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      Jazz Freed Keith LaMar’s Soul. Can It Help Him Get Off Death Row?

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      With concerts and a new album, musicians are trying to draw attention to the case of an inmate, convicted in the death of five other prisoners, who they believe deserves a new trial.Keith LaMar has spent 33 years in prison, nearly all of it in solitary confinement. He is scheduled to be executed in Ohio next year, after being convicted in the 1993 killing of five fellow inmates during a prison riot.But a cadre of jazz musicians led by Albert Marquès, a pianist, composer and New York City schoolteacher, is convinced he is not guilty. And they’ve decided to put music to work as a tool to help LaMar, who they say was denied a fair trial in the inmate deaths and should be granted a new one.“I believe he’s innocent,” Marquès said in an interview. “But if you don’t believe that he’s innocent? Cool. Agree, at least, to judge him again. Reopen the case. Let him prove that what he tried to say, but he was not ever able to say, is false or true. Give him another chance.”For more than a year, Marquès has organized concerts to draw attention to LaMar’s case. He is part of a wider group of civic activists and lawyers — the “Justice for Keith LaMar” campaign — that argues the government illegally withheld inmate statements that could have helped LaMar at trial and offered inmates who testified against him leniency and special deals.LaMar, who was convicted in the 1993 deaths of five fellow inmates, has maintained his innocence through multiple appeals.  An impressive roster of jazz professionals, including Salim Washington, Brian Jackson, Arturo O’Farrill and Caroline Davis, have played at the Freedom First concerts, which began on a broiling afternoon in August 2020 at the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, where some 25 musicians performed in the middle of a pandemic. There had not been a single rehearsal. They had no permit. The sound equipment was cobbled together. The budget nonexistent.Three concerts later, Marquès and the others are producing an album this month in conjunction with LaMar. A year in the making, it will feature remarks and poetry by LaMar, a 10th grade dropout who has educated himself in prison by reading Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Cornel West, as well as jazz from sympathetic musicians who’ve recorded covers and fresh compositions from locations including Spain and Oregon.“To meet someone like Keith LaMar, who’s not only incarcerated, but on death row, unfairly, unjustly, it’s a heavy thing,” said Washington, a tenor saxophonist and jazz educator with a doctorate from Harvard. “But the warmth that he has as a human, and the elegance and eloquence that he has as a scholar, and just the charge that he has for himself, and that he’s able to exude to the rest of us, is a thing of beauty.”Beyond music’s primal power to sooth, energize and inspire, it has helped focus attention on the pleas of those incarcerated for crimes they say they did not commit. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer convicted of murder, spent almost a decade in prison before Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” raised the profile of his case. He was ultimately freed years later.Bob Dylan played “Hurricane” at a 1975 benefit concert for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter at Madison Square Garden.Larry Morris/The New York TimesCarter spent 19 years in prison. In 1985, a judge voided his conviction and ordered his release.William E. Sauro/The New York TimesMarquès, who by day leads the music department at the Institute for Collaborative Education in Manhattan, is not Bob Dylan. Still, his efforts drew nearly 100 people last November to the most recent Freedom First concert inside a black box theater at Northwestern University.When the prison riot erupted in 1993, LaMar, a former drug dealer, was serving an 18-years-to-life sentence after pleading guilty in 1989 to fatally shooting a man, a drug user and childhood friend, who he said had attempted to rob him.Authorities said that during the riot, LaMar became an enforcer and used the chaos of a cellblock takeover by other prisoners to kill inmates who some viewed as “snitches.”LaMar is adamant that he had no role in the killing of the inmates during what became known as the Lucasville prison uprising, an 11-day siege during which some inmates seized hostages and a cell block to protest conditions.Ten people, nine inmates and a guard, died.LaMar suggests he was a convenient scapegoat for officials, an inmate who loudly objected to prison conditions and who had refused to cooperate in the riot investigation.“I think they came to me under the impression that I would plead guilty,” LaMar said in an interview. “And I think that that was a way for them to really kind of sweep these cases under the table.”But multiple appeals court decisions have gone against him, and the prosecutors who handled the case, Bill Anderson and Seth Tieger, remain unswayed.“To Bill and I, he is extremely guilty, he is where he belongs: on death row,” Tieger said in an interview. “But all of this was brought out at the trial and in all of his different appeals, and nobody has believed that anything was done wrong at all, and that this death sentence has been upheld consistently all the way through this.”The riot at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility was triggered by the warden’s demand that inmates submit to tuberculosis testing that Sunni Muslim inmates objected to on religious grounds. LaMar was in a recreation yard, waiting to re-enter his cell block, when inmates inside overpowered the guards and took control. He said he briefly went in, intending to grab some personal belongings, but was told by one of the riot leaders that if he didn’t want to be involved in the takeover, he had to leave.The Freedom First concerts to benefit LaMar have been organized by Albert Marquès, a pianist and music teacher in New York.Danielle A. Scruggs for The New York Times“And so I came back out onto the yard without retrieving my property,” LaMar said. He said he remained there until two or three in the morning.Prosecutors said LaMar actually stayed inside the cell block, killing or ordering the killing of four inmates there, and a fifth inmate the next day after being placed in a separate cell block with other prisoners as the riot continued.In the aftermath of the chaos, the crime scenes were too contaminated for investigators to find forensic evidence, such as DNA, to help identify the killers. So witness statements became critical.But before the trial, when it came time to review who had identified LaMar in the killings, prosecutors balked at turning over the statements. All of the inmates had been promised confidentiality, they said.The prosecutors asked the judge to decide what information to give the defendant. The judge ruled that the names of 43 inmates who had been interviewed by investigators should be turned over to the defense. Separately, prosecutors were to turn over 11 pages of brief summaries, without any names attached.It was the defense’s job to figure out who had said what — a nearly impossible task, even with the additional time and funds the judge offered, said Herman Carson, one of LaMar’s trial lawyers.