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      George Wein, Newport Jazz Festival Trailblazer, Is Dead at 95

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      He brought jazz (and later folk music) to Rhode Island, and made festivals as important as nightclubs and concert halls on jazz musicians’ itineraries.George Wein, the impresario who almost single-handedly turned the jazz festival into a worldwide phenomenon, died on Monday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 95. His death was announced by a spokeswoman, Carolyn McClair.Jazz festivals were not an entirely new idea when Mr. Wein (pronounced ween) was approached about presenting a weekend of jazz in the open air in Newport, R.I., in 1954. There had been sporadic attempts at such events, notably in both Paris and Nice in 1948. But there had been nothing as ambitious as the festival Mr. Wein staged that July on the grounds of the Newport Casino, an athletic complex near the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue.With a lineup including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and other stars, the inaugural Newport Jazz Festival drew thousands of paying customers over two days and attracted the attention of the news media. It barely broke even; Mr. Wein later recalled that it made a profit of $142.50, and that it ended up in the black only because he waived his $5,000 producer’s fee.But it was successful enough to merit a return engagement, and before long the Newport festival had established itself as a jazz institution — and as a template for how to present music in the open air on a grand scale.By the middle 1960s, festivals had become as important as nightclubs and concert halls on the itinerary of virtually every major jazz performer, and Mr. Wein had come to dominate the festival landscape.He did not have the field to himself: Major events like the Monterey Jazz Festival in California, which began in 1958, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which began in 1967, were the work of other promoters. But for half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.At the height of his success, Mr. Wein was producing events in Warsaw, Paris, Seoul and elsewhere overseas, as well as all over the United States.Where Jazz History Was MadeNewport remained his flagship, and it quickly became known as a place where jazz history was made. Miles Davis was signed to Columbia Records on the strength of his inspired playing at the 1955 festival. Duke Ellington’s career, which had been in decline, was reinvigorated a year later when his rousing performance at Newport landed him on the cover of Time magazine. The 1958 festival was captured on film by the photographer Bert Stern in the documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” one of the most celebrated jazz movies ever made.Mr. Wein’s empire extended beyond jazz. It included the Newport Folk Festival, which played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many other performers. (It was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965.) He also produced the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which showcased a broad range of vernacular music as well as the culture and cuisine of New Orleans, and staged festivals devoted to blues, soul, country and even comedy.The Newport Folk Festival, which Mr. Wein also produced, played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many others; it was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965. But jazz was always Mr. Wein’s first love.Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHis one venture into the world of rock was not a happy experience. Gate-crashers disrupted the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, whose bill for the first time included rock bands, among them Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone. The Newport city fathers issued a ban on such acts the next summer; when both rock (the Allman Brothers) and the gate-crashers returned in 1971, Mr. Wein was not invited back. (The Newport Folk Festival, which had not been held in 1970 but was scheduled for later in the summer of 1971, was canceled.)He was not discouraged. In 1972 he moved the Newport Jazz Festival to New York City, where it became a less bucolic but more grandiose affair, with concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall and other locations around town. Under various names and corporate sponsors, the New York event continued to thrive for almost 40 years. In addition, the jazz festival returned to Newport in 1981 and the folk festival in 1985, both once again under Mr. Wein’s auspices. Mr. Wein’s success in presenting jazz and folk at Newport helped pave the way for the phenomenon of Woodstock and the profusion of rock festivals in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But jazz was always his first love.Playing and PromotingHe was a jazz musician before he was a jazz entrepreneur. He began playing piano professionally as a teenager and continued into his 80s, leading small groups, usually billed as the Newport All-Stars, at his festivals and elsewhere. (He performed in public for the first time in several years at Newport in 2019. It was, he announced, “my last performance as a jazz musician.”) He was a good player, in the relaxed, melodic vein of the great swing pianist Teddy Wilson, with whom he briefly studied. But he determined early on that playing jazz would be a precarious way for him to make a living, and he became more focused on presenting it.The success of Mr. Wein’s Boston nightclub, Storyville, named after the red-light district of New Orleans where legend has it jazz was born, led Elaine Lorillard, a wealthy Newport resident, to approach him about producing what became the first Newport Jazz Festival, which she and her husband, Louis, financed. And the success of that festival determined the direction his career would take.The crowd at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1967. The festival became known as a place where jazz history was made.Associated PressGeorge Theodore Wein was born on Oct. 3, 1925, in Lynn, Mass., near Boston, and grew up in the nearby town of Newton. His father, Barnet, was a doctor. His mother, Ruth, was an amateur pianist. Both his parents, he recalled, loved show business and encouraged his interest in music, although they did not necessarily see it as a