieces that were premiered online. Those “pandemic solos,” as they have been called, became a tradition of their own. (Some of them showed up as programming last year at the collective’s summer festival.)Still, there was a sense of something lost.“We had this gigantic idea of how to expand the marathon into Long Play,” David Lang, the composer and Bang on a Can co-founder, told The New York Times in April 2020. “I’m sure we’ll do that again, should the world ever get back to normal.”Now, it’s normal — enough — for another go at it. Long Play comes to New York City this weekend at seven venues in Downtown Brooklyn, from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. There are familiar names on the lineup, but also ones that suggest Bang on a Can has its ears open to the work of younger artists. (Friday night’s sets by Jeff Tobias and the Dither guitar quartet offer some of that generational variety.)The festival won’t be a retread of the 2020 program. “Mostly, this is new stuff,” Lang said in an interview. And a sparkling highlight comes at the close, on Sunday night: a thorough, multilayered reimagining of the saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” The performance will feature a band led by Coleman’s son, Denardo, who held the drum chair in his father’s groups over several decades (including in “Haven’t Been Where I Left,” a piece the elder Coleman, who died in 2015, wrote and sometimes performed with the Bang on a Can All-Stars).Denardo Coleman, left, and Tacuma during a recent rehearsal.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThis weekend’s take on “Shape” will also include a 20-person ensemble, conducted by Awadagin Pratt and playing new arrangements of all six compositions from the album. These have been written by a dizzyingly varied roster of artists — including the vocalist and electronics virtuoso Pamela Z (who arranged “Lonely Woman”) and the orchestral and big band composer David Sanford (who took on the boppish “Chronology”).“There are all these threads that go through the festival,” Lang said. “Threads of young composers, and threads of dead composers. And threads of modernist music and threads of free jazz.”The idea is for audiences to be able to follow their own stylistic predilections. “But all of these threads lead to this piece, and to this concert,” Lang noted. “We designed some of the concerts to interfere with other concerts; nothing interferes with this concert.”To prepare for this festival climax, Denardo Coleman has been rehearsing his own core group of players on a weekly basis. On a recent afternoon, in a modishly designed living and rehearsal space near Penn Station in Manhattan, he drilled the group, now called Ornette Expressions, through the album’s six tunes, twice.The performers come from different generations: Ulmer, left, played wth Ornette Coleman in the 1970s, while Moran didn’t get to know him until the 2000s.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesAlthough the music comes from “Shape,” the musicians come from different generations. The guitarist James Blood Ulmer and the bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma both played with Coleman’s father in the 1970s. In an interview after a rehearsal, Coleman said that the ensemble’s pianist, Jason Moran, hadn’t made his way to Ornette Coleman’s home until the early 2000s; he was already a leading light in the contemporary jazz scene, and quickly built a rapport with one of the great melodists of the field’s avant-garde.Filling out the ensemble are two up-and-coming musicians: the saxophonist Lee Odom and the trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr. The first time they all played one of the compositions, “Peace,” they hewed somewhat closely to the original, an emotionally complex work that manages to be at once mournful and finger-snapping.After a break — and after Moran had to leave — the tune took a turn, with Roney plugging his trumpet into a wah-wah pedal. This time, his electric trumpet lines wove around Odom’s acoustic, prayerful alto sax playing: even more searching and heated.Roney, on trumpet.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“We’re doing our arrangement right now,” Denardo Coleman said after the take was over, though he added that “it may not be that way” at the concert on Sunday. It’s likely to turn out different because the day of that rehearsal, he had only just received the finished arrangement. And much of the balance between his group and the sinfonietta was yet to be hashed out.In a phone interview, Z said “everybody was asked to write for this sinfonietta.” There was “a little side note,” she added, saying to “also please leave space for Denardo’s ensemble to jump in, here and there.”When arranging “Lonely Woman” — perhaps Ornette Coleman’s most famous melody — she brought the work in line with her own electronic music. “I played with the music the same way that I play with sampled sound. I really stretched it out, and I compressed it.”Odom on saxophone.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesUlmer on guitar.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesStill, her contribution is entirely acoustic — unlike many of her solo sets. “It starts out with really high harmonics on the strings and bowed vibes,” Z said. “And the first time you hear the melody, it’s played a quarter of the speed that it’s supposed to go, being played on a tuba. So I just had a lot of fun, playing with time in it.”That’s exactly what Denardo Coleman was hoping for. “The way my father would have approached it would have been that everybody had equal participation,” he said. “Meaning he wasn’t just the leader and everybody was there to make him sound good. If you had an idea, you could take it.”Hence, Coleman said, each arranger’s freedom in working with the original tunes.“It wasn’t as if we said ‘OK, just orchestrate the song the way it is,’” he said. “They may reconstruct, deconstruct, turn it inside out, something else. The tune — the composition — is just a starting point. That just leads you into some other territory. And that other territory is what it’s really about.” More

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      Sid Mark, Disc Jockey Devoted to Sinatra for Six Decades, Dies at 88

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      He hosted four radio shows that focused on the singer, who at one concert singled him out in the audience and said, “I love him.”Sid Mark, a longtime disc jockey in Philadelphia who made Frank Sinatra’s songs the center of his musical universe for more than six decades, died on April 18 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 88.His daughter, Stacey Mark, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not cite the cause.Mr. Mark brought a warm, conversational style to his broadcasts. Between selections from his trove of vinyl albums and CDs, he offered bits of his aficionado’s knowledge, told stories about hanging out with Sinatra and played snippets of interviews with him.He hosted three shows on various Philadelphia radio stations: “Friday With Frank,” “Sunday With Sinatra” and the syndicated “The Sounds of Sinatra,” which has run for 43 years and at its height was heard on 100 stations. He also hosted a fourth, “Saturday With Sinatra,” on stations in New York.In 1966, Sinatra’s office invited Mr. Mark to Las Vegas to see him perform as a reward for helping to stoke sales in Philadelphia of the singer’s newly released live album, “Sinatra at the Sands,” by playing it nonstop for a week.While there, he dined with Sinatra and a group of other stars, including Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. Afterward, Mr. Mark recalled, Sinatra told him, “I’ll see you at the show,” but Mr. Mark said that he and his wife, Loretta, did not have tickets.“He thought that was pretty funny, as did everyone at the table,” Mr. Mark told Vice.com in 2009, “and he gave me a little pinch on the cheek and said, ‘No, you’re sitting at our table.’ I walked in with all these celebrities and everyone knew who everyone was, but they had no idea who we were. Like ‘Who’s that with the pope?’”It was the start of a friendship that lasted until Sinatra’s death in 1998. Mr. Mark attended many of Sinatra’s performances and would sometimes visit him at his suite at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan. At times, during a concert, Sinatra would single him out from the audience.“I love him, and I say that publicly, I love him,” Sinatra said in 1991 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. “He’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life.”Mr. Mark in a recent photo hosting “Sunday With Sinatra,” which was on the air for more than 40 years.Family photoSidney Mark Fliegelman was born on May 30, 1933, in Camden, N.J. His father, Aaron, and his mother, Sylvia (Pfeffer) Fliegelman, owned a variety store in Camden. The family lived above the store, where Sid got his first taste of Sinatra’s music by listening to his sister Norma’s records. He hoped to one day get a job in radio.He entered the Army in 1953 and served at Camp Polk (now Fort Polk) in Louisiana. His admiration for Sinatra’s music swelled when he listened to his records on the radio at night in the barracks. “Somehow his voice got to me and I realized he knew exactly what he was singing about,” he told Vice. “If he was singing about lonely, he knew what lonely was. If he was singing about love, he knew what love was about.”Mr. Mark stopped using his surname early in his career but never changed it legally.After his discharge in 1955, Mr. Mark got a job at the Red Hill Inn, a jazz club in Pennsauken, N.J., as a talent coordinator. His responsibilities included driving artists like Count Basie and Duke Ellington to and from their hotels. They would often talk about Sinatra, further stoking Mr. Mark’s interest in his music. More important, he was hired around that time as a disc jockey at WHAT-AM, a jazz station in Philadelphia. He hosted a one-hour show called “Sounds in the Night.”One night in 1955, when the station’s overnight D.J. did not show up, Mr. Mark was asked to fill in.