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      SZA’s ‘Ctrl’ Bonus, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Saucy Santana, Demi Lovato, Joyce Manor 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.SZA, ‘Jodie’One way to satiate fans who have been clamoring for your long-delayed next album: just keep adding new material to the one they already love! Five years ago this week, SZA released her widely adored debut “Ctrl,” and though she’s put out a handful of singles and made some celebrated feature appearances since then (including her Grammy-winning Doja Cat collaboration “Kiss Me More”), she’s yet to follow it up with a full-length. As a stopgap, though, SZA offered fans seven previously unreleased tracks this week on a deluxe edition of “Ctrl.” The best of them is “Jodie” — already a fan favorite, since a demo version leaked last year. “Stuck with just weed and no friends,” she laments on the buoyant track, which balances a confessional tone with self-deprecating humor. Her vocals are melodically nimble but endearingly off-the-cuff, as though you’re overhearing an animated conversation she’s having with herself. LINDSAY ZOLADZSaucy Santana featuring Latto, ‘Booty’Whether the exuberant horns deployed on Saucy Santana’s “Booty” are sampled from Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” or “Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites (which provided the original sample for “Crazy in Love”) is immaterial — it’s pure cheat code either way. “Booty” functions as a kind of conceptual bootleg remix of the Beyoncé classic, a way of trumpeting an alliance that could be actual, virtual or theoretical. Most listeners won’t parse it out. Consider it a savvy stroke by Saucy Santana, whose “Material Girl” was the best kind of TikTok breakout — a catchphrase that was in fact connected to an outsized personality. “Booty” is his first major label single, and it has a couple of other borrowings, too: a flow from J-Kwon’s “Tipsy,” a nod to Bubba Sparxxx’s “Ms. New Booty.” But mainly this onetime makeup artist is having fun in the shrinking space between fan and star. JON CARAMANICALizzo, ‘Grrrls’Another entry in the gratuitous remake sweepstakes of 2022: Lizzo reimagines the Beastie Boys’ hypercrass “Girls” as a celebration of female friendship: “That’s my girl, we codependent/If she with it, them I’m with it.” CARAMANICABeach Bunny, ‘Entropy’“Somebody’s gonna figure us out,” Lili Trifilio sings with bracing confidence, “and I hope they do ’cause I’m falling for you.” The hopelessly catchy opening track from the Chicago pop-rock band Beach Bunny’s forthcoming second album, “Emotional Creature,” is all about throwing caution to the wind and going public with a clandestine romance. There’s a fitting clarity to the song’s production and arrangement: glimmering guitars, steady percussion and Trifilio’s voice at the forefront as she sings such openhearted lyrics as “I wanna kiss you when everyone’s watching.” ZOLADZDemi Lovato, ‘Skin of My Teeth’Demi Lovato — the child star turned grown-up hitmaker who survived a 2018 drug overdose and has come out as nonbinary — leverages notoriety and a setback into fierce punk-pop with “Skin of My Teeth.” It’s an armor-plated confession that begins “Demi leaves rehab again” and rides seismic drums, cranked-up guitars and an “ooh-woo-hoo” pop hook to claim solidarity with everyone struggling with addiction. “I can’t believe I’m not dead,” they belt, adding, “I’m just trying to keep my head above water.” JON PARELESJoyce Manor, ‘You’re Not Famous Anymore’“40 Oz. to Fresno,” the new album from the Torrance, Calif., rock band Joyce Manor, is a relentlessly tuneful 17-minute collection of all-killer, no-filler power-pop. An obvious highlight is the punchy “You’re Not Famous Anymore,” which sounds like something that would have gotten a lot of play on mid-90s alternative-rock radio — the sort of song that would have seemed like a mere novelty hit until it ended up stuck in your head for weeks. “You were a child star on methamphetamines,” the frontman Barry Johnson sings, “Now who knows what you are, ’cause you’re not anything.” Accompanied by head-bopping percussion and a surfy guitar, Johnson’s archly acidic delivery cuts through the rest of the song’s mock-breezy atmosphere. ZOLADZJoji, ‘Glimpse of Us’A splendid and striking piano ballad from the singer Joji, who finds middle ground between 1970s soft rock and James Blake. His singing is lightly unsteady, meshing an unnerving sadness with a know-better resilience. CARAMANICAJulius Rodriguez, ‘In Heaven’The 23-year-old pianist and multi-instrumentalist Julius Rodriguez has been wowing audiences at New York clubs for more than half his young life. In a story that’s already become part of jazz’s 21st-century lore, from the time Rodriguez was 11 his father would drive him in from White Plains to partake of jam sessions at Smalls. Cats were floored from Day 1. The other big portion of his musical education took place in church, where he started out even younger as a drummer, and those two big influences resound throughout “Let Sound Tell All,” Rodriguez’s highly anticipated debut album. On “In Heaven,” an invocation written by Darlene Andrews and first recorded by Gregory Porter, Rodriguez joins up with another rising star, the singer Samara Joy. He accompanies her molasses-rich vocals with fanned-out harmonies, channeling Kenny Barron and Hank Jones, sweeping from heavy clusters of notes to threads of crystal clarity. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSonic Liberation Front and the Sonic Liberation Singers featuring Oliver Lake, ‘Ain’t Nothin’ Real But Love’“Love is an emotion in action,” the eminent saxophonist, poet and visual artist Oliver Lake, 79, recites over the Sonic Liberation Singers’ suspended, open-vowel harmonies. “Ain’t nothin’ real but love/It moves independently of our fears and desires.” Lake recently performed a series of farewell shows with Trio 3, the avant-garde supergroup that he has played in for more than three decades — but it should come as little surprise that as he closes one chapter, the ever-prolific Lake has opened another: “Justice,” on which this track appears, is the first LP to feature Lake’s vocal compositions. At times wild and purgative, the album is also full of moments like this one: poised, stubbornly hopeful, grounded in Lake’s memories of a more revolutionary age and seeking to stir that energy up again. RUSSONELLO More

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      Grachan Moncur III, Trombonist Whose Star Shone Briefly, Dies at 85