career option.Mr. Wein took his first piano lessons at age 8 and discovered jazz while in high school. By the time he entered Northeastern University in Boston, he was beginning to think seriously about a career in jazz.He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, spending some time overseas but not seeing combat, and enrolled in Boston University after being discharged. Before graduating with a degree in history in 1950, he was working steadily as a jazz pianist around Boston.In his autobiography, “Myself Among Others: A Life in Music” (2003), written with Nate Chinen, he said that he knew by then that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but that he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” By the fall of 1950 he was a full-time nightclub owner; by the summer of 1954 he was a festival promoter.Rough PatchesMr. Wein encountered some rough times in the early years of the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1960 the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, protesting what they called Mr. Wein’s overly commercial booking policy, staged a smaller “rebel” festival in another part of Newport in direct competition. But both events were overshadowed when throngs of drunken youths, unable to get tickets to Mr. Wein’s festival, descended on the city, throwing rocks and breaking store windows. City officials shut the Newport Jazz Festival down, although the Mingus-Roach event was allowed to continue.As a result of the rioting, Mr. Wein’s permit was revoked, and he did not return to Newport in 1961. A festival billed as Music at Newport, staged by another promoter and featuring a range of music including some jazz, was presented in its place but was not successful. Mr. Wein was allowed back the next year, and the festival continued without incident until the end of the decade.Coverage of Mr. Wein in the jazz press grew more negative over time, and the criticism would persist for the rest of his career. In 1959, the critic Nat Hentoff called the Newport Jazz Festival a “sideshow” that had “nothing to do with the future of jazz.” (Mr. Hentoff later changed his tune: In 2001 he wrote that Mr. Wein had “expanded the audience for jazz more than any other promoter in the music’s history.”)Mr. Wein was sometimes attacked as exploitive, money-hungry, unimaginative in his programming and too willing to present non-jazz artists at his jazz festivals — criticism first heard when he booked Chuck Berry at Newport in 1958, and heard again when he booked the likes of Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and even the folk group the Kingston Trio (who performed at both the folk and jazz festivals in 1959). He professed to take the criticism in stride, but in his autobiography he left no doubt that he had forgotten none of it, quoting many of his worst notices and patiently explaining why they were wrong.Mr. Wein in 1970. For half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.David Redfern/Getty ImageThe two Newport festivals had been established as nonprofit ventures, but in 1960 Mr. Wein formed a corporation, Festival Productions, to run what soon became a worldwide empire. At the company’s height it was producing festivals and tours in some 50 cities worldwide. Over the years he also tried his hand at personal management and record production.After years of, by his account, struggling to break even, Mr. Wein became a pioneer in corporate sponsorship in the late 1960s and ’70s, enlisting beer, tobacco and audio equipment companies to underwrite his festivals and tours. There was the Schlitz Salute to Jazz, the Kool Jazz Festival and, most enduringly, a partnership with the Japanese electronics giant JVC, which began in 1984 and lasted until 2008.“I never realized that you could make money until sponsors came along,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “The credibility we’d been working on all those years always brought media notice. And then the opportunity for media notice was picked up by sponsors.”In 1959, Mr. Wein married Joyce Alexander, who worked alongside him as a vice president of Festival Productions for four decades. She died in 2005. He is survived. by his partner, Dr. Glory Van Scott.Presidential HonorsOver the years Mr. Wein received numerous honors and accolades. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2005 and inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1991. He was honored by two presidents, Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill Clinton in 1993, at all-star White House jazz concerts celebrating the anniversary of the first Newport Jazz Festival. In 2015, the Recording Academy gave him a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.In 2007, nine years after a deal to sell 80 percent of Festival Productions to Black Entertainment Television fell through, the company was acquired by a newly formed company, the Festival Network. Mr. Wein remained involved, but as an employee — a kind of producer emeritus — and not the boss.Things changed again in 2009, when the Festival Network ran into financial problems and Mr. Wein regained control of the handful of festivals left in what had once been a vast empire. (At first he was legally prevented from using the names Newport Jazz Festival and Newport Folk Festival because they belonged to the Festival Network, but he reacquired the rights in 2010.)He also found new sponsors for the Newport Jazz Festival — first a medical equipment company and later an asset management firm, Natixis — to replace his longtime corporate partner, JVC. The folk festival, whose sponsors in recent years had included Ben & Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, had by then been without sponsorship for several years; both festivals were later partly sponsored by the jewelry company Alex and Ani.Mr. Wein at his home in 2004, the year the Newport Jazz Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. He knew from an early age, he said, that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” Associated PressIn 2011 Mr. Wein announced that both Newport festivals, the only events he was still producing, would become part of a new nonprofit organization, the Newport Festivals Foundation.He eventually handed over the reins of both festivals, although he remained involved until the end. Jay Sweet became producer of the folk festival in 2009 and six years later was named executive producer of the Newport Festivals Foundation. In 2016 Danny Melnick was promoted from associate producer to producer of the jazz festival, and the jazz bassist and bandleader Christian McBride, who had performed at Newport numerous times since 1991, was named artistic director. (Mr. Melnick left the company in 2017.)The coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of both festivals in 2020, but they were back the next year. Mr. Wein had planned to attend the 2021 jazz festival, but on July 28, just two days before it was scheduled to begin, he announced on social media that he would not be there. (He did participate remotely, introducing the singers Mavis Staples, by phone, and Andra Day, via FaceTime.)