“It was a show called ‘Rock and Roll Kingdom,’ and I wasn’t going to do that,” he told The New Yorker in 2021. He asked his audience what they wanted to hear, and one fan suggested playing an hour of Sinatra’s music. “The all-night guy got fired for not coming in, and they kept me on.” Several months later, in 1956, the show formally began its run as “Friday With Frank.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Mark’s popularity in Philadelphia was growing. He was hosting “Friday With Frank” and a daily six-hour jazz show, “Mark of Jazz,” which would run for nearly two decades, on WHAT. He also had a weekly jazz program on local public television.Mr. Mark hosted “Friday With Frank” for 54 years, “Saturday With Sinatra” for about 17 and “Sunday With Sinatra” for more than 40. “The Sounds of Sinatra” will remain on the air and present archival shows, said his son Brian Mark, the executive producer.In addition to his daughter and his son Brian, Mr. Mark is survived by his wife, Judy (Avery) Mark; two other sons, Eric and Andy Fliegelman; and two grandchildren. His marriage to Loretta Katz ended in divorce.The playlists of Mr. Mark’s Sinatra shows did not consist entirely of solo recordings by Sinatra. He also played duets Sinatra recorded with singers like Liza Minnelli, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as records by Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Davis.There have been other Sinatra devotees on the radio over the years. William B. Williams emphasized Sinatra’s music on his “Make Believe Ballroom” on WNEW-AM in New York (and gave him his nickname Chairman of the Board). Jonathan Schwartz was known for his loyalty to Sinatra on several New York stations. But with four Sinatra shows, Mr. Mark was probably singular in his commitment.“D.J.s can often be disappointing in person, which was not the case with Sid,” James Kaplan, the author of a two-volume biography of Sinatra — “Frank: The Voice” (2010) and “Sinatra: The Chairman” (2015) — said in a phone interview. “He was physically impressive, a tall, striking-looking guy who had a real warmth. He didn’t have a phony atom in his body, and he had a true love of Sinatra and everything about Sinatra. His enthusiasm was real.” More

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      Mavis Staples and Levon Helm’s Last Show, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Pusha T, Laura Veirs, Helado Negro 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.Mavis Staples and Levon Helm, ‘You Got to Move’Back in 2011, Mavis Staples and her band visited Woodstock, N.Y., to perform at the barn-studio-theater of the Band’s drummer Levon Helm; they had appeared together at the Band’s “The Last Waltz,” in 1976. Helm’s band joined hers, which included her sister Yvonne Staples on backup vocals, and they recorded the show. More than a decade later, an album, “Carry Me Home,” is due May 20. Staples gave “You Got to Move,” a gospel standard, her full contralto commitment; the guitarists Rick Holmstrom and Larry Campbell traded blues twang and bluegrassy runs. It was just another good-timey show in two long careers, but it would be their last together; Helm died in 2012. JON PARELESPusha T featuring Ye, ‘Dreamin of the Past’Nostalgia is not a concept often associated with Pusha T; even when he’s mining his coke-dealing past for material (and best believe, he usually is), his rhymes have the vivid immediacy of the present tense. But the classic, Old-Kanye production heard on “Dreamin of the Past” — revolving around a sped-up sample of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” — gives the song a halcyon glow that’s playfully at odds with his unrepentant flow. As ever, on this highlight from his latest solo album “It’s Almost Dry,” Push’s lyrics pop with poetic detail (“We hollowed the walls in back of bodegas”) and riotous cleverness: At one point, he boasts of keeping people “on the bikes like Amblin.” LINDSAY ZOLADZShakira and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Te Felicito’​​Robot love, funky bass lines, Rauw Alejandro’s head in a refrigerator: Welcome to Shakira and the Puerto Rican reggaeton star’s first collaboration. “Te Felicito” is a bitter send-off to a paramour whose love has been a charade that marries some of the superstars’ signature gifts: the Colombian singer’s eccentric choreography and Rauw’s penchant for funk-infused reggaeton. The Shak stamp of approval is a sought-after trophy for young artists ascending the ranks of the industry — just another sign that Alejandro is here to stay in all his freaky glory. ISABELIA HERRERAMidas the Jagaban featuring Liya, ‘420’Marijuana anthems abound on April 20. Here’s a lighter-than-smoke one from Nigeria, sung by the always-masked female songwriter Midas the Jagaban and a guest, Liya. The tapping, airborne polyrhythms of Afrobeats, topped by labyrinthine echoed vocals, provide just enough propulsion and haze as the women declare, “Whatever I do/I do it better when I smoke my marijuana.” PARELESPinkPantheress featuring Willow, ‘Where You Are’To capture the way a breakup can upend everything, PinkPantheress enlisted two beat experts — Skrillex and Mura Masa — to share production on “Where You Are,” along with Willow (Smith), who delivers full-throated hooks. They sing about the limbo between wanting to move on and longing to stay together: “I know it will never be the same,” Willow wails. The song is a vortex of obsession, with a brisk beat, a fingerpicking pattern (sampled from Paramore’s “Never Let This Go”) and vocals that diffuse into echoes and wordless syllables as PinkPantheress (breathy) and Willow (desperate and dramatic) toss around all the possibilities of separation, confrontation and wishing for a reunion. PARELESLaura Veirs, ‘Winter Windows’Laura Veirs has been a folk-rock fixture since the early aughts, but over the past few years she’s experienced a great deal of personal and professional change. Shortly before the pandemic, she divorced her longtime collaborator Tucker Martine, who had produced many of her albums — including “My Echo” from 2020, which was partially about their split. Her forthcoming album “Found Light,” due July 8, is her first album without Martine and the first she co-produced herself. Veirs sounds fittingly reinvigorated and inspired on the lead single “Winter Windows,” an antsy, guitar-driven meditation on motherhood and moving on. “I used to watch them watch you light up every room,” she sings, a gritty resilience in her voice. “Now it’s up to me, the lighting I can do.” ZOLADZSorry, ‘There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved’On the London group Sorry’s charming “There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved,” Asha Lorenz sings with the sort of sweet, earnest guilelessness that Mo Tucker brought to the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” “See them in the nightclubs, barking up the walls, head in their hands in the bathroom stalls,” she notes of all the lonely people she observes. But as the song gradually builds from unassuming to epic, “There’s So Many People” becomes less a lament and more a celebration of communal human longing — a feeling to be cherished, and, ironically, shared. ZOLADZRavyn Lenae, ‘M.I.A.’It’s been four years since the Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae dropped her “Crush” EP, a Steve Lacy-produced release that stitched her sky-high vocals with funky bass lines and delicious electro-soul textures. For “M.I.A.,” her first single from her debut album “Hypnos,” Lenae pairs with the producer Sango for something a little more breezy. Over a buoyant, syncopated Afrobeats production, a gleaming synth expands and contracts under Lenae’s airy falsetto, as she coos about finally making it: “I’m gonna run the town, ain’t nothing in my way.” HERRERARuth Radelet, ‘Crimes’“Is it easy to start over?” Ruth Radelet wonders on the chorus of her debut solo single, and it’s safe to assume that’s an autobiographical sentiment. For nearly two decades, Radelet was the frontwoman of the moody electro-pop group Chromatics, who disbanded last summer amid drama surrounding a mysterious (and possibly nonexistent) final album. On the glassy, synth-driven “Crimes,” though, Radelet sounds ready to wipe the slate clean. The verses have a bit of a steely bite (“I know what they’re telling me is true/I know I could never be like you”), but the lush chorus is awash in her signature, dreamy melancholy. ZOLADZHelado Negro, ‘Ya No Estoy Aquí’Helado Negro’s music may be dreamlike and crepuscular, but don’t confuse his songs for simple lullabies. “Ya No Estoy Aquí,” his latest single, revisits the celestial meanderings that have defined his work: soft, pulsing drum loops and wobbling, echoing synths. The Ecuadorean-American artist sings about isolation and melancholy alongside harmonic melodies from the Chicago singer-songwriter Kaina. “Ojalá me estoy volviendo loco/Por lo menos tengo con quien puedo hablar/alucinaciones,” he intones (“Hopefully I’m going crazy/At least I have someone to talk to/Hallucinations”). Underneath that soothing exterior, Helado Negro’s music holds a special power: the capacity to engage difficult feelings. HERRERALou Roy, ‘U.D.I.D.’The Los Angeles songwriter Lou Roy regularly juggles euphoria and disillusionment. Her debut album, “Pure Chaos,” is due April 29, and in “U.D.I.D.” — “You don’t I don’t” — she probes a relationship that seems about to fissure. “I always want you here/but I’m starting to get the deal,” she sings. The track, which she co-produced with Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, has an upbeat 4/4 pop thump, but some sonic elements — vocals, keyboards, guitar chords — linger like contrails, hinting that the romance may already be a memory. PARELESCharles Mingus, ‘The Man Who Never Sleeps’One heavy day in 1973, Columbia Records dropped every jazz musician on its roster besides Miles Davis. The bassist and composer Charles Mingus (whose 100th birthday would have been on Friday) was among them. So were Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. But just months before that, the label had arranged to have a performance by Mingus’s new sextet recorded at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. The tapes were ultimately shelved. They’ll finally be released on Saturday, Record Store Day, as the triple-disc set “The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott’s.” On “The Man Who Never Sleeps,” Mingus is lit up by the antic virtuosity of the young trumpeter and Dizzy Gillespie protégé Jon Faddis, barely 19, who had just joined the band. Just before Columbia would press a final symbolic seal on an entire jazz generation, you can hear a torch being passed. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOFred Moten, Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, ‘The Abolition of Art, the Abolition of Freedom, the Abolition of You and Me’“Freedom is too close to slavery for us to be easy with that jailed imagining,” the poet and theorist Fred Moten says in a coolly controlled voice, speaking over the rustle of Gerald Cleaver’s drums and the dark pull of Brandon López’s open bass strings. There’s a doom-metal energy here, and Sun Ra’s relationship to darkness — as a substance. López hangs on the high strings for a moment at the end of Moten’s phrase, aware that the thought needs time to settle and land, then comes home to the root of the minor key. In the past 20 years Moten has become perhaps the leading thinker on Black performance, writing volumes of poetry and theory that dance with the ways in which Diasporic expression resists definition and capture. “The Abolition of Art” is the first track from a new album, “Moten/López/Cleaver,” putting that engagement directly to music and sacrificing none of its complexity or wit. RUSSONELLO More

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      The Multifaceted Mingus

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      On the bassist and bandleader’s centennial, 10 jazz musicians discuss his achievements and complexities and pick out a pivotal track from his repertoire.Charles Mingus was everything all at once: jazz, folk, dance, theater, label owner, brave Black man. In an era where the wrong opinions could get him killed or, at the very least, exiled from the music business, he expressed himself boldly, and exorcised strong emotions through the strings of his upright bass. His playing style was fierce, almost violent, as if the trauma of American racism was coming through it.Born 100 years ago on Friday along the United States-Mexico border, in a body that confounded easy racial categorization (one of his most memorable ballads is “Self-Portrait in Three Colors”), Mingus lived, wrote and played bass in a state of agitated brilliance. He stretched the instrument’s powers of melody and found new ways of making it into leadership material. As a composer, he brought the blues erudition of Duke Ellington into every group he led, whether sextets or full orchestras. And he kept his ensembles as loose as a group of friends joking around the card table.In one of his most quoted interviews, with the producer Nesuhi Ertegun, Mingus explained that the smoldering, sizzling force of his music was a reflection of everything happening inside. “What I’m trying to play is very difficult, because I’m trying to play the truth of what I am,” Mingus said. “The reason why it’s difficult — it’s not difficult to play the mechanics of it — it’s because I’m changing all the time.”By the time he released his most widely remembered album, “Mingus Ah Um,” in 1959, he was both a leading man and an elder statesman on the New York scene. But his defining years were still ahead: Mingus’s music would ultimately become hard to disassociate from the 1960s, probably because it so powerfully conveys a feeling of convulsive change. He made reinvention and regrowth feel like a ritual and a party, all the way until his death of a heart attack in 1979, at 56.Highly sensitive, he had a short temper onstage and sometimes with his band; he was called the “Angry Man of Jazz” in a time when the genre was hopped up on cool. (His infamous memoir, “Beneath the Underdog,” showcased this sometimes volatile passion.) Mingus’s legacy is best represented by the unruly beauty of his recordings, including “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” a courageous 1963 album filled with the roots of Baptist gospel and the blues, the language of Blackness and the sound of togetherness. He wanted to stray from the labels that siphoned Black music into prescribed boxes and sanitized it for the mainstream marketplace. This was him — the rage, the swing, the beauty and the confusion.Still, no single album sums up the live-wire brilliance of Mingus. What follow are edited excerpts from conversations with a wide range of jazz musicians who are active today, including one who played with Mingus and many who carry his torch. Each picked a pivotal track from his career and explained its powers.Charles McPhersonSaxophonist, 82; played in Mingus’s ensembles from 1960 to 1972Mingus to me was a complicated person, and he had a lot of moving parts, which can translate into musical dimension. I would use the term “Renaissance man.” I think of him as a world thinker. He had feelings, thoughts and opinions about the world, and he expressed all of that in his compositions.When we would play his music, if we were too clean, he would say: “I do not want it to sound processed. It’s too pristine.” And if we weren’t as organized, then he would say, “Well, that’s too raggedy.” He would say, “I like organized chaos.”He called his group the Jazz Workshop. So when you come to see Mingus, you’re not only coming to see a performance, but you’re also coming to see a process. He would sometimes just stop a tune right there, in front of 200 people, and give advice to the musicians. And then he would turn to the audience and say, “Jazz Workshop process. You’re witnessing creation in progress in real time.”“Peggy’s Blue Skylight” (live at Town Hall, 1962)There was a recording date at Town Hall where we were reading music that was being copied while we were on the bandstand — and we were performing this music and some of the parts were still not quite written. That’s a great example.Georgia Anne MuldrowSinger, songwriter, rapper and producer, 38I think the most meaningful aspect is his naturalness, because we can look at it two different ways, right? His naturalness as far as the transparency of his emotions coming through his arrangements, and just him. However he felt it, he was going to write it. And I think the other thing is in the way he arranged his music, and the way he taught it to people. Like, “I’ll hand you the music, but you should probably play it how I’m singing it to you.” That’s one of my favorite things about Mingus, because it’s something that transcends the paper.He was pressing up his own stuff — and I love that, too. I think that’s one of my favorite things, his independent business sense. He walks his talk, basically. He’s like, “Yo, I’m going to do this differently. I’m going to own my own thing.”“Myself When I Am Real” (recorded 1963)I love Mingus on piano, so “Myself When I Am Real” is one of my favorites. He’s just such a West Coast dude, and it’s a beautiful song.Jason MoranPianist, 47; studied for years with Mingus’s longtime pianist, Jaki ByardFirst, Mingus wholeheartedly acknowledges the folk aspect of all great music. That means acknowledging your ancestry and how it shows up — and that you can never put a tuxedo on it. That’s what makes it vital, because a folk tradition just is. That’s one aspect that makes Mingus’s music vital today, for the artistry’s part.But the political part, I think, is that, because of his generation, he was able to say things with maybe a more pointed tongue than, say, Ellington. Then he and Max Roach and Ellington teamed up, and that’s a really beautiful generational meet-up. Whether everybody was on the same page or not, it’s necessary. So I think he also represents that every generation will have a way that they view the politics and react to it, and the artists will find a way to sew it in so that it hits people differently.“Meditations on Integration,” (a.k.a. “Praying With Eric,” recorded live at Town Hall, 1964)On “Meditations,” there’s something that happens in it, especially when they would play it live, where it feels like it just rips apart. It sounds like the band is literally screaming through the instruments.Esperanza SpaldingBassist, vocalist and producer, 37I like the way that you hear the personality of everybody in his band, even when it’s a big band. Even as you’re hearing the arrangement that clearly was written by his hand on a piece of paper. And the total sound of the arrangement is this tapestry of every individual’s sound and way of playing.I think his transparency is really meaningful. His transparency of who he is and what he thought, what he felt and what he was dissatisfied with. And what he was striving for and what he was talking about in the music. From the way he plays and the way he writes and the titles of his songs, and the words in the songs, you can feel exactly what he means. I feel like that was his point, to let you know exactly what the hell he meant, and exactly who he was. And I think that’s really radical for anybody.“So Long Eric” (live in Stockholm, 1964)There is this song for the saxophonist Eric Dolphy called “So Long Eric.” It was his last gig with the band. I remember hearing it when I was pretty young, thinking, “This is a grown man onstage in front of people he doesn’t know, offering a song of longing and grieving and farewell to another person that he loves. That’s so generous and radical.” What a profound gesture of love.Michael FormanekBassist, 63; played in Mingus Dynasty and Mingus Big Band in the 1990sWhen people talk about Mingus’s music, more often than not they talk about these pieces of music that are incredible tunes by themselves. But in some ways, I think of him as so much more than that: as a composer who was able to combine different moods and feelings and colors in ways that are just so human.He was also about setting things in motion and then cutting them off. And pulling the rug out from under you, and then sending you back in another direction. And then just when things are getting to a certain point of tension, he would throw in this beautiful ballad idea — but it would only last for a short time. His compositions often had many moods right up against each other, yet changing very quickly. I think human beings can relate to that in a different sort of way, maybe even unconsciously. The internal sort of push-and-pull of life. It’s very real, it’s very exposed. And very beautiful.“Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk,” (recorded 1964) and “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blue,” (recorded 1974)“Orange Was the Color of Her Dress” is a really important one for me, partially because the recorded versions are so different. The sextet played it in Europe in ’64, with Jaki and Dolphy and Clifford Jordan. To go from that to “Changes Two” in 1975, to hear what they did with it, and how portable the material was. To have music like that, with all that character and all that complexity, but that can really happen in really different ways with different groups — to me, that’s amazing.Miles MosleyBassist, singer and composer, 42One of my favorite ideas of Mingus’s is that rhythm is felt in a circle. Each of us feels time in a slightly different place. When I refer to “time” in music, it’s the rhythm, the beat, the tempo. And Mingus would put his band together depending on who felt the rhythm where, in this concept of a circle: ahead of it, on top of it, behind it. And he would make it so that the entire band equaled a group of musicians that created a full circle of time.What Mingus embraced in his music, what you’re hearing, is someone embracing the idea that you want to cultivate a collection of humans because they are different from one another, not because they are the same. You’re not hearing a bunch of people in unity. You are hearing a bunch of people sharing a concept and expressing it uniquely to themselves, all at once. That is one of the most unique approaches to music, to jazz, that I’ve been able to bring into my own thought process. And I think it’s a wonderful idea: The small things that separate us on a common goal is what makes us more powerful.“Haitian Fight Song” (recorded 1957)There’s so much I like about this piece of music. One is the constant tension of that bass line and the constant lurking sound that it has: Something is coming for you. He was so able to capture the spirit of the Haitian revolution throughout the arc of that song. It sounds like it’s starting at night. It sounds like people are making their way toward some purpose. The ability of that song to set visuals in your head is something that I aspire to at all times — not just tell a story but to evoke imagination in the listener.I also like that the band and Mingus don’t stay quiet inside of their instruments. They’re expressing themselves vocally. They’re expressing themselves with yells and shouts, not just for effect, but in actual praise of the musicians around them and the performances they’re hearing.Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott)Trumpeter and composer, 39If I had to choose one thing to take away from what he contributed, it would be courageousness, the things that he levied against a world that refused to see all people’s humanity, in a time where those types of accurate appraisals of our environment could have been met with death.And, as much as his musicianship and genius, the things that he was able to conceptualize and actualize, I think his ability to be upright in the moment and say the things that he said through his chest and mean it, is one of the greatest examples that we have in the 20th century of a human being speaking to the ills of this world and trying to do something to contribute light to it.“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” (recorded 1959)Obviously, we understand that it’s written for the great Lester Young. It was my grandfather’s favorite song, and when I was a very small boy, and before I started to cut my teeth into music, he would play the song all the time. It’s just one of the most beautiful examples of that kind of send-off, the power in the melody, the space and the timing of it, texturally what’s going on.Endea OwensBassist and bandleader, 30I was introduced to Mingus at Michigan State University. I was told to play “Haitian Fight Song,” the first tune of his I ever played. I listened to a lot more Mingus after that, partially because that record is so iconic and begins with an open bass solo. It’s something that every bass player knows.When I listen to Mingus, I can hear all of the influences that relate to me, even in 2022. Mingus’s music was a very social-activist music. You take “Fables of Faubus,” that was written in the late ’50s. People were still getting lynched for speaking their minds back then. To create music that really impacted such a social change and pressed against the society’s norms at the time, that was incredible. He always kept the integrity.“Better Git It in Your Soul” (recorded 1959)“Better Git It in Your Soul,” that’s just a feel-good song. I grew up in church, so automatically I’m just vibing to it. I could hear people doing the two-claps, and then just all the jazz language that he uses in it. From his work with Ellington, he found a way to mash everything together and make it relatable and timeless.William ParkerBassist and composer, 70Musically, he had a great imagination, and lots of the content in his music came from the church. His music grew from contrasts, fast against slow; from the idea of politics; from color and bursts of sound; and using the instrument as a human voice.If you look at the way the books try to clean up Mingus’s music, I feel that his music was much less cleaned up than they represent. If you’re changing it every time you play it, it can’t be boxed in. There’s one thing missing when you say, “Let’s play the music of Charles Mingus.” And that’s Charles Mingus. You need Mingus.“Money Jungle” (recorded 1962)Mingus was a street musician, to me. People say, “Well, he’s academic, he’s trying to do a kind of classical or symphonic music.” But, to me, the way he played was non-calculated; he used his ear a lot. If you listen to “Money Jungle,” with Duke Ellington and Max Roach, I believe they just came together and pulled that record together in the studio.Nick DunstonBassist and composer, 25In the music, I feel like there’s a very audible sense of his search for identity, and constructing an identity in real time. And him being multiracial — that’s been a significant part of my identity development over the years, and he also went through that.There was such a strong foundation of the blues in particular, and also Ellington’s music. And you can tell that even as he branches out with experimentation, and exploring other kinds of music in his work, he is always playing with this idea of tension and release. There’s this balance of checking out relatively unexplored areas, and then connecting it back to the blues roots. It also, I think, challenges this idea that musical evolution is a linear concept. He really turns that inside out. It’s more like a circle.“Duet Solo Dancers” (recorded 1963)“Duet Solo Dancers” is the second track on “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” and I think is pretty much a perfect composition. What starts out as the most beautiful ballad I’ve ever heard goes into a section where the band starts in this sort of downtempo funeral march, and then just keeps on constantly accelerating. Then they drop back down. He’s kind of messing with you a little bit, which I really dig. And then, toward the end of the track, he brings back stuff from the track prior, in really creative ways. As the album progresses, all this material kind of returns; it gets folded back and creates this really beautiful chaos that he’s controlling. More

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      Lizzo’s Disco Dance Party, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Phoebe Bridgers, KeiyaA, Wild Pink 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.Lizzo, ‘About Damn Time’The disco revival continues on Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” which features a rubbery, “Get Lucky” bass line and a bridge overflowing with Diana Ross glitter (“I’m comin’ out tonight, I’m comin’ out tonight”). More of a crowd-pleaser than last year’s Cardi B duet “Rumors,” “About Damn Time” is the first official single from Lizzo’s long-awaited album “Special,” which will be out July 15. If this track is an indication, she hasn’t switched up the formula too much, and at times — the Instagram-caption one-liners; the obligatory flute solo — it can feel a little paint-by-numbers Lizzo. But the song is best when she leans more earnestly into its emotional center, belting, “I’ve been so down and under pressure, I’m way too fine to be this stressed.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAmelia Moore, ‘Crybaby’In “Crybaby,” Amelia Moore moans, “Do you like to make me cry, baby, because you do it all the time.” The production heaves and twitches with up-to-the-minute electronics: reversed tones, programmed drums, little keyboard loops, computer-tuned vocals. But the song’s masochistic drama stays rooted in the blues, and in the ways a human voice can break and leap. JON PARELESCisco Swank and Luke Titus featuring Phoelix, ‘Some Things Take Time’The multi-instrumentalist bedroom beat-makers of Instagram, who live by the loop and have lately turned overdubbing into a visual art form — or, at least, into visuals — are a mini-movement by now: Jacob Collier, DOMi and JD Beck, Julius Rodriguez. The list continues, and it’s bound to grow. If they’re all different, most are united in their worship of Stevie Wonder, more for his solo-studio mastery than for the extended-form genius of his compositions. The moment is understandably more interested in texture and groove than in duration or arc. Then it tracks that “Some Things Take Time” — the fun-loving debut album from Cisco Swank and Luke Titus, a duo of young polymaths — is barely the size of a mixtape: just 24 minutes across 11 tracks. And wisely, the tracks themselves aren’t overstuffed. The album’s title tune is a breezy blend of Titus’s sizzling snare patter; Swank’s rich piano harmony, no-notes-wasted bass line and synthesizer strings; and the falsetto flurries of Phoelix, the Noname accomplice who contributes a guest spot. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKay Flock featuring Cardi B, Dougie B and Bory300, ‘Shake It’A deeply strategic song that sounds deliciously happenstance, “Shake It” solves a few conundrums at once. First, for more than a year, sample drill has been the prevailing sound of New York rap, primarily from Brooklyn and the Bronx. But even though artists like Kay Flock and B-Lovee have had minor radio breakthroughs, the sound could still benefit from an ambassador. Enter Cardi B, who is due for a re-emergence, and is almost certainly the only mainstream rap star currently working who could hop on this rowdy of a drill song so seamlessly. Which isn’t to say without effort: This is a return to adaptable form for Cardi, reminiscent of the way she adopted Kodak Black’s flow on her breakout single “Bodak Yellow.” Her verse here is punchy and clipped — she’s morphing to the sound, not imposing herself onto it.Inside Lizzo’s WorldThe Grammy-winning singer is known for her fierce lyrics, fashion and personality.‘Big Grrrls’: The singer wanted a new kind of backup dancer. In her pursuit of proper representation, she created a TV show.‘Feel-Good Music’: Lizzo says her music is as much about building yourself up as it is about accepting where you are.Why ‘Truth Hurts’ Matters: In 2020, The New York Times Magazine put her No. 1 hit on its list of songs that define the moment.Diary of a Song: Watch how Lizzo made “Juice,” a party song that packs all of her joy and charm into three danceable minutes.Technically, this song belongs to Kay Flock, who is currently in jail: He was arrested in December and charged with murder. It also features Bory300 and Dougie B, another promising Bronx rapper who has the most limber verse here. Unlike the sublimated anxiety of the recent Fivio Foreign hit “City of Gods,” which strains to mold his brusque style into something soft-edged and arena-scaled, “Shake It” is nothing but abandon. It’s true to sample drill heritage, with bits of Akon’s “Bananza (Belly Dancer)” and Sean Paul’s “Temperature” woven throughout. But it has its eyes on bigger targets. An early snippet was made available as part of the highly viral New York video show “Sidetalk,” a favorite of insiders and voyeurs alike, giving “Shake It” a running start toward the kind of online ubiquity that makes for a contemporary pop hit without forsaking the essence of drill. JON CARAMANICAEdoheart, ‘Pandemonium’“Pandemonium” is the explosive title track of a new EP by Edoheart, a singer and producer who was born in Nigeria and is based in New York. It’s four minutes of brisk, skewed, constantly shifting African funk with rhythmic double vision: staggered guitar arpeggios, sputtering drumbeats, distant horns and overlapping voices proclaiming, “Change must come!” and, believably, “I’m free!” PARELESKeiyaA, ‘Camille’s Daughter’KeiyaA — the songwriter, instrumentalist and producer Chakeiya Camille Richmond — liquefies everything around her in “Camille’s Daughter.” Keyboard chords melt into wah-wah and echo, the beat drifts in late and haltingly, and KeiyaA starts and ends verses where she pleases, trailed by ever-shifting clouds of her own backup vocals. “Never will you replicate me,” she taunts, utterly secure in every self-made fluctuation. PARELESNaima Bock, ‘Giant Palm’Weightless and unpredictable (“I float high, high above it all”), the Glastonbury-born artist Naima Bock’s “Giant Palm” sounds a song you’d hear in a pleasant dream. Bock used to be in the British art-rock group Goat Girl, but her solo material leans more into the traditions of European folk and the off-kilter pop she heard during a childhood spent in Brazil. There’s a bit of ’70s Brian Eno in her vocal delivery and an echo of John Cale in her arrangements, but the fusion of her disparate cultural influences makes for an enchanting sound entirely Bock’s own. ZOLADZPhoebe Bridgers, ‘Sidelines’In Phoebe Bridgers’s world, even the most wholehearted love song is usually bittersweet: “Had nothing to prove, ’til you came into my life, gave me something to lose,” she sings on “Sidelines,” her first new song since her breakout 2020 album “Punisher”; it will be featured in the forthcoming Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends.” “I’m not afraid of anything at all,” Bridgers insists at the beginning of the song, before listing off a series of potential fears (earthquakes, plane crashes, growing up) in the sort of granular detail that makes her previous statement sound a little ironic. “Sidelines” features what has by now become Bridgers’s signature multi-tracked vocals — here, they glimmer with an almost Vocoder-like iridescence — which make her sound at once numb and, quite poignantly, wrestling with something ghostly right under the surface. ZOLADZWild Pink, ‘Q. DeGraw’Wild Pink hails from Brooklyn, but the group specializes in the sort of open-air, stargazing indie rock that usually gets associated with the Pacific Northwest. Like its acclaimed 2021 album “A Billion Little Lights,” its towering new single “Q. Degraw” shows Wild Pink’s flair for the epic, but it’s less an anthemic rocker than a slow-smoldering mood piece. The frontman John Ross’s muffled vocals are buried under distortion that obscures them as diffusely as a moon behind clouds, though the moments they become legible are especially affecting. “I’ve been to hell and back again,” he murmurs, before adding tenderly, “I know you’ve been to hell too.” ZOLADZKisskadee, ‘Black Hole Era’Kisskadee pulls together progressive-rock (the Canterbury school to be precise), astronomy, chamber-pop, computer sound manipulation and faith in resurrection in “Black Hole Era.” The music is rooted in a lurching piano more-or-less waltz — the meters shift — and it grows ever more programmed, overdubbed, manipulated and elastic. A lot of transformations happen within five minutes. PARELESFKA twigs, ‘Playscape’FKA twigs keeps working her art and fashion connections. “Playscape,” with a diversely cast video that she directed, is a showcase for wool clothing and Isamu Noguchi sculptures. After a sustained intro — isolated syllables and vocal harmonies — that hints at both Meredith Monk and Take 5, she goes full late-1970s punk, channeling the wail and saxophone of X-Ray Spex to remake a song with terminology that survived into the 21st century: “Identity.” With a mostly one-note melody, FKA twigs wails, “Identity! When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?” It’s not a new song, but it’s still pointed. PARELESJoel Ross, ‘Benediction’With his octet, Parables, the vibraphonist Joel Ross plays what could be called chorales, though they involve no vocals. The group’s repertoire grew out of a series of casual improvisations that Ross played and recorded years ago with the saxophonist Sergio Tabanico. Ross went back and pulled small curves and dashes of melody out of those recordings, then taught them to the octet by ear. They developed into entire pieces over time, through a process of collective weaving, until each tune had taken on an illusion of contained endlessness, like Maya Lin’s land sculptures or an old song of praise. Indeed, Ross built the octet’s new album, “The Parable of the Poet,” around the structure of a church service. But these seven tracks don’t seek to raise the rafters so much as waft slowly up toward them. “Benediction,” the final track, begins with a sublimely peaceful intro from the young pianist Sean Mason; at the end, the track fades with the band still savoring the melody in harmonized communion. RUSSONELLO More

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      Chick Corea, the Master Mixer of Jazz’s Past and Future

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      An eclectic array of musicians will gather in New York to celebrate the pianist’s legacy. Five collaborators and admirers discuss his experiments, artistry and generosity.When the groundbreaking pianist Chick Corea died unexpectedly, at 79, last February, he left a legacy of experimentation, preserving and expanding the jazz tradition. Over more than a half-century, he deftly navigated the music’s continually shifting boundaries. Corea started his career playing with the Afro-Cuban percussionist Willie Bobo and spent time with the bossa nova stalwart Stan Getz. His presence in Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” ensemble, and later, his leading role in Return to Forever, gave him a seminal role in the origins of 1970s jazz fusion.But Corea didn’t stop there, devoting himself to straight-ahead jazz trios and quartets; duos with greats like Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett; outside-the-box collaborations with the bluegrass banjo player Béla Fleck; and even to playing Mozart Concertos with Bobby McFerrin. His long stint with the Elektric Band showed he never abandoned fusion, and his 2019 release, “Antidote,” recorded with an array of Spanish and Latin American musicians, renewed his early passion for Latin sounds. Over the course of his career, he won 25 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards and was nominated for more than 60 others.Friday and Saturday at Lincoln Center, an all-star lineup of musicians who either played with Corea or were strongly influenced by him will come together for concerts that reimagine his classic compositions.“Chick had this way of instilling in us that if someone is trying to define what jazz is or isn’t for you, you don’t have to accept it,” the bassist John Patitucci, a longtime member of the Elektric Band and musical director of the shows, said in a phone interview. “He was extremely affirming with all of us, and he was funny — hysterically funny.”The shows will be more than just a tribute; they will allow Corea’s colleagues to recapture his energy, focused determination and generosity of spirit. In a recent interview, five musicians — Rubén Blades, Béla Fleck, Christian McBride, Renee Rosnes and Corea’s widow, Gayle Moran, a singer and keyboardist who was by his side till the end — discussed how deeply he connected with his collaborators when creating music and the ways he touched them personally. (All but Fleck will take part in the Lincoln Center event, which was postponed from January.