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      Romeo Santos’s Melodramatic Return, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jack Harlow, Flock of Dimes, Tame Impala 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.Romeo Santos, ‘Sus Huellas’“Sus Huellas,” the first single from Romeo Santos’s forthcoming fifth solo album, “Formula, Vol. 3,” finds him reprising the bleeding-heart theatrics he’s known for, recalling the kind of cortavenas (roughly, “wrist cutting”) torment of bachata classics. This time, the genre’s white-pants-wearing, antics-obsessed lover boy is trying to recover from the despair of a lost love, and the melodrama is in overdrive: “Come, pull out my veins/Because the plasma inside of me has the poison of her love,” he sings. “And take this lighter, I want you to burn my lips/Eliminate the taste of her tongue, which did me harm.” It’s not all tradition though; Santos drops in an EDM interlude that will have uptown clubs losing it. ISABELIA HERRERAJack Harlow, ‘Nail Tech’Last year Jack Harlow went to No. 1 as the guest on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby,” and he’s learned something from that experience. “Nail Tech” has echoes of that song’s horns, and Harlow approaches the beat similarly, with imagistic rapping — “You ain’t one of my dogs, why do you hound us?” — and a confidence that makes this song sound like a victory lap. JON CARAMANICAC. Tangana, Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and Canelita, ‘La Culpa’The Spanish singer-rapper C. Tangana gets top billing on “La Culpa” (“The Blame”), a song added to the deluxe version of his 2021 Latin Grammy-winning album “El Madrileño.” But except for a brief, vulnerable bridge, he spends most of the song merged in harmony with three other singers who are more robust and closer to flamenco — Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and the especially gutsy Canelita — while rock drums and electric guitars join flamenco handclaps to pace the song. While the lyrics profess guilt and regret, they’re delivered with jolly camaraderie, suggesting that male bonding can easily overcome pangs of conscience. JON PARELESTame Impala, ‘The Boat I Row’Kevin Parker, a.k.a. the one-man studio band Tame Impala, took so long to release his 2020 album, “The Slow Rush,” that of course he had outtakes. “The Boat I Row” is from his collection “The Slow Rush B-Sides and Remixes.” It shares the album’s stately, logy, time-warped sound — psychedelically phased drums playing a hip-hop beat, multitracked vocal harmonies suggesting both the Beatles and ELO — and its thoughts about dogged persistence. “Even if it takes a hundred thousand goes/The way’s in front of me ’cause that’s the one I chose,” Parker sings, at once diffident and determined. PARELESFlock of Dimes, ‘Pure Love’Jenn Wasner, who records as Flock of Dimes, ponders unsatisfied desire — material and emotional — in “Pure Love,” recorded with the producer Nick Sanborn from Sylvan Esso: “I keep dreaming of a better moment,” she sings. She’s surrounded by looped voices and instruments, with ricocheting programmed beats that hit like 1980s drums; she sounds like she’ll persist. PARELESAsa, ‘Ocean’The songwriter Asa has forged a long career in Nigeria, singing about adversity and conflict as well as romance. But “Ocean” is pure affection. Asa is about to release her fifth studio album, “V,” and “Ocean” distills the ways Nigerian Afrobeats exalts Minimalism. The percussion is just a few syncopated taps, the bass lines are only two or three notes and Asa’s breathy voice floats with professions of pure devotion: “Boy, you are the ocean,” she coos, and everything about the song promises bliss. PARELESYeat featuring Young Thug, ‘Outsidë’Two generations of surrealists in one liquid pool of syllables. Yeat is still swooning over abstraction, and Young Thug, several years older, has learned how to form word-like shapes while still seeming to melt in real time. CARAMANICASigurd Hole, ‘The Presentation Dance’Like so many, the Norwegian bassist Sigurd Hole — a nimble-fingered player and a composer of sonically expansive, thoughtfully paced music — has been overcome with dismay at the fast-worsening climate crisis. Like too few, in the face of it he’s sought out wisdom and theory from non-industrialized societies. “The Presentation Dance” comes from his newest album, “Roraima,” which he made after reading “The Falling Sky,” a book by the Yanomami shaman and mouthpiece Davi Kopenawa. The rain-like pitter-patter of a marimba interacts with a small corps of strings, playing fluid and intertwined melodies that sometimes fall into a pizzicato repartee with the marimba’s mallets. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOEd Sheeran featuring Bring Me the Horizon, ‘Bad Habits’Last week Ed Sheeran released a new version of his song “The Joker and the Queen,” accompanied by Taylor Swift. Pfft. Predictably pretty. Plain. This is more like it. “Bad Habits” is maybe Sheeran’s most anodyne pop hit, and this version, which is theatrically stomped all over by the British metalcore band Bring Me the Horizon, rescues it, recalling the essential and overlooked “Punk Goes Pop” compilation series. CARAMANICAFrontperson, ‘Parade’Frontperson is the indie-rock duo of Kathryn Calder, from the New Pornographers, and Mark Hamilton, from Woodpigeon. Blooping, calliope-like keyboard arpeggios and layers of nonsense-syllable vocals give “Parade” a blithe, circusy tone as Calder and Hamilton sing about anticipation, connection and disconnection, accepting it all: “Sometimes you’re left/Sometimes you leave.” PARELESAmbar Lucid, ‘Dead Leaves’Ambar Lucid’s music bottles youthful longing. The 21-year-old, whose debut album, “Garden of Lucid,” collected stories about escape and radical self-acceptance, seems to know exactly how to stir the soul. “Should I even bother letting anybody know how I feel?” she wonders on “Dead Leaves.” It’s soft winter balladry that contains all the pain and promise of the change of seasons. HERRERAHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Jupiter’s Dance’“Jupiter’s Dance” is from the newly released “Life on Earth,” the seventh album Alynda Segarra has made as Hurray for the Riff Raff. The new songs contemplate the natural world and humanity’s toll on it. “Jupiter’s Dance” is a quasi-mystical reassurance — “Celestial children coming through/You never know who you’ll become” — with a glimmering bell tones and an undercurrent of Puerto Rican bomba, a brief benediction. PARELESJavon Jackson featuring Nikki Giovanni, ‘Night Song’The poet Nikki Giovanni selected the repertoire for “The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni,” a new album by the strapping tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson that explores the lineage of Black American spirituals and hymns. But her voice appears on only one track, and it’s the one that’s not a church melody: “Night Song.” Rather that recite her own poetry, Giovanni sings this ode to unbelonging — a favorite of her old friend Nina Simone — with wistful conviction, picking up where Jackson’s gentle treatment of the melody leaves off. Her voice crinkles up on the high notes but loses none of its gravitas or tenderness as she sings: “Music, by the lonely sung/When you can’t help wondering:/Where do I belong?” RUSSONELLOChris Dingman, ‘Silently Beneath the Waves’For the vibraphonist Chris Dingman, solo playing was becoming central to his practice even before the pandemic hit. Since then, it’s been his primary mode, and he’s increasingly sought to use the big, chiming instrument as a vehicle for transcendence. That pursuit has guided him into a close study of a far tinier instrument: the mbira, a thumb piano with spiritual applications across southern Africa. On “Silently Beneath the Waves” — the opener to a new album of solo performances, “Journeys Vol. 1” — you can hear evidence of that research, as he repeats fetching, hypnotizing patterns that pull you into their force field before gradually giving way to a different shape. RUSSONELLO More

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      ‘Oscar Peterson: Black + White’ Review: Never Mind the Talking Heads

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      The flashing fingers of this jazz piano icon, and his mesmerizing tracks, are all the perspective we need.At one in point in “Oscar Peterson: Black + White,” Barry Avrich’s documentary about the Canadian jazz pianist, Billy Joel is raving about the speed of Peterson’s hands on the piano. “You’d try to watch what he was doing,” he explained, “but it’s a blur.”True enough, but completely redundant: We’re already watching Peterson’s hands flash across the keys, in the crisp archival concert footage Joel is talking over. The breathless praise adds nothing; in fact, it distracts from the pleasure of seeing a jazz great perform. As a recent viral tweet skewering this music-doc convention sarcastically pointed out, we don’t need a bunch of interviews with experts “to put the band in historical context.” Seeing Peterson play is more than enough.“Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance. The footage of Peterson at work is an infinitely better testament to that brilliance than words of admiration from artists he influenced. What’s more, the relevance of the interviewees varies wildly. Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock are understandable. But if, like me, you wonder why we’re hearing so much from Randy Lennox, a pretty nondescript corporate media executive, stay through the credits: he’s one of the film’s producers. If you don’t already believe Oscar Peterson was a genius, I doubt he’ll be the one to convince you.Oscar Peterson: Black + WhiteNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      An Exhilarating Set of Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Arrives, 49 Years Later

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      A performance recorded at Town Hall in 1973 went unreleased, partly because of its length. A digital-only release this week includes the 88-minute track “Autumn/Parade.”Creative jazz at its best is a music of discovery: improvisers caught up together in a moment that’s passing even as they conjure it, with the next already materializing between them.The jazz business, meanwhile, is often about rediscovery, as newly issued recordings from canonized greats frequently outsell and out-stream the releases of contemporary musicians, even those certain to be canonized themselves someday.This Tuesday’s digital-only arrival of a mostly lost concert from the innovative pianist Cecil Taylor exemplifies both points. Recorded at the Town Hall in New York on Nov. 4, 1973, the music gushes as if it were an uncapped fireplug. Previously unreleased, the relentless 88-minute track “Autumn/Parade” catches the inexhaustible Cecil Taylor Unit in the grip of one revelation after another, playing free jazz, a style of improvisation, in the purest definition of free.Unburdened by the boundaries of keys, structures, time signatures and the dictates of each piece’s composer, Taylor, Andrew Cyrille (percussion), Jimmy Lyons (alto saxophone), and Sirone (bass) formed an organic whole, making — discovering — one torrent of sound together.“He never told me what to play,” Cyrille, now 82, said of Taylor last week. “He would say, ‘Play what you hear. Play what you want.’”Or, as Cyrille put it at a 2020 Village Vanguard performance, such in-the-moment musical freedom is “playing life.”Free jazz liberated rhythm sections from the traditional role of keeping time in favor of making sound, as Cyrille does throughout “Autumn/Parade.” Taylor, who died in 2018, famously hit his keys with a percussionist’s force, and for all the considerable harmonic excitement of his runs, what’s most immediately striking on the new release is the Unit’s restless, driving polyrhythms, pulsing clots of tones and beats.Taylor’s Town Hall quartet included the percussionist Andrew Cyrille, the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons and the bassist Sirone.“No other pianist I know plays with such physicality at the piano,” Kris Davis, a singular improvising pianist and composer in her own right, said in an interview. “Every idea, whether gestural, melodic or harmonic, is expressed through rhythm.”Davis noted that Taylor’s technique of composing fragments of notes in “cells” that he then would “develop, expand and turn upside down” at times appealed more to classical musicians than to jazz musicians, though today his influence is heard widely among improvising pianists. (She cited an expansive list, among them Marilyn Crispell, Jason Moran, Craig Taborn, Myra Melford, Alexander Hawkins, Angelica Sanchez and Vijay Iyer.)But on the nightclub scene of the ’60s and ’70s, genius didn’t always mean drink sales, and being in the vanguard of a new approach meant it could be a challenge finding suitable collaborators. Oblivion, the label putting out this release, has called it “The Return Concert” because in ’73, Taylor, then 44, had been mostly absent from recording and being in the New York scene for five years as he pioneered another aspect of avant-garde jazz life: turning to academia. (He taught at Antioch College and the University of Wisconsin, not without controversy.)The taping of the Town Hall concert was another feat of