“At my age of 95, making the trip will be too difficult for me,” he wrote. “I am heartbroken to miss seeing all my friends.” But, he added, with a new team in place to run both festivals, “I can see that my legacy is in good hands.” More

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      Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ Era Outtake, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ed Sheeran, Jazzmeia Horn and Her Noble Force, Ìfé 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.Radiohead, ‘If You Say the Word’In 2000, Radiohead ripped apart old, pompous Britpop assumptions. With the sessions that yielded the albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac,” the band followed its most arty, experimental inclinations and looked inward at the same time. “If You Say the Word” is a song that the group completed but shelved, which will appear on its expanded reissue “Kid A Mnesia.” Its sound is still relatively live — a band with a steady drummer going minimalist — with lyrics that contemplate entombment and liberation. JON PARELESEd Sheeran, ‘Shivers’The producer Max Martin may have coined the phrase “melodic math,” but Ed Sheeran absolutely embodies it in his lyrics, music and production. “Shivers” is just packed with pop trigger words — love, heart, fire, kissed, party, car, dance, sunlight, soul, “tear me apart,” “lipstick on my guitar,” “all day and all night,” “do it like that” — backed by a track that pulls in pizzicato strings and flamenco handclaps over a solid four-chord structure. If computers will dance or fall in love, this is their song. PARELESSam Hunt, ‘23’A balmy track about the one who got away, “23” is about how the power of memory is sometimes more than enough. Sung with wistfulness but no malice, Sam Hunt recalls a love who moved on in a different direction, and he sounds almost as soothing remembering their good times together as imagining how her future might have turned out: “I really hope you’re happy now/I’m really glad I knew you when.” JON CARAMANICALisa, ‘Lalisa’The solo debut single from Lisa of Blackpink is politely exuberant and tautly bubbly. Perhaps her group’s most nimble rapper, she sashays her way through this thumping, popping song. It’s an extension of a familiar brand, with a sprinkle of innovation when the track and video nod to Lisa’s Thai heritage. CARAMANICAYebba, ‘Boomerang’​​Yebba (the singer and songwriter Abigail Elizabeth Smith) harks back to vintage-sounding 1960s pop and soul on her debut album, “Dawn.” In “Boomerang,” she sings about an inevitable payback for the man who, she realized too late, would “drag me through hell.” She gathers her rage in a spaghetti-Western track, with distant drums, castanets and orchestral accents; her “whoo-oo-oo-oo” hook whirls like a boomerang. PARELESJazzmeia Horn and Her Noble Force, ‘Where Is Freedom!?’The vocalist and composer Jazzmeia Horn closes her new album, the rousing big-band effort “Dear Love,” with “Where Is Freedom!?,” carrying a message of self-liberation over a groove that could have come off a 1970s soul record. “What does it mean to ascend after your journey begins?/You just might lose all your friends to be free,” she sings defiantly, as the track nears its summit and the horns’ harmonies pool together behind her. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSleigh Bells, ‘True Seekers’How does a band built for brash, high-gloss, defiant pop address pandemic times? Brashly and knowingly, summoning its usual muscle and melody — Derek Miller’s walloping drum-machine beats and loud guitars behind Alexis Krauss’s chipper voice — but now, on its new album “Texis,” with lyrics that stare down dread and mortality: “Strip away armor, strip away fear/I think I lost it but here it comes again,” Krauss sings. “I’ll find my way out of the grave.” PARELESÌfé, ‘Fake Blood’The genre-crushing group Ìfé is a revelation. Its new song, “Fake Blood,” is a reminder of the boundless promise of music, collaging Auto-Tuned Yoruba prayer, the steady shakes of a maraca and thumping bass into a meditation on colonialism, police violence and mass shootings. Over clattering hand percussion, deep bass and razor-sharp synth stabs, the group asks, “¿Qué es lo que pasa aquí?” (“What’s going on here?”) Drawing on sounds and styles from across the African diaspora, it is an exercise in divination — a demand to imagine a better future, right here, right now. ISABELIA HERRERAFivio Foreign, ‘Story Time’The early waves of Brooklyn drill were light on storytelling, so Fivio Foreign’s breakout performance on Kanye West’s “Donda” album came as a shock. “Story Time” underscores that his narrative gifts are here to stay. It’s a vivid tale about a young man in jail facing unthinkable choices: “He was a little fish when he jumped into the water/and then he grew into a shark.” CARAMANICATirzah featuring Coby Sey, ‘Hive Mind’Like the neon glow of a below-ground cocktail lounge, Tirzah’s “Hive Mind” flickers into cool tranquillity. A kick drum thumps under oblique, dog-bark synths. Tirzah and the vocalist Coby Sey offer a serene, call-and-response conversation: “But who we were/Do we see things through?” By the song’s end, the question is seemingly left unanswered. The effect is a bit haunting and a bit loose, and all the more hypnotic. HERRERASt. Etienne, ‘Pond House’Saint Etienne, which arrived in the 1990s as a suave, optimistic, crate-digging corollary of trip-hop, is downright somber on its album “I’ve Been Trying to Tell You,” billed as music for the film of the same name. “Pond House” meditates in a wide-open soundscape, with a vocal sample from Natalie Imbruglia’s “Beauty on the