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      Ron Miles, Understated Master of Jazz Cornet, Is Dead at 58

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      He enjoyed the admiration of his fellow musicians for decades, but he had just been starting to find his place in the spotlight.Ron Miles, whose gleaming, generously understated cornet playing made him one of the most rewarding bandleaders in contemporary jazz, if also one of its most easily overlooked, died on Tuesday at his home in Denver. He was 58.His label, Blue Note Records, said in an announcement that the cause was complications of a rare blood disorder. Mr. Miles had only recently gained the wider attention that he had long deserved, and his death proved as wrenching as it was unexpected for a jazz world already reeling from a cavalcade of untimely deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.The pianist Jason Moran paid tribute to Mr. Miles in a Facebook post, praising the spirit that he poured into both his compositions and his contributions to other people’s bands. “He’d make a chart with so much soul and simplicity,” Mr. Moran wrote. “And he would imbue any other song with that soulfulness as well. Every turn was original.”For decades, Mr. Miles enjoyed the admiration of insiders and fellow musicians and was known as a munificent educator and standard-bearer on the Denver scene. But his retiring personality and his relative absence from New York conspired with the resolute unflashiness of his playing to keep him out of the brightest spotlight. In his bands, the accompanists were often more famous than the leader.Only with the 2017 release of “I Am a Man,” a collection of seven inspired originals played by an all-star quintet, did the scope of his creativity gain wider recognition. Three years later, Blue Note released the quintet’s second album, “Rainbow Sign,” a set of languorous, poignant tunes that he had written while caring for his ailing father, who died in 2018.The title had a few levels of meaning for Mr. Miles, all of them intertwined. Referring to a passage in the Book of Revelation, when Christ perceives that his skin is multihued, Mr. Miles said the rainbow was a symbol of humanity’s oneness. “The idea of a rainbow is that it’s this thing that takes us outside of our expectations and our limitations of what we can see,” he told the Denver-based publication Westword.While grieving, Mr. Miles had also been drawn to mythology that sees rainbows as a gateway connecting the living to their ancestors. “Those who have left us can come back when we see a rainbow and visit us,” he said, “and we can interact with them through this rainbow.”Ronald Glen Miles was born in Indianapolis on May 9, 1963, to Jane and Fay Dooney Miles. When he was 11, his parents moved the family to Denver, hoping that the mile-high climate would help Ron cope with his asthma, and took jobs as civil servants there.He started playing trumpet in middle school, at a summer music program, and grew devoted to the instrument as a student at East High School. Mr. Miles played in the jazz band alongside the future actor Don Cheadle, who played saxophone, and soon began an apprenticeship with the respected Denver saxophonist Fred Hess.Mr. Miles and Mr. Hess would become collaborators, making a number of recordings together and both serving on the faculty of Metropolitan State University of Denver, where Mr. Miles eventually became director of jazz studies.After graduating from high school, he enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Denver, but soon transferred to the University of Colorado Boulder to study music. He went on to graduate school at the Manhattan School of Music; this was the only period he spent living outside Denver, where he would spend the rest of his career mentoring a generation of musicians — both on the live scene and in classrooms at Metropolitan State.On his first album, “Distance for Safety,” released in 1987, he led a hard-driving trumpet-bass-drums trio infused with equal doses of rock and free jazz. He went on to release a string of consistently unorthodox albums on various small labels, conforming to no favored format or style, including “Witness,” a 1989 quintet date, and “Heaven,” a 2002 duo record with the guitarist Bill Frisell.As Mr. Miles’s career went on, an expansive Rocky Mountain sound seeped ever more indelibly into his compositions and his playing, which was rough around the edges but balanced and controlled at its core. In the 2000s he switched fully from the trumpet to the cornet, a slightly less glamorous instrument that seemed to suit him.Unlike a typical East Coast trumpeter, he rarely flitted or zipped around on the instrument. He approached notes as if to disarm them, sometimes allowing tones to fill themselves out gradually, becoming wide and full and bright. The melodies he traced felt designed to be followed, even when they went fiendishly askew.By his mid-50s, Mr. Miles had become the leading brass player in what can now be considered a legitimate subgenre in jazz: the blending of American folk, blues and country with cool jazz and spiritual influences. One of its originators was Mr. Frisell, a Denver native 12 years older than Mr. Miles. In the 1990s and 2000s, the drummer Brian Blade and his Fellowship Band were its biggest exponents. Mr. Miles worked closely with both musicians.Mr. Miles performing at the Stone in New York in 2006.