“That list of names and statements, it was like, ‘Judge, you could give me another five years; these guys aren’t going to talk if we just walk in there cold and say, ‘Hey, which one of these 43 statements did you make?’” Carson said.Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, and Justin Murray, an associate professor at New York Law School who researches disclosure disputes in criminal proceedings, called the judge’s decision unusual, one that unfairly handicapped LaMar’s lawyers.“People have tried to reopen the Lucasville cases, and it seems like the courts are just like, ‘Oh, this is that black hole called Lucasville,’” Godsey said. “‘We’re not going to look at it.’”Given the death of the prison guard, LaMar’s trial in 1995 was moved to avoid any prejudicial climate to the adjoining county, just 30 miles away and also overwhelmingly white. Prosecutors used peremptory challenges to remove the only two Black potential jurors, so LaMar’s case was heard by an all-white jury.Eight inmates testified that LaMar was involved in the killings. Six, including Stacey Gordon, said LaMar had led the “death squad.” But a year earlier, Gordon had given a sworn statement to investigators in which he said he had not seen LaMar in the cell block, and that he did not know who LaMar was.That statement was never turned over to the defense, one of a number that defense lawyers have argued would have helped LaMar, but were withheld. Initially charged with attempted murder and seven counts of assault in connection with the riot, Gordon testified after reaching a plea agreement for only two assaults.Ten people died during the uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, which lasted 11 days.  Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDana Hansen Chavis, a lawyer for LaMar, said Gordon’s statement could have been used to impeach his credibility and should have been turned over under the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense.“Before we, as a society, actually go through with taking the life of another human being,” Chavis said in an interview, “I believe that we need to be absolutely sure that society has followed all of the rules in posing the punishment and is absolutely sure that that person is guilty of the crime.”The prosecutors said that they had not withheld any evidence that was exculpatory from LaMar’s lawyers.“They were very, very aggressive attorneys,” Tieger said. “And we turned over everything that we were required to under the rules of discovery.”LaMar took the stand at trial and testified that he had not been involved in the killings. Five inmates testified for the defense, four of whom said they had seen LaMar in the recreation yard shortly after the riot started. Two said they saw him in the yard throughout the day.But the jury ultimately convicted LaMar in the murders and sentenced him to death, a decision that has been upheld through several appeals.In ruling against LaMar, some appellate panels found that, even if the withheld evidence had been exculpatory, it would not have outweighed other evidence and led to a different verdict. Several found that any withheld evidence was not “material” to his defense because they said statements from inmates who implicated themselves or others in the killings did not preclude LaMar from having had a role, since so many prisoners had taken part.Dwayne Svette, the son of one of the inmates LaMar was convicted of killing, said those trying to help LaMar are misguided.“I understand,” Svette said, “that there’s been people on death row before and they’ve got released because some evidence came up where they was actually not the people who did the crime. But that’s not the case in this man.”The cover of the “Freedom First” album features LaMar, Marquès and the names of other musicians who contributed music as part of an effort to block the execution next year.For those who have taken up LaMar’s cause, the evidence that he has been treated unjustly appears quite substantial and they have been equally impressed by his drive to overturn the verdict. In 2013, he spent eight months writing “Condemned,” an autobiographical book that details his experience from the day of the uprising through his time on death row. LaMar wrote the memoir on a typewriter, then dictated the story over the phone to a friend who transcribed each word.During his time in prison, LaMar became a student of jazz, and credits the music — especially “A Love Supreme,” the jazz journey by John Coltrane — with teaching him to improvise, to avoid being engulfed by his own anger. The Coltrane work is often played at the Freedom First concerts.LaMar came to the attention of the musicians after talking to Mother Jones about his case and his experience in making the best use of his time while in solitary confinement. Brian Jackson, a jazz musician who frequently collaborated with Gil Scott-Heron, then reached out to LaMar and they created a podcast about music and justice that attracted additional interest.LaMar typically calls in to the Freedom First concerts from the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown to say hello, offer remarks and poetry and listen to the music, his words at times interrupted by a tinny voice.“This call,” the voice says, “is originating from an Ohio correctional facility, and may be recorded and monitored.”On a bitterly cold Saturday in mid-November, LaMar called into the Northwestern theater outside Chicago for the most recent concert. He read poetry, both others’ and his own, like his poem “Tell ’Em the Truth.”Salim Washington performs at the Freedom First concert last November at the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center on the campus of Northwestern University. Danielle A. Scruggs for The New York Times“Children of slaves who braved the worst of it, so we, their children and grandchildren, could make the most of it,” LaMar read. “To shield us from the pain of knowing the truth, they never explained what kind of society we were born into.”The concert had opened with a Coltrane piece: “Alabama,” which some believe the jazz great wrote in response to the killing of four African American girls in a 1963 bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Later, the composer and alto saxophonist Caroline Davis blew the first haunting notes of “A Love Supreme” — the music that LaMar says freed him, at least internally.“This music was born out of suffering, I think,” Davis, a former composer-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, said in an interview. “That essence of it is what, in its musical form, people can feel. People can sense that suffering. But there’s also a lot of joy in the music.”Marquès said he is hopeful about the ability of the music to broaden support for LaMar’s case. But, he said, he had already benefited personally: LaMar, who he met in person last summer, has become one of his best friends.“There is a human connection,” he said, “that goes beyond those walls that are between us. And it’s very powerful. All of this comes from love.”Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Illinois. Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      A Hallowed London Jazz Club Comes to Life Onscreen