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      He mixed free jazz and post-bop in notable 1960s and ’70s recordings. But he withdrew from the jazz scene, in part because of a dispute over publishing rights.Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist and composer who came to renown in the 1960s and early ’70s for his deft playing of a hybrid of post-bop and free jazz, but who later receded from the spotlight, died on June 3 — his 85th birthday — in a hospital in Newark.His son Kenya said the cause was cardiac arrest.“Whenever I have a conversation about what’s wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, ‘Where is Grachan Moncur?’” the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of Mr. Moncur’s most important collaborators, told The New York Times in 2003.Long before Mr. McLean asked that question, Mr. Moncur (pronounced mon-KUR) had started his jazz career as a teenager, jamming at the New York nightclub Birdland and sitting in with the drummer Art Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1959, he went on the road with Ray Charles.But after about two years, feeling a need to perform with a smaller ensemble based in New York City, he was recruited to join the Jazztet, a sextet formed by the trumpeter Art Farmer and the saxophonist Benny Golson. He played with that group until it disbanded in 1962, then took that summer off to study the challenging and unconventional music of Thelonious Monk. His goal was to learn how to write his own.“I just wanted to get the sound of his music inside of my body,” Mr. Moncur said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2003.On a night when he had written two compositions, he said, he got a call from Mr. McLean, whom he had known since Mr. Moncur was a teenager, asking him to join his ensemble for rehearsals and club dates in advance of recording an album for Blue Note Records.That album, “One Step Beyond,” and “Destination … Out!,”both released in 1963, were critically praised documents of a transitional period in jazz when musicians like Mr. McLean and Mr. Moncur were blending the harmonic advances of the bebop era with the more adventurous spirit of the avant-garde. They contained five of Mr. Moncur’s compositions, among them “Ghost Town,” which conjures up desolation in long passages where little is heard except reverberations on vibes and cymbals.Mr. Moncur then recorded two albums for Blue Note as a leader, “Evolution” (1963) and “Some Other Stuff” (1964), with stellar accompaniment. Both albums featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Tony Williams on drums; “Evolution” also featured Lee Morgan on trumpet and Mr. McLean, while the “Some Other Stuff” lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.Reviewing “Evolution” in The Pittsburgh Courier, the critic Phyl Garland praised Mr. Moncur’s technique and the album’s title number, which, she wrote, evoked images of “mankind emerging from one murky, primeval mire into another, undergoing one subtle change after another, as does the music.”What might have been a longer relationship with Blue Note ended after two albums in a dispute over publishing rights. In the end, he managed to retain his rights to the music from “Evolution,” but he sensed that he would not last long at the label.“They were very disappointed with that, and they kind of dropped me like a hot potato,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. He believed he was blackballed over his position — a position he later came to regret. In retrospect, he said, he wished he had found a way to compromise with Alfred Lion, Blue Note’s founder.“I think my mind was really going to a revolutionary attitude more on the business trip than it was on a musical trip,” he said, “because I was kind of determined on trying to own my own music.”Grachan Moncur III was born on June 3, 1937, in Manhattan. His father, Grachan II, played bass with the Savoy Sultans, a swing ensemble, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, Ella (Wright) Moncur, was a beautician whose clients — and friends — included the singer Sarah Vaughan.Although enamored of the trombone from age 5, Grachan nonetheless received a cello from his father. But the cello did not inspire him, so his father gave him a trombone. Lessons followed. He also had a role model for the trombone: his father, who played the instrument.“I have never, up until today, heard anybody with a sound like my father,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. “He had a timbre that was very dark and clear. That sound, it just kind of stayed with me, and I always wanted to produce that same type of — project that same type of sound that my father had.”He graduated from the Laurinburg Institute, a historically Black prep school in North Carolina that Dizzy Gillespie had attended in the 1930s. Back in New York, he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, then kick-started his career in nightclubs before joining Ray Charles’s orchestra.In 1964, Mr. Moncur learned that the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician for its Broadway production of James Baldwin’s civil rights drama “Blues for Mister Charlie.” Mr. Moncur played two roles, one of them a trombonist, and contributed a piece of music.He recorded “Some Other Stuff” three months after the play opened; two of the cuts on the album, “Gnostic” and “Nomadic,” were reflections on his breakup with a girlfriend and his departure from his $27-a-week apartment.“I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive by my wits,” he told The Times.He continued to record, releasing two albums in 1969 on the French label BYG Actuel, “New Africa” and “Aco del de Madrugada” (“One Morning I Waked Up Very Early”), and another, “Echoes of Prayer,” with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, in 1974. But he was entering a long, relatively quiet period during which he made almost no records but ran jazz workshops in Harlem in a studio called Space Station; performed in Europe; and taught jazz at the Newark Community School of the Arts.In 1994, Mr. Moncur adapted his four-movement “New Africa” suite into a theatrical piece for the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. The poet Amiri Baraka, a friend, was the producer.In addition to his son Kenya, Mr. Moncur is survived by his wife, Tamam Tracy (Sims) Moncur; two other sons, Grachan IV and Adrien; his daughters, Ella and Vera Moncur; his twin brothers, Lofton and Lonnie; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His son Toih died in 2016, and his daughter Hilda died in 1992. He lived in Newark.In 2004, the composer and arranger Mark Masters brought together Mr. Moncur and seven other musicians to reprise, with new charts, eight of Mr. Moncur’s pieces for an album, “Exploration,” released on the Capri label.“As a composer, he was original and singular,” Mr. Masters said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t derivative of anyone. I see the Monk influence, but Monk wasn’t hovering over him. His music doesn’t sound like anyone else’s.” More