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesHe began collaborating with Mr. Frisell in the 1990s, playing first in the guitarist’s unusual quartet (joined by trombone and violin); they went on to appear in a variety of each other’s ensembles. Mr. Blade joined them in a trio under Mr. Miles’s direction that recorded a pair of arresting albums, “Quiver” (2012) and “Circuit Rider” (2014), before expanding into a quintet.With Mr. Moran added on piano and Thomas Morgan on bass, Mr. Miles composed for the band with each individual musician in mind. And he gave his side musicians full scores, rather than just individual parts, so they would see how all their voices would move together.The band became a darling of the jazz world, and “I Am a Man,” released on Enja/Yellowbird Records, garnered widespread acclaim. Mr. Miles made his first appearance as a leader at the Village Vanguard last year, playing the storied club’s reopening week after it had been shut down for a year and a half because of the coronavirus.Mr. Miles is survived by his wife, Kari Miles; his daughter, Justice Miles; his son, Honor Miles; his mother; his brother, Johnathan Miles; his sisters, Shari Miles-Cohen and Kelly West; and his half sister, Vicki M. Brown.Mr. Miles was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2017; that same year, he joined the saxophonist Joshua Redman in recording “Still Dreaming,” a tribute to the band Old and New Dreams, with Mr. Miles filling the trumpeter Don Cherry’s chair. The album earned him his lone Grammy nomination.Mr. Miles had also been a member of the pianist Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret, an acclaimed avant-garde quintet; the violinist Jenny Scheinman’s groups; and the blues musician Otis Taylor’s backing band.A decade before Mr. Miles put together his quintet, the New York Times critic Nate Chinen, reviewing a performance with a sextet, made note of how selflessly he led his band. “Mr. Miles, who wrote most of the material for the group, appeared flatly uninterested in solo heroics; he was more intent on submerging himself in a sound,” Mr. Chinen wrote. “The songs felt like internal monologues in open spaces: careful and contemplative but free.” More

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      Conrad Janis, Father on ‘Mork & Mindy’ and Much More, Dies at 94

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      His role on the hit sitcom was just one of more than 100 film and television credits; he was also a fine jazz trombonist and co-owner of an art gallery.Conrad Janis, an actor familiar to television viewers as Mindy’s father on the hit sitcom “Mork & Mindy” who was also a skilled jazz musician and a gallerist well known in the New York art world, died on March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 94.Dean A. Avedon, his business manager, confirmed the death.Mr. Janis, a child of the noted art collectors and gallerists Sidney and Harriet (Grossman) Janis, moved easily between the worlds of high art, jazz and acting, sometimes switching one hat for another in the same evening.“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”The key to juggling three areas of expertise, Mr. Janis told Newsday, was keeping his personas separate.“It just wouldn’t do to tell a knowledgeable art patron that ‘man, I dig Picasso the wildest,’” he said.Mr. Janis, an accomplished trombonist as well as a busy actor, peformed regularly with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. Among the other members of the band, seen in performance in 1980, was his fellow actor George Segal, who played banjo and sang.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via AlamyConrad Janis was born on Feb. 11, 1928, in Manhattan. His parents had a successful shirt-making business early in their married life, which gave them the wherewithal to begin collecting art and, in 1948, open the Sidney Janis Gallery, which became, as The New York Times put it in Sidney Janis’s obituary in 1989, “a major pacesetter for the art world in the 1950s and ’60s.”Harriet Janis also wrote books with the jazz historian Rudi Blesh, including “They All Played Ragtime” (1950). That connection led to Conrad’s musical expertise. Mr. Blesh’s daughter played trombone in her school’s marching band but lost interest; the spare trombone ended up in Conrad’s hands. He particularly studied the music of the influential New Orleans trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory.“I memorized a lot of what he did,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.His acting developed alongside his musicianship. When he was 13, a classmate at the Little Red School House in Manhattan told him that “Junior Miss,” a popular Broadway comedy about a teenage girl, was holding auditions for a road company. He auditioned, got in, and spent two years with the tour, advancing to a leading juvenile role. He started doing radio voice work at the same time.“I played kids of 14 and old men of 40” on the radio, he told The New York Times in a 1945 interview.He landed a role in the pre-Broadway run of “The Dark of the Moon,” which got him noticed by a Hollywood talent scout. He remained with the play when it went to New York, making his Broadway debut in March 1945, but within a few months he was on the West Coast to make his first film, the comedy “Snafu,” in which he played a teenager who lies about his age to enlist.It was the first of more than 100 film and television credits. In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagan Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.“All through the ’50s,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981, “I was in so many TV shows as a young musician on drugs, desperately trying to kick the habit, that I’m sure I helped cement in the public’s mind a relationship between musicians and dope. All they cast me in were shows in which I did or didn’t kick the habit. I was always saying, ‘Hey, man, I just got to have a fix.’”He continued to play small parts on TV in the 1960s and ’70s before landing his best-known role, Mindy’s father. His character operated a music store, but although “Mork & Mindy” ran for four seasons, he never got a chance to play his trombone on the show, something he regretted.