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      The new documentary “Ronnie’s” tells the story of a venue that reshaped the city’s jazz scene, and the mysterious musician who lent it his name.Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club has been an enduring beacon of musical genius in London. Any self-respecting jazzhead had to make the pilgrimage to the venue during its 1960s heyday. Musicians, too: Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald played it, along with Buddy Rich and Dizzy Gillespie.Scott, one of its benevolent owners, was as hallowed as the establishment itself, but remained a somewhat mysterious figure throughout his life. A charming tenor saxophonist with a warm demeanor and great comedic timing, he also had a gambling addiction and endured bouts of depression. Even those closest to him didn’t feel like they connected with him.“He was a very hard person to know,” Paul Pace, the club’s current music bookings coordinator, said in an interview. “He was a very quiet, private man.”Scott died in 1996 at the age of 69. The venue he opened with a fellow saxophonist, Pete King, is still holy ground among jazz supper clubs in the United Kingdom, and “Ronnie’s,” a new documentary getting a wider release in the United States this week, offers a multidimensional view of Scott and the nightclub through the perspective of journalists, friends and musicians who knew him — and a host of live performance footage. The film celebrates how the spot with narrow hallways and a tiny stage housed all sorts of grand performances, including Jimi Hendrix’s last gig before his 1970 death. And it reveals that the secret of the venue’s success largely was Scott, himself, who drew in patrons like he was an old friend who just happened to know the best players of his era.The tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins first went to Ronnie Scott’s in the 1960s as part of a deal that allowed American musicians to play British venues and vice versa. That partnership was brokered by King, who served as the club’s manager and saw the need to book established jazz artists to draw bigger crowds. His work paved the way for other notable artists, like the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk, to play there.The club is still active today, drawing a range of artists from different scenes.Greenwich Entertainment“A lot of people hadn’t seen me in Europe,” Rollins said in a phone interview. “It was my first time in London, so I had a good time just looking at the scene. Every club has its own demeanor, and playing there was a wonderful experience. That was the place to go — Ronnie Scott’s club.”Scott, whose jazz career started in his teens, helped open the club in 1959 after a trip to New York City, where he heard Charlie Parker and Davis play at the Three Deuces along East 52nd Street. He was so taken by the jazz emanating from the New York scene that he wanted to replicate the feeling at home. “To walk in this little place and hear this band with this American sound we’d never really heard in person before — amazing,” Scott says in the film.With assistance from a £1,000 loan from Scott’s stepfather, he and King opened the club as a basement venue on Gerrard Street in Soho, a neighborhood with coffee shops and after-hour venues that catered to British counterculture. Before then, the space had been used as a tea bar and restroom for taxi drivers. Scott and King saw it as a place where British jazz musicians could work out material in a safe space — all strains of jazz were welcome — and get paid fairly, not a small thing in that era. The club, which moved to a bigger space on Firth Street in 1968, is known as the birthplace of British jazz.Yet the narrative wasn’t all sunny: Ronnie Scott’s had good and bad times financially, and sometimes teetered on the verge of closing until some last-minute lifeline kept the lights on. Then there was the issue of Scott’s gambling. “When things were really desperate,” King says in the film, “I used to come to work and there were guys in suits with notebooks there in the afternoon, making notes of how much the piano was worth, and how much the tables and chairs were worth. We were very close to just having to forget it all.”The film’s director, Oliver Murray, heard many similar stories about Scott while making his documentary. “Multiple people said to me that if he was able to gamble the club on certain occasions, he would’ve gambled away the club and then been absolutely devastated,” he said in an interview. “But that’s the complexity of the guy, just a true jazz man in that sense. He does live up to the stereotype of the musician with demons.”Ella Fitzgerald onstage at the club in a scene from “Ronnie’s.”Greenwich EntertainmentMurray was brought into the project by one of its producers, Eric Woollard-White, who frequented the club. One of Murray’s goals was to humanize Scott for a younger audience less familiar with the club’s golden era. “I wanted to make something that was like a passing of the torch from one generation to the next,” Murray said. The story felt especially ripe for this moment, when venues are in jeopardy because of ongoing pandemic challenges.Ronnie Scott’s remains vital, and “cultivates so much talent,” he explained. “It’s not necessarily even just the people that play, but it’s giving people in London a platform to see the very, very best, and that in itself raises the caliber of what’s going on in the city.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Kamasi Washington Blasts Into a Fresh Era, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Koffee, Lucy Dacus, Sasami 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.Kamasi Washington, ‘The Garden Path’ (Live on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’)The Los Angeles-based saxophonist and spiritual-jazz revivalist Kamasi Washington, 40, made his American late-night TV debut this week, performing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” With over a dozen instrumentalists and singers arrayed around him onstage, all draped in desert whites and golds, he presented a new composition, “The Garden Path.” Washington’s basic musical components haven’t changed since the release of “The Epic,” his breakout album: polyrhythmic funk and rock beats; a full blast of horns over a meaty rhythm section; scant harmonic or melodic movement in the song’s theme. The biggest source of magnetism here came from downstage right: It’s the voice of Dwight Trible, a Los Angeles jazz fixture, whose lush baritone carries the plangent lyrics in harmony with Patrice Quinn: “Bright minds with dark eyes/Speak loud words, tell sweet lies/Lost without a trace of a way/To get out of this misery.