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      Sky Ferreira’s Dazzling, Defiant Return, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Wynonna & Waxahatchee, Superorganism, Rico Nasty 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.Sky Ferreira, ‘Don’t Forget’The nine long years since Sky Ferreira’s 2013 cult-classic album “Night Time, My Time” vanish in the opening moments of “Don’t Forget,” a dazzling return to form that is slated to appear on Ferreira’s much-delayed second album, “Masochism.” In her near decade (mostly) away from music — due, in part, to disagreements with her record label — Ferreira’s grungy synth-pop sound has hardly changed at all. But “Night Time, My Time” still sounds singular enough that “Don’t Forget” (which she co-produced with Jorge Elbrecht and co-wrote with Tamaryn) comes as a comfort rather than a disappointment. It’s refreshing to hear the 29-year-old pick up exactly where she left off, inhabiting a song’s echoing, tarnished atmosphere with her signature breathy intensity and smeared glamour. “Keep it in mind, nobody here’s a friend of mine,” Ferreira sneers, proving her melodramatically defiant edge is still intact. LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex G, ‘Blessing’The Philadelphia-based indie artist Alex G has both an easily recognizable aesthetic sensibility and a playfully elastic sense of self. On his excellent 2019 album “House of Sugar,” Alex (last name: Giannascoli) sometimes pitch-shifted and distorted his vocals as though he were embodying different characters — and then on the very next track he’d sing a twangy and seemingly earnest acoustic-guitar ditty that could break your heart in half. His predictable unpredictability strikes again on “Blessing,” which contrasts quasi-spiritual lyrics (“Every day/Is a blessing”) with a sound that borrows from the moody, alt-rock/nu-metal sound of the late ’90s. Alex sings in a menacing whisper, and an explosion of apocalyptic synths completely transforms the song midway through. Inscrutable as it may be, the whole thing is eerie, hypnotic and, somehow, strangely moving. ZOLADZSuperorganism, ‘On & On’The London-based group Superorganism turns boredom and monotony into something almost perky in “On & On.” “No more space, hit replay/It goes on and on,” Orono sings with sullen nonchalance, then repeats “and on” another 16 times. The track is bubble gummy pop with a hint of reggae, and it’s packed with little hooks and ever-changing effects, but nothing breaks through the ennui. JON PARELESWynonna & Waxahatchee, ‘Other Side’As she’s gotten older, Wynonna Judd has been singing with an assured husk in her voice, cutting the crisp country she’s performed for decades with just a hint of the blues. Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, over the course of a career that began in DIY warehouse spaces, has found her bridge to American roots music. The two singers meet on “Other Side,” a gentle rumination on impermanence. For Judd — whose mother and longtime singing partner, Naomi, died last month — it’s a sturdy breeze, understated but invested. For Crutchfield, it’s a soft landing in a new home. JON CARAMANICASaya Gray, ‘Empathy for Bethany’“Empathy for Bethany” keeps wriggling free of expectations. Saya Gray, a Canadian songwriter who played bass in Daniel Caesar’s band, starts the song like a folky, picking triplets on an acoustic guitar. But almost immediately, the chord progression starts to wander; then her vocals warp by multitracking and shifting pitch, and soon a breathy trumpet drifts in from the jazz realm; by the time the track ends, it has become a loop of electronic aftereffects. “Honestly, if I get too close I’ll go ghost,” Gray sings, and the track bears her out. PARELESBruce Hornsby, ‘Tag’Bruce Hornsby has stayed productive and exploratory through the pandemic, doubling down on musical craftiness and structural ambition. His new album, “’Flicted,” pulls together spiky dissonances and folky warmth, chamber orchestrations and electronic illusions, puckishness and benevolence. “Fun and games in pestilence/We could use, use some kindly kindliness,” he sings in “Tag,” adding, “Still shake your fist/A kind of gritted bliss.” The music seesaws between rumbling, dissonant piano over a funky backbeat and richly chiming folk-rock, neatly juggling skepticism and hope. PARELESMaria BC, ‘April’The songs on Maria BC’s debut album, “Hyaline,” are reveries built around patiently picked guitar patterns and tranquil melodies, though they might sprout electronics, percussion or chamber-music orchestrations at any moment. In “April,” vocals overlap and multiply into cascading chords while unexpected sounds wink into earshot behind the guitar. “Listen to me/Anything you want,” the lyrics promise. PARELESKaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Emile Mosseri, ‘Amber’The experimental artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the Academy Award-nominated film composer Emile Mosseri have struck gold with their collaborative album, “I Could Be Your Dog/I Could Be Your Moon.” It’s only two minutes long, but “Amber,” from the second half of the project, runs like a spaced-out symphony. Over bubbling synth tones, Smith’s airy vocalizations loop into circuitous entanglements, shapeshifting into oceans of cosmic flotsam. The effect is appropriately cinematic, like a long-lost immersive Pipilotti Rist video. ISABELIA HERRERANduduzo Makhathini featuring Omagugu, ‘Mama’The first release on the new Blue Note Africa label, “In the Spirit of Ntu” is the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini’s homage to the universal energetic force known in Bantu cultures as “ntu.” It includes this wistful but swiftly rolling tune, “Mama,” written by Makhathini’s wife, Omagugu, in memory of her mother, who recently died. Omagugu sings in a sweeping, brushy tone, holding her syllables open, as Makhathini surrounds her in a pattern of chords that ascend and ascend. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORico Nasty, ‘Intrusive’Falling somewhere between gritty hardcore and distorted jungle, Rico Nasty’s “Intrusive” scrapes like metal through a meat grinder. With her latest single, the Maryland rapper continues her return to music after her 2020 album “Nightmare Vacation.” On “Intrusive,” she harnesses punk verve and raps over a warped breakbeat, letting her intrusive impulses and most violent desires flow out in a stream-of-consciousness torrent. It’s bratty, turbulent and deliciously cathartic, like a childhood temper tantrum. “Mom, if you hear this I’m sorry,” she raps. Hey, at least she warned you. HERRERASleazyWorld Go featuring Lil Baby, ‘Sleazy Flow’ (remix)There’s not much to “Sleazy Flow,” by the Kansas City rapper SleazyWorld Go: a few piano tinkles, some groaning bass throbs, a sleepy, sinister tempo and crucially, some select lyrics blending street beef and sexual conquest: “How you mad she choosing me?/I like what she do to me/She say she feel safer over here, this where the shooters be.” That snippet became a TikTok breakout earlier this year, and Lil Baby picks up that taunting theme on the song’s official remix. His verse is almost chipper: “Acting like I’m chasing her or something, she be pursuing me/Can’t hold her, she be telling me all the time she wish that you was me.” CARAMANICADavid Virelles, ‘Al Compas de Mi Viejo Tres’David Virelles has no beef with the piano. A virtuoso improviser and classically trained pianist from Santiago de Cuba, he doesn’t seem intent on turning the instrument inside-out, like Thelonious Monk did; or jettisoning it entirely, like a John Cage; or turning it into an android, like some of his contemporaries. Virelles is a subtler expander. He plays the grand piano with sensitivity and deference, working with it, not against. He tucks dense harmonies inside other harmonies, shading his music with deep browns and grays — like an island sky turning dark before a storm. And on “Al Compás De Mi Viejo Tres” (“By the Compass of my Old Guitar”), from his masterly new album, “Nuna,” he celebrates the lilt of classic Cuban danzón by playing with utter elegance and clarity — stopping every so often to get in his own way with a few irruptive slashes or low, corrosive chords. RUSSONELLO More

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      The Bolero Is Timeless. Miguel Zenón Is Giving It a Jazzy Tinge.