“The producers wouldn’t go for it,” he told The Albany Democrat-Herald of Oregon in 1990. “We had a really cute script where I got together with my old Dixieland jazz band, but they didn’t think it was funny enough.”Mr. Janis with Thomas Scott, left, and Steven Scott in the 1996 movie “The Cable Guy.”He continued to work in television after “Mork,” with appearances on “St. Elsewhere,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Frasier” and other shows. His later movie appearances included small roles in “Mr. Saturday Night” (1992) and “The Cable Guy” (1996). He sometimes collaborated with his wife, Maria Grimm, including directing two movies she wrote, “The Feminine Touch” (1995) and “Bad Blood” (2012).Mr. Janis’s acting career also included a dozen Broadway credits, among them the Gore Vidal play “A Visit to a Small Planet” in 1957 and a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969.Throughout his musical and acting adventures, Mr. Janis also kept a hand in the art world.Arne Glimcher, the founder and chairman of Pace Gallery and a friend of Mr. Janis’s for almost 60 years, said Mr. Janis worked for his father at the Sidney Janis Gallery and was responsible for certain artists there, including Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann.“His knowledge of 20th-century art and Modernism was really encyclopedic,” Mr. Glimcher said in a phone interview.When Sidney Janis reached 90, he turned the Janis Gallery over to Conrad and his brother, Carroll, who kept it going until 1999.Mr. Janis’s first marriage, to Vicki Quarles, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ronda Copland. Ms. Grimm, whom he married in 1987, died in September. He is survived by his brother; two children from his first marriage, Christopher and Carin Janis; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Glimcher said that in recent years some of Mr. Janis’s old jazz pals would come to his home in Beverly Hills on Thursdays and play. When his wife died, Mr. Glimcher said, Mr. Janis gave her a jazz funeral, then changed the location of those jam sessions.“Every Thursday,” Mr. Glimcher said, “he took the jazz band to her mausoleum and played there.” More

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      The Buzzy Band Wet Leg Trips Out at a Party, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bartees Strange, La Marimba, Sharon Van Etten 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.Wet Leg, ‘Angelica’The latest single from the buzzy post-punk revivalists Wet Leg tells a more linear story than their drolly absurdist breakout “Chaise Longue”: “Angelica” captures that all-too-relatable experience of feeling awkward at a bad party, observing with a pang of envy the people who actually seem to be having fun. “I don’t know what I’m even doing here,” Rhian Teasdale deadpans, “I was told that there would be free beer.” But she and bandmate Hester Chambers finally get to let loose on the chorus, as the song’s surf-rock-meets-French-disco groove explodes, however briefly, into a psychedelic freakout. LINDSAY ZOLADZBartees Strange, ‘Heavy Heart’With its jangly guitar riffs and a cutting post-hardcore edge, Bartees Strange’s “Heavy Heart” at first seems like a simple slice of mid-00s nostalgia. But there is more longing for another time here. Strange, who grew up playing in hardcore bands in Washington, D.C., shatters genre tropes with ease: there is a rap-sung verse, a blossoming horn section, an aura of tender hope. “Heavy Heart,” which Strange wrote during a period of personal crisis in 2020, is about the guilt he experienced around the passing of his grandfather and the sacrifices his father made for his family. But it’s not a submission to that feeling; Strange sings, “Then I remember I rely too much upon/My heavy heart.” This is a relinquishing — a promise to embrace the possibility that lies beyond debilitating regret. ISABELIA HERRERAKevin Morby, ‘This Is a Photograph’“This Is a Photograph,” by the songwriter Kevin Morby (from the Woods and the Babies), starts out sparse and low-fi and keeps gathering instruments and implications. He juxtaposes momentary images with mortality: “This is what I’ll miss about being alive,” he repeats, between descriptions of mundane scenes. His vocals are largely spoken, more chanted than rapped, over a repeating modal guitar line that the arrangement keeps building on: with keyboards, drums, guitars, saxes and voices, a gathering of humanity to hold off the solitude of death. JON PARELESLabrinth and Zendaya, ‘I’m Tired’“Hey Lord, you know I’m tired of tears,” Labrinth sings in “I’m Tired,” a gospel-rooted song from the “Euphoria” soundtrack that retains the barest remnants of gospel’s underlying hope. It contemplates oblivion as much as redemption: “I’m sure this world is done with me,” Labrinth adds. Organ chords and choir harmonies swell, yet even when Zendaya comes in at the end, vowing to get through somehow, she wonders, “It’s all I got, is this enough?” PARELESRobyn, Neneh Cherry and Maipei, ‘Buffalo Stance’Neneh Cherry’s album “Raw Like Sushi,” released in 1989, was both of and ahead of its time: reveling in the ways pop, electronics, hip-hop and rock were merging and defining what an autonomous woman could do with them all. This week she released a remade version of the international hit “Buffalo Stance” featuring the dance-crying Swedish songwriter Robyn and the Swedish American rapper-singer Mapei. Cherry’s original, with vintage vinyl scratching for rhythm, was about fashion, poverty, exploitation and defiance: “No moneyman can win my love,” she taunted. The remake is slower and warier, with snaking minor-key guitar lines and even more skepticism about what men want. PARELESSharon Van