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKoffee, ‘Pull Up’The Jamaican firebrand Koffee, who made history as the youngest person and first woman to win a Grammy for best reggae album in 2020, has good reason to arrive triumphantly on “Pull Up,” the beatific new single from her long-awaited debut album, “Gifted,” due March 25. A liquid beat from the masterful British-Ghanian producer Jae5 trickles between Afrobeats and reggae; in the video, Koffee grins from ear to ear, mouth full of braces, as she leans out of the window of a drifting car and lets the barbs flow: “Zero to a hundred in two/Yeah, so me flex pon you.” ISABELIA HERRERAMachine Gun Kelly featuring Willow, ‘Emo Girl’A love song in which both MGK and Willow bemoan falling for the emo girl who’s just out of reach, sulkily celebrating her the way songs in the 1950s serenaded the prom queen. If this doesn’t inspire and soundtrack a Netflix awkward-teen meet-cute rom-com by this time next year I’m canceling my subscription! JON CARAMANICALucy Dacus, ‘Kissing Lessons’The songs on Lucy Dacus’s 2021 album, “Home Video,” revisited childhood memories, many of them fraught with difficult self-discoveries. “Kissing Lessons” is more cheerful. It’s a two-minute pop-punk reminiscence of being in second grade and learning to kiss from a girl who was a year older, sharing childish thoughts about what grown-up romance would be: a fond, brief, revelatory interlude. PARELESTate McRae, ‘She’s All I Wanna Be’Tate McRae has a dry, wiry voice that’s well suited to this convincingly mopey and skittish punk-pop thumper about envy: “If you say she’s nothing to worry about/then why’d you close your eyes when you said it out loud?” CARAMANICASasami, ‘Call Me Home’With each single she releases from her upcoming album “Squeeze,” the Los Angeles artist Sasami Ashworth shows off another subgenre of rock that she can pull off with effortless and idiosyncratic style. “Say It” was an industrial banger, “Skin a Rat” flirted with metal and “The Greatest” indulged in some slow-burning garage rock. Her latest, “Call Me Home,” is a lush, nostalgic blast of AM-radio psychedelia, suggesting that she’s not yet done revealing the many sides of her eclectic talent. LINDSAY ZOLADZArlo Parks, ‘Softly’The track cruises along easily, with a light boom-bap beat, a sprinkling of piano notes, leisurely guitar chords and a canopy of strings. Arlo Parks tries to keep her voice nonchalant. But she’s all too aware that her romance is ending: “Has something changed? Have I just missed the memo?” She’s shattered, and all she can do is beg her lover to “Break it to me softly.” PARELESKassi Ashton, ‘Dates in Pickup Trucks’A gifted soul vocalist hiding out in country music, Kassi Ashton sings with resonant wistfulness on “Dates in Pickup Trucks,” a lovely breeze of a song about what to do when there’s absolutely nothing to do. CARAMANICAObongjayar, ‘Try’Obongjayar is Steven Umoh, who was born in Nigeria and moved to London in his teens. He won’t be pinned down; “Try,” from his debut album due in May, jump-cuts among spacious, quasi-orchestral ambience to gently crooned electronic R&B to deep-growl toasting to a big, yearning chorus with an Afrobeats undertow. “All we do is try,” he sings, and there’s palpable ambition in every stylistic leap. PARELESMy Idea, ‘Cry Mfer’My Idea is a duo of two prolific New York-based indie musicians who also happen to be friends: Nate Amos of the experimental dance band Water for Your Eyes, and Lily Konigsberg of the art-rockers Palberta (who also released an excellent solo album, “Lily We Need to Talk Now,” late last year). “Cry Mfer,” from a forthcoming album of the same name, is less confrontational than its title might suggest, revolving around a looping, hypnotic track and Konigsberg’s reflections on a collapsing relationship: “I could be the one that makes you cry, I could be the one that makes you — ouch.” ZOLADZIlluminati Hotties, ‘Sandwich Sharer’To describe the genre of her eclectic project Illuminati Hotties — or perhaps just to thumb her nose at the absurdity of genre itself — Sarah Tudzin coined a term: “tenderpunk.” “Sandwich Sharer,” her latest one-off single, oscillates restlessly between those two adjectives. At first it seems like this song will showcase the softer side of Illuminati Hotties: “Restarted kissing,” she begins over a dramatically strummed, slow-motion chord. But before the listener can gain footing at that tempo, Tudzin suddenly kicks the song into a spunky gallop, punctuated by her humorously offbeat lyrics (“You thought I was bleeding but that’s just my spit!”). Tudzin often paints vivid and lifelike portraits of modern human relationships, and the shape-shifting nature of “Sandwich Sharer” captures the feel of one that’s constantly in flux. ZOLADZWhatever the Weather, ‘17ºC’Whatever the Weather is a new pseudonym for the English electronic musician Loraine James, who thrives on concocting dance-floor rhythms that she skews with gaps, interjections and disorienting shifts of texture. “17ºC” — from a coming album of tracks named after temperatures — ratchets up a beat from hisses, thumps, boops and blips, but continually disassembles and reformulates it: with hollows of reverb, with street and party noises, with disembodied vocal syllables, with clusters of keyboard tones and with sudden drum-machine salvos. The pulse persists, even when it’s only implied. PARELESAyver, ‘Reconciliación Con la Vida’For nearly two decades, the Peruvian label Buh Records has showcased the esoteric and avant-garde sounds of Latin America, from forgotten electroacoustic legends of the ’70s to contemporary noise artists. That mission returns in its latest release, a compilation of new faces in the Peruvian electronic scene. “Reconciliación Con la Vida,” its standout, bottles a wide spectrum of emotional textures. Lying somewhere between profound tragedy and wistful wonder, tender piano keys and sweeping string crescendos bleed into trembling beauty. It is intimate but heart-rending, like the soft caress of a lover you may never see again. HERRERAPeter Brötzmann, Milford Graves, William Parker, ‘Historic Music Past Tense Future, Side C’“Historic Music Past Tense Future” is the first in a planned series of albums on the Black Editions Archive label that will exhume previously unreleased live recordings of Milford Graves, the drummer and polymath who died last year amid a late-career re-emergence. This is the first album featuring Graves alongside the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and the bassist William Parker — all lions of the avant-garde. The third of four freely improvised, quarter-hour-long tracks, “Side C” starts as a quiet conversation between Graves and Parker, then gets lit up by Brötzmann’s tone-smashing saxophone. Midway through, Graves guides things back down to a simmer, Brötzmann drops out, and Parker begins to play a repetitive, rhythmic drone, almost like something you’d hear in Gnawa ritual. Stroking his deeply resonant, hand-altered drums, Graves brings the energy back up slowly by playing around Parker’s plucks, adding rhythms that keep his drone dancing. RUSSONELLO More

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      On ‘The 7th Hand,’ Immanuel Wilkins Sees Jazz as an Escape Pod