Fire” — “Here it comes again/Cannot outrun my desire” — hovering above a thudding reggae beat and bass line, as percussion and sea gull sounds open out the horizon. PARELESAakash Mittal, ‘Nocturne III’Visiting Kolkata, India, years ago, the saxophonist Aakash Mittal became inspired by the throbbing energy and lively soundscape of night in that crowded city, and endeavored to write music that captured the feeling. He ended up living there for the better part of two years, and came away with a book of compositions that he referred to as his “nocturnes.” On “Nocturne III,” he was specifically thinking of the way drivers use their car horns — freely, as a form of chattery communication — while drawing from the Carnatic raga of Bageshri. Mittal and his trio (the guitarist Miles Okazaki and the mrudangam drummer Rajna Swaminathan) play in unison, repeating an increasingly urgent rhythm at one pitch before jumping to another, like different cars stuck in a jam. RUSSONELLOCircuit des Yeux, ‘Sculpting the Exodus’Haley Fohr, the composer and singer who records as Circuit des Yeux, brings operatic drama to a sense of loss in “Sculpting the Exodus” from her album due Oct. 22, “-io.” It’s an elegy that begins with a modest, tolling harpsichord motif and swells to an overwhelming orchestral peak in a swirl of ghostly voices, as Fohr clings to a kind of memorial, singing, “The signal goes on repeating.” PARELESSarah Davachi, ‘Abeyant’“Abeyant,” a new work from the experimental luminary Sarah Davachi, is deeply reverent of time. The song is simple but potent: For seven minutes, the fuzz of tape hovers under subdued piano keys and synths, repeating, suspending and lulling melody into a kind of extended, decomposed aria. This is the kind of music that demands repeat listens, urging us to listen closely, deeply and intimately to what might appear to be just texture, but contains the promise of deep contemplation under the surface. HERRERA More

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      ‘Fire Music’ Review: An Impassioned Case for Free Jazz

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      The beautiful souls that created free jazz — including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry and Carla Bley — light up this new documentary from Tom Surgal.One default reaction to the musical form called “free jazz” — Ornette Coleman’s phrase for this improvised, experimental style of jazz — has long been that it’s “not music.” This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.Gary Giddins, a critic who’s equally at home explicating Bing Crosby as Cecil Taylor, points out at the film’s beginning that someone playing the blues on a porch can make their phrases 12 bars or 14 bars or whatever at will. In group playing, certain agreements have to be met.One basis of free jazz is to approach ensemble playing without conventional agreements. Hence, Coleman’s practically leaderless double quartet approach on the 1961 “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” album. Much consideration is also given here to Coleman’s break with bebop in insisting one could improvise without chords. His playing sounded out of tune to traditional jazz musicians not yet conversant with microtones.This sounds a little dry, but the movie is anything but. Among other highlights are incredibly well-curated archival footage and contemporary interviews that allow the viewer to briefly commune with some beautiful souls, including Coleman, Sam Rivers, John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Don Cherry, Carla Bley. “Whatever he did was the right thing to do,” Bley, now 85, says of Cherry, who died in 1995.Most of these players are Black, and their innovations in the ’60s had trouble gaining traction in the United States. So they flocked to Paris, and the movie is scrupulous in chronicling how the European movement “free improvisation” grew into something allied with, but distinct from, what the U.S. founders created.As a fan of improvisational music myself, the 88 minutes of this movie constituted a too-short heaven on earth. I’d binge on an expanded series, honestly.Fire MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s Art of Avoiding the Obvious

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      The son and grandson of Latin jazz royalty is releasing a new album with his quartet Stranger Days, and it’s their most melodically engaging yet.If you pay close enough attention to jazz, Adam O’Farrill might have landed on your radar about a decade ago, when he was still an adolescent. His last name is immediately recognizable — his father and grandfather are Latin jazz royalty — but he stood apart even then, mostly by hanging back and letting his trumpet speak for itself.Since his teens, O’Farrill has prioritized restraint, so that his huge range of inspirations — Olivier Messiaen’s compositions, Miles Davis’s 1970s work, the films of Alfonso Cuarón, the novels of D.H. Lawrence, the contemporary American-Swedish composer Kali Malone — could emulsify into something personal, and devilishly tough to pin down.“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” he said in a phone interview last month, while visiting family in Southern California. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”That, he said, feels “more exciting than trying to prove that you’re coming from somewhere” in particular.Now 26, O’Farrill this year was voted the No. 1 “rising star trumpeter” in the DownBeat magazine critics’ poll, and there’s little disagreement that he is among the leading trumpeters in jazz — and perhaps the music’s next major improviser.For the last seven years he has led Stranger Days, a quartet that also features his brother, Zach O’Farrill, on drums, as well as the bassist Walter Stinson. Until last year, its tenor saxophonist was Chad Lefkowitz-Brown; after a brief hiatus, the band recently returned with a new saxophonist, Xavier Del Castillo.On Nov. 12, Stranger Days will release “Visions of Your Other,” its third album, and O’Farrill’s most melodically engaging effort yet.O’Farrill was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWith its spare lineup, the band has given O’Farrill ample room to play around with dimension, scale and tension in his compositions. He thinks of Stinson’s bass as the group’s sonic center, and challenges himself to orient his layers of dynamic melody around that