Etten, ‘Used to It’Following her recent, upbeat single “Porta,” “Used to It” is a return to the more meditative side of Sharon Van Etten. Vividly imagistic lyrics and the smoky hush of Van Etten’s voice unfurl across the track with an unhurried confidence: “Where are you going, you rainstorm?” Van Etten sings. “Are you used to it, pouring out your life?” ZOLADZHaim, ‘Lost Track’“Lost Track” — a playfully punny title for a previously unreleased one-off single that is also about someone in an emotional free-fall — is as understated as a Haim song gets. Handclaps take the place of the group’s usually forceful percussion, Danielle Haim’s signature guitar is absent from the verses, a plinking toy piano gives the whole thing a dreamlike vibe. But the dynamism the Haim sisters are able to create from such simple means, and the way the song suddenly and satisfyingly builds to a crescendo during the chorus, is a testament to their deft and resourceful song craft. The music video, by the group’s longtime collaborator and Alana Haim’s “Licorice Pizza” director Paul Thomas Anderson, casts Danielle as a fidgety malcontent at a country club, her frustration bubbling over as she shouts the song’s most triumphant line, “You can sit down if you don’t mind me standing up!” ZOLADZOmah Lay and Justin Bieber, ‘Attention’Justin Bieber isn’t done with Nigerian Afrobeats; his restrained croon dovetails nicely with the equanimity of Afrobeats singers. Meanwhile, Western producers are learning Afrobeats techniques. Last year Bieber joined a remix of “Essence,” a worldwide hit by Wizkid. Now he’s collaborating with another Nigerian star, Omah Lay, on “Attention,” which melds Afrobeats and house music in a production by Avedon (Vincent van den Ende), from the Netherlands, and Harv (Bernard Harvey), from Kansas City. Separately and then together, Bieber and Lay state a longing that might be either for romance or clicks: “Show me a little attention.” PARELESNew Kids on the Block featuring Salt-N-Pepa, Rick Astley and En Vogue, ‘Bring Back the Time’At a moment when current hitmakers like the Weeknd and Dua Lipa revive glossy, pumped-up 1980s sounds — ballooning drums, arpeggiating synthesizers — the not-so-New Kids on the Block cannily position themselves as a nostalgia act for both music and video. Abetted by early-MTV contemporaries, they fondly parody 1980s videos from Devo, Talking Heads, A Flock of Seagulls, Robert Palmer, Twisted Sister, Michael Jackson and more. “We’re still the same kids we were back in ’89,” they proclaim, all evidence to the contrary. PARELESLa Marimba, ‘Suéltame’The Dominican singer-songwriter La Marimba may have a smoky voice, but don’t confuse it for hushed modesty. Her single “Suéltame,” or “Let Me Go,” is nothing less than a battle cry: this is punk perico ripiao, an electric take on the oldest style of merengue, with a liberatory spirit. (On Instagram, La Marimba said the song is a response to the everyday struggles of women and girls in the Caribbean.) Over razor-sharp synths and the raucous metal scrapes of the güira, La Marimba demands freedom through gritted teeth: “Let me go already/I am how I want to be.” HERRERAMelissa Aldana, ‘Emelia’The Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana was in the middle of a dream about motherhood one night when the melody to “Emelia” came to her. Pillowy and suspended, caught between longing and rest, this tune is the moment on “12 Stars” — Aldana’s latest release for Blue Note Records — when she and her hyper-literate quintet of rising jazz all-stars slow down and fully embrace the blur. The pianist Sullivan Fortner is the biggest smudge artist here, adding clouds of harmony on Rhodes, cluttering the airspace around Lage Lund’s guitar, and complementing the distant, even-toned longing of Aldana’s saxophone. At the end of the song, taking the melody home, she tongues the instrument’s reed, letting her notes crack; then the music cuts off and the voices of young children come in, bringing the track to a close. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOThe Weather Station, ‘To Talk About It’“I’m tired of working all night long, trying to fit this world into a song,” Tamara Lindeman sighs, although the striking achievement of her latest album as the Weather Station is how often she is able to do just that. “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars,” out Friday, is at once spacious and granular: Lindeman’s precise lyricism zooms in on particular human experiences and scenes, but her airy, piano-driven compositions allow for all sorts of environmental ambience and collective anxieties to seep in. “To Talk About,” the album’s latest single, features vocals from the Toronto-based musician Ryan Driver, and seeks refuge from an emotionally fatiguing world in quiet, shared intimacy: “I am tired,” Lindeman repeats, this time adding, “I only want to lie beside my lover tonight.” ZOLADZCarmen Villain, ‘Subtle Bodies’The composer Carmen Villain blends nature recordings, instruments, samples and programming to create tracks that feel both enveloping and open. “Subtle Bodies,” from her new album “Only Love from Now On,” stacks up layers of quiet polyrhythm, swathes them in pink noise that could be wind or waves, nudges them forward with a muffled two-note bass loop and wafts in sustained tones and distant wordless voices; it’s ambient but clearly in motion. PARELESLila Tirando a Violeta & Nicola Cruz, ‘Cuerpo que Flota’“Cuerpo que Flota,” the first single from Uruguayan producer Lila Tirando a Violeta’s forthcoming album “Desire Path,” refuses to hew to tradition. Alongside the Ecuadorean producer Nicola Cruz, Lila stitches together murmurs; a muted, stuttering half-dembow riddim; and layers of static disturbance. The album samples pre-Hispanic flutes and ocarinas right alongside Lila’s electronic experimentation (you can even buy a 3-D printed ocarina along with the release), allowing her to forge her own dystopic, serrated universe where past meets present. HERRERA More