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      The alto saxophonist’s second album is blues-based, gospel-infused, intellectually considered music that secures his quartet’s commanding status on the scene.The alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and his quartet make bristling, physical music, both leaning into and pulling against the swing rhythm that has historically been the backbone of jazz. There’s a certain sensuality to classic swing, an element of taking your time that doesn’t seem at home amid the hamster-wheel feeling of life today. Wilkins has wisely left that part behind in favor of a layered, exploding-grid approach to rhythm.Still, there’s no confusing that this is blues-based, gospel-infused, intellectually considered music, from concept down to craft. All of which qualifies it neatly as part of the jazz tradition (pardon the four-letter word).But it’s much harder to locate his major saxophone influences than to position him in a broad lineage — which is a sign of how widely Wilkins, 24, has listened. Soon after Blue Note Records released his debut album, “Omega,” in 2020, I found myself nagged by that question: Whose alto playing casts the biggest shadow over Wilkins? Comparisons to legends like Jackie McLean or contemporaries like Logan Richardson didn’t feel right. It was J.D. Allen, a saxophonist one generation ahead of Wilkins, who solved the riddle, in a chat that summer: When he listened to Wilkins, he said, James Spaulding came to mind. It made sense on a few levels.One of jazz history’s crucial supporting cast members, Spaulding was a frequent presence on classic Blue Note albums in the early ’60s. But he also spent time playing rougher, more atonal stuff with Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Billy Bang and others. Skating alongside the tempered scale, Spaulding, now 84, might blow squirrelly, zigzagging lines at a thousand notes a minute, or pause to tug at a single note from multiple sides. These are shoes that Wilkins walks in.But he has made himself known as a composer, too, to a degree Spaulding never did, and in just a few years, his quartet — with Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass and Kweku Sumbry on drums — has become a band that members of the young generation can measure their own ideas up against.“The 7th Hand,” Wilkins’s newly released second album, confirms the quartet’s commanding status on the scene. Another collection of all originals, it is just as unrelenting as “Omega.” On tunes like “Don’t Break” and “Shadow,” Wilkins and Thomas play the melody in loosely locked unison, shifting in and out of keys, tilting and rocking the harmonic floor beneath them. Moving like this, Wilkins can switch emotional registers, even genres, with the flick of a wrist: A simple blues lick transposes into what sounds like a heart-tugging soul line, then scrambles up into something that’s undeniably jazz.“Don’t Break” includes a cameo from the Farafina Kan percussion ensemble (with which Sumbry often performs), weaving its West African hand percussion into the flow of the quartet and proving that Wilkins’s progressive take on rhythm still connects easily with its roots. The album’s other guest artist, the flutist Elena Pinderhughes, makes a strong impression on back-to-back tracks, “Witness” and “Lighthouse,” with a hard-blown and soaring sound that will be immediately recognizable to listeners who’ve heard her in Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s recent groups. Throughout the album, Thomas’s dazzling presence across the entire keyboard gives the quartet much of its depth; he’s on his way to becoming a prominent bandleader in his own right.Wilkins has said that with “The 7th Hand,” he was looking for nothing less than spiritual transmission — to make himself and the quartet into a “vessel” for the divine, in the way of a Mahalia Jackson, or a John or Alice Coltrane. Biblically, the number seven represents completion and the limits of human endeavor: On the seventh day, we rest. The album’s seventh and final track is a 26-minute free improvisation titled “Lift,” which Wilkins saw as an opportunity to set aside his own map and let spirit take over. The quartet unspools its finely woven, vigilant group sound into something wide open, achieving a kind of escape. Thomas and Sumbry sometimes sound like the free-jazz pioneers Cecil Taylor and Sunny Murray going at it; elsewhere, Wilkins and the drummer collide with the combustive power of John Coltrane and Elvin Jones.Wilkins’s idea to use this album as a means of transcendence — of exiting the body and disappearing into sound — isn’t just about worship. In interviews, he has cited contemporary theorists like Arthur Jafa with providing crucial inspiration, and he’s spoken about seeking an aesthetics of abstention: from being watched, from being sorted into commercial bins. It’s in line with a larger current in Black radical thought today, shepherded by figures like Jafa and Fred Moten. In “Glitch Feminism,” published in 2020, the writer and curator Legacy Russell proposes rethinking our entire relationship to the human body — a site of so much labeling and othering. “The glitch,” she says, is a place where we might reject capture and embrace “refusal.”It’s possible to hear “The 7th Hand” in a similar way. In her liner notes, the poet Harmony Holiday calls this album “the sound of turning away from ourselves to get back to ourselves, of how abandon can be organized into liberation with the right set of adventures and a beat to unpack them by.”Immanuel Wilkins“The 7th Hand”(Blue Note) More

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      Remembering Greg Tate, Critic and Catalyst

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherGreg Tate, the pioneering critic, died last December at 64. His 1992 anthology “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” is a startling document of the innovations taking place in the Black music, film and art of the time, and also a guidebook for a sui generis style of writing that was deeply lyrical on its own terms.Tate’s criticism was political, empathetic and skeptical all at once. It valued exuberant expressiveness along with a mischievous twist, and sought out the most provocative creators and rewarded them with close attention and, when warranted, loving scrutiny.On this week’s Popcast, conversations with two of Tate’s contemporaries about the fertile Black writing and arts scene in New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the overlap between creators and critics, and the impression Tate left on his peers and on those who came after.Guests:Michael A. Gonzales, who writes about music and true crime and is the co-author of “Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture”Joan Morgan, program director at the Center for Black Visual Culture, N.Y.U. Institute of African American Affairs, and the author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      glaive Showcases His Less Hyper Pop, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Raveena, the Weather Station, Immanuel Wilkins 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.glaive, ‘Icarus’The ostensibly summery, mid-tempo “Icarus” shows off the relatively less hyper side of the hyperpop star glaive, though its lines still hit like angst-ridden daggers: “We’re flying too close to the sun,” he sings to his romantic partner in crime. A highlight from the deluxe edition of his 2021 EP “All Dogs Go to Heaven” (cheekily retitled “Old Dog, New Tricks”),“Icarus” has an instantly catchy hook that shows why many hail glaive as the potential breakout star of his underground subgenre. But the song still retains an appealingly edgy sense of emotional mayhem: “I’m setting fire to my room, ’cause I don’t know what else to do!” LINDSAY ZOLADZThe Smile, ‘The Smoke’The Smile — Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead with Tom Skinner, a drummer from Sons of Kemet — has quickly demonstrated its range. The trio snarled through its first single, “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” only to play things cool on its second, “The Smoke.” A minute-long instrumental intro sticks to syncopated bass and dub-echoed drums, in a 10-bar pattern that threatens to trip up unwary dancers as it seems to switch between 4/4 and waltz. Yorke’s high vocals and a hazy horn arrangement join the rhythmic crosscurrent as he sings about what might be the heat of desire or destruction, crooning, “Smoke wakes me from my sleep.” JON PARELESImmanuel Wilkins, ‘Fugitive Ritual, Selah’Peaceful and incantatory, “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” offers a moment to re-center amid the dicey, kinetic tour de force that is “The 7th Hand,” the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s second album with his quartet. Wilkins is more often in a high-octane mode, but here he nearly caresses each note. He wrote “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” — which weaves through a melody built around harmonic shifts until finally landing on a repetitious, soothing coda — as a tribute to spaces like the Black church, where a distance from the white gaze allows for freer expression. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOPierre Kwenders, ‘Papa Wemba’The Congolese musician Pierre Kwenders was born in Kinshasa and has lived in Montreal since 2001. “Papa Wemba,” from an album due in April, is a tribute to the singer, bandleader and snappy dresser Papa Wemba, who brought Congolese rumba, or soukous, to an international audience from the 1970s until his death in 2016. “Papa Wemba” adds electronic clout to the soukous beat — it sounds like it’s being punched out on a Teletype — and stirs up a rhythmic vortex with echoing guitars, gruffly sung and chanted vocals and a twin-saxophone riff that approximates the horns saying “Papa Wemba.” PARELESRaveena featuring Vince Staples, ‘Secret’Serpentine and luxurious, Raveena’s “Secret” is a pulsing after-hours affair. With her barely there voice, the R&B singer whispers silken come-ons, a steady thrum ricocheting off a muted tabla drum. It’s retrograde but futuristic, like the forthcoming concept album it appears on, which tells the story of a space princess from ancient Punjab. “Wait a sec, I’ll hit you right back,” Raveena coos in the chorus. You can almost feel her hot breath on your neck. ISABELIA HERRERASaba featuring G Herbo, ‘Survivor’s Guilt’“Survivor’s Guilt” is filled with wounds, yet Saba’s flow is breathless, like he’s outrunning the aftermath of trauma in real time. “I’m trying to move better/What’s really eating when you from a food desert,” he raps, echoing the hyper-speed flows of chopper forebears like Twista. A guest verse from G Herbo cements the song as an unforgettably Chicago linkup. HERRERAEx-Void, ‘Churchyard’Reuniting two members of the too-short-lived noise-pop band Joanna Gruesome, Ex-Vöid is a relatively new, jangly British power-pop group set to release its debut album later this year. The lush, taut “Churchyard” retains their previous band’s keen sense of melody, but this time favoring the sort of clean, bright guitar tones that broadcast their penchant for pop songcraft loud and clear. ZOLADZTess Parks, ‘Happy Birthday Forever’Tess Parks’s voice has an alluring, husky grain on “Happy Birthday Forever,” the first single from her upcoming album, “And Those Who Were Seen Dancing.” The Toronto-born artist hasn’t released an LP since her 2013 debut “Blood Hot,” and has since been collaborating with Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but “Happy Birthday Forever” proves she’s a confident, enchanting presence on her own. The song is propelled by a jaunty beat and a bright piano riff, but there’s a dark undercurrent to the way Parks delivers her lines, like she’s exhaling cigarette smoke from the corner of her mouth: “Get me outta here.” ZOLADZDora Jar, ‘Lagoon’A lurching drumbeat, a barely tuned piano: The songwriter Dora Jar — who has lived in New York, California, Poland and England — doesn’t need much more to profess her longing in “Lagoon,” in terms both mundane and surreal: “My heart is a crustacean/Could you come and crack it open?” There’s an Elton John backbeat in her piano chords, but also a 21st-century sense of possibility, as vocal overdubs surround her and, for some reason, what sounds like a banjo surfaces near the end of the tune. PARELESThe Weather Station, ‘Endless Time’“It’s only the end of an endless time,” Tamara Lindeman sings in the opening moments of this shattering new ballad, the first song released from the Weather Station’s upcoming album, “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars.” Lindeman has said the March 4 LP is a kind of companion piece to last year’s excellent “Ignorance,” and “Endless Time” certainly mirrors its predecessor’s chilling evocation of loss as well as its elegant weaving together of the personal and ecological. But while “Ignorance” experimented with fractured, jazzy rhythms, “Endless Time” echoes through a sparse negative space — just a haunting piano accompaniment and Lindeman’s elegiac vocals. Any “companion record” to a strong artistic statement risks being dismissed as a collection of B-sides, but this arresting first single is Lindeman bringing her “A” game. ZOLADZDonna Missal, ‘Insecure’​​Sooner or later, every sound ricochets around Donna Missal’s “Insecure”: ticks and taps of percussion, calm keyboard note clusters, grainy simulated strings and whispery vocals that split into harmonies, get pitched up and down and waft up out of nowhere. “Never want to see you again,” she announces as the song begins, and she goes on to denounce her “baby” as an unapologetic liar. But the confrontation is hushed, private and solitary, as if it’s taking place in a sonic hall of mirrors. PARELESKatie Dey, ‘Real Love’The Australian songwriter Katie Dey is both deadpan and devastating as she sings about an abusive relationship and her own self-destructive impulses in “Real Love.” The verses have an offhand sound — a thumpy drumbeat, dinky keyboard chords — as she recalls how “I made myself small/you made yourself big,” but her vocals take on hyperpop glitches and an Auto-Tuned edge on the way to a chorus that crashes in with distorted guitars, as she declares, “I want love that hurts.” PARELESTyler Mitchell featuring Marshall Allen, ‘A Call for All Demons’The bassist Tyler Mitchell played briefly in Sun Ra’s Arkestra during the 1980s, then put in decades of work as a straight-ahead jazz musician before rejoining the group about 10 years ago, after its patriarch had died. By now, he’s a deeply embedded member of the band. Leading his own sextet on a new album, “Dancing Shadows” — with the Arkestra luminary