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      When Boston Ruled the Music World

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      Three recent recordings conjure the mid-20th-century moment when the city was a center of innovative composition.When I moved to Massachusetts in the mid-1970s to start a doctorate at Boston University, there was a specific professor I wanted to study with: the formidable pianist Leonard Shure.But Shure was hardly the only renowned pedagogue in Boston. The city had at that point long been a hub of academic music, with distinguished programs at Harvard, Brandeis and Boston universities, the New England Conservatory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Until I arrived, though, I didn’t realize what a center the Boston area was for contemporary music; from afar, the city had seemed to me too staid and traditional for that. But in its own buttoned-up New England way, it was a modernist hotbed. Each of those institutions was like a little fief, with eminent composers on the faculty. Each maintained active student ensembles, including many devoted exclusively to new music.If you wanted to be on the front lines of the battle between severe “uptown” music and rebellious “downtown” postmodernism, you headed to New York. If you were drawn to mavericks and intrigued by non-Western cultures, especially Asian music, you probably found your way to Los Angeles or San Francisco.But if you wanted a classic education, studying with a true master composer — and at that time, almost all the major university composers were white men — you went to Boston. But the music that emerged there in those decades has faded in favor of work from other American cities.Not entirely, however. Keeping that legacy alive is part of the mission of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and its record label BMOP/sound. The ensemble champions modern and new music from all over. But according to its founder and artistic director, Gil Rose, 40 or 45 percent of its recordings have been of works by Boston-area composers.Schuller in the late 1970s. His overlooked operatic collaboration with John Updike, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” has been recorded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.Fletcher DrakeSeveral recent releases have brought me back to my first years in the city, when composers at those various academic institutions loomed large. Three recordings are especially exciting: Gunther Schuller’s overlooked opera “The Fisherman and His Wife” and albums of orchestral works by Leon Kirchner and Harold Shapero.Schuller, who died in 2015 at 89, once described himself as a “high school dropout without a single earned degree.” Technically that was true. But he was a protean musician who in his late teens won the principal horn position at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and then, two years later, moved on to the Metropolitan Opera, where he held the same post until 1959. Yet, he also played and recorded in jazz groups with the likes of Miles Davis.When I moved to Boston, Schuller was in the final years of his transformative tenure as president of the New England Conservatory. There he had established the first degree-granting jazz program at a major American conservatory — bringing in the pianist Ran Blake to chair it as well as hiring giants to teach, including Jaki Byard and George Russell.Anticipating by decades creative practices that are commonplace today, he had coined the term “third wave” to describe music that drew from both classical and jazz genres. Schuller, who as a composer was drawn to 12-tone idioms, though not in the strictest sense, also appointed the brilliant modernist Donald Martino to lead the composition faculty. He had all the bases covered. Schuller also taught for two decades at the Tanglewood Music Center, serving as artistic director for 15 of those years, until 1984.For all his formidable skills and vision as a composer, Schuller may have been more consequential as a teacher, mentor, conductor and a tireless (sometimes shrill) agitator on behalf of contemporary music and living composers than as a writer of music himself. That perception has long seemed unfair, but it persists. Though fine pieces from his large catalog have been gaining attention, “The Fisherman and His Wife” has languished.It was commissioned as a children’s opera by the Junior League of Boston, and first performed in 1970 by Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston — though Caldwell had another composer in mind for the project when she found herself working with the imposing Schuller.The 65-minute opera, based on a familiar story by the Grimm brothers, boasts a libretto by none other than John Updike. As the story unfolds, a lowly fisherman makes repeated trips back to the restless sea to summon a magical fish he has caught and released — the fish is actually an enchanted prince — and to ask for the granting of yet another of his wife’s increasingly grandiose wishes. Schuller inventively, yet subtly, organized the score like a theme and variations. Most boldly, he wrote whole stretches of the score in his trademark modernist language — steeped in, but not beholden to, the 12-tone approach, with some jazz chords folded in.A 12-tone opera for children?Yet Schuller was on to something. The story is full of darkness, strangeness, magic, evocations of a threatening sea and cloudy skies, bitter confrontations between the wife and husband. Why not convey it through flinty, atonal music? The voice lines are written