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      Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Album Tackles a Newer Archive: Her Own

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      The vocalist who dares to take on older music with unsavory history turns inward on “Ghost Song,” her most revealing and rewarding album yet.Since her arrival on the jazz scene about a dozen years ago, Cécile McLorin Salvant has made a practice of shining a black light on the unsavory history of American popular song. She sings standards, show tunes and old novelties in a taut, flinty, elusively beautiful voice, erring toward material with difficult lyrics and tough places in history. Salvant wins over her audiences by tweaking them slightly: daring them to go there with her — not just into the archive, but toward the darkness of the past.Today, you’re as likely to hear jazz’s most decorated vocalist singing a tune like “You Bring Out the Savage in Me” (a Valaida Snow vehicle from the mid-1930s that Salvant has called “so ​​racist and perfect and hilarious”), or Burt Bacharach’s “Wives and Lovers” (sample lyric: “Wives should always be lovers, too/Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you/I’m warning you!”), as to find her doing the typical standard, or a jazz take on a pop tune, or an original.But on “Ghost Song,” a new album out on Friday, Salvant has applied that daring-to-go-there ethic to something else: herself, writing music that looks within and doesn’t blink. In conceiving the LP, Salvant spent more time leafing through her own notebooks than she did the Great American Songbook.“Some of my favorite stuff to read is always the letters and the journals and diaries,” she said, talking about the artists that inspire her. “I love to see where the thinking happens, and I think I wanted, in a way, to share that. I wanted to translate that feeling to an album.”Salvant, 32, was speaking via video chat from her apartment in central Brooklyn, and she brandished her notebook for the camera. It serves a lot of functions, she said: journal, day planner, sketch pad, lyric book.“Ghost Song” is her first album to feature more originals than covers, and it breaks away hard from the sounds and structures of small-group jazz, which Salvant had been treating as a kind of gilded cage. At the same time, she’s keeping her links to the past, through the mixing bowl of styles she writes in and the covers she’s included. Some tracks feature a banjo, a flute and hand percussion, but no bassist or drummer. On one, a cathedral-grade pipe organ pushes the piano aside. All together, the result is her most revealing and rewarding record yet.“It lifts everything up to have standards that we all play that are written by our peers, and I just feel like that’s missing a little bit,” Salvant said.Olivia Galli for The New York TimesA kind of romantic wariness, bordering on pessimism, forms a leitmotif on this album — though it rarely tips into despair. It’s there on her blazing cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” and on “Dead Poplar,” for which Salvant put music to a letter Alfred Stieglitz had written Georgia O’Keeffe, in which he sounds both loving and conflicted. It should tell you something that the sunniest original composition on the album is called “Thunderclouds.”The archive-trolling music for which she’s best known has garnered Salvant a level of steadily mounting success that’s almost unheard-of for a jazz musician these days. Each of her past three LPs won the Grammy for best jazz vocal album, and in 2020 she was named a MacArthur fellow. But as Salvant has embraced the unruliness of her creativity, she’s realized that the boundaries holding her in place as a virtuoso jazz vocalist were always artificial.The same day she releases “Ghost Song,” her first solo exhibition will open at Picture Room, a gallery near her home in central Brooklyn. The show, also titled “Ghost Song,” features a selection of her embroideries and drawings, which seem indebted in equal measure to the cutouts of Henri Matisse, the market paintings of Haitian tradition, the tapestries of Moki Cherry (“I’m obsessed,” Salvant said of the Swedish textile artist), and the eerie, three-dimensional canvases that Salvant remembers seeing her sister, Aisha McLorin, make when she was younger.She’s also been applying a designer’s eye to her own attire, which in the past few years has grown explosively colorful. Performing at BRIC JazzFest in October, in a duet with the pianist Sullivan Fortner — her frequent creative partner and her co-producer on “Ghost Song” — Salvant wore a flowing purple dress, silver boots and a wiry, oversize necklace that she had made herself, as she volleyed comfortably with Fortner over standards and Sondheim.