and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, 97, as a featured guest — Mitchell covers a range of Sun Ra material alongside his own tunes; throughout, he guides things from below with the same bobbing, pulpy vigor that makes him sound at home in the Arkestra. “A Call for All Demons” is a tune that Sun Ra first recorded in the 1950s, and on Mitchell’s album it serves as the opening invocation. RUSSONELLONyokabi Kariūki, ‘Equator Song’Nyokabi Kariūki’s “Equator Song” radiates the dissonance of bilingual (or even trilingual) existence. Kariūki, who grew up in Kenya and now lives in Maryland, recorded the song on a trip to Kenya’s Laikipia county, collaging the chatter of weaverbirds — wordless, sky-high vocalizations floating into the ether. “You’ll find my soul on someone’s tongue,” she sings in English, harnessing the experience of living in a language that will never be your own. But instead of lingering in the discomfort or seeking some empty form of reconnection, Kariūki moves fluidly between English, Maa and Kiswahili. It is an acceptance of the diaspora’s constant condition of loss, and the beauty that exists within it. HERRERA More

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      Beegie Adair, a Jazz Master in Country Music’s Capital, Dies at 84

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      In a city defined by honky-tonks and string ties, she had a 60-year career as a jazz pianist and a mainstay of the local scene.Beegie Adair, whose status as a renowned jazz pianist was all the more noteworthy for the place where she built her career — Nashville, the home of country music — died on Jan. 23 at her residence in Franklin, Tenn. She was 84.Monica Ramey, her manager and frequent vocal partner, confirmed the death. She did not provide a cause but said Ms. Adair had been in failing health.If you happened to live in Nashville and found yourself more a fan of Cole Porter than Porter Waggoner, chances are you came across Ms. Adair at some point in her six-decade career. Starting in the early 1960s, she could be found at least once a week playing at the Carousel, a downtown nightclub, or later at F. Scott’s, a restaurant in the Green Hills neighborhood.Being a jazz musician in Nashville is something like being a surfer in Las Vegas, and those who make it need flexibility and hustle — qualities Ms. Adair possessed in surplus.She played hotel lobbies and retirement homes. She and her husband, Billy Adair, wrote jingles for television commercials. And she was in constant demand as a session musician, appearing on more than 100 albums by a wide range of artists, including Dolly Parton, Henry Mancini, and Mama Cass Elliot.“She was omnipresent,” Roger Spencer, who played bass in the Beegie Adair Trio, said in an interview. “If there was an opportunity to play, she was there.”Ms. Adair mostly played American songbook standards, with a restrained, relaxed technique. She adapted to the venue: If it was a restaurant, she receded to the background; in a club, she could dominate the room.“I’ve played with her in just about every kind of musical setting you can play in Nashville over the years,” George Tidwell, a veteran Nashville jazz trumpeter, said in an interview. “And I never played anything where I didn’t think she was the right person to do it.”She released her first album, “Escape to New York,” in 1991. A few years later she formed her trio, with Mr. Spencer on bass and Chris Brown on drums. They toured frequently, including trips to Tokyo and London. Starting in 2011, they played annual gigs at Birdland, in Midtown Manhattan, and later added regular shows at Feinstein’s/54 Below, also in Midtown. They recorded 35 albums and, according to Ms. Ramey, sold some two million copies over the last four decades.Back home, Ms. Adair was the de facto leader of Nashville’s jazz scene, especially during a rough stretch in the 1970s and ’80s when venues closed and gigs were few. What kept her going was the knowledge, not always obvious to the outside observer, that the scene was larger than it seemed, with musicians playing country for the money and jazz for themselves, even if it meant nothing more than jam sessions in someone’s basement.“There are a lot of wonderful jazz players here that don’t get heard often because they’re doing studio work all of the time,” she told The Nashville Banner in 1997. “Every horn player that does studio work is probably a jazz player underneath their skin.”In addition to working steadily as a jazz pianist, Ms. Adair was in constant demand as a session musician.via Adair Music GroupBobbe Gorin Long was born on Dec. 11, 1937, in Cave City, Ky., a small town about halfway between Nashville and Louisville. She began taking piano lessons at 5 and by her teenage years was playing in clubs in Tennessee and Kentucky.Her parents, Bobbe (Martin) Long and Arthur Long, ran a gas station, where young Bobbe also worked when she wasn’t playing piano. To differentiate her from her mother, her father called her “B.G.,” after her first two initials, and the nickname stuck.Ms. Adair graduated with a degree in music education from Western Kentucky University in 1958. After teaching music for three years in Owensboro, Ky., she moved to Nashville for graduate studies in education at Peabody College, now a part of Vanderbilt University.But she was already building a career as a musician in the city’s downtown clubs, especially along Printers Alley, then and now a center of Nashville nightlife. By 1963 she had dropped out of Peabody to play music full time.Ms. Adair came under the wing of the saxophonist Boots Randolph, a resident musician at the Carousel best known for his 1963 hit “Yakety Sax.” He got her gigs and introduced her to the city’s many producers and studio managers, who, though they mostly recorded country and rock ’n’ roll, were always looking for talented, dependable session musicians.Another local music luminary, the guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, was the first to bring her on as a regular at his recording sessions, and his recommendations brought her a steady stream of work in and out of the studio. She played in the house band for “The Johnny Cash Show” and for the local TV host Ralph Emery (who also died this month).She married Mr. Adair in 1974. He died in 2014. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Adair was a prolific musician in his own right, and he built a career as an instructor, eventually becoming a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. In 1995, the couple joined Mr. Spencer and his wife, Lori Mechem, to start the Nashville Jazz Workshop.The workshop trained a new generation of jazz musicians in Nashville, and in recent decades the scene there has started to make a comeback, with its former students starting to win national recognition. In 2016, Ms. Adair and her trio were invited to play Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. “The best thing of all for us was that there were a lot of our fans from Nashville in attendance,” she told The Nashville Scene in 2016, a few days after the show. “I think our appearance there is another indicator that people all over the country recognize that there are great jazz musicians here, and that there is an audience for the music.” More