with skill to make the words come through clearly. Updike introduced the character of a cat that both meowed and talked, a charming role that Schuller assigned to a high soprano. The orchestration, for a smaller ensemble, is alive with myriad sonorities and captivating colors.Though released last year, the BMOP/sound recording was made in 2015 in collaboration with Odyssey Opera, founded by Rose, following a semi-staged concert performance. The commanding mezzo-soprano Sondra Kelly as the wife, the plaintive tenor Steven Goldstein as the fisherman and the sturdy baritone David Kravitz as the magic fish are excellent — and Rose draws glittering, swirling, mysterious playing from the orchestra. I could be wrong, but with a vivid staging, I think an audience of children would respond well to it.Schuller, an accomplished, exacting conductor, wrote a comprehensive book about conducting. Across the river in Cambridge, the respected composer and Harvard professor Leon Kirchner also had a following as a conductor back then, though he was not the most efficient technician. He was, however, a skilled pianist and a probing musician who understood how pieces were supposed to go.Leon Kirchner, a composer and conductor based at Harvard, in 1982.John GoodmanIn 1978, with the support of a dean at Harvard, Kirchner founded the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, a professional ensemble of freelance players organized purely so that Kirchner could conduct free, routinely packed concerts. With those dedicated players, he led scores like Debussy’s “La Mer” and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony as if he had written them. A remarkable 1984 account of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Peter Serkin as soloist, was issued recently on a Verdant World Records release, and it’s just as exhilarating and profound as I remembered.As a composer, Kirchner was powerfully influenced by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. Like Schuller and others of their generation, Kirchner adopted the aesthetic and approach of 12-tone music but with freedom and flair, unbound by strict rules. I do remember him being narrow-minded about composers who stuck essentially to tonal harmonic languages — let alone to Minimalism, which he could not abide.But I’ve always admired the depth, imagination and engrossing complexity of his music. Those qualities abound in five orchestral pieces on a riveting BMOC/sound recording from 2018 — particularly the 11-minute “Music for Orchestra,” from 1969. It’s a transfixing score that feels subdued in a lying-in-wait way, as if at any moment pensive stretches of lyricism could break out. And sometimes do, through cascades of skittish riffs and teeming bursts.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation, which included his friend Leonard Bernstein. As a student at Tanglewood, Shapero deeply impressed Aaron Copland. He earned the attention of his idol, Stravinsky, when that composer came as a guest to Harvard, where Shapero was a student.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation.Gordon Parks/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesShapero set about adapting Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical style, giving it a jolt of American spunk and unfettered intricacy. From 1940 to 1950, he produced a breakthrough series of ambitious works, including his daunting 45-minute Symphony for Classical Orchestra, composed in 1947. Bernstein adored the piece and led the premiere in 1948 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He recorded it in 1953 on a single hectic day with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Then the work disappeared until André Previn discovered it and led a triumphant performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1986, and later recorded it. You could make a case for the piece as one of the great American symphonies.The BMOC/sound album includes Shapero’s Serenade for String Orchestra from 1945, a 35-minute, five-movement score that vividly demonstrates how Shapero, while writing in a Neo-Classical idiom, was attempting to make essentially tonal music modern and challenging. The first movement is an engrossing jangle of counterpoint, yet somehow transparent. The Menuetto is like a diatonic retort to Schoenberg’s 12-tone minuets. The slow movement is weighty and searching, yet harmonically tart and suffused with tension. The finale is frenetic, pointillist and wonderfully jumpy.In 1950, Shapero helped start the music program of the newly founded Brandeis. That department soon became the unofficial headquarters of the “Boston School” of composers, as it was called, which included Irving Fine (who died in 1962, at 47) and Arthur Berger. All three began as Stravinsky-influenced Neo-Classicists. But over time, Fine and Berger slowly adopted their own brands of the 12-tone writing that was taking hold in universities, for better or worse, as the de facto language of modernism. Shapero, who died in 2013, explored the technique but never went along. He composed less and less, until he had a renewed burst of creativity running Brandeis’s electronic music studio.But he was a great mentor to countless student composers. And his life offered a lesson, a kind of warning: Stick to your guns; don’t be intimidated; write the music you want to write. They were lessons eagerly learned in the explosion of creativity happening in Boston. More

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      Vijay Iyer’s New Trio Is a Natural Fit. Its Album Is ‘Uneasy.’