“It’s very rare that we’ll actually talk about music. We never practice together,” Fortner said in a phone interview, explaining that they’re more likely to visit a museum in their off hours. “Her awareness of all of the arts informs her music, and it’s taught me to kind of do the same.”A big moment of creative unfastening for her arrived not long before the pandemic, when Salvant wrote “Ogresse,” a concert-length musical fairy tale that tells the story of a large beast with “chocolate brown” skin who lives in the woods and feasts on the people who come near her. Salvant first came to the idea for “Ogresse” after being struck by a painting by the Haitian artist Gerard Fortune depicting an Erzulie, or Voudou deity, whose urine becomes a flourishing stream full of fish. Salvant has since recorded “Ogresse,” which features a 13-piece chamber orchestra conducted by Darcy James Argue, and she intends to release it as an album. She’s also at work on a feature-length animated film to accompany the music, using her own drawings.For Salvant, coming into herself as a multidimensional artist has had a feeling of return. “It’s like this weird optical illusion, I guess, where it does feel like suddenly now I’m beginning to be on this quest — and in fact, I was always on it,” she said. “I remember lists of things I wanted to do as a kid: I wanted to be a playwright and I wanted to be an actress, and I wanted to design the sets of the plays that I wrote.”Salvant grew up in Miami surrounded by music, but she didn’t take an immediate interest in jazz. Her parents and grandparents, who hailed from Haiti and Guadeloupe, listened to some, but it struck her as belonging to a culture that wasn’t fully hers. “For me, it started off as thinking that it was completely dead and dried up,” she said. “There was something almost as exotic about it as the Paraguayan folk music that my mom used to listen to. It was just one of many world musics in the house.”At university in France, taking classical voice lessons while studying political science and law, Salvant felt herself being pushed toward jazz — partly because of others’ expectations, she said, but also by her own curiosity. “I was in a music school where there was a jazz program, and I was the only” — she hesitated — “American there. And they’re like, ‘It’s your music, you need to sing,’” Salvant said. “It’s so strange. It’s like that in-between space of: This is an exotic thing, but this is also the way in which I connect back to the country that I was born in, and this homesickness that I felt.”Jazz also proved a worthy outlet for her historical drive. Even now, as she has delved into more personal songwriting, that hasn’t meant abandoning her interest in the archive; much the opposite. “There’s something about us being so obsessed with our own time. I think that’s the tendency, and it’s so self-centered, so narcissistic in a way,” Salvant said. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s been around for thousands upon thousands of years, a lot of storytelling devices. And in a way, it’s quite humbling, and also really inspiring.”It was her love of Baroque “mad songs” — a genre with its own troubling history, related to the exploitation and othering that mentally ill patients were subjected to in 17th-century England — that led her to write “I Lost My Mind,” from “Ghost Song.” It starts with a verse of jazz-genre balladry (“Here am I, lounging on the sands of my hourglass/Watching the time drip, sand sketching strange glyphs/Feeling my mind slip off a cliff”), then dissolves into an echoing incantation over Aaron Diehl’s pipe organ. Salvant’s voice, overdubbed upon itself, deadpans: “I lost my mind/Can you help me find my mind?”On “Ghost Song,” she’s also on a mission to punch up the jazz ballad for the 21st century, and she does two covers that could well become new standards: Sting’s plangent “Until,” and Gregory Porter’s triumphant “No Love Dying” (which she and Fortner deftly combine, on Track 2, with “Optimistic Voices,” a chipper tune from “The Wizard of Oz”).“It lifts everything up to have standards that we all play that are written by our peers, and I just feel like that’s missing a little bit,” Salvant said of the contemporary jazz scene. “I’m not saying that it’ll be ‘No Love Dying,’ but I hope it happens with something.”She has written a moving ballad of her own, too: “Moon Song,” a kind of companion piece to the album’s bluesier, aching title track. “Moon Song” has the aesthetic of classic jazz, with Diehl leading a piano trio behind her, but its words meditate on the dangers and discomforts of love, in a way that few old standards do. But none of this feels totally fatalistic. More than anything, “Moon Song” is a demand for love without sacrifice — which is to say, devotion without possession.Let me pine, let me yearnLet me crawl, let me write you a songAnd long to belong to youWrite you a song from a distanceLet me love you like I love the moon.Cécile McLorin Salvant will perform music from “Ghost Song” at Jazz at Lincoln Center on May 12 and 13; jazz.org. More

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      Florence + the Machine’s Conflicted Coronation, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bonnie Raitt, Kehlani, Mahalia 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.Florence + the Machine, ‘King’Career vs. family. Artistic inspiration vs. a stable life. “The world ending and the scale of my ambition.” Florence Welch takes them all on in “King,” which affirms both the risks and rewards of her choices. Like many of the songs Welch writes and sings for Florence + the Machine, “King” moves from confessional to archetypal in a grand, liberating crescendo, while its video elevates her from a tormented partner to something like a saint. JON PARELESBonnie Raitt, ‘Made Up Mind’It’s an old story: the bitter end of a romance. “Made Up Mind,” written and first recorded by a Canadian band called the Bros. Landreth, tells it tersely, often in one-syllable words: “It goes on and on/For way too long.” On the first single from an album due April 22, “Just Like That,” Bonnie Raitt sings it knowingly and tenderly, after a scrape of guitar noise announces how rough the going is about to get. PARELESKehlani, ‘Little Story’Kehlani has long narrated tales of devastating romance, but “Little Story,” the latest single from the forthcoming album “Blue Water Road,” opens a portal to a world of candor. Sounding more self-assured and tender than they have in years, the singer (who uses they/them pronouns) curls the honeyed sways of their voice over the delicate strumming of an electric guitar. “You know I