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      ‘Bix’ Review: A Jazz Legend Fondly Remembered

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      The composer and cornet player Bix Beiderbecke changed music forever in a very short life. A restored documentary from the ’80s goes into the details.Although this iteration of this 1981 documentary is a restoration, one ought not go to see “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” expecting a shiny cinematographic object. The movie looks like a 40-year-old mix of talking-head and archival footage. What makes it extraordinary is the story it tells of an uncanny musician and his beautiful playing and songs.Born in 1903, Bix Beiderbecke didn’t live to be 30, but he made an impression on jazz that is still felt today. He was raised in Davenport, Iowa, in a strait-laced German American household. A child prodigy, Beiderbecke first fell in love with jazz via the frenetically bouncy tune “Tiger Rag.” But he was also devoted to the work of Debussy and Ravel, and he brought their dreamy impressionism to his music. That influence persisted in jazz for decades. (It’s said that before recording “Kind of Blue” in 1959, Miles Davis and the pianist and composer Bill Evans did some serious listening to a rendition of Ravel’s Piano Concerto.)Among the luminaries contributing reminiscences are Hoagy Carmichael, Artie Shaw and Doc Cheatham. Louis Armstrong, in an audio recording, coins the phrase that gives the movie its subtitle. That the director, Brigitte Berman, doesn’t give more weight to the racial segregation that defined the jazz milieu of the 1920s speaks to a blind spot that was all too present when she made the picture. But the film does cite Beiderbecke’s devotion to Bessie Smith, as well as his playing in integrated jam sessions.The accounts of Beiderbecke’s tremendous ear — a protean soloist on the cornet, he composed on piano — and shyness are moving. The exhaustion and tedium of life on the road got Beiderbecke tripped up by alcoholism, which led to other health problems. Conventional wisdom in some circles considers the existence of a gigging musician to be somehow leisurely; this movie painstakingly lays out the way it can be practically deadly.Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Silk Sonic’s Retro Roller Jam, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bomba Estéreo featuring Yemi Alade, Saint Etienne, Dry Cleaning 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.Silk Sonic, ‘Skate’With a new single, “Skate,” it becomes ever clearer that Silk Sonic — the collaboration of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak — is a project in vintage reverse engineering, finding and recreating the sounds and structures of the era when 1970s soul melted into disco. “Skate” — invoking bygone roller discos — has the scrubbing rhythmic guitars, the glockenspiel, the Latin percussion, the back-talking string section and the rising bridge of late 1970s hits. Can young 21st-century listeners feel nostalgia for a time before they were born? JON PARELESBomba Estéreo featuring Yemi Alade, ‘Conexión Total’Bomba Estéreo’s new single, “Conexión Total,” is an effervescent blend of pan flutes, marimbas and drum loops featuring the Nigerian Afropop idol Yemi Alade, whose 2014 song “Johnny” remains an anthem in the genre. The Colombian duo’s maneuver adds to a growing list of collaborations between African and Latin American artists, a much-needed reminder of the links between Afro-diasporic sounds and their origins. Euphoric lyrics from the lead singer Li Saumet and layers of carefully placed air horns coalesce into a prismatic summer jam, like a cool, carbonated drink foaming to the surface. ISABELIA HERRERASaint Etienne, ‘Pond House’You’d be forgiven for assuming that the looped, airy voice at the center of Saint Etienne’s new song belongs to the group’s lead vocalist Sarah Cracknell — but it’s actually a sample of Natalie Imbruglia’s 2001 song “Beauty on the Fire.” The British pop icons’ forthcoming “I’ve Been Trying to Tell You” (their first sample-driven album since the 1993 classic “So Tough”) is a collage of sounds culled from 1997 through 2001; they’ve described it as something of a concept album about late-90s optimism and the collective delusions of pop-cultural memory. Heady and idea-driven as that may sound, though, “Pond House” is as light as a sea breeze, a steady, aquamarine undertow drawing you into its hypnotic atmosphere. LINDSAY ZOLADZLos Lobos, ‘Los Chucos Suaves’Through four decades of recording, Los Lobos have always chosen their occasional cover versions instructively. During the pandemic they made their new covers album, “Native Sons,” filled with songs from Los Angeles bands including the Beach Boys, War, Buffalo Springfield and Thee Midnighters, along with one new Los Lobos song. “Los Chucos Suaves,” originally released in 1949 by Lalo Guerrero y Sus Cinco Lobos (!), recognizes an emerging Los Angeles pachuco culture, with elegant, zoot-suited Mexican Americans broadening their tastes — and dance moves — to Cuban music. Los Lobos’s version places Cesar Rosas’s rasp atop a mesh of cumbia and mambo, with distorted guitar, brawny baritone sax and frenetic timbales celebrating an early Latin cultural alliance. PARELESBéla Fleck featuring Billy Strings and Chris Thile, ‘Charm School’The album due in September from the banjo innovator Béla Fleck — who has collaborated with jazz musicians and chased down the banjo’s African roots — is “My Bluegrass Heart,” billed as his return to bluegrass. “Charm School” uses a classic bluegrass quintet lineup, with Fleck on banjo, Chris Thile on mandolin, Billy Strings on guitar, Billy Contreras on fiddle and Royal Masat on bass. But “Charm School” is by no means a traditional bluegrass tune; it’s a speedy, ever-changing suite, vaulting through keys, meters and tempos. The quintet alights in a seemingly familiar bluegrass zone only to dart off someplace else entirely, again and again. PARELESBarry Altschul’s 3Dom Factor, ‘Long Tall Sunshine’Barry Altschul’s drumming, and especially his rambunctious ride cymbal, is a study in something more than contrast: He knows how to skip across the surface of a beat while also giving it serious heft; his pocket is magnetic, but he’ll just as soon dice it up or splatter it to bits. Over an almost six-decade career in jazz, he’s played on both sides of the aisle, avant-garde and straight-ahead, and in his running trio — the 3dom Factor, with Jon Irabagon on saxophones and Joe Fonda on bass — he lassos it all together. “Long Tall Sunshine” is the title track from the 3dom Factor’s new live album, and it’s classic Altschul: brimming and charging but holding back too (thanks especially to Fonda’s bass), with a harmonically rangy melody that sets up Irabagon for an uncorked solo. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODry Cleaning, ‘Tony Speaks!’On its magnificently odd debut album “New Long Leg,” released earlier this year, the London band Dry Cleaning fused post-punk grooves with the deadpan musings of the frontwoman Florence Shaw, a sharp, dryly funny observer of modern life’s absurdities. But “Tony Speaks!,” one half of a double-A-side single the band released this week, is its most barbed and political track yet. The song is an unnerving meditation on the banal but weighty effect that systemic problems can have on individual psyches: “I’m just sad about the collapse of heavy industry, I’ll be all right in a bit.” But Shaw’s most piercing musings come when she widens her lens and ponders climate change; her reflections poised in a delicate balance between comedy and tragedy. “I always thought of nature as something dead and uninviting,” she mutters, “but there used to be a lot more of it.” ZOLADZAda Lea, ‘Damn’“Damn,” from the Montreal-based singer-songwriter Ada Lea, unfolds like a quiet epiphany: a gradual accumulation of feelings and frustrations that, in an instant, snap into a sudden clarity. Atop an understated arrangement of guitar and percussion, Lea (whose real name is Alexandra Levy) sings of gradually slipping into an emotional rut: “Every year’s just a little bit darker, then the darker gets darker,” she sings in a low, throaty drawl, “then it’s dark as hell.” But in the song’s closing moments, Lea recollects herself and summons all her energy into a spirited, defiant refusal of everything that’s gone wrong: “Damn the work, damn the music, damn the fun that’s missing.” It’s the sound of hitting bottom but finally looking up. ZOLADZEkyu, ‘Oh Dje’Ekyu, a songwriter from Benin, sings about destructive envy in “Oh Dje”: “When someone goes up, we want to take them down/When someone moves forward, we want to stop him.” His voice is husky and melancholy, with an electronic veil; the rhythm is ticking, ratcheting Afrobeats-meets-trap, while guitar licks and manipulated vocals ripple in the distance. Below them all are bassy, looming synthesizer tones, threatening, as the lyrics suggest, to drag down everything. PARELESNao, ‘And Then Life Was Beautiful’“Hope will come someday soon,” the English songwriter Nao (Neo Jessica Joshua) promises in her helium-high soprano in “And Then Life Was Beautiful,” the title song from her next album. To recover from the way “Change came like a hurricane” in 2020, she advises self-preservation, patience, contemplation and gratitude amid invigorating triplets, rising chromatic chords and airborne vocal harmonies. She’s determined to conjure a sense of uplift. PARELESSilvana Estrada, ‘Marchita’Silvana Estrada’s voice oozes quiet fury. It’s a quality that connects her to a long line of women in Latin America, whose voices are almost synonymous with the experience of suffering and abandonment: icons like Chavela Vargas and La Lupe. But unlike some of her forebears, the 24-year-old Mexican artist’s anguish is so quiet, so raw, it burns in her chest, smoldering under the surface. On “Marchita,” the rolling melismas of Estrada’s voice glide over the warmth of a Venezuelan cuatro, blooming into waves of violin and violoncello strings. “Me ha costado tanto y tanto/Que ya mi alma se marchita,” she weeps. “It’s cost me so much that my soul is withering,” she says. That is the kind of slow-burning despair that steals life from you. HERRERAGrouper, ‘Unclean Mind’Grouper, a.k.a. Liz Harris, effortlessly collapses the grittiest of emotions into simple jolts of sorrow. Though she is known for her hypnotic tape loops, breathy whispers and quiet piano arrangements, on “Unclean Mind,” Harris swaps the familiar, morose piano keys of previous releases for the strum of an acoustic guitar. Her harmonic vocals are weightless, almost imperceptible, but the sentiment is transparent. “Tried to hide you from my unclean mind,” she sighs, “Put it in a costume/Turning patterns with a perfect line.” We may not know what kind of relationship she refers to, but the enigmatic beauty of Grouper’s music is that it is immersive without being obvious, so potent it needs little explication to convey the trickiest emotions. HERRERADot Allison, ‘Long Exposure’The Scottish songwriter and singer Dot Allison has recorded, as leader and collaborator, with arty musicians like Kevin Shields, Massive Attack and Scott Walker beginning in the 1990s. Her new solo album, “Heart-Shaped Scars,” is her first since 2009. It’s largely acoustic and minimal, with songs that meditate on the unhurried growth of plants. “Long Exposure” intertwines Allison’s voice with steady guitar picking, single piano notes and a chamber-pop string section, but it’s far from serene. It’s an indictment of a partner’s gradually revealed infidelity that gathers pain and wrath from the realization that it went on so long. PARELES More

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      Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow’s Prison Break, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Remi Wolf, Camila Cabello, the War on Drugs 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.Lil Nas X featuring Jack Harlow, ‘Industry Baby’Lil Nas X continues his victory lap around a world of his own making on the triumphant “Industry Baby” with Jack Harlow, featuring appropriately brassy production from Take A Daytrip and Kanye West and a video in which the duo busts out of Montero State Prison. “Funny how you said it was the end, then I went and did it again,” he sings, his braggadocio packing extra bite since it’s directed not just at generic haters but pearl-clutching homophobes. (“I’m queer,” he proclaims proudly, in case there was any confusion there.) The wild video’s most talked-about set piece will probably be the joyous dance scene in the prison showers, but its most hilarious moment comes when Lil Nas X catches a guard enjoying the video for his previous single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” LINDSAY ZOLADZRemi Wolf, ‘Liquor Store’“Liquor