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      The pianist teamed up with the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey for a record that came together during a period of tragedy and unrest.The pianist Vijay Iyer composed the title track to his new trio album, “Uneasy,” back in 2011 for a collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage. It was still a few years before the 2016 presidential campaign, when so many of the country’s old wounds and resentments would burst onto public display, but he already felt some undercurrents stirring.“It was 10 years after 9/11, and having been in New York for all that time, any kind of moment of relative peace felt precarious,” he said recently by phone from his home in Harlem. “I’m speaking not just about the attack itself, but all of the aftermath: the blowback, the backlash against communities of color, the atmosphere of surveillance and fear.”“It was the Obama years, so there was a certain kind of exuberance about possibility, and there was also a kind of unease,” he added. “It was a time of the Affordable Care Act and of drone warfare, gay marriage and mass deportations.” With digital surveillance becoming a fact of life, he was struck, as an American-born artist of South Asian descent, by the feeling “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be,” he said.Another decade has now passed, and the version of “Uneasy” that appears on the album, out Friday, seems to be carrying a mix of heavy thought and rich optimism — a typical blend in Iyer’s work. He’s joined by two slightly younger musicians with sizable followings of their own, Linda May Han Oh on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. As improvisers, they’ve got a few things in common: the ability to play with a lithe range of motion and resplendent clarity, in the style of well-schooled jazz musicians, while stoking a kind of writhing internal tension. Crucial to that balance is their ability to connect with each other in real time, almost telepathically.The title track unfolds ominously over more than nine minutes, starting off in a dark cloud of doubt, with Iyer’s low piano repetitions hovering around a slow, odd-metered pattern. Later, the group upshifts — abruptly, but without totally losing its cohesion — into a quicker, charging section with a wholly different rhythm, Iyer’s right hand darting in evasive gestures while Oh holds down the scaffolding and Sorey adds action and sizzle.The trio first came together in 2014 at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, where Iyer, now 49, and Sorey, now 40, serve as artistic directors. The two have been collaborating since 2001, when Sorey wowed Iyer at a rehearsal. During a break, Sorey started casually noodling on the piano, and Iyer soon realized he was playing an excerpt from Iyer’s most recent album. It wasn’t even from the song’s melody; it was part of Iyer’s improvised solo on the recording.“He was just this 20-year-old,” Iyer said. “So I already knew, like, oh, this is a bona fide genius right here.” (Indeed, in the years since, both Iyer and Sorey — who is now as well known for his long-form compositions as he is for his drumming — have been awarded MacArthur “genius” grants. They have also both become professors of music at Ivy League institutions.) Sorey joined the collective trio Fieldwork, with Iyer and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, and their partnership blossomed.In 2013, Iyer took over as artistic director at Banff — a creative enclave in Alberta, Canada, where students gather every year for a three-week improvisation workshop — and he found himself inviting Sorey to teach alongside him each year. Eventually, he formalized their relationship as a partnership, welcoming Sorey as his co-director.Oh, 36, had collaborated here and there with both Iyer and Sorey before also becoming a regular instructor at Banff. She said she appreciated the fluidity of the divide between instructors and students that the workshop fostered. Speaking by phone from her home in Australia, Oh recalled the poetry of how Iyer encouraged students to think about the notes they played on their instrument in relationship to the range of their own speaking voice.Playing Iyer’s compositions, she said, can be like working out “beautiful little puzzles,” and she called Sorey an ideal teammate.“It’s a lot of fun to tread that line between what is inbuilt in that structure and what we can sort of dialogue on, and have a conversation over that,” she said. Sorey is “so thorough with the inbuilt things in the composition, but he’ll create these sparks that you really don’t expect,” she continued. “It’s just constant energetic dialogue.”Oh also has a knack for establishing sturdy foundations without sinking into a pattern. Playing together, she said, “We can be reactive and proactive at the same time.”The group started recording in 2019, but Iyer didn’t cull the tracks they’d recorded into an album until the following year, when the name “Uneasy” felt even more painfully apt. Elianel Clinton for The New York TimesIyer was quick to emphasize the importance of Sorey’s supportive style, calling it remarkable for an artist who has so much to say on his own terms. He described starting to nod toward one song in the middle of playing another, maybe just flicking at a phrase, and then feeling Sorey immediately dive into it, anticipating his next move, as if to catch him. “Because he hears everything, it means we can just do anything,” Iyer said.In an interview, Sorey said he always felt “most at home in situations where it’s only three players,” describing this particular trio as “basically one organism.”“That feeling of intimacy leads to a certain type of trust where there can be no wrong done,” he said.The group entered the studio in 2019, but Iyer didn’t cull the tracks they’d recorded into an album until the following year, when the name “Uneasy” felt even more painfully apt. “It was under the conditions of the hell that was 2020: tragedy and loss and the political battle of the century,” he said. “Then, on the other hand, an incredible uprising of, particularly, young people fighting for justice for Black people, and for everybody. That is imagining a future.”Some of the song titles speak to this theme: “Children of Flint” refers to the water crisis in Michigan; “Combat Breathing” was composed in 2014 in solidarity with Black Lives Matter activists, and presented as part of a “die-in” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But so do the sounds themselves — tetchy and bristling, while evincing an inspiring level of unity and compassion.When it came time to choose the cover art for the album, Iyer rejected nearly a dozen suggestions from Manfred Eicher, the head of ECM Records, before settling on a black-and-white double-exposure by the Korean photographer Woong Chul An. It shows the Statue of Liberty, blurry and gray, seemingly caught between the clouds in the sky and another puff of clouds hanging just above the sea.“When I saw it, I didn’t know how to feel about it,” Iyer said. “For one thing, what does it mean for me to have this on my album cover? What does this even represent?”Ultimately, he was attracted to the hazy ambivalence that the image conveys. “This one is a distant image of the Statue of Liberty, not as this looming prideful symbol but