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      The saxophonist and his longtime collaborator Luis Perdomo reimagined some of their favorite Latin American ballads for an album that made deep connections during the pandemic.On New Year’s Eve 2020, the saxophonist Miguel Zenón and his longtime collaborator, the pianist Luis Perdomo, took the stage at the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan to perform a makeshift duet concert that would be recorded for a live album. The set list included a collection of classic Latin American boleros they were fond of, reimagined through a jazz lens, much as giants like John Coltrane and Miles Davis did with the American songbook in the mid-20th century.“It was a live show, but there wasn’t anyone there,” Zenón, 45, said on a recent video chat, describing one of the biggest challenges for musicians during coronavirus shutdowns. “It’s weird because playing this music live has a lot to do with the energy you get from the room.”Feelings of loss and nostalgia permeate the bolero, a kind of ballad that incorporates romantic European lyricism with Afro-Cuban percussive elements. Boleros originated in Eastern Cuba and eventually spread to Mexico and the rest of Latin America, becoming standard material for an array of star vocalists. Onstage, Zenón and Perdomo rearranged classics made famous by Beny Moré, La Lupe and Sylvia Rexach, bringing out their universal musical language of passion and rhythm.“In a world where everything is so complex, boleros kind of bring you back to things that make you feel good and help you process things like love and heartbreak,” said Adrian Quesada, the Black Pumas guitarist and singer-songwriter and a fan of boleros.Zenón and Perdomo’s album, “El Arte del Bolero,” broke through to pandemic-weary listeners as an astonishingly intimate and stirring performance and picked up Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations. And now, a year after the LP’s release, Zenón is finally back before live audiences; he’ll perform with his quartet at Columbia’s Miller Theater on Saturday.Zenón, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient in 2008, has long had a tendency to shift between his grounding in traditional jazz and his roots in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the home of salsa, reggaeton, and still, bolero. After attending his hometown’s Escuela Libre de Música — his classmates included the reggaeton superstar Daddy Yankee, who was there to play trombone — Zenón arrived at Berklee School of Music in Boston with visions of bebop dancing in his head.“My main thing was I just wanted to play like Charlie Parker and Coltrane and Cannonball,” Zenón said of Julian Adderley. “But I quickly came to understand that I really didn’t know my music, the music of Puerto Rico. If I wanted to play something slow, instead of playing standards from the Great American Songbook, I’d rather go into my world, you know?”Zenón began to think of his rediscovery of his Puerto Rican and Latin American roots — a task of nostalgia-inducing methodological research — as a bridge to reconnect him to the island, like the longing for a lost homeland that fueled the Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Hernández to write his famous bolero, “Silencio,” while he was living in New York in 1932. Zenón covered “Silencio,” revived in 2000 by Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club, for his 2011 release “Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook.”Perdomo, 51, is in many ways Zenón’s perfect musical partner. He grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, listening to pianists like Oscar Peterson at first, then going through a salsa phase that had him emulating Eddie Palmieri and the Sonora Ponceña’s Papo Lucca. Perdomo decided to come to New York in the 1990s, and while he was studying at Manhattan School of Music with another Zenón collaborator, the bassist Hans Glawischnig, he met Zenón and quickly realized how talented he was.“I thought: This guy is amazing! Rhythmically, he was perfect,” Perdomo said in an interview. With Glawischnig and the drummer Adam Cruz, they formed a quartet that played regularly at the old East Village club C Note, not far from Slug’s Saloon and the Five Spot, where Lee Morgan and Eric Dolphy once held sway in the 1960s.For the New Year’s Eve concert, Zenón and Perdomo reworked their performance of Beny Moré’s classic “Cómo Fue,” which had become a signature live tune, playing it in D flat rather than E flat “because I was listening to a lot of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn at the time,” Zenón said. They performed “Este Hastío” (“This Weariness”), a song written by the Cuban pianist Meme Solís for the jazz-inspired singer Elena Burke, then covered as “Piensa en Mi” (“Think of Me”) on Ray Barretto’s 1979 salsa masterpiece “Ricanstruction.” They treated “La Vida es Un Sueño” (“Life Is a Dream”), perhaps the Cuban orchestra leader Arsenio Rodríguez’s most famous song, with a kind of poignant reverence, drawing from a previous cover by the Cuban jazz-fusion group Irakere.One of the most affecting songs on the album is “Qué te Pedí” (“What Did I Ask of You”), made famous by the Cuban singer La Lupe, who spent much of her life in New York. Beginning with a long, swirling Zenón solo, the song evokes the bitter sadness of a failed relationship as longingly as Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache.”“We played this with La Lupe in mind,” Zenón recalled. “It’s a kind of gritty, greasy version of bolero,” he said, and it seems more emotional, sadder, like the blues.Perdomo, whose brief excursion into the Cuban guajira style closes “Que te Pedi,” said he has been struck by the intersections he discovers when playing Latin American boleros through a jazz lens. “Everything comes from African music, but there are some elements that go between different roots. It’s like how flamenco singers sing — it sounds like when B.B. King sings the blues.”Re-engaging the deep feelings invested in boleros can have the effect of transforming sad memories into a kind of newfound hope and passion.Steven Molina Contreras for The New York TimesAlthough bolero was created in Cuba — drawing from rhythms that migrated from Haiti following its revolution — it has deep resonance in Mexico and much of South America. Maybe it’s about processing the sadness of migration, or an unspoken story about the wounds of colonization. My uncle’s brother, Fernando Álvarez, was the founder of one of Puerto Rico’s most famous trio-bolero groups, Trio Vegabajeño, which like Cuba’s Trio Matamoros and Mexico’s Trio Los Panchos used three harmonizing singers to popularize the genre in Puerto Rico, making the first recorded version of “En mi Viejo San Juan” in 1943.Some Latinos grew up with scratchy-record boleros from their elders, or retooled salsa versions, while others remember the emotive excesses of singers like Juan Gabriel and José José. Those vocalists’ over-the-top emotion, a style some call “corta-venas” (literally cut your veins) may be linked to young Latin Americans’ ongoing attraction to emo music (and Mexican youth’s particular obsession with the woe-is-me rock balladry of Morrissey).Re-engaging the deep feelings invested in boleros can have the effect of transforming sad memories into a kind of newfound hope and passion. And the genre continues to appeal to new generations. In June, Quesada of Black Pumas is releasing “Boleros Psicodélicos,” a mix of covers and original songs that try to capture the moment in the 1960s and 1970s when young Latin American musicians fused the bolero with psychedelic guitars and atmospheric electric organs.“I was driving with my father, and I heard a song called ‘Esclavo y Amo’ by a group called Los Paseteles Verdes and became obsessed,” Quesada, 45, said from his home in Austin. Working with the Puerto Rican singer ILe, who turned him on to the Argentine idol Sandro, the eclectic indie singer Gabriel Garzón Montano, the guitarist Marc Ribot and others, Quesada seems to have tapped into an emerging mood in Latin music.This year has also seen the release of an album of satirical boleros by Puerto Rico’s Los Rivera Destino, who became YouTube stars by landing Bad Bunny on their original bolero “Flor.”Zenón remembered growing up listening to the Sunday morning bolero shows on San Juan radio and his mother’s obsession with Sylvia Rexach, whose “Alma Adentro” is a centerpiece of “El Arte del Bolero.”“Even though it was from before our time,” he said, “it’s still here, in our time.”Miguel Zenón will be playing with Luis Perdomo on piano, Hans Glawischnig on bass and Henry Cole on drums at Columbia’s Miller Theater on Saturday; millertheatre.com. More

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      Samora Pinderhughes Explored Incarceration in Song. The Result Is ‘Grief.’