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did Corea’s experiments in jazz fusion and eclecticism inspire you?CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE I think there’s this accepted narrative, like, there was quote unquote, “no jazz in the ’70s” and people like Chick, Herbie, Weather Report, George Duke all turned their backs on jazz. I’m not exactly sure how so many critics and writers missed all these great albums that Chick did in addition to his Return to Forever albums, which were also great. Anytime you got a group with people like Bill Connors and Al Di Meola, that was the peak of Return to Forever. I mean, how can anyone not like Flora Purim and Joe Farrell [who played important roles on a few Return to Forever albums]? That band was absolutely crystalline, everything they did was just gorgeous.RENEE ROSNES His fusion playing — electric playing, whatever genre you want to call it — was as harmonically and rhythmically complex as all the music he wrote. It wasn’t that anything was dumbed down. It was all beautiful, and from his very individual mind. He remained curious, whether it was classical, bebop, Latin, electric, acoustic. He really had a limitless range and he seemed to be fearless. He didn’t really seem to care what anyone thought, what the critics thought, he would just go ahead and make the music he wanted to make.“He really had a limitless range and he seemed be fearless,” Renee Rosnes said.Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images)BÉLA FLECK It just was all music to him. So I don’t know if there was much of a line between the different styles. In terms of Return to Forever, for me, I don’t think I would be doing anything I’m doing if it wasn’t for that band. In 1975, I saw them at the Beacon Theater and I wouldn’t have gone on to try to play the banjo the way I play. I wouldn’t have had the Flecktones. Fusion has almost gotten a bad name or something, but if you go back to the original stuff, this music had a lot of intelligence to it. It was not just rock with jazz. It was its own thing. It really was a fusion.RUBÉN BLADES Chick was always curious, and I think that that is the real definition of an intellectual, an artist constantly curious. He collaborated with a lot of different people and showed them ways that perhaps were not clear to them at the time, no matter how successful they were. The opportunities that he created for music to go forward are impossible to consider as a whole. He was just an incredibly curious and talented man.Corea was unusually attentive in the way he worked with musicians, his sense of generosity and mentoring. Can you talk about that?FLECK He had this thing about giving permission to everybody to do what they needed to do, or what they ought to do, which was be themselves. One of the first times he came to play with me in the Flecktones in Nashville, we did an interview and the idea of rules came up in music and he said something like: “Well, there are no rules. If there’s anybody out there who thinks there’s any rules, I hereby give you permission to ignore them.” When we were in the airports, you’re standing in a line and there’d be those barriers, and he would always walk around and pop them out so that people wouldn’t have to stand on the lines anymore.“This music had a lot of intelligence to it,” Béla Fleck said. “It was not just rock with jazz. It was its own thing. It really was a fusion.”Jessica Hill/Associated PressMCBRIDE I was very fortunate to play with Chick a lot with Roy Haynes. Even though it was Chick’s band, he always put the power with Roy. We went on the road with the Remembering Bud Powell Quintet in the summer of 1996 and I remember after we rehearsed each arrangement, Chick would say something like, “Roy, is that cool?” You know, “Is that the right vibe?” And it made me love Chick even more because even though it was his band, he was checking with Roy Haynes to make sure everything was cool.FLECK Because I play with different kinds of people, I get asked, “How do you play all this stuff?” And I say, “I really don’t. I just play like myself all the time, and it’s the people around me that change.” He was just so him, anything he did had the stamp. I mean, is there any Chick Corea thing you could hear that you wouldn’t know? It was him within three or four notes. So he just had this language.MCBRIDE Even with the Foo Fighters.ROSNES Or even going right back to the very beginning, you know, the beginning of when he was playing with Mongo Santamaría, Cal Tjader — I mean, he still sounded like himself even then.GAYLE MORAN He really wanted to be a better classical player, and he worked at it. He practiced Mozart over and over and over. He said to me more than once, “If I could practice 24 hours a day, maybe someday I’ll be a pretty good piano player.” He says that to me [laughs], yeah!What kind of things did Chick share about his influences and the musicians he played with?MORAN I got this little family concert together because the doctor told me it wouldn’t be long. I didn’t tell anybody that news — we were celebrating our anniversary coming up. We all started “All Blues,” the famous Miles tune, and it was really beautiful. And he just very gently raised up his hand and said: “That is so beautiful. Now I want to show you the original arrangement that Miles taught me.” And he took his time and energy to teach everybody — When does the melody come? When does the piano come? His eyes brightened up when he was talking, and we played it and he gave everybody a thumbs up and, and we were supposed to have one more concert the next night. He wasn’t strong enough. And then he had this next adventure.MCBRIDE Chick deeply loved Horace Silver, and I don’t think a lot of people draw that line between Horace and Chick. He would talk about Horace so much and how much he influenced the structure of his writing. He was telling me the story about when he first joined the Blue Mitchell-Junior Cook Quintet, which was basically the old Horace Silver Band, and he was like, man, I always feel like the one thing I was never really that great at was playing the blues. I was like, Chick, I’m going to blindfold test you, and I played a recording of him playing with Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook. And I said, this cat sounds a lot like Wynton Kelly. And he’s like, yeah, that’s swinging. And then like after about eight bars, he went, wait a second — and I said, yeah, you can very much play the blues. You funky as hell, Chick!“That band was absolutely crystalline,” Christian McBride said of Return to Forever, “everything they did was just gorgeous.”Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images MORAN Oh, that’s great to hear, Christian. I heard him say that too. He didn’t think he really could. Of course Miles gave him the big compliment, and, and that made Chick just fly — it was his first gig with Miles, no rehearsal, no charts. Chick was getting a drink by the bar because he thought he didn’t do so good. And then Miles whispers in his ear. I can’t say the word Miles used … But Chick went, Oh my goodness. He was dancing around.How did Chick influence your approach to music?BLADES He was playing at the Blue Note and I went over and said hello. So Chick asked if I would like to do something with him. I had no idea what I was going to do to fit in this thing. You know, he goes to Mars and he goes to Jupiter, a lot of places that I don’t know how to get to. And there are no directions. I had a great time when I was with him, always respectful. It was very hard for me to call Tito Puente “Tito,” you know what I mean? That’s the way he wanted to be called, he was Chick. I knew immediately he would not bat an eye if I would do “Pennies From Heaven” with a salsa band. Right away, he would go like, oh, that’s wonderful, you know?ROSNES He was so open, and his imagination just knew no bounds. He had a desire to cross all those lines, musically, and play anything. That definitely inspired me in so many ways, compositionally as well as just playing the piano and improvising. I know that when I write, I don’t really think about what genre I’m writing. I follow in his footsteps that way, in terms of just having the whole world at your fingertips. He was so focused all the time, too. One piece I’m excited about playing at the show is “Eternal Child” because I I’d heard it, but I never studied it. It’s such a beautiful composition.MORAN Oh my, he wrote that in the middle of the night, Renee, I remember in L.A. We were trying to sleep and he just said, “I hear something.” And he had to get out of bed and go down. And he said, when he wrote that down on the paper, by the piano, he was crying.Corea with his wife, Gayle Moran, in 2020.Chick Corea ProductionsROSNES Well, it’s beautiful. I kind of think of Chick himself as the eternal child. He has that spirit. He had an email address at one point, something with “eternal child” in it.BLADES When I recorded “Spanish Heart,” he sent me the lyric and I’m singing on top of what the chart was, but I did the thing in my tone, and he said: “Oh, that’s great. Let’s do that.” He felt a special attachment to that song. It was a tremendous honor for me to do it. He was someone who called, he talked to you, he would prod you. He was always keeping in touch. I don’t know how his heart was big enough to be able to keep up with all this stuff. I’m terrible at that. I love people, but I don’t tell them.MORAN You hear those lyrics and it sounds like a love song, and that’s what I thought it was. One time I said, “Oh sweetie, you wrote that for me.” And he said, “Well, yeah, but it’s for them.” And he meant the audience, a love song for the audience. That’s how it ends, he says “I give it all to you.” More