point, even if it’s constantly shifting.Near the end of “Visions of Your Other” comes a standout, “Hopeful Heart,” a neatly balanced tune in an odd meter. O’Farrill begins his solo about halfway through the track, and it sounds as if he’s starting a conversation with a stranger, tentative and broadcasting caution. Then the harmony shifts, and he seems to find a riverbed coursing through the chord changes: His improvising begins to roll down easily, as simple and elegant as the trumpet playing on an old Mexican danzón record.But that flood of momentum only lasts a few bars; soon he pulls back again, holding his notes longer, and subtly gesturing at the influence of the contemporary trumpet star Ambrose Akinmusire. He alternates between beautifully diatonic notes and more worrisome ones, asking you to notice both.O’Farrill grew up enmeshed in New York’s jazz and Latin music scenes, and was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, a Grammy-winning pianist, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.He started out on piano at age 6, and was almost immediately composing tunes of his own. He took up the trumpet two years later, and started to learn the art of improvising.Anna Webber, a rising saxophonist and composer, has worked with O’Farrill in various situations since he was in high school — though she didn’t realize then how young he was. “He just had this patience and maturity and confidence to his playing,” she said. “Even when he was I guess 17 or 18, it felt like it was already there.”O’Farrill is an expert at “not throwing everything you have into a particular solo,” she said, “always trying to find something new in a given piece, but always letting the music choose which direction you go in.”“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” O’Farrill said. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWebber recently invited him to be a part of the band that recorded “Idiom,” her album of dense and rigorous experimental compositions. As she prepared the music, she had one-on-one conversations with each of the group’s 13 members, to ensure the ensemble would feel like an organism in motion, not a firing squad of hired guns. (That band will perform music from “Idiom” on Sep. 23 at Roulette.)Moved, O’Farrill said he was inspired to bring this approach to his own large-ensemble project, Bird Blown Out of Latitude, a nine-piece group for which he wrote a suite of electroacoustic music that surges with rock energy and toggles, sometimes abruptly, between borderline over-spill and near-total silence.Thinking about his son’s sense of efficiency and control, Arturo O’Farrill acknowledged that training in Afro-Latin music forces a trumpeter to learn the importance of precision and leaving space. But he also touched on another of Adam’s childhood pastimes: video games.“The golden rule of video games is that you don’t look at the avatar, you look at the shadow,” Arturo O’Farrill said. “It’s about not declaring. Not stating the obvious, not following the avatar.”It’s through video games that Adam first found out about Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician whose old band, Yellow Magic Orchestra, planted the seeds in the 1970s and ’80s for what would become chiptune, or early arcade-game music. “Visions of Your Other” opens with a restive, cycling cover of Sakamoto’s “Stakra.”“He’s a real master of taking a lot of pillars of musical convention — whether it’s pop or more Romantic, Schumann-esque things — and both respecting and dismantling them,” O’Farrill said, explaining what he loves in Sakamoto’s music, though it sounded as if he could be describing his own work. “That’s what’s so brilliant about his voice: It’s both deeply individual and very grounded in musical history, and relatable.” More

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      Phil Schaap, Grammy-Winning Jazz D.J. and Historian, Dies at 70

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      His radio programs, most notably on Columbia University’s WKCR, were full of minutiae he had accumulated during a lifetime immersed in the genre.Phil Schaap, who explored the intricacy and history of jazz in radio programs that he hosted, Grammy-winning liner notes that he wrote, music series that he programmed and classes that he taught, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 70.His partner of 17 years, Susan Shaffer, said the cause was cancer, which he had had for four years.Mr. Schaap was host of an assortment of jazz radio programs over the years, but he was perhaps best known as a fixture on WKCR-FM, the student-run radio station of Columbia University, where his delightfully (some would say infuriatingly) obsessive daily program about the saxophonist Charlie Parker, “Bird Flight,” was an anchor of the morning schedule for decades.On that show, he would parse Parker recordings and minutiae endlessly. In a 2008 article about Mr. Schaap in The New Yorker, David Remnick described one such discourse in detail, relating Mr. Schaap’s aside about the Parker track “Okiedoke,” which veered into a tangent about the pronunciation and meaning of the title and its possible relation to Hopalong Cassidy movies.“Perhaps it was at this point,” Mr. Remnick wrote, “that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap’s behalf.”But if jazz was an obsession for Mr. Schaap, it was one built on knowledge. Since childhood he had absorbed everything there was to know about Parker and countless other jazz players, singers, records and subgenres. He won three Grammys for album liner notes — for a Charlie Parker boxed set, not surprisingly (“Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve,” 1989), but also for “The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959” (1993) and “Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings” (1996).He did more than write and talk about jazz; he also knew his way around a studio and was especially adept at unearthing and remastering the works of jazz greats of the past. He shared the best historical album Grammy as a producer on the Holiday and Davis-Evans recordings, as well as on “Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings” (2000).Mr. Schaap surrounded by jazz albums at WKCR, which also houses his collection of jazz interviews.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesOver the years he imparted his vast knowledge of jazz to countless students, teaching courses at Columbia, Princeton, the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere.“They say I’m a history teacher,” he said in a video interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, which this year named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a living jazz figure, but he viewed his role differently.“I teach listening,” he said.He had what one newspaper article called “a flypaper memory” for jazz history, so much so that musicians would sometimes rely on him to fill in their own spotty memories about play dates and such.“He knows more about us than we know about ourselves,” the great drummer Max Roach told The New York Times in 2001.Mr. Remnick put it simply in the New Yorker article.“In the capital of jazz,” he wrote, “he is its most passionate and voluble fan.”Philip Van Noorden Schaap was born on April 8, 1951, in Queens.His mother, Marjorie Wood Schaap, was a librarian and a classically trained pianist, and his father, Walter, was a jazz scholar and vice president of a company that made educational filmstrips.Phil grew up in the Hollis section of Queens, which had become a magnet for jazz musicians. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge lived nearby. He would see the saxophonist Budd Johnson every day at the bus stop.“Everywhere you turned, it seemed, there was a giant walking down the street,” Mr. Schaap told Newsday in 1995.By 6 he was collecting records. Jo Jones, who had been the drummer for Count Basie’s big band for many years, would sometimes babysit for him; they’d play records, and Mr. Jones would elaborate on what they were hearing.Seeing the 1959 movie “The Gene Krupa Story,” about the famed jazz drummer, fueled his interest even more, and by the time he was at Jamaica High School in Queens he was talking jazz to classmates constantly.“As much as they gave me a hard time and isolated me as a weirdo,” he told Newsday, “they knew what I was talking about. My peers may have laughed at me, but they knew who Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were.”Mr. Schaap became a D.J. at WKCR in 1970 as a freshman at Columbia, where he was a history major. He set out on a lifelong mission to keep jazz’s past alive.“One thing I wanted to impart,” he told the radio program “Jazz Night in America” this year, “was that the music hadn’t started with John Coltrane.”Mr. Schaap in 2012. “He knows more about us,” the great jazz drummer Max Roach once said, “than we know about ourselves.”Angel Franco/The New York TimesHe graduated from Columbia in 1974, but he was still broadcasting on WKCR half a century later. He started “Bird Flight” in 1981 and — as the “Jazz Night in America” host, the bassist Christian McBride, noted during the recent episode devoted to Mr. Schaap — he kept the show going for some 40 years, longer than Parker, who died at 34, was alive. He also hosted an assortment of other jazz programs at WKCR and other stations over the years, including WNYC in New York and WBGO in Newark, N.J.In 1973 he started programming jazz at the West End, a bar near Columbia, and he continued to do so into the 1990s. He particularly liked to bring in older musicians from the swing era, providing them — as he put it in a 2017 interview with The West Side Spirit — “with a nice last chapter of their lives.”In the “Jazz Night in America” interview, he said the West End series was among his proudest accomplishments.“A lot of them were not even performing anymore,” he said of the saxophonist Earle Warren, the trombonist Dicky Wells and the many other musicians he put onstage there.“They were my friends,” he added. “They were my teachers. They were geniuses.”Mr. Schaap, who lived in Queens and Manhattan, also did a bit of managing — including of the Countsmen, a group whose members included Mr. Wells and Mr. Warren — and curated Jazz at Lincoln Center for a time.As an educator, broadcaster and archivist, he could zero in on details that would escape a casual listener. He’d compare Armstrong and Holiday recordings to show how Armstrong had influenced Holiday’s vocal style. He’d demand that students be able to hear the difference between a solo by Armstrong and one by the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.Mr. Schaap’s marriage to Ellen LaFurn in 1997 was brief. Ms. Shaffer survives him.His National Endowment for the Arts honor this year was the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, presented to “an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge and advancement of the American jazz art form.”In a 1984 interview with The Times, Mr. Schaap spoke of his motivation for his radio shows and other efforts to spread the gospel of jazz.“I was a public-school music student for 12 years and never heard the name Duke Ellington,” he said. “Now I can correct such wrongs. I can be a Johnny Appleseed through the transmitter.” More

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      A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

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      When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More

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      Abba Previews First Album in 40 Years, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Charli XCX, Bobby Shmurda, Japanese Breakfast 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.Abba, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’Before Max Martin’s hit factory ruled radio playlists, another Swedish pop phenomenon had its run: Abba, which is reuniting after nearly 40 years. A new album, “Voyage,” is due on Nov. 5 and quasi-concert dates are scheduled in London in May; the singers will be digitized images backed by a live band. Though the verses of “Don’t Shut Me Down” are about a woman surprising an ex with her return, the choruses also recognize the strangeness of Abba’s reappearance: “I’m not the one you know/I’m now and then combined,” Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad sing, backed and produced by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. “And I’m asking you to have an open mind.” Meanwhile, the music reclaims familiar ground: a strutting march with gleaming orchestration and scrubbing disco guitars, stolid and earnestly tuneful. JON PARELESCharli XCX, ‘Good Ones’Charli XCX oscillates between big-gesture pop and artier impulses, but “Good Ones” swings the