love a story, only when you’re the author,” Kehlani sings, pleading for a lover’s return. Strings crescendo into blooming petals, and Kehlani makes a pledge to embrace tenderness. “Workin’ on bein’ softer,” they sing. “’Cause you are a dream to me.” ISABELIA HERRERACarter Faith, ‘Greener Pasture’A bluesy lite-country simmerer in which the cowboy does not stick around: “I was his Texaco/A stop just along the road/I shoulda known I ain’t his last rodeo.” JON CARAMANICANorah Jones, ‘Come Away With Me (Alternate Version)’With the 20th anniversary of Norah Jones‘s millions-selling debut, “Come Away With Me,” arrives a “Super Deluxe Edition” featuring this previously unreleased alternate take of the title track, with the band work shopping the song. There’s a constant, pendulum-swinging guitar part in this version, matching the songwriter Jesse Harris’s lulling bass figure and pushing the band along. Ultimately you can see why this take didn’t make the cut: The biggest draw is Jones’s matte, desert-rose voice, and it seems most at home when in no hurry, cast in lower contrast to the rest of the band. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOPorridge Radio, ‘Back to the Radio’One electric guitar chord is strummed in what seems to be 4/4 time, repeated, distorted and topped with additional noise for the first full minute of “Back to the Radio.” Then Dana Margolin starts singing, decidedly turning the 4/4 to a waltz as the lyrics push toward a confrontation with someone who matters: “We almost got better/We’re so unprepared for this/Running straight at it.” The song is pure catharsis. PARELESMahalia, ‘Letter to Ur Ex’The threat is both restrained and potent in “Letter to Ur Ex” from the English songwriter Mahalia. She’s singing to someone trying to maintain a connection that has ended: “You can’t do that any more,” she warns. “Yeah, I get it/That don’t mean I’m gonna always be forgiving.” Acoustic guitar chords grow into a programmed beat and strings; her voice is gentle, but its edge is unmistakable. PARELESEsty, ‘Pegao!!!’The Dominican American artist Esty collides genres and aesthetics like a kid scribbling on paper. “Pegao!!!,” from her new “Estyland” EP, mashes up the singer’s breathy, coy raps and sky-high melodies with razor-sharp stabs of synth and a skittish, percussive dembow riddim. She declares her imminent ascent in the music industry, whispering, “They say I’m too late/But I feel like I’m on time.” Her visual choices are part of the plot too: between the anime references, her love for roller skating (which has made her famous on TikTok) and a head full of two-toned braids, Esty’s aesthetic is a kind of punk dembow, her own little slice of chaotic good. HERRERAMura Masa featuring Lil Uzi Vert, PinkPantheress and Shygirl, ‘Bbycakes’Here is how layered things can get in 21st-century pop. The English producer Mura Masa discovered “Babycakes” by the British group 3 of a Kind. He pitched it up and sped it up, keeping the catchy chorus hook. He also connected with Pink Pantheress, Lil Uzi Vert and Shygirl. The new, multitracked song is still both a come-on and a declaration of love, but who did what is a blur. PARELESR3hab featuring Saucy Santana, ‘Put Your Hands On My ____ (Original Phonk Version)’Saucy Santana’s “Material Girl” is the optimal viral hit — easy to shout along with, organized around a catchy phrase, full of performative attitude. For Saucy Santana, onetime makeup artist for the rap duo City Girls turned reality TV star, its emergence as a TikTok phenomenon a couple of months ago (more than a year after the song’s initial release) was a classic case of water finding its level. And now, a future full of promising party-rap club anthems beckons. This easy-as-pie collaboration with the D.J.-producer R3hab is an update of Freak Nasty’s “Da Dip,” one of the seminal songs of Atlanta bass music, and a bona fide mid-1990s pop hit as well. It doesn’t top the original, but it doesn’t have to in order to be an effective shout-along. CARAMANICALil Durk, ‘Ahhh Ha’The first single from the upcoming Lil Durk album, “7220,” is full of exuberant menace. Lil Durk raps crisply and with snappy energy while touching on awful topics, including the killing of his brother DThang and of the rapper King Von, and instigating tension with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. In the middle of chaos, he sounds almost thrilled. CARAMANICAKiko El Crazy, Braulio Fogón and Randy, ‘Comandante’On “Comandante,” two generations of eccentrics — the Dominican dembow newcomers Kiko el Crazy and Braulio Fogón, alongside the Puerto Rican reggaeton titan Randy — join forces for a send-off to a cop who threatens to arrest them for smoking a little weed. Randy drops a deliciously flippant, baby-voiced hook, and Fogón’s offbeat, anti-flow arrives with surprising dexterity. When that timeless fever pitch riddim hits, you’ll want every intergenerational police satire to go this hard. HERRERACharles Goold, ‘Sequence of Events’The drummer Charles Goold and his band are hard-charging on “Sequence of Events,” the opening track to his debut album as a bandleader, “Rhythm in Contrast.” He starts it with a four-on-the-floor drum solo that has as much calypso and rumba in it as it does swing. When the band comes in — the slicing guitar of Andrew Renfroe leading the way, with Steve Nelson’s vibraphone, Taber Gable’s piano and Noah Jackson’s bass close on his heels — that open approach to his rhythmic options remains. Goold graduated from Juilliard, probably the premiere conservatory for traditional-jazz pedagogy, but he’s also toured with hip-hop royalty. All of that’s in evidence here, as he homes in on a sincere update to the midcentury-modern jazz sound. RUSSONELLO More

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      Marta Sánchez Finds Beauty in Loss With a Refreshed Quintet