Store” (and its “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” meets Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” music video) is a perfect introduction to the neon-Brite imagination of Remi Wolf, a charismatic 25-year-old pop singer from California. The song is a catchall repository of Wolf’s anxieties about sobriety and long-term commitment, but she tackles these subjects with such idiosyncratic playfulness that it all goes down smoothly. ZOLADZCamila Cabello, ‘Don’t Go Yet’Fifth Harmony’s original defector Camila Cabello returns with the fun, exuberant first single from her upcoming album, “Familia.” Cabello leans harder than ever into her Latin-pop roots here, but there’s also a sassy rasp to her vocals that brings Doja Cat to mind. “Baby don’t go yet ’cause I wore this dress for a little drama,” she sings, and the song’s bright, bold flair certainly matches that sartorial choice. ZOLADZAlewya, ‘Spirit_X’Alewya, a songwriter with Ethiopian and Egyptian roots who’s based in England, has been releasing singles that rely on a breathless momentum. “Spirit_X” has a defiant, positive message — “I won’t let me down” — expressed in terse lines that hint at African modal melodies, paced by looping synthesizers and a double time breakbeat. She makes a virtue of sounding driven. JON PARELESKamo Mphela, ‘Thula Thula’Amapiano music is sparse and fluid, representing the hypnotic elasticity that is baked into South African dance music, simmering the textures and drums of jazz, R&B and local dance styles like kwaito and Bacardi house into a slow, liquid groove. “Thula Thula,” a new single from the genre’s queen Kamo Mphela, captures the hushed energy of the genre: a shaker trembles alongside a sinister bass line and a rush of drums claps under the surface. Mphela offers a summertime invitation to the dance floor, but the track’s restrained tempo is a reminder that the return to nightlife is a marathon, not a sprint. ISABELIA HERRERALorde, ‘Stoned at the Nail Salon’Lorde has always been an old soul; when she first arrived as a precocious 16-year-old in 2013, there was even a popular internet conspiracy theory that she was only pretending to be a teenager. Although she’s still just 24, Lorde sounds prematurely weary on her new single “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” from her forthcoming third album “Solar Power.” “My hot blood’s been burning for so many summers now, it’s time to cool it down,” she sings atop a muted chord progression that bears a striking resemblance to Lana Del Rey’s “Wild at Heart,” another recent Jack Antonoff production. The mellifluous “Stoned” flirts with profundity but then suddenly hedges its bets — “maybe I’m just stoned at the nail salon,” she shrugs in each chorus — which gives the song a hesitant, meandering quality. But perhaps the most puzzling declaration she makes is how “all of the music you loved at 16 you’ll grow out of.” Is this perhaps a self-deprecating wink at her own past, or a gentle hint that her new album might be a departure from what her fans have been expecting? ZOLADZIlluminati Hotties, ‘U V V P’As Illuminati Hotties, Sarah Tudzin has been rolling out deliriously catchy, high-octane summer jams for the past few months, like the incredibly titled “Mmmoooaaaaayaya” and the effervescent “Pool Hopping.” Her latest preview of her forthcoming album “Let Me Do One More,” though, slows things down considerably. “Every time I hear a song, I think about you dancing,” she swoons on “U V V P,” buoyed by a beachy beat. Late in the song, a spoken-word contribution from Big Thief’s Buck Meek transforms the vibe from a ’60s girl-group throwback to a lonesome country ditty, as if the versatile Tudzin is proving there’s no genre she can’t make her own. ZOLADZIndigo De Souza, ‘Hold U’Sometimes a song only needs to communicate the most honest and heartfelt emotions to work. That is the spirit of Indigo de Souza’s “Hold U.” There’s a splatter of programmed drums; a jangly, soulful bass line; and the melted caramel of de Souza’s voice, which gushes with simple lyrics (“You are the best thing, and I’ve got it, I’ve got you”) and blooms into a falsetto, her sky-high oohs curling into the air. It is a love song, but it’s not just about romance — “Hold U” is about living fully with your emotions, and embracing the love that emerges from being in community, too. HERRERABrandi Carlile, ‘Right on Time’Piano ballad turns to power ballad in “Right on Time,” an apology that rises to a near-operatic peak as Brandi Carlile acknowledges, “It wasn’t right.” It’s clearly a successor to “The Joke,” but this time, she’s not helping someone else; she’s facing the consequences of her own mistakes. PARELESThe War on Drugs, ‘Living Proof’The War on Drugs reaches back to the late-1960s era when folk-rock, drone and psychedelia overlapped, when the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead weren’t that far apart. But it’s self-conscious retrospection, aware of what’s changed in a half-century. “Living Proof” lays bare that awareness. “I know the path/I know it’s changing,” Adam Granduciel sings, as he returns to an old neighborhood and finds it’s not what he remembered. “Maybe I’ve been gone too long,” he reflects. The song has two parts: feathery acoustic guitar strumming and piano chords and then, at the end, a subdued march, as Granduciel declares, “I’m rising, and I’m damaged.” PARELESJordyn Simone, ‘Burn’An old-fashioned soul song is at the core of “Burn”: an invitation to “stay the night” that escalates toward despair — “There’s no hope for people like me” — and fury, as Jordyn Simone declares, “I didn’t ask for no goddamn savior.” Simone, 21, was a strong enough singer to be a teenage contestant on “The Voice,” and in “Burn” her vocal builds from a velvety tremulousness to flashes of a bitter rasp. Meanwhile, the production’s lugubrious strings and club-level bass open up new chasms beneath her. PARELESWilliam Parker, ‘Painters Winter’ and ‘Mayan Space Station’The bassist, organizer and free-jazz eminence William Parker released two albums with separate trios on Friday: “Painters Winter,” featuring the drummer Hamid Drake and the saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, and “Mayan Space Station,” a sizzling free-fusion workout, with the guitarist Ava Mendoza curling out surf-rock lines and conjuring spacey fuzz while the drummer Gerald Cleaver drives the group steadily on. Together the LPs give an inkling