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      The vocalist, pianist and composer interviewed roughly 100 people of color who had experienced “structural violence” and created the Healing Project, a three-part interdisciplinary work.OAKLAND, Calif. — Near the end of a sold-out show earlier this month, celebrating the release of his visionary second album, “Grief,” the vocalist, pianist, composer and activist Samora Pinderhughes asked the audience to sing with him. He was about to hit the coda to “Process” — a heart-baring anthem of solitude and self-forgiveness, which he uses to close all his concerts — and he wanted some familiar voices to join the wordless melody.For every new fan who’d showed up that night at the downtown headquarters of the online music store Bandcamp, a member of Pinderhughes’s close-knit community seemed to be there too. Standing in the back was his friend Adamu Chan, a filmmaker and organizer, who had been incarcerated early in the pandemic and is now working on a documentary about Covid-19’s spread in the prison system. In the front row, an arm’s length from the grand piano, sat one of his mentors, the historian Robin D.G. Kelley. A few seats down were Pinderhughes’s parents, scholars and activists themselves.In the past few years Pinderhughes, 30, has been breaking out well beyond the Bay Area, and with the release of “Grief,” he’s emerged as one of the most affecting singer-songwriters today, in any genre. His trebly, confessional voice steps deliberately on its own cracks, and he treats his gut-level lyrics with care. His piano playing, rich with layered harmony and rhythmic undertow, holds together his arrangements, which mix the influences of Radiohead, chamber classical, Afro-Cuban rhythms and underground hip-hop. Not unlike Kendrick Lamar, Pinderhughes has become a virtuoso at turning the experience of living in community inside-out, revealing all its personal detail and tension, and giving voice to registers of pain that are commonly shared but not often articulated.The “Grief” LP is one of three components in the Healing Project, a yearslong undertaking based around roughly 100 interviews Pinderhughes conducted with people of color who had been incarcerated or had experienced some form of “structural violence,” he said. The first part of the project was a visual-art exhibition that opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in March, and will be on view through September. Then came “Grief” last month. And on Tuesday, he unveiled an online archive of the interviews and an accompanying interactive online experience, which he hopes will help to bring listeners from all over the country — and beyond — into contact with the stories of his interviewees and their arguments for prison abolition.The first part of the Healing Project was a visual-art exhibition that opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in March.Charlie Villyard, via Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsPinderhughes created the Healing Project in pursuit of answers to two lines of inquiry, both about mass incarceration in the United States. “How is this operating, and what is the machinery that’s going on systemically that’s doing this to us, and how can we fight back? That’s one set of questions,” he said over coffee in Harlem, where he now lives. “And then the other one, on the personal tip, is: How am I a part of that? How am I implicated and how am I doing something against it? What does that make me feel like? How am I dealing?”Pinderhughes is currently on his way to a Ph.D. in creative practice and critical inquiry from Harvard, where he studies under the pianist and scholar Vijay Iyer, who called him an “unstoppable creative force.”Coping With Grief and LossLiving through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. But the ways in which we experience and deal with the pain can largely differ.What Experts Say: Psychotherapists say that grief is not a problem to be solved, but a process to be lived through, in whatever form it may take.How to Help: Experiencing a sudden loss can be particularly traumatic. Here are some ways to offer your support to someone grieving.A New Diagnosis: Prolonged grief disorder, a new entry in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, applies to those who continue to struggle long after a loss.The Biology of Grief: Grief isn’t only a psychological experience. It can affect the body too, but much about the effects remains a mystery.“He’s just constantly making new things: new music, new writing. Imagining past the standard contours of the music business, even,” Iyer said. “That’s been the most exciting thing to witness — that, through a lot of study and surveying the landscape, and doing a lot of community work and just being in the trenches, he’s sort of imagining another way to be a musician.”A SLIGHT MAN with a flop of brown hair dumped over alert eyes, Pinderhughes is fashion-forward but understated, favoring denim gear and streetwear. When we walked the San Francisco exhibition earlier this month, he was dressed in a burnt-orange jean jacket and a faded tee from Daily Paper, a Black-owned brand based in Amsterdam. In conversation he’s quick to laugh, and always on the lookout for points of common ground.“He is cool, because he’s in the jazz world, but he’s not cool in that way of cutting himself off from feeling,” said the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, who is one of Pinderhughes’s mentors and a producer of the Healing Project. (Iyer and the artist Glenn Ligon are the others.)Pinderhughes, who is of Black and mixed-race ancestry, was raised in Berkeley, Calif., by professor parents who work in urban and environmental planning (his mother, Raquel Rivera-Pinderhughes), and at the intersection of race, behavioral science and violence prevention (his father, Howard Pinderhughes). Both are active community organizers, and their connection to incarcerated populations around the country helped Pinderhughes get the Healing Project off the ground.Pinderhughes hopes the Healing Project can ultimately become a permanent installation. “I want to build a space that actually engages,” he said.Geoffrey Haggray for The New York TimesMusic was constantly around the house, which was littered with hand drums and other small instruments, though only the children played. Both Samora and his sister, Elena, a flutist who has become a major player in jazz, showed promise early. He began playing percussion almost as soon as he could land his hand on the drum, and his parents started taking him to La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, where he was immersed in Cuban and Venezuelan music from age 3. When he was 10, his parents went to Cuba on sabbatical, and instead of enrolling in school he spent his time becoming ordained in the spiritual (and musical) tradition of Santería.As a teenager, Pinderhughes attended the Young Musicians Program (now the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra) in Berkeley, which caters to low-income students and has produced many of the current jazz generation’s brightest stars. “The spaces where I learned growing up, and where my sister learned, they were community spaces that combined the musical with the communal,” he said.When he got to Juilliard, although he loved his piano teachers, Kendall Briggs and Kenny Barron, alienation set in fast. “As an institution, it totally felt like a factory,” Pinderhughes said. “We’re here to get as good as we can at playing the music, but we don’t talk about why we’re doing what we’re doing. I don’t know if I had three conversations about that.”He pushed through, graduating in 2013 and settling in to create a major work of protest, “The Transformations Suite.” Close to an hour of semi-orchestral jazz, laced with poetic broadsides against the establishment, the 2016 album was proof-positive of Pinderhughes’s vision and his rigor. It caught the attention of Common, Karriem Riggins and Robert Glasper, who invited him to tour and record with their August Greene project.Keith LaMar, an author and activist on death row in Ohio, was also impressed by “The Transformations Suite,” and through friends he got in touch with Pinderhughes. The musician joined a group of artists working to raise awareness about LaMar’s case, and LaMar became part of the Healing Project. “He’s talking about speaking truth to power, he’s talking about your agency, putting it in perspective, the unequal distribution of wealth and how it’s basically the foundation of all the inequalities that exist in this country,” LaMar said in an interview.