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      Camila Cabello Gets in Her Head, and 16 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kelsea Ballerini, Syd, Oliver Sim 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.Camila Cabello featuring Willow, ‘Psychofreak’Alienation gets an electronic lilt in “Psychofreak” from Camila Cabello’s “Familia,” which is actually stacked with songs about jealousy. In “Psychofreak” she sings about feeling dissociated, insecure and suspicious: “Tryin’ to get connected, no Wi-Fi/tell me that you love me, are you lying?” Against brittle percussion and impassive chords on the off-beats, Cabello sounds relatively unruffled despite what the lyrics say, but Willow (Smith) focuses and ratchets up the anguish. JON PARELESMiranda Lambert, ‘Actin’ Up’Miranda Lambert’s “Actin’ Up” could have been just another feisty, bluesy country-rock song. “I want a sunset ride, a velvet rodeo/A Colorado high, a California glow,” she declares. Its richness is in its arrangement: its stereo, reverbed guitar picking, its syncopated drumming, the echoes and pauses placed behind her boasts. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘Heartfirst’On her 2020 album “Kelsea,” Kelsea Ballerini honed her keen ability to spotlight the sort of anxiety and self-doubt that many other country singers conveniently crop out of the frame. The single “Heartfirst,” though, is all about pushing those impediments aside and jumping headlong into new romance: “That voice in my head says to slow down, but it can’t feel your hands on my hips right now,” she sings. Recommended for anyone who revisited Taylor Swift’s version of “Red” last year and wished someone were still making glimmering, wholehearted pop-country songs like that in the present tense. LINDSAY ZOLADZBanks, ‘Meteorite’Banks’s songs bring a deep wariness to her relationships. “We’re already in bed, you may as well lie,” she sings as “Meteorite” begins. But in this track, syncopation fights pessimism. Handclaps, stop-and-start drums and backup vocals that hint at Balkan and African call-and-response insist that this iffy romance could still push ahead. PARELESPieri, ‘Vente Pa Aca’It was only a matter of time until the textures of hyperpop collided with reggaeton. Consider the Mexican-born, Brooklyn-based artist Daniela Pieri its champion: Her new single “Vente Pa Aca” interlaces a muted dembow riddim, serrated synths and gauzy speaker feedback lifted straight from a PC Music compilation. In an Auto-Tuned shrill, one that carries just enough of a punk edge, she intones, “No te quiero perder/tú y yo hasta el amanecer” (“I don’t want to lose you/Me and you till dawn”). ISABELIA HERRERASyd, ‘Fast Car’“Broken Hearts Club,” the first album in five years from Syd — a member of the R&B collective the Internet and a one-time Odd Future upstart — is mostly an intimate chronicle of a relationship’s demise, but the sultry “Fast Car” conjures a moment before things went sour. A driving, 4-4 beat and glossy ’80s sheen provide a backdrop for Syd’s vaporous vocals (“No one can see inside,” she croons, “do with me what you like”) before a glorious, Prince-like guitar solo breaks the whole song open like a cracked sunroof. ZOLADZOliver Sim, ‘Fruit’Harnessing the high drama of a power ballad, but holding all the airiness of the xx’s gauzy R&B, Oliver Sim’s “Fruit” is the kind of queer anthem only he could make. Produced by his bandmate Jamie xx, “Fruit” is a love letter to a younger self coming to terms with queer identity. “You can dress it away, talk it away/Dull down the flame/But it’s all pretend,” Sim whispers, oozing melancholia. He may have been the last member of the xx to go solo, but it has been well worth the wait. HERRERAFlorist, ‘Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)’This one’s a tear-jerker. Emily Sprague — sometimes a solo artist, sometimes the leader of the Brooklyn indie-folk group Florist — recounts the life of her late mother and her own early childhood in a series of vivid, cleareyed snapshots (“I’ve seen photos of the living room, we didn’t have a lot”), sung atop a gentle, fingerpicked chord progression. Synthesizer whirs mingle with bird chirps in the song’s airy atmosphere; Sprague and the band actually recorded it on a porch. That sonic embrace of the natural world becomes even more poignant toward the end of the song, which will appear on a forthcoming self-titled Florist album, when Sprague sings in a peaceful murmur, “She’s in the bird song, she won’t be gone.” ZOLADZDaniel Rossen, ‘Unpeopled Space’“Unpeopled Space,” a dazzling highlight from the former Grizzly Bear guitar virtuoso Daniel Rossen’s first full-length solo album “You Belong Here,” is a searching meditation about leaving the city for the country, as Rossen himself did a decade ago. But his arrangement is so full of compositional surprises and instrumental chatter — shape-shifting acoustic guitar riffs, croaking strings and dynamic percussion from his former bandmate Christopher Bear — that he makes the natural world sound every bit as alive as a teeming metropolis. “Whatever was, whatever will,” he sings to the vast green space around him, “we belong here now.” ZOLADZPink Floyd featuring Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox, ‘Hey, Hey Rise Up’Andriy Khlyvnyuk from the Ukrainian band Boombox returned to his homeland to fight the Russian invasion. From Kyiv, he made an Instagram post of his defiant, full-throated rendition of a resistance anthem, “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” singing with a rifle slung across his chest. It moved Nick Mason and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd to build a full-length track around it — their first new Pink Floyd song since 1994, which will benefit Ukrainian relief. Pink Floyd accompanies Khlyvnyuk with somber gravity, buttressing him with organ chords and choir harmonies; a wailing, clawing Gilmour guitar solo sustains the mood of grim determination. PARELESJoyce Manor, ‘Gotta Let It Go’Emo bands tend to be verbose, but Torrance, Calif.’s Joyce Manor are unusually efficient — as if Taking Back Sunday had attended the Guided by Voices school of songwriting. “Gotta Let It Go,” a two-minute ripper from the band’s forthcoming album “40 oz. to Fresno” (out June 10 and named after an autocorrected text about Sublime) showcases the lead singer and guitarist Barry Johnson’s rabid but melodic holler, alongside the sort of crushing waves of distorted guitar that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on late-90s alt-rock radio. “You say it’s cute but you think it’s ugly,” Johnson shouts on the pummeling bridge — yep, a bridge in a two-minute song! Told you these guys are efficient. ZOLADZEl Alfa, Braulio Fogón, French Montana and Kaly Ocho, ‘Máquina de Dinero’El Alfa’s ascent as the king of Dominican dembow has come with its fair share of missteps: diluted EDM bangers, or pop-dembow tracks with a little too much gloss. So “Máquina de Dinero,” from his fourth studio album, “Sabiduría,” is an unexpected bombshell. El Alfa deploys his double entendres and witty raps over a gritty, shrapnel-like beat from his go-to producer Chael Produciendo, its deliciously raw, unfinished texture aligning more closely with the coarseness of his own early hits. His guests are surprising, too — Braulio Fogón and Kaly Ocho, titans of el bajo mundo (the underground dembow scene), along with French Montana. Just try not to laugh out loud when Montana says, “’Rican or Dominican, she bustin’ out the skirt,” and mimics the addictive hook from El Alfa’s summer heater “La Mamá de la Mamá.” HERRERAAlicia Keys, ‘City of Gods (Part II)’Alicia Keys let herself be treated as a mere hook singer alongside Fivio Foreign and Kanye West on “City of Gods,” shunted aside as they touted their careers. But with “City of Gods (Part II)” she reclaims the song as the plea of a spurned lover, begging, “Don’t leave me, go easy,” amid towering piano chords and cavernous bass tones, a voice trying to find its way through the cityscape. PARELESSun’s Signature, ‘Golden Air’Sun’s Signature is the partnership of Elisabeth Fraser from Cocteau Twins and Damon Reece from Massive Attack. In the 1990s, both groups conjured encompassing atmospheres, but in different registers. Cocteau Twins were mistily ethereal; Massive Attack was bassy and seismic. “Golden Air,” the first song from an EP due in June, is more protean. It works through multiple transformations — tinkly Baroque-pop, Minimalist a cappella vocal layers, shimmering psychedelic march — as Fraser sings cosmic musings: “My heart shall say to me/Do with me something.” PARELESS. Carey, ‘Sunshower’S. Carey, a longtime collaborator with Bon Iver, goes for billowing bliss in “Sunshower.” His multitracked falsetto harmonizes with cascading guitars and saxophones as he surrenders to the unexplainable beauty of a deep connection: “I don’t know myself before I knew you,” he realizes. PARELESSam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz, ‘Something Real’One afternoon in Los Angeles, the saxophonist, keyboardist and composer Sam Gendel improvised some songs with Antonia Cytrynowicz, the younger sister of his partner, the filmmaker Marcella Cytrynowicz; at the time Antonia was 11 years old. They haven’t played them before or since. Luckily they recorded them, and realized they were good enough to release as an album; “Live a Little” is due May 13. In “Something Real,” Gendel circled through an undulating, slightly gloomy four-chord keyboard pattern as Antonia mused about what she was hearing: “Never knowing, never feeling/Like a sound, that is nice,” she sang. “You’re nice and gentle.” But dissonant feedback wells up at the end, suggesting that safety is fragile. PARELESMyra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet, ‘For the Love of Fire and Water: II.’On “For the Love of Fire and Water,” the esteemed pianist and bandleader Myra Melford helms a new band featuring some of the most distinctive players in improvised music today: Ingrid Laubrock on saxophone, Tomeka Reid on cello, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Susie Ibarra on drums. On Track 2 of the 10-part suite, the quintet pulls itself forward with a mix of lethargy and restlessness, Halvorson and Laubrock — longtime musical intimates — carrying the nervy melody over Melford’s halting left-hand pattern, then improvising together in dyspeptic bursts. The tune itself is hard to keep track of, and the meter tough to count, but the stubbornness of the pulse and the resonance of the harmony may linger in your ear long after the track fades away. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      An Afrofuturism Festival Brings an Energy Shift to Carnegie Hall