pendulum back to pop. It’s produced by Oscar Holter, from the Max Martin stable that also concocted the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” and it looks back directly to the 8th-note synthesizers of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Hopping between registers, Charli XCX indicts herself — “I always let the good ones go” — neatly and decisively. PARELESJuls featuring Niniola, ‘Love Me’Everything is rhythm in “Love Me”: the shakers and hand drums, the squiggles of electric guitar, the overlapping call-and-response of the blithely syncopated Nigerian singer Niniola and a saxophone that eventually claims the last word. Juls, a Ghanaian-British producer, neatly balances 1970s Afrobeat, the hand-played, steady-state funk perfected by Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with the multitrack transparency of 20th-century Afrobeats. Even after the song erupts midway through, the groove keeps its sly composure. PARELESFred again.., ‘Billie (Loving Arms)’Sonically rich, big-tent-pop ambitious, soulful house music from Fred again.., a singer and songwriter who has worked with Ed Sheeran and Stormzy, was mentored by Brian Eno and has a soft spot for bright dance music that’s almost physically cheerful. JON CARAMANICATokischa and Rosalía, ‘Linda’On “Linda,” Rosalía — a white European woman who has dominated Spanish-language pop over the last few years — turns to the Dominican musician Tokischa and dembow for street cred. Tokischa is the genre’s resident insurgent, an iconoclast who makes government officials, homophobes and upper-class puritans clutch their pearls. It’s no surprise that “Linda” runs like a sexed-up playground chant; over a dembow-flamenco concoction, the two stars trill, “Nos besamo’, pero somo’ homie’” (“We kiss each other, but we’re homies”). This is the kind of song that sparks necessary reflection about race, power and collaboration — conversations about who these cross-cultural team-ups are designed to make rich, and who, if anyone, they intend to liberate. ISABELIA HERRERABobby Shmurda, ‘No Time for Sleep (Freestyle)’Bobby Shmurda’s first post-prison song — seven years after his breakout single “Hot ___” made him a star — feels like burning off excess energy. This six-minute freestyle is a workout; it’s delivered with a doggedness reminiscent of the fervor of Meek Mill, but leaves little room to breathe. The stakes here are purposely low. Releasing a song like this — no chorus, intense rhymes, cluttered flow — lightens the pressure that would come with seeking to score another hit as massive as his first. For now, he just wants to rhyme. CARAMANICAMartox featuring Gian Rojas, ‘Pausa’All cool grooves and saccharine strings, Martox’s “Pausa” is best enjoyed with a spiked seltzer. The Dominican duo, alongside the producer and vocalist Gian Rojas, collage disco grooves and syncopated bass lines into a prismatic beachfront boogie. HERRERAJhay Cortez, ‘Tokyo’The second track on Jhay Cortez’s new album, “Timelezz,” exemplifies a small rebellion happening in Spanish-language pop. At times, the production is aquatic; at others, its twinkling synths resemble a midnight drive through the streets of the Japanese capital. With a thumping four-on-the-floor rhythm, the track is another sign that reggaeton’s major players are embracing the textures of house music, and stretching the genre’s boundaries beyond the realm of stale pop. HERRERAJapanese Breakfast, ‘Glider’In “Glider,” a song she wrote for the video game Sable, keyboard patterns enfold Michelle Zauner, the singer, musician and producer who records as Japanese Breakfast. There’s wonderment in her voice as she sings about an excursion into the unknown: “It feels like everything is moving/Around me.” The keyboards start out plinking like music boxes, soon to be joined by sustained, cascading chords, an ever-thickening structure that can’t constrain her delight. PARELESAoife O’Donovan, ‘Reason to Believe’In a live-streamed home performance last year, the virtuoso folk singer Aoife O’Donovan played the 10 songs on Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” front to back. She accompanied herself alone on acoustic guitar, as Springsteen had on the original album in the early 1980s, but that’s about where the similarity ends. The original album was desperate and dark, with doubt coursing through its tracks like murky blood; O’Donovan treats them as canon, saluting Springsteen’s songcraft with clear, pitch-perfect articulation and affable delivery. The approach is suited best to “Reason to Believe,” the finale, a Springsteen classic that contemplates the mysterious pull of resilience. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORuby Landen, ‘Pt. 1’Ruby Landen’s blend of Celtic-tinged acoustic-guitar fingerpicking and bowed strings — cello and fiddle — echoes the introspection of songwriters like Nick Drake. But she has her own story to tell, with an unassuming but pointed voice, in songs like “Pt. 1.” It’s an anatomy of a failed relationship — “Was it the safety of my presence that made you come undone?” — that she relays patiently and quietly. Then she segues into a modal, accelerating instrumental coda, picking behind fiddle and steel guitar, that needs no words to capture the underlying pain. PARELESNate Smith featuring Joel Ross and Michael Mayo, ‘Altitude’On drums, Nate Smith is in the business of inspiriting. Far from flashy, he’s an ebullient technician who keys into the subtleties of his bandmates’ playing and laces joie de vivre into his own. Smith, 46, just released “Altitude,” a breezy original and the latest single from a forthcoming album, “Kinfolk 2: See the Birds.” His band, Kinfolk, is joined here by a pair of young and prodigious improvisers: the vibraphonist Joel Ross and the vocalist Michael Mayo. The music video captures the group recording the song in the studio, just before the coronavirus pandemic struck; when Mayo digs into a short scat solo, improvising flawlessly in little rhythmic zags in the lower register and high-flying longer notes, you can see — and hear — him passing inspiration back and forth with the drummer. RUSSONELLO More