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      “SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum),” an album featuring three new players, was written after the death of the pianist’s mother in 2020.When Marta Sánchez’s mother died unexpectedly in late 2020, the pianist was at a loss. But Sánchez knew, almost instinctively, where she could process her grief: at the piano, pen and paper in hand, sounding out new music for her quintet.In the decade since she moved to New York from Madrid, the quintet has been Sánchez’s main creative outlet. And since the release of its strong 2015 debut, “Partenika,” it has made itself known as one of the most consistently satisfying bands in contemporary jazz — largely thanks to the well-ordered complexity and openhearted energy of Sánchez’s tunes, which blur the divide between lead melody and accompaniment, steady pulse and unruly drift.The group’s personnel rotates often, but the format has never shifted: a pair of saxophones out front, often in high contrast with one another; a bassist; a drummer; and the tension-raising technique of Sánchez’s piano.As a composer, she culls a lot of her inspiration from life experience, and no matter how technical her music gets, it retains an unpretentious, poignant appeal. (On “Partenika” the deftly sculpted tunes often had prosaic names, like “Patella Dislocation” — yes, inspired by a knee injury Sánchez suffered — or simply “Yayyyy.”) So it’s no surprise that the quintet’s fourth album, “SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum),” is both musically complex and emotionally direct, managing to convey the raw, implacable pain of loss.The quintet’s lineup has almost completely changed since its latest release, “El Rayo De Luz,” from 2019. The saxophonist Román Filiú — a Sánchez collaborator since before she moved to New York — is the only remaining original member, and even he has moved from alto to tenor, making way for the rising alto saxophonist Alex LoRe. The rhythm section is now filled out by two of the most in-demand players on the New York scene: the bassist Rashaan Carter and the drummer Allan Mednard.Quintets are a standard format in jazz; having two saxophones up front, less so. Sánchez’s group has some things in common with Quintessence, a two-sax quintet that the pianist and composer Michele Rosewoman has led, off and on, since the 1980s: an off-kilter, often funky pulse; interwoven saxophone melodies; a dynamic role for the piano, which can either add melodic counterpoint to the saxophones or throw clots of harmony into the mix. But Sánchez — who studied classical piano and composition at a conservatory in Spain — seems ultimately more interested in the chamber-jazz lineage of Lennie Tristano, whose combo in the 1960s featured the saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh out front.And there’s no getting around the living legacies of Carla Bley and Guillermo Klein, two pianist-composers who draw folk traditions together with jazz and pop formations, and whose influences loom over Sánchez’s writing. Klein, an Argentine-born big band leader famous for his interleaved, cyclical melodies, was a teacher and mentor to Sánchez in the 2000s, when he was living in Barcelona; she would travel from Madrid for lessons.Polyphonic group improvising was central to early New Orleans jazz, and the joy of hearing horn players trade and haggle over melodies has always been part of the tradition. In Sánchez’s group, it’s more often an element of the composition than of the improvisation — but the two aren’t always cleanly divided: A saxophone solo may give way to a finely stitched three-part melody, then open onto a rugged piano solo.Sánchez was already trending toward a darker, more occluded approach to harmony and melody (they’re often one and the same for her) before her mother passed away. And there’s evidence of that interest all over “SAAM,” not just on the tunes inspired by loss. It’s there on “December 11th,” named for the day she died, and on “The Eternal Stillness,” on which a tired yawn of lissome, high-pitched saxophone harmony leads to a restive, sparring exchange. But it’s also on “Dear Worthiness,” a plangent meditation on the many sources of self-doubt these days, and on “When Dreaming Is the Only,” the album’s fervid, charging final track, on which Sánchez ranges from low rumbles to high, tolling notes to screwy lines and chunky chords, feeding fuel into LoRe and Filiú’s tense saxophone interplay.As a listener, you may end up feeling both energized and overloaded by this music, caught between the desire to keep singing the crisp melodies swimming around your ears and the recognition that you really can’t do it alone.The exception is “Marivi,” the album’s centerpiece and the only track not to include the saxophonists. Instead it features the guitarist and vocalist Camila Meza, a longtime Sánchez collaborator, singing Sánchez’s plaintive melody and lyrics; the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire painting in light strokes behind her; and the synths artist Charlotte Greve adding faint textures.The words, in Spanish, are a bereaved soliloquy: One verse translates to “I had imagined that we would have many days/where you would tell me/the secrets of your past.” After Akinmusire takes a solo, Meza returns to the main theme, and he joins her in simple unison. This time, writing from inside a desire that will never be fulfilled, Sánchez has crafted a melody of great simplicity and beauty. When the album ends, it’s one thing you really can take with you.Marta Sánchez Quintet“SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum)”(Whirlwind Recordings) More

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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