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      The inaugural event explored a movement about denial and transcendence in the most institutional music hall in New York City.The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldn’t fathom why, on the country’s most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensemble’s wondrous “array of odd instruments” and “colorful costumes” out of view.The messages in Ra’s music, and his riddle-like public statements, could’ve helped Wilson understand. “​​On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things,” Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. “As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea of the impossible more and more.” Perhaps the most appealing impossibility, for Ra, was to escape — to disappear.The Arkestra returned to Carnegie Hall in February, almost three decades after Ra’s death, to help kick-start the hall’s first-ever Afrofuturism festival, a series of concerts on its major stages, with satellite events held in smaller venues across New York, around the country and online. Those programs included screenings of sci-fi films made by Black directors, comics lectures and panels on social theory.All tied back to Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that mixes realistic racial pessimism with audacious fantasy, and that holds an increasingly prominent place in culture today. Afrofuturism picks up on a more than century-old mode in Black American art: fusing the tools of sci-fi and surrealism with the histories and belief systems of African societies, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, in search of new models.The trumpeter Theo Croker made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March alongside the keyboardist Mike King, the bassist Eric Wheeler and the drummer Shekwoaga Ode.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“You can call Afrofuturism the high culture of the African diaspora right now,” Reynaldo Anderson, a Temple University scholar and a co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, said in an interview. He was on the five-person committee of scholars and artists that curated the festival, and he sounded well aware of the inherent contradictions of trying to bring a movement about denial and transcendence into the most institutional music hall in New York City.“The Carnegie function is going to be remembered as bringing all those threads together at a mainstream institution,” he said. “I think we made the argument successfully.”That’s partly because the artists they chose knew how to treat reclamation as a viable alternative to escape. Camae Ayewa, a speculative poet and electronic musician who performs as Moor Mother, sat in with the Arkestra toward the end of its set. “I was never here,” she recited, invoking Ra, over the large ensemble’s turbid, thumping swing. “From 1619 to Wakanda, I don’t exist/Whose map is this? Whose timeline?”Then she issued a warning, seemingly to herself: “Don’t be truth in front of the vultures/Don’t be truth in Carnegie Hall.”The festival’s performances were stacked with moments like this: disruptions of the space, caught between gratitude and suspicion. All the performers seemed sincerely thrilled to be there, and nearly all of them went out of their way to say how welcomed they’d been by the staff and the curators. Most also expressed a kind of surprise.Fatoumata Diawara, the incendiary Malian vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, headlined a bill in Zankel Hall that also featured Chimurenga Renaissance, a transnational band mixing hip-hop, lounge music, Zimbabwean protest songs and Afrobeats. Diawara and her five-piece band administered energy to the room as an undiluted concentrate, playing distorted, tension-ratcheting desert blues and dance music from the West African coast.Her songs are mostly in Bambara, which she sings over tightly riveted rhythms drawn from the Wassoulou region of Mali or the highlife tradition of Ghana. She, too, insisted on the right to remain partly unknown. “Many people told me, ‘Why don’t you sing in English?’” she mused between songs. “I don’t need to sing in English to connect with you guys!” A roar rose up to agree, but the point was already proved.Fatoumata Diawara performed with a band featuring Sam Dickey on bass and Victor Campbell on drums.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesDiawara did one song in English: “Sinnerman,” the old spiritual and Nina Simone staple. By the time the quintet reached a canter, many in the crowd had stood up to dance, and those still in their seats seemed to have loosened up completely. It rearranged the energy in the room, made it unrulier. Not long after, in an encore, she pulled up about 10 audience members to dance with her, and the disarray spread to the stage.There was nothing blatantly futuristic about Diawara’s performance, and she was one of a few artists on the bill who have not made a point of nominally affiliating themselves with Afrofuturism. But it felt unbounded, in a way that made you think about how tightly energy like this is often asked to be kept in when it’s not onstage.By contrast, the flutist Nicole Mitchell often does compose for her Black Earth Ensemble with the science-fiction writings of Octavia Butler in mind. Mitchell and her band gave one of the most consistently breathtaking performances of the festival. Mixing Mitchell’s streaked, blustery flute and echoing effects with the inchoate, chewed-up speech sounds of Mankwe Ndosi; the earthy, shifting beats of the drummer Avreeayl Ra; and the contributions of a small crowd of acoustic instrumentalists, this was music with drive and narrative of its own, but it seemed to make every move in anticipation of something far grander to come. That grand thing never quite arrived, which also felt right.The Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig led a group that included four fellow synthesizer artists and a concert pianist, all playing together, and just about everything they did was grandiose. He leaned into fan favorites from the 1990s, and delivered a key insight during his stage banter: Most of the beats he made as a young person, he said, were crafted with the idea that they might one day become the soundtrack to a “Blade Runner” movie.The Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble performed grandiose versions of fan favorites from his early days.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOpening the festival on Feb. 12, Flying Lotus, who may be Craig’s best-known heir, played a sold-out show at the nearly 3,000-seat Stern Auditorium, flanked by the harpist Brandee Younger and the violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Draped in a white robe, and huddled over what looked like an ice sculpture crowned with a laptop, he ran through new and old material, heaving from agitated beats to wide-open airscapes that the three musicians gradually curved and bent. Abstract projections crawled across the ceiling; the elegant molding overhead became electric goo.The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by the (white) cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, the year Ra died, in a series of interviews he’d conducted with Black writers: Samuel R. Delany, a novelist; Tricia Rose, a hip-hop scholar; and Greg Tate, a music and cultural critic. Those interviews, for a special edition of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, are revealing in a number of ways. In them, Dery framed the proposition of Afrofuturism as a conundrum. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” he wondered.But Tate — an expert across the fields of jazz, film, comics, Black history and cultural studies — countered, pointing out: “You can be backward-looking and forward-thinking at the same time.” In fact, that very action sits at the center of Black cultural practice, especially in music. “I see science fiction as continuing a vein of philosophical inquiry and technological speculation that begins with the Egyptians and their incredibly detailed meditations on life after death,” Tate said.Shelley Nicole of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber steps to center stage.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesTate’s sudden death in December at 64 sent a chill through the world of arts and letters. Writing since the early 1980s for The Village Voice and other publications, he had been the rare figure who could comfortably present the patois and perspective of everyday Black life to a mainstream (read: white) audience, without any act of translation or dilution. His presence at the festival would have been meaningful.His shadow loomed generously instead. And for the festival’s closing night on Sunday, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, the genre-stirring big band that Tate co-founded in the late 1990s, played two sets of thrashing, syncopated music: five vocalists, seven horn players, two drummers and two bassists, all in the flow. Bringing the show to a close, the guitarist Vernon Reid delivered a last homage to Tate. Reid and the band chanted Tate’s phone number back and forth, and he asked over and over: “Whose band is this?”“Tate’s!”Reid continued: “He wanted you to make a sound. If you made a sound from your heart, you were in the Burnt Sugar Band.”Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber’s set was in many ways a homage to Tate, its co-founder.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times More