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      5 Things to Do on Labor Day Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.Art & MuseumsMoMA PS1’s Engaging CourtyardNiki de Saint Phalle’s “La femme et L’oiseau fontaine” (1967) will be on view in MoMA PS1’s courtyard until Monday.Niki Charitable Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; MoMA PS1; Marissa AlperIn 1997, the courtyard at MoMA PS1 became the main venue for “Warm Up,” a summer event that mingled art, music and design in order to draw new audiences. But things change. “Warm Up” certainly hasn’t gone away, but last fall, the institution began “PS1 Courtyard: an experiment in creative ecologies,” a program testing out ways to use the outdoor space that encourage community engagement.The initiative’s projects include a fountain from Niki de Saint Phalle, part of a larger exhibition at PS1 that closes on Monday, and Rashid Johnson’s “Stage.” Visitors are welcome to get up on his installation’s large yellow platform and freely use its five live microphones of varying heights. By showing a microphone as a dynamic social tool, Johnson’s piece, which will be on view through the fall, indicates the many things a stage can represent: a site of protest, music making, solidarity and, most important, amplification of your voice.MELISSA SMITHFilm SeriesScenes From Every SeasonA scene from “A Summer’s Tale,” one of four features in Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, all of which Film Forum will screen through Sept. 9.Janus FilmsThe maximalist moviegoing event of Labor Day weekend is “Lawrence of Arabia,” screening on Saturday and Sunday on 70-millimeter film at the Museum of the Moving Image. But for a minimalist alternative, try Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons — four features, each set at a different time of year, that Rohmer, the most conversation-oriented French New Wave director, turned out from the late 1980s through the late 1990s. (Together, the running times total roughly two showings of “Lawrence of Arabia.”) With the changing of the seasons, Film Forum is showing all the titles separately from Friday through Sept. 9.Watching them in tandem illustrates how Rohmer — superficially so consistent and serene — subtly toys with structure and variation, recombining types of characters in friendships and romances that rarely develop as expected. The most summery is, naturally, “A Summer’s Tale.” Melvil Poupaud plays a commitment-phobe vacationing in Brittany who somehow winds up juggling a surfeit of commitments to women.BEN KENIGSBERGJazzCelebrating a Visionary Record LabelCharles Tolliver at the 50th anniversary of Another Earth in 2019. Through Saturday, he will be celebrating another 50th anniversary at Birdland — that of the record label he started with Stanley Cowell, Strata-East.Lev Radin/Pacific Press, via Getty ImagesIn 1971, seeking refuge from an exploitive, increasingly commercialized jazz industry, the trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the pianist Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East, a record label offering artists creative freedom and relative commercial control. Though short-lived, Strata-East inspired Black musicians in other cities to undertake similar efforts. And it captured a moment in time: Nearly every Strata-East album simmers with the heat and tension of the Black Power era, delivering terse, syncopated rhythms and pushing jazz linguistics into a more spare, confrontational zone.Cowell died last year after a prolific career, but Tolliver, 79, continues to perform. At Birdland through Saturday, he is celebrating the label’s 50th anniversary with an ensemble of all-stars, including some who recorded on Strata-East in the 1970s: the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the pianist George Cables, the bassist Buster Williams and the drummer Lenny White. Sets are at 7 and 9:30 p.m. The late show on Saturday, which will also be livestreamed at dreamstage.live, will feature a guest appearance by the storied bassist Cecil McBee and will be hosted by the actor Danny Glover.GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOComedyNo Labor for These LaughsErik Griffin in his Showtime special “AmeERIKan Warrior.” He is headlining at Carolines on Broadway through Saturday.ShowtimeEven workaholics know they should take it easy this weekend, and fans of “Workaholics” will recognize the headliner at Carolines on Broadway through Saturday: Erik Griffin, who played Montez Walker on that Comedy Central sitcom. Griffin also portrayed a stand-up in “I’m Dying Up Here,” a dramedy about comedy in the 1970s on Showtime, where you can find two of Griffin’s comedy specials. At Carolines, he will perform one set at 7 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and two sets at 7 and 9:30 on Saturday. Tickets start at $31.25.On Sunday at 7 and 9:30, Carolines will welcome Rosebud Baker, who released her debut special, “Whiskey Fists,” in August on the Comedy Central Stand-Up YouTube channel. Tickets are $27.25 and up.There will be a two-drink minimum at each show.SEAN McCARTHYKIDSThis Is How They RollA child at an NYC Unicycle Festival event in 2019. The 12th edition of the annual celebration takes place throughout the boroughs this weekend.Kenneth SpringleIn New York, casual basketball games are about as common as strutting pigeons. But the contest scheduled on Saturday at 11 a.m. in the Bronx should result in a lot of head-turning, not to mention wheel-turning.That’s when the King Charles Unicycle Troupe will play — while riding its favorite vehicles — at the basketball court in Clinton Playground in Crotona Park. (Enter at Clinton Avenue and Crotona Park South.) A beloved local circus act, these guys can double-Dutch jump rope on one wheel, too.Their show is a highlight of the 12th annual NYC Unicycle Festival, a free outdoor celebration presented by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. The festivities also include long-distance group rides on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, which proficient young unicyclists can join if they’re accompanied by an adult. (Details are on the festival’s website.) Experienced riders can participate in a post-performance pickup game with the King Charles players on Saturday, too, along with a free-throw basketball contest and a unicycle obstacle course.Neophytes, however, can do more than watch. On Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m., at Grant’s tomb in Morningside Heights, the festival’s conclusion will offer instruction and youth-size equipment for children who want to give unicycling a whirl.LAUREL GRAEBER More