“The Transformations Suite” had been forceful as a manifesto of rightful outrage, but it wasn’t really a document of intimacy. For his next project, Pinderhughes started to interview men and women impacted by the criminal justice system, hearing their stories up close.An installation as part of the Healing Project at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts by Josh Begley, Pinderhughes, Shantina Washington and SameGang.Charlie Villyard, via Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsON ‘GRIEF,’ PINDERHUGHES focuses on an emotion that we all intimately know and fear, but that comes in particularly high frequency close to prisons and incarceration. He said that Nina Simone and Curtis Mayfield had been his lodestars: “To me, those are both artists that are working out ideas about how to contextualize not just their life, but their own entire communities’ lived situation.”Pinderhughes recorded the album — which was co-produced by his longtime collaborator Jack DeBoe — in pieces during the pandemic, overdubbing one instrumental section at a time to help maintain social distancing in the studio. Some tracks have only a string quartet, playing slowly dragged harmonies that sometimes pinch into fine-grain dissonance. Others have a full band, with Pinderhughes often playing the Rhodes, sputtering beats underneath and gossamer strings above.On “Holding Cell,” a highlight, voices harmonize over swarming violins, cello and electric bass; the harmony shifts tensely around them as they sing: “Holding cell/I can’t get well while you hold me.” For the title track, one of the most patiently beautiful songs — co-written with the bassist Burniss Earl Travis, known as Boom Bishop — two chords are all Pinderhughes and the band need to build a sonic whirlpool, conjuring the disorientation of loss.A standout of the Healing Project exhibition at the Yerba Buena center is the one piece without any visuals: a small, darkened room with a bench surrounded by speakers. They play an hour-and-a-half-long audio piece on loop, lining up clips from Pinderhughes’s interviews over ambient, sometimes ominous backing tracks that he recorded. The way they’re edited, these voices present critiques and reflections from within the system, not simple narratives of personal trauma or triumph over the odds.“With the sound room, you’re in the middle of the sound, and there’s nothing but you and the voices,” Pinderhughes said. “What I wanted to create is: ‘This is your brain.’ There is no us-and-them.” Everything is first person, he explained, “So unless you’re doing the work of separating yourself from the experiences, you’re in it.” (In this way, he acknowledged, he had been inspired by a conversation he’d seen on YouTube between the author bell hooks and the artist Arthur Jafa. In it, Jafa says that any camera can effectively function as a tool of the white gaze.)The people whose voices Pinderhughes uses in the sound room share publishing rights to the tracks that feature them, something that Pinderhughes saw as nonoptional. Some also have bio pages on the Yerba Buena center’s Healing Project website.In one clip, Keith LaMar speaks about feeling victorious simply for having maintained his “sweetness” — a personal quality that’s obvious in his voice — despite the inhumanities of living in solitary confinement for decades. He calls the prison system a “digestive tract,” not a space of rehabilitation.Not long after comes the voice of Roosevelt Arrington, an educator and peer mentor who spent years in the system. He says that socially accepted language can be dehumanizing: “‘Inmate,’ ‘convict,’ ‘ex-felon,’ they’re demeaning titles: They’re put in place to diminish self-respect and dignity, and to demean you and to break your spirit.” He adds, “When a person feels like they have no self-value and no self-worth, that mind-set tends to take them back to a criminal element.”The exhibition also includes visual artworks by Pinderhughes himself; the artist Titus Kaphar, who also designed the “Grief” LP cover; Nnaemeka Ekwelum, whose works in the gallery are a variation on Nigerian funeral cloths; and Peter Mukuria, known as Pitt Panther, who’s currently incarcerated in Virginia and serves as the minister of labor for the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party.Since connecting for the Healing Project, Mukuria and Pinderhughes have become close, and now talk by phone multiple times a week. In the gallery hang a number of works Mukuria drew on prison bedsheets, including a portrait of George Floyd, a piece to accompany the song “Process,” and a strikingly intimate scene with Mukuria seated in his cell. The show also has an altar, drawing from Afro-Latino traditions and New York City street culture, with a faceless portrait at its center, inviting visitors to honor anyone they’ve lost.Pinderhughes plans to take the Healing Project around the country, ideally reaching all the 15 states where he did interviews. He hopes it can ultimately become a permanent installation somewhere, someday. “I want to build a space that actually engages, and is able to offer the healing practices that I’ve learned through the interviews,” he said. “In an everyday context, offer those things.” More

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      My Chemical Romance’s Prog-Emo Surprise, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by the Smile, Julia Jacklin, black midi 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.My Chemical Romance, ‘The Foundations of Decay’My Chemical Romance — the New Jersey band that fused the momentum of pop-punk, the crunch of hard rock and the opulent productions of glam — announced its breakup in 2013 and released its last new song in 2014. Although the band reunited to tour in 2019, “The Foundations of Decay” is its first new material since then. There’s no punk sarcasm for now; as the music builds from measured dirge to pummeling anthem, the lyrics both recognize and rail against the ravages of time, even on the verge of a new tour. JON PARELESThe Smile, ‘The Opposite’On its debut album, “A Light for Attracting Attention,” the Smile is Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead joined by a different drummer: Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet. The new band’s ingredients add up largely as expected: a leaner take on Radiohead’s longstanding thoughts of alienation and malaise, pushing rhythm into the foreground. Skinner starts “The Opposite” by himself, with a sputtering, shifty funk beat that’s soon topped by an accumulation of overlapping, stop-start guitar riffs, each one adding a new bit of disorientation. Yorke might be describing the track itself when he sings, “It goes back and forth followed by a question mark.” PARELESblack midi, ‘Welcome to Hell’“Welcome to Hell” announces the third album by black midi, “Hellfire,” due July 15. It’s a jagged, funky, speed-shifting mini-suite, by turns brutal and sardonic, with lyrics about the dehumanization of a soldier. “To die for your country does not win a war/To kill for your country is what wins a war,” Geordie Greep sings. The music is exhilarating; the aftertaste is bleak. PARELESKendrick Lamar, ‘The Heart Part 5’Kendrick Lamar has made a series of songs called “The Heart” to preface his albums. “The Heart Part 5” arrived a few days before his new one, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” As always, Lamar’s work is multilayered, self-questioning, thoughtful, rhythmic and bold. The track’s jumpy, insistent conga drums, bass line and backup vocals come from Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You,” a title that Lamar repurposes to address his fans. On the sonic level, Lamar’s fast-talking vocals challenge the congas for syllable-by-syllable momentum. His mission is to “Sacrifice personal gain over everything/Just to see the next generation better than ours.” The song’s video clip uses deep-fake technology to make Lamar look like charged cultural figures including O.J. Simpson, Kanye West and Nipsey Hussle. This is hip-hop working through its own implications, contradictions and repercussions. PARELESFlores, ‘Brown’Flores’s voice has luster, but she can also envelop messages of pain and pride into moments of gentle acuity. On “Brown,” from her debut EP “The Lives They Left,” she meditates on her upbringing on the El Paso-Juárez border: the violence of government agencies like ICE and C.B.P., as well as the small joys of quotidian life, what she calls “brown trust” and “brown love.” A lonely saxophone resounds under the production, as Flores reflects on the resilience of the Indigenous ancestors that preceded her: “When they ask you where you people come from/16,000 years we here/Valleys stained of blood and tears/Mexica let ’em know/ This the land we’ve sown/Laid the seeds that grow.” ISABELIA HERRERARemi Wolf, ‘Michael’“Michael” is a relatively subdued song for an artist as antic and kaleidoscopic as Remi Wolf, but she puts her stamp on it nonetheless. Written with the Porches mastermind Aaron Maine — their first time working together — and Wolf’s touring guitarist Jack DeMeo, the track is a sing-songy depiction of romantic desperation, with Wolf singing from the perspective of someone clinging to an obsessive relationship she knows is doomed. “Michael, hold my hand and spin me round until I’m dizzy,” she begs atop a murky electric guitar progression. “Loosen up my chemicals.