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      5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

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      Recordings of Brahms, Haydn, Grieg, Nikolai Kapustin and George Walker are among recent highlights.‘Blueprint’: Piano Music by Nikolai Kapustin for Jazz TrioFrank Dupree, piano; Jakob Krupp, bass; Obi Jenne, drums (Capriccio)When I reported last year on the pianist Frank Dupree’s first album of works by Nikolai Kapustin, Dupree previewed things to come. For his follow-up engagement with Kapustin, a swing-influenced Russian composer, Dupree said he would release a series of solo piano works played by a traditional jazz trio.Now that the results are out, the wisdom of the idea is evident. Dupree could have recorded an enjoyable solo set, as his feel for Kapustin is as fluid as ever. But we currently have no lack of one-player recitals of this music — including from Marc-André Hamelin, Steven Osborne and Kapustin himself.The improvised element on “Blueprint” is subtle. Dupree plays the piano solos as they were notated, and the bassist Jakob Krupp follows his left hand. The album’s distinguishing element of improvisation is left to the percussionist Obi Jenne. And it’s his interventions that truly elevate this set. In a piece like the Op. 41 Variations, Kapustin moves briskly between different syncopated styles; Jenne’s mutable beat-juggling highlights each change. Perhaps not every item here needed the jazz combo treatment. But when the arrangements work — as on selections from the Eight Concert Études — this trio adds to the material a new jolt. SETH COLTER WALLSBrahms: Late Piano WorksPaul Lewis, piano (Harmonia Mundi)To listen to the pianist Paul Lewis’s new album of late Brahms, you would think these pieces had been written just after the last sonatas of Schubert, which Lewis has recorded with wrenching restraint. Splicing the gap between 1828 and the early 1890s, Lewis’s is a vision of Brahms as fully Classicist; these final four sets of solos are rendered with judicious tempos and a clean, calm touch — intelligent, sensitive readings.The pearly moderation that makes Lewis’s Schubert so movingly humble sometimes keeps his Brahms shy of grandeur and especially mystery. These are tender, affecting interpretations more than pensive, let alone unsettling, ones; Lewis sometimes stints the softest dynamics, giving a slight sense of straightforwardness when you want intimations (at least) of the epic. The Intermezzo in E flat (Op. 117, No. 1) doesn’t seem to lose itself in the middle section — as it does in Radu Lupu’s benchmark 1987 recording — so the return to the theme is less than overwhelming.But a cleareyed Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2) is deeply satisfying; the Intermezzo in E Minor (Op. 119, No. 2) leavens lucidity with dreaminess. And Lewis’s sparkle in the middle of the Romanze in F (Op. 118, No. 5) gives the shift back to sober feeling at the end quietly immense power. ZACHARY WOOLFEGrieg: SongsLise Davidsen, soprano; Leif Ove Andsnes, piano (Decca)The recording industry has finally found a way to capture Lise Davidsen. A luminous soprano of remarkable range, equally capable of floodlight power and the piercing smallness of a laser pointer, she wasn’t well represented on her first two albums for Decca, which were documents of sensitive and intelligent interpretation more than versatility or resounding might.Now, after programs of Wagner, Strauss, Beethoven and Verdi, comes a much more intimate album of Grieg songs performed with the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes — a pairing of two excellent Norwegian musicians in works by their country’s most treasured composer. The scale of this program is better suited than Davidsen’s earlier albums at conveying the dexterity of her voice, and her gift for endearing levity; there are playful turns of phrase here that you just don’t get in “Tannhäuser.”Throughout the album — which begins with the eight-song cycle “The Mountain Maid” and continues with excerpts from other collections — Andsnes is an evocative tone painter, with dreamy glissandos in “Singing,” galloping festivity in “Midsummer Eve” and flowing momentum in “A Boat on the Waves Is Rocking.” And Davidsen is a nimble raconteur, lovingly warm in the opening cycle’s “Meeting,” then shattering in its Schubertian finale, “At the Gjaetle Brook,” and later bringing both folk lightness and Wagnerian heft to the six songs of Op. 48. To the credit of Grieg and these artists, you’ll never be so moved by a song called “Snail, Snail!” JOSHUA BARONEHaydn: SymphoniesAcademy of St. Martin in the Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor (Eloquence)It’s easy now to be a little sniffy about Neville Marriner’s achievements with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a partnership renowned as the most recorded in history. With the success of the period-instrument movement, their hundreds of recordings on modern instruments have gained the reputation of being a bit staid — practical and reliable, to be sure, but nevertheless dusty relics of an era best forgotten.But this thoroughly enjoyable 15-disc set — which for the first time brings together 33 Haydn symphonies set down between 1970 and 1990 — is ample reminder that there were perfectly good artistic reasons Marriner and his chamber-orchestra forces were such a roaring commercial success.Conceiving their work initially as a crisp, stylish rejoinder to an older, stouter approach to the Baroque and Classical repertoire, they played this music with insatiable collective commitment — the slow movements singing gracefully, the outer movements sparkling in their drive and invention. If there is a little more zest in their accounts of Haydn’s earlier symphonies than his later ones, they are all brilliantly well judged, and full of life. DAVID ALLENGeorge Walker: Piano SonatasSteven Beck, piano (Bridge)In 2018, when the composer and pianist George Walker died at 96, there were plenty of accomplishments to memorialize, including his Pulitzer Prize — the first awarded to a Black composer. But there was also a dispiriting acknowledgment of a missed opportunity, given that so few elite classical institutions had seriously engaged with Walker’s work while he was alive.The inattention extended to recordings; there remains a notable dearth of sets devoted exclusively to Walker. Very partial redress comes in the form of this new album, in which Steven Beck takes on all five of Walker’s piano sonatas, written between 1953 and 2003.The first sonata, revised in 1991, offers some of the galloping energy seemingly required when suggesting Americana, but it also includes a rambunctious harmonic edge that bristles with maverick spirit. By the time of the Third Sonata, written in 1975 and revised in 1996, atonality had taken center stage. But Walker’s signature feel for contrast — including alternations between motifs that ring out and peremptory chordal bursts — is still evident. With playing that’s slashing and sensitive by turns, Beck’s recital accentuates the through lines in a protean artistic life. SETH COLTER WALLS More