of how broad Parker’s creative footprint has been on New York jazz. For a fuller measure, look to the 25th annual Vision Festival, happening now through next week in Manhattan and Brooklyn; he helped found the festival a quarter-century ago with the dancer and organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker, his wife. At 69, he hasn’t slowed down: Parker is slated to perform in no fewer than five different ensembles over the course of this year’s festival. RUSSONELLOKippie Moeketsi and Hal Singer, ‘Blue Stompin’’The alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi was among the first to fit bebop’s musical language into South African jazz, but he didn’t import it whole cloth. He made the language sing rather than banter, and he played with a circular, spinning approach to rhythm — related to marabi and earlier South African styles — not the typical American sense of swing. On his unaccompanied intro to “Blue Stompin’,” Moeketsi leaps in with a sharp, bluesy cry, then nods toward a carnival-style rhythm before growling his way to the end of the cadenza. Then he locks into the main melody, playing in unison with the American tenor saxophonist Hal Singer, who wrote the tune. A former Duke Ellington Orchestra member who had scored some radio hits of his own as a jump-blues saxophonist, Singer was in South Africa in 1974 on a State Department tour when he recorded a few tracks with Moeketsi. Those became an album, originally released in South Africa in ’77; it has just been remastered and released digitally by the Canadian label We Are Busy Bodies. RUSSONELLO More

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      The Music Scene in This Brooklyn Neighborhood Is Here to Stay

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      During the city’s lockdown, porch concerts in Ditmas Park began as a way to unite artists. These events, along with new series and festivals, have transformed this quiet area into an arts hub.One July Sunday, just off Newkirk Plaza in Brooklyn — between the yellow facade of a laundromat and the red awning of a bodega — the mellow strains of a saxophone floated over a crowd of about 150. The Haitian jazz guitarist Eddy Bourjolly introduced the song “Complainte Paysanne,” and the band serenaded the street.This was a kickoff event for Open Streets, a series of Sunday concerts that will run through the end of August in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn. It is hosted by 5 p.m. Porch Concerts, one of a handful of groups that have taken root around the Ditmas Park neighborhood since the pandemic began. Operation Gig, which connects local musicians to paying gigs, began last July. Artmageddon, an art and music festival on the porches and in the gardens there, saw its first installment this June.As to-go cocktails — and (hopefully) outdoor birthday parties in frigid January — become a thing of the past, some rituals that have developed during the pandemic are here to stay in the city. The nascent arts and music scene around Ditmas Park — a neighborhood nestled in Flatbush, below Prospect Park — appears to be one of them.Robert Elstein, an artist and public-school teacher who organized Artmageddon, plans to hold its next installment in October. Last time, paintings and sculptures from groups like Flatbush Artists and Oye Studios were on display in yards and in the Newkirk Community Garden. The neighborhood has always counted artists and musicians among its residents, but because of the pandemic they were suddenly staying put, Elstein said.“Our world went from being the entire world to just our local community, no matter where we were,” he said. “And because of the neighborly spirit and creativity of the residents of Ditmas Park, we saw what we saw.”A crowd on Newkirk Avenue watching the Playing for the Light Big Band in July.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesThe quiet, leafy area of Ditmas Park is known better for its Victorian houses than concert venues (in fact, there’s a dearth of them), but it became a musical destination in the city in 2020 thanks in part to the wiry 70-year-old saxophonist Roy Nathanson.Beginning in April of last year, he played “Amazing Grace” from his second-floor balcony in Ditmas Park every evening at 5 sharp — a soothing change from the constant wail of sirens then. Soon a motley crew of local musicians — including the pianist and composer Albert Marquès — took shape, and they joined him in playing that hopeful hymn for 82 days straight.Last May, when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and New Yorkers took to the streets to protest police brutality, Marquès did too.“I was playing for the community, we were doing all those things,” he said in a video interview from Spain this month. “And I was going to the protests. So in my mind, both things had to connect somehow.” That connection took shape as Freedom First, a series of jazz concerts around New York he organized around a cause, raising funds to support Keith LaMar, a death-row inmate in Ohio who is fighting to be exonerated for a crime he says he did not commit.Last summer, 5 p.m. Porch Concerts pivoted to hosting mostly jazz performances, and began offering outdoor lessons to young musicians in middle and high school in June of 2020. After going mostly dormant over the winter, they started “porch jams” in April; this series, held on Sundays at 5 p.m. on East 17th Street, will resume in mid-August.A member of a punk duo that performed. This Sunday concert series will run through the end of August.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesRhonasha George singing a song she wrote at the event in July.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesAnother group, Operation Gig, founded by Aaron Lisman in July 2020, has been bringing live music to Ditmas Park, and paying local professional musicians for their work, for a full year now. Especially during a pandemic, he said, musicians should not be expected to play for free.There’s no overhead for shows like these, and no booking agent or venue. Each concert averages between $300 and $500 in crowd funding (think Venmo), by Lisman’s estimate. The record collected for a performance was around $1,000 — more than some music clubs in the city pay. At a recent event, they announced a suggested donation of $10 per person, $20 per family. Many young families attend, as do older people.