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJulia Jacklin, ‘Lydia Wears a Cross’The Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin’s music is a gradual accumulation of small, sharp lyrical details, and “Lydia Wears a Cross,” the first single from her forthcoming album “Pre Pleasure,” is full of them: Two young girls “listening to ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ soundtrack”; a child “singing every single word wrong” on a parade float; a catechism teacher instructing her pupils to pray for Princess Diana. Such snapshots create a larger atmosphere of religious indoctrination and Jacklin’s youthful questioning: “I felt pretty in the shoes and the dress/Confused by the rest, could he hear me?” The arrangement is sparse — drum machine, echoing stabs of piano — to spotlight Jacklin’s storytelling, but a subtle unease creeps in when she gets to the haunting chorus: “I’d be a believer, if it was all just song and dance/I’d be a believer, if I thought we had a chance.” ZOLADZDeath Cab for Cutie, ‘Roman Candles’Ben Gibbard sings about numbness and detachment, claiming “I am learning to let go/of everything I tried to hold,” in “Roman Candles,” the preview of an album due in September. But the music belies any claim to serenity. Drums, bass and guitars all overload and distort, pounding away in a relentless two-minute surge. PARELESThe Black Keys, ‘How Long’There’s usually some angst tucked between the brawny classic-rock riffs on a Black Keys album. The duo’s new one, “Dropout Boogie,” includes “How Long,” a betrayed lover’s confession of desperate devotion. Just two descending chords, a cycle of disappointment, carry most of the song, with layers of guitar piling on like heartaches. “Even in our final hour/See the beauty in the dying flower,” Dan Auerbach sings in the bridge, but the obsession isn’t over; the song ends with the narrator still wondering, “How long?” PARELESJoy Oladokun, ‘Purple Haze’It’s not the Jimi Hendrix song. “You and I know that love is all we need to survive,” Joy Oladokun insists in her own “Purple Haze,” preaching togetherness in the face of dire possibilities. A syncopated acoustic guitar and Oladokun’s determined voice hint at Tracy Chapman as the song begins; more vocals and guitars join her, insisting on optimism even if “maybe we’re running out of time.” PARELESAmbar Lucid, ‘Girl Ur So Pretty’Ambar Lucid may be known for her brassy, arena-sized voice, but on her new single, she ventures into new territory. “Girl Ur So Pretty” glitters like pixie dust: in an airy, gossamer falsetto, the 21-year-old artist serenades her crush over sparkling synths and ’00s girl group handclaps. It’s a welcome spin on the bubble gum pop of a bygone era, and she brings her tongue-in-cheek humor along, too: “Can’t tell if I’m in love or high,” she sings. “I’m not usually into Earth signs.” HERRERAChes Smith, ‘Interpret It Well’There’s a nervy, bated-breath feeling about the music that the drummer and vibraphonist Ches Smith is making with his new quartet featuring Mat Maneri on violin, Craig Taborn on piano and Bill Frisell on guitar. It’s not fully dread, but not simple anticipation either. For an LP led by a drummer, “Interpret It Well” is full of extended passages with no drumming; latent tension hangs where the percussion might have been. On the title track, Smith taps the vibraphone in a pattern of resonant octaves, and the rest of the quartet grows restless behind him. A bluesy aside from Frisell sends the band into silence, and Taborn plays a long cadenza. By the end of the nearly 14-minute track, the four are charging ahead together. This is the peak, but the stench of expectation still lingers, as if something else even louder — or completely peaceful — waits just ahead. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJacob Garchik, ‘Fanfare’The trombonist and composer Jacob Garchik treated his new album, “Assembly,” as a canvas for some impressive formal experiments, and there’s rarely a dull moment. Its tracks include spontaneous improvisations reframed via overdubs; complex compositions mixing two different tempos; and dissections of pieces of the jazz canon. On the fast-charging “Fanfare,” as Garchik and the soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome harmonize on a series of descending and ascending patterns, the rhythm section’s off-track backing gives the illusion that things are speeding up. Then suddenly a long, cooled-out passage begins, just trombone and piano, with Garchik sounding as buttery as Tricky Sam Nanton over changes borrowed from Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” RUSSONELLO More

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      ‘Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story’ Review: An Event With Unique Flavor

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      Gumbo, fried oysters, po’ boy sandwiches. And then there’s the music. This documentary gives an overview.As has been demonstrated in films as wide-ranging as “Monterey Pop,” “Woodstock,” and “Summer of Soul,” music festivals can’t help but get part of their vibe from their settings. As musicians from all over the world testify in the documentary “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, the Louisiana city’s annual jazz festival has an irreproducible flavor because it happens in the cradle of American music.The movie’s opening montage, featuring familiar famous faces ranging from Tom Jones to Pitbull, is — happily — a bit of a fake out. These big names and others get some play (and in what some might consider an unfortunate feature, Jimmy Buffett gets a lot of play) but the movie is conscientiously attentive to the festival’s homegrown eclecticism.Exploring the musical atmosphere of New Orleans itself, the film features experts laying out the distinctions between Cajun and Zydeco, for example. While both are dance music that trades in old melodies, the latter features electric guitar and washboard and comes at you “like a freight train.”The entrepreneur George Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz Festival, had a hand in Jazz Fest’s creation, sagely taking on the musician Ellis Marsalis (you may be familiar with the pianist’s work, or that of his sons, who include Wynton and Branford) as his New Orleans docent. The organizational work was soon handled by the young music enthusiast Quint Davis, who’s still in charge today.The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005. But the music came back like a miracle, and the movie reports that after a two-year postponement because of Covid-19, the event is currently on the comeback trail again.Jazz Fest: A New Orleans StoryRated PG-13 for a little saucy language. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      At 85, the Jazz Bassist Ron Carter Still Seeks ‘A Better Order of Notes’