improvisation. Taylor had recorded significant LPs (“Conquistador!,” “Unit Structures”) for Blue Note in the late 1960s, but, at this point, was independent. Planning a release for Taylor’s nascent Unit Core label, his sort-of manager, David Laura, turned to an unlikely source: a Columbia student, Fred Seibert, who had recorded concerts for the university radio station and released several blues LPs on the independent Oblivion label with cohorts from a Long Island record store.With borrowed equipment and much youthful confidence, Seibert took the gig — and faced a torrent of music. “I felt like I was under Niagara Falls with every sound coming at me from 360 degrees and fighting for space in my head,” said Seibert, who would go on to engineer and produce records for Muse Records before leaving the music industry at the dawn of the 1980s for Hollywood, where he became a storied producer of animated television. (Series launched under his aegis include “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “Powerpuff Girls” and “Adventure Time.”)For Taylor, “free” also meant freedom from the restraints of the commercial music industry. Releasing the first set would have demanded making a double LP and fading down the music at the end of each side, which Seibert considered contrary to its spirit. A shorter second set proved a better fit: Split between a 16-minute solo Taylor piece and a side-length band workout, the encore performance had a limited 1974 release as “Spring of Two Blue J’s.” One of the 2,000 copies made it to the critic Gary Giddins at The Village Voice; he called it “probably my favorite album made in the last year.”“He never told me what to play,” Cyrille said of Taylor. “He would say, ‘Play what you hear. Play what you want.’”Fred W. McDarrah/Getty ImagesThe other 88 minutes of music remained on Seibert’s tapes, though he always hoped to put them out in the world. Now, taking advantage of digital music’s lack of physical limitations, he’s unleashing “The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert” on the newly reconstituted Oblivion Records. Seibert’s conviction not to fade or shorten the first set, “April/Parade,” and his disinterest in taking on the hassle of traditional distribution has led him to rule out the deluxe CD or vinyl package that such rediscoveries typically enjoy.Critics and fans often view jazz history as a succession of giants making artistic breakthroughs, as the music itself changes in their wake. That accounts for some of the trepidation and revulsion that, decades ago, some critics expressed toward free jazz in general and Taylor in particular — was this the direction it all would go? It perhaps also explains the tendency of some of Taylor’s champions to emphasize what was new in his music (especially techniques inspired by classical composition) to the detriment of its roots in Black American jazz.“He didn’t just come out of the blue and say, ‘I’m Cecil Taylor. I’m doing what I do, and it’s always been this,’” Cyrille said. “He learned from a lot of other people. He played with Johnny Hodges and Hot Lips Page. He observed Thelonious Monk. Now, the concepts were different, but all of those musicians before him played who they were, too — they played their freedom.”Almost 50 years after that Town Hall concert, Cyrille is still doing the same. At Dizzy’s Club on Feb. 5, his longstanding group Trio 3 — with the bassist Reggie Workman and the alto saxophonist Oliver Lake — played its last-ever concerts, with guest appearances from Iyer and the altoist Bruce Williams. Cyrille, though, will continue playing live and recording, and he has performances scheduled at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., in March.Cyrille calls playing “therapeutic” and refers to the music he has made with Taylor and so many others throughout a 60-plus year career as “democratic.” Whether in the ’70s with Taylor or with his own groups today, “It’s about self expression,” he said, “and the spiritual signature of the players.”He recalled the Taylor of the Town Hall era, hearing the other players’ discoveries, which then fed his own. “Whatever the rest of us played, he used it,” he said. “He absorbed music. And in his playing, you hear how he would deal with it as it entered his body, and how he felt about what was being offered to him. It all came out through the piano.” More

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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