“They’re not going to be going to Manhattan, period, let alone to clubs,” Lisman said. “So they are sort of an untapped market, and it turns out that doing music on porches — which turns out to be really beautiful and special — is a perfect way to tap that market.”On the same Sunday in July, music, folksy and bright, could be heard down Buckingham Road, an area lined with beautiful old Victorians. A stroller brigade was parked on the grass. Through the trees emerged a Japanese-style, bright red stucco-covered box of a house, trimmed in forest green and built at the beginning of the 20th century. Below the porch, a white-haired couple held hands. Toward the fence, Amy Bramhall of Copper Spoon Bakery presided over a table of free cupcakes, macarons and cookies.Gloria Fischer, the homeowner for 40 years, listened to the four songwriters in-the-round at the Operation Gig event — Scott Stein, Andi Rae Healy, Jeff Litman and Bryan Dunn — from her porch. Sporting teashade sunglasses with purple-swirled frames, Fischer said that over the past year alone, she estimates she has hosted around 50 Operation Gig shows.“I think that it actually gave me an emotional lift,” she said. “Because it was obviously such a dent” during the pandemic.A concert at Gloria Fischer’s home on Buckingham Road in Brooklyn this month.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesOperation Gig has sprouted offshoots: The fiddle player and singer Melody Allegra Berger has taken charge of a weekly Operation Gig Bluegrass Sesh on Sundays at various locations. On Saturdays, she runs her own Stoop Sesh nearby in Park Slope.“When you’re a hustling creative type in New York, you just get used to having to adapt and having many things going on at once,” she said. “So it was like, ‘Oh, well that whole revenue stream is gone.’ And we made this happen instead.”These neighborhood concerts are popular with crowds of all ages.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesThe suggested donation, often sent via Venmo, is $10 for individuals and $20 for families.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesLast summer, 5 p.m. Porch Concerts started a program of outdoor lessons, pairing professional musicians from the neighborhood with kids aged 10 to 18. At the Open Streets event, which will make Newkirk Avenue a car-free zone on Sundays through the end of the summer, the Multigenerational Playing for the Light Big Band performed, featuring teachers alongside their students.Aaron Scrimgeour, a melodica player, said that inspiration for the lessons came from “knowing the amount of musicians doing different and interesting things that live in the neighborhood, and the amount of kids who could have access to what I think is really a cool opportunity.”Among Scrimgeour’s students is the pianist Rhonasha George, 15. At the Open Streets event, she sang a song she had written, “Outside My Window,” her fire engine red braids matching her dress. The song comes from a poem George wrote with the informal music school last summer. Over Zoom, teachers asked students to visualize what happened in the neighborhood around them during the pandemic.For George, that meant writing about an old man outside of her window caught in a summer storm, with no coat and no umbrella. But like the city itself, “he was OK. And he was actually stronger and healthier than anything,” George said. And like the city, she added, “He knows how to come back.” More

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      Roy Hargrove and Mulgrew Miller’s Glorious Duets

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      Two performances by the trumpeter and pianist are collected on “In Harmony,” a new double album that takes on standards via a fresh lens.On a snowy evening in January 2006, the trumpeter Roy Hargrove sped from Newark Airport to Merkin Hall, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to play a rare duet concert with the esteemed pianist Mulgrew Miller. He got there just in time: There was no room for a rehearsal or even a proper soundcheck; they selected the set list while waiting in the wings, just before going onstage.The two had long been in each other’s orbit, but they’d hardly ever played alone together, so they chose almost entirely standards, the common tongue of the jazz tradition. Their instruments blended effortlessly — just as they did nearly two years later, when the musicians came together again at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where Miller sometimes taught, for another duet.Those two performances are collected on “In Harmony,” a double album from the archival jazz label Resonance Records arriving on vinyl and CD. Only select tracks will be available on streaming services.The album is a low-key triumph, and a worthy addition to Black American music’s inventory of great trumpet-piano duet recordings, including the famous sides that Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines made in the 1920s, and the underrecognized LP that Oscar Peterson recorded with Clark Terry in 1975. There’s something satisfying about the neatness of the format — the clarity of the roles, the separation of powers — that allows a trumpeter and a pianist to let loose within the gift of structure.Both Hargrove and Miller died in recent years, at ages 49 and 57, but despite being relatively young, they’d each achieved a kind of hallowed-elder status. Both had moved to New York from the South, roughly a decade apart, and they became shaped by the straight-ahead jazz renaissance going on in Manhattan in the 1980s and ’90s. At the same time, they never fell out of touch with the blues and gospel traditions, which they had learned from the inside out as youngsters.On the opening track of “In Harmony,” a nine-minute sprint through Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love,” Miller tosses together bluesy rumbles, fast-break bebop and the occasional passage of stride piano. Hargrove’s smartly dazzling solo is laced with bebop callbacks — to Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-Ning” and Tadd Dameron’s “Hot House” — yet his style transcends: He has a buttery and elegantly coiled attack that harks to Clifford Brown, and the acuity to follow Miller’s lead into postmodern harmonic leaps.Hargrove grew up in Texas, quiet and reclusive, but by his midteens he had found his vocation and was becoming known as a prodigy. He moved to New York at 20, and for months he spent almost every night at Bradley’s, a bustling jazz haunt in Greenwich Village with a luxurious grand piano but no drum kit. The club was a laboratory and a proving ground, and while there he grew close with various older musicians. Miller was one of them.Hailing from Mississippi by way of Memphis State University, Miller was a pianist who could fill any assignment. As his career went on, he tended to do the assigning himself: Throughout the 2000s, he led a trio that hewed to an acoustic-jazz format but left plenty of room for Miller’s vast palette of influences to shine — the stride of Art Tatum, the bebop of Bud Powell, the block chords of Erroll Garner, the soul piano of Donny Hathaway or Aretha Franklin, the gospel playing of James Cleveland.Like Hargrove, Miller moved to New York from the South and was shaped by the straight-ahead jazz renaissance of the 1980s and ’90s.Mark SheldonHe also took close notes on the non-pianists he worked with. Toward the beginning of his career, in the early 1980s, Miller spent three years playing in the band of the trumpeter Woody Shaw, who did more than perhaps any other musician of his era to expand the possibilities of harmony and imbrication in modern jazz. Miller learned to pour those lessons into his piano playing, and you can hear it across “In Harmony,” including on “Invitation,” the Bronislaw Kaper standard, when Hargrove and Miller trade fours in a high-velocity repartee. At times, Miller cycles through harmonies around a fixed point, and Hargrove cuts into them at an angle, traveling in leaps. In other cases, Miller improvises in chunky, rhythmic sequences of chords — no melody needed.Miller and Hargrove bring the same level of intense focus to the ballads they play, including Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford” and Monk’s “Ruby My Dear”; on most of those, Hargrove switches to the fuller-toned fluegelhorn. Throughout, both players are at the height of their powers, and it’s arresting to hear them up close, in such rich detail. It’s also rare, in today’s jazz generation, for musicians to approach standards with this level of hands-on commitment and devotion.“In Harmony” was recorded in far grander rooms than Bradley’s, before much-less-roisterous audiences, but it’ll leave you musing on what a night at the club might have felt like: the stripped-down instrumentation; the intimacy of the exchange; the standard jazz repertoire, renewed through camaraderie and fresh ideas.Roy Hargrove and Mulgrew Miller“In Harmony”(Resonance) More

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      Rick Laird, Bassist at the Forefront of Fusion, Dies at 80

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      He played with jazz greats and helped make music history with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. But he gave it up in his 40s to become a photographer.Rick Laird, a bassist who played a central role in the jazz-rock fusion boom as a founding member of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, then retired from music to pursue a career in photography, died on July 4 in New City, N.Y. He was 80.His daughter, Sophie Rose Laird, said the cause was lung cancer.The guitarist John McLaughlin called Mr. Laird in 1971 with an invitation to join a group he was forming with the goal of uniting the jazz-rock aesthetic — which Mr. McLaughlin had helped establish as a member of Miles Davis and Tony Williams’s earliest electric bands — with Indian classical music and European experimentalism.The new ensemble, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which also featured the drummer Billy Cobham, the keyboardist Jan Hammer and the violinist Jerry Goodman, became one of the most popular instrumental bands of its time. It released a pair of studio albums now regarded as classics for Columbia Records, “The Inner Mounting Flame” (1971) and “Birds of Fire” (1973), and one live album, “Between Nothingness & Eternity” (1973).Mr. Laird had already begun to prove himself in the jazz world as a promising upright bassist, but with Mahavishnu he switched to playing electric exclusively. The group ranged from simmering interplay over odd time signatures to thrashing, high-altitude improvisation. It was all dependent on Mr. Laird’s steady hand, and on his knack for balancing power with restraint.“Someone had to say one” — that is, make clear where each measure began — “and that was me,” Mr. Laird said in a 1999 interview with Bass Player magazine.On the day of Mr. Laird’s death, Mr. Cobham posted a tribute on Facebook calling him “the most dependable person in that band.” Mr. Laird, he said, “played what was necessary to keep the rest of us from going off our musical rails.”“He was my rock,” Mr. Cobham added, “and allowed me to play and explore musical regions that I would not have been able to navigate without him having my back!”All of Mr. McLaughlin’s bandmates left Mahavishnu in the mid-1970s amid disagreements over money, creative control and the role of religion in the group. (Mr. McLaughlin was a devoted follower of the spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy and wanted the band to express his teachings directly.) He would continue the band for years, using different lineups.Mr. Laird spent the rest of the decade as a bassist-for-hire with some of the most esteemed names in jazz, touring the United States and the world with the saxophonists Joe Henderson and Stan Getz, among others. In the late 1970s he spent a brief stint in a band led by the keyboardist Chick Corea.Mr. Laird released one album of his own, “Soft Focus,” recorded in 1976, which featured Mr. Henderson.But in 1982, fearing that a musician’s lifestyle would prove unstable as he grew older, Mr. Laird embraced his other passion: photography. He had bought cameras and equipment on a tour of Japan and started doing photo shoots for fellow musicians. He soon made taking pictures his full-time job, shooting portraits for law firms and doing stock photography for agencies.But he also composed and recorded frequently throughout his retirement, although these projects have not been officially released.In addition to his daughter, Mr. Laird is survived by his sister, Tanya Laird; his brother, David; and his partner, Jane Meryll. His two marriages ended in divorce.Mr. Laird in 1967. He had begun to prove himself in the jazz world as a promising upright bassist before joining Mahavishnu and switching to electric.via Sophie LairdRichard Quentin Laird was born in Dublin on Feb. 5, 1941. His father, William Desmond Laird, a building contractor, was Protestant, and his mother, Margaret Muriel (Le Gear) Laird, a homemaker, was Roman Catholic; although neither parent was particularly religious, their families weren’t on speaking terms. Eventually, the couple split up.At 16, Rick was sent to live on a sheep farm in New Zealand. Hoping to pursue a career in music, he eventually moved to Sydney, Australia, where he gained a reputation on the jazz scene before moving to London.There he became the house bassist at Ronnie Scott’s, a top jazz club that often hosted musicians on international tours, and met some of the world’s most famous jazz talent. He played with the likes of the guitarist Wes Montgomery and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and engagements with the saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Ben Webster led to albums with them.It was a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston that first took Mr. Laird to the United States, in 1966. He moved to Los Angeles without graduating and joined the drummer Buddy Rich’s band for a year before relocating to New York. In the early 2000s, he moved to New City, just north of New York City, where he lived until his death. He died in a hospice facility.In an interview for Guitar Player magazine in 1980, Mr. Laird reflected on a career as a side musician.“If you play a supportive role, instead of soloing constantly, the chances of becoming well known by the average audience are very slim,” he said. “The more I’ve refined my skills, the less I get noticed.“It’s a paradox, but I don’t mind. I don’t think I need my ego stroked like that.” More

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      National Endowment for the Arts Announces Jazz Masters

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      Its 2022 class includes the bassist Stanley Clarke, the drummer Billy Hart, the vocalist Cassandra Wilson and the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr.The National Endowment for the Arts has announced its 2022 class of Jazz Masters — and it represents a broad swath of the blues-based, boundary-pushing music that has been made in the last 50 years under the label of jazz.The new Jazz Masters are the bassist Stanley Clarke, the drummer Billy Hart, the vocalist Cassandra Wilson and the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. They will be honored in April 2022, at a ceremony at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, the N.E.A. said on Tuesday. The Jazz Masters award is the highest national honor given to living American jazz musicians, and comes with a $25,000 cash prize.Clarke, 70, is best known as a founding member of the seminal jazz-rock fusion band Return to Forever, though he has also enjoyed a vibrant career as a solo artist. Hart, 80, can be heard on timeless recordings by Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and others. In recent decades, his quartet has often been hailed as one of the leading bands in jazz.Wilson’s husky, confiding vocal style and passion for scrambling genres made her one of the leading jazz vocalists of the 1990s. Both Wilson, now 65, and Clarke are multi-Grammy winners.Harrison grew up in New Orleans, immersed in the city’s Black musical heritage, and after earning national recognition in the 1980s and 1990s he recommitted to cultivating his hometown scene through activism and education work. Harrison will be this year’s recipient of the A.B. Spellman Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, which the N.E.A. more typically gives to non-musicians. More

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      Pop Smoke’s Memory Lives On, and 14 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Xenia Rubinos, Swedish House Mafia, Soccer Mommy 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.Pop Smoke, ‘More Time’“Faith,” the second posthumous album from Pop Smoke, includes collaborations with Kanye West, Dua Lipa, 42 Dugg, Future and others. But this track, early in the album, is jarring and stark. Not simply because it’s still eerie to hear Pop Smoke rapping with a blend of menace and joy, but because of its chilling beat — produced in part by the rapper’s longtime collaborator Rico Beats, but also in part by Nicholas Britell, who has scored “Moonlight” and “Succession.” It is a familiar trick, these reverberating keys that stand stern sentry, but no less effective for it. Here is a splash of theater more visceral than any radio hit, any pop crossover. JON CARAMANICAXenia Rubinos, ‘Working All the Time’Xenia Rubinos’s “Working All the Time” is only two minutes long, but it’s as intricate as an arduous jigsaw puzzle. There are waves of skittish synths, air horns straight out of a Funk Flex set on Hot 97, a bridge that sounds like the glitchy maximalism of hyperpop, and last but not least, an interpolation of the traditional rumba “Ave María Morena.” Somehow, Rubinos makes sense of all these disparate pieces using her brassy, featherlight voice. Blink and you’ll miss that it’s a workers’ anthem, too: In one verse, Rubinos sings, “You better keep me poor and busy or I’d be a danger.” It’s a warning for those who try to crush the power of the people. ISABELIA HERRERASwedish House Mafia, ‘It Gets Better’I suppose you can absorb this song on the internet, where it is currently available. But the slick return of Swedish House Mafia — the Brobdingnagian kings of mainstream EDM, the clout champions of biggest-room house music — cries out for an open field, a dizzying laser show, a loss of sense of time and place. Hug a friend; the soundtrack of shared mayhem is upon us. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Whenever You’re Ready’A brisk, ratcheting, evolving ska-meets-trap beat carries “Whenever You’re Ready” by Mahalia, a British singer whose mother is Jamaican. It’s a semi-breakup song that flaunts confidence instead of pain. The singer is letting him go because he’s angry at her now, but she’s sure he’ll be back: “You won’t be gone for good,” she sings. “No, I’m not worried.” JON PARELESCaroline Polachek, ‘Bunny Is a Rider’Singing about a woman so elusive that a “satellite can’t find her,” Caroline Polachek makes staccato syllables and short phrases bounce all around the beat, working equally as percussion and melody. They’re just a few of the syncopated layers in a playful yet strategic production — by Polachek and her frequent collaborator, Danny L. Harle from the PC Music circle — that juggles whistling, triangle, birdsong and the giggles and gurgles of Harle’s baby daughter. “I’m so nonphysical,” Polachek exults, over the sustained bass tone that cushions the chorus. Nonsense: The song is built for dancing. PARELESSoccer Mommy, ‘Rom Com 2004’“Rom Com 2004” could have been a straightforward indie-rock love song, vowing “Just let me be yours like no one else before” over a march beat, guitar chords and a chorus with a proud leap in the melody. But Soccer Mommy — Sophie Allison — handed over her demo to the producer BJ Burton with instructions, she has said, to “destroy it.” He obliged with glitches, distortion, speed variations and exposed moments — making the song more appealing because it plays hard to get. PARELESTurnstile featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alien Love Call’From the forthcoming Turnstile album, “Glow On,” comes this shoegaze space-soul collaboration with Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). The video compiles mayhem-esque live footage more in keeping with the hardcore band’s usual rhythms, but perhaps this is the meditation before the rage. CARAMANICADave McMurray, ‘Dark Star’Dave McMurray is a longtime Detroit tenor saxophonist with decades of experience in rock, jazz, pop and R&B, mostly as a side musician. But he’s just released his second album for Blue Note as a leader: “Grateful Deadication,” a tribute to the Grateful Dead songbook. His cover of the classic “Dark Star” channels the epically trippy M.O. of a Dead performance: McMurray declares the melody over Wayne Gerard’s twinkling, distorted guitar; eventually, a dug-in backbeat sets in. Then a coolly grooving section opens up, and the saxophonist dishes out a solo that’s laced with greasy Motor City attitude but still takes its time, as if to bask in the California sun. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The songs on “Mythopoetics,” Nandi Rose Plunkett’s new album as Half Waif, suffer and exult in all-consuming love. As “Swimmer” leaps from everyday sensation to all-out devotion and need — “I want to know they can’t take this away from me” — synthesizer arpeggios and vocal harmonies swarm around Plunkett’s ardent voice, like a suddenly racing heartbeat and an uncontainable obsession. PARELESYas, ‘Idea of You’A viscous tar pit of a track — slow, oozing bass tones, sparse drum-machine taps and gaping silences — hints at the difficulty of pulling free from an increasingly destructive relationship. Yas (the songwriter, singer, producer and violinist Yasmeen Al-Mazeedi) sings about being “in love with the idea of you” amid details of mental and physical abuse. The negotiations aren’t quite over; her voice rises to a fragile soprano as she decides, “You think that I want you back — I don’t.” PARELESKoreless, ‘White Picket Fence’Koreless — the Welsh producer Lewis Roberts — swerves between pastorale and rave on “White Picket Fence.” A keening female voice, uncredited and possibly built from samples, floats at first over a stately harpsichord; then fuzzy synthesizers arrive with a pulsing beat under that vocal melody, before it gets stretched and chopped up; then it’s sent back to harpsichord territory. In the video, directed by FKA twigs, club creatures climb out of a futuristic green car alongside a bucolic creek, where fishing ensues; urban artifice meets Nature. PARELESKarol G, ‘200 Copas’To a friend who’s still tearful about her ex, the Colombian songwriter Karol G (Carolina Giraldo Navarro) doesn’t mince words in “200 Copas” (“200 Drinks”); she dismisses the guy with profanities after all the suffering he caused. Yet her 21st-century bluntness gets a traditionalist backing; while the rest of her album, “KG0516,” traverses modern Pan-American pop with all its technological tricks, “200 Copas” is an old-fashioned waltz backed by a few acoustic instruments, nothing more. The lyrics are decidedly impolite, but the predicament she sings about is not new. The new video has her leading a beach-bonfire singalong: solidarity against undeserving men. PARELESTainy and Yandel, ‘El Plan’“Dynasty” is a new collaborative album from Tainy and Yandel, two titans of reggaeton celebrating 16 years of eminence. With its sinister harpsichord, muted marimbas and a piercing dembow riddim, “El Plan” recalls the mid-00s reggaeton that required listeners practice dancing in front of the mirror. It’s all about the thrill of an after-hours dance-floor chase — the electrifying, will-it-or-won’t-it-happen energy of a night at the club. “Estoy esperándote y tú perreando sola,” Yandel says. “I’m waiting for you and you’re dancing alone.” Luckily, he knows he’s at the whim of his partner: “Pero tú dime cuál e’ el plan.” You tell me what the plan is. HERRERAMas Aya, ‘Momento Presente’It is easy to reference folkloric sounds, but have little to offer other than mere nostalgia. The instrumentalist Brandon Valdivia, better known as Mas Aya, escapes this fate masterfully on “Momento Presente.” More than a mere collision of past and present, the track is a study in the power of harnessing ancestral knowledge. Over six and a half minutes, Valdivia braids a skittish footwork beat with a flurry of Andean pan flutes, arpeggiated synths and polyrhythms. Halfway through, the voice of an elder reflects on centuries of protest, a reminder that the work of liberation is part of a continuum. One moment the song is celestial, transporting the listener 40,000 feet into the air. In another it is meditative, urging us into quiet introspection. HERRERAMatt Mitchell and Kate Gentile, ‘Trapezoids | Matching Tickles’In recent years the pianist Matt Mitchell and the drummer Kate Gentile have developed a book of pithy, one-bar-long compositions, which they play with small ensembles under the name Snark Horse. Through intense improvisation, taking equal cues from free jazz and metal, they morph and distend and scramble these little melodic fragments. On Friday, Snark Horse released its first album — a boxed set spanning no fewer than 49 tracks and five-and-a-half hours, mostly recorded at a three-day session in late 2019. “Trapezoids” is a Gentile composition, a crooked and incessant spray of notes, with Jon Irabagon’s saxophone further destabilizing the mix. It’s paired on this track with “Matching Tickles,” a Mitchell piece, which he plays more softly and abstractedly, as if it were the echo of another idea. RUSSONELLO More