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      The famously curious musician and bandleader will celebrate his milestone birthday with a career-spanning Carnegie Hall concert.On a recent morning on the Upper West Side, the bassist and bandleader Ron Carter sat on the far end of a plush, rust-colored sofa in his spacious 10th floor apartment, an oak-hued space with ornate sculptures and panoramic views of the bustling neighborhood blocks below. In the background wafted a gentle melody from Antônio Carlos Jobim, the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist and a former collaborator. The place exuded a grandeur that describes the man, too. It’s no surprise that Carter — Mr. Carter, Maestro, a jazz legend — lives here.With over 60 albums as bandleader and countless others as a sideman, and more than 2,220 recording sessions to his credit, Carter has long let his music do the talking. During our conversation, he seemed guarded, resting his head in a balled-up right fist and looking away when answering questions. But on this April day, he had something specific to discuss: a career-spanning show at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday with his own trio, quartet and octet to celebrate his 85th birthday.“He’s as straight as an arrow,” said Herbie Hancock, the hallowed pianist who met Carter at Miles Davis’s house in 1963, in a phone interview. They were playing tunes in what would become the trumpeter’s Second Great Quintet. “Miles played a little bit, then he threw his horn down on the couch and went upstairs,” he added. “But before he did, he told Ron to take over. He targeted Ron to do that because he knew that Ron could. Ron is a no nonsense guy.”Carter grew up as something of a prodigy in the Midwest, in a family that played instruments, yet wasn’t musical, per se. “Most Black people in the ’40s and ’50s, the families had some kind of common bond in the house before TV and all the stuff took over,” he said. “It was always someone who played piano, you had this choir singing at the house, normal African American communal in-house music.”Carter turned to the bass in high school as a way to stand out in the orchestra.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesHe took up the cello at 11 when a teacher starting an orchestra laid out the instruments on the table and it “seemed to strike my fancy,” he said, and played it until he got to high school. But he noticed he didn’t get the same opportunities as white students, despite being told how talented he was. High school orchestra members were sometimes asked to play background music for dinners and P.T.A. meetings — everyone except the Black students. In 1954, Carter saw that the orchestra’s only bassist was graduating. He turned to the instrument as a way to stand out.Discrimination followed him to Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where Carter played bass in the orchestra: The guest conductor Leopold Stokowski, then leading the Houston Symphony, said he liked Carter as a player and person, but Texas wasn’t progressive enough to have a Black musician in the orchestra. So Carter started playing at a local jazz club called the Ridge Crest Inn, working as the de facto bassist for touring musicians passing through town.“They said I played really good, and they thought that if I got to New York City, I could find work there,” Carter said. He moved to the city after graduating in 1959 and landed a spot playing in a band led by the drummer Chico Hamilton while also pursuing a master’s at the Manhattan School of Music. In 1961, he earned the advanced degree and released his debut album, “Where?,” which featured two other stalwarts — the alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy and the pianist Mal Waldron.“I wanted to paint a picture of what I could do,” Carter said of his first LP. Aside from Charles Mingus and Oscar Pettiford, bassists weren’t seen as bandleaders; being able to carry out his own vision was a rebellious act. “By and large, bass players were not getting the attention for those details that everyone else was getting,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is my chance to do what I think is my point of view.’ I took advantage of that.” Concurrently, his star rose in the New York scene; by 1963, he was perhaps the hottest young talent in the city. The coolest jazz purveyor in the area, and likely the world, soon came calling.Carter was working as a freelance musician with folk and blues singers, and was playing a club gig with the trumpeter Art Farmer, when Miles Davis asked him to play bass in the new quartet he was forming. Davis’s band was headed to California for a six-week tour, which meant Carter would have to quit Farmer’s group. Other musicians would have been likely to leave to play with the star trumpeter, but Carter — out of respect for Farmer — didn’t budge so easily.The saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis and Carter onstage in Rochester, N.Y.Paul Hoeffler/Redferns“I said, ‘Mr. Davis, I have a job already for the next two weeks with Mr. Farmer,’” Carter recalled. “If you will ask him to let me out of my gig, yes. If not, I’ll see you when it’s over.” Farmer let the young bassist tour with Davis. “Because I gave him the respect that he was due,” he continued. “I think it showed Miles that I was a man of my word, that I was an honorable person.”In Davis’s home and on the road, Hancock was taken by Carter’s tone and intuition. “He had the mind of someone that continued to explore and try new things,” he said. “His playing was clean and clear and definitive, and he was always right in the pocket at just the right place. He knew which way to go, to make it not just an exciting listening and playing experience but one that opened doors to new possibilities.”The group lasted five years, disbanding in 1968 when Davis sought an electric sound that merged rock, funk and ambient on albums like “In a Silent Way,” “Bitches Brew” and “On the Corner.” But you don’t get those records without the Second Great Quintet, and artists like Carter, Hancock, the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the drummer Tony Williams pushing Davis’s music to uncomfortable places. “Every night was a chance to play some wonderful music with some lovely people,” Carter said. “I still look back in awe at what we were doing, not understanding what it was, but it worked for us night in and night out.”Carter kept evolving, even as the popularity of jazz gave way to funk as the dominant genre in Black music. He taught jazz at the City College of New York, worked as a sideman at the record labels Blue Note and CTI, and has credits with everyone from Roberta Flack and Gil Scott-Heron to Lena Horne and Archie Shepp. Carter also embraced hip-hop later in his career, and played on A Tribe Called Quest’s sophomore album “The Low End Theory.” (He hadn’t heard of the group, but one of his sons advised him to do the session.) The “surprise of the music” has kept him going, he said.The bassist Stanley Clarke met Carter as a teenager in 1970 and was enamored with Carter’s consistency on the instrument. “He’s kind of like the center of a concentric circle,” Clarke said in a phone interview. “He pretty much controls every band he’s in. On every record I’ve ever heard him play, the first thing you go to is the bass.”By 1963, Carter was one of the hottest young talents in New York City. Soon, Miles Davis came calling.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesCarter, he said, is the culmination of the great bassists before him — Mingus, Pettiford and Paul Chambers — who all pulled magnificent tones from the instrument, paving the way for someone like Carter to synthesize it into something more melodic and wistful. “It’s all directed and converged in this person,” Clarke said. “There isn’t a bass player that’s out here today that has any sense that is aware of the bass, that’s not influenced by Ron Carter.”While he’s willing to discuss the past, Carter can’t help but focus on the future: his upcoming concerts and making sure he’s always improving.“Can I find a better order of notes that I didn’t find last week?” he asked.His dedication to his bandmates is always top of mind. “Can I be responsible for the standard I’m setting for them?” he continued. “Can I make them see how responsible I am to the music that I’m presenting to them?”“I’m going to make sure that I let them know that I appreciate their love, their care,” he added reflectively, looking toward a window. “I’m still getting better at doing what I do right now.”“For the Love of Ron,” an 85th birthday celebration with Ron Carter and Friends, is at 8 p.m. on Tuesday at the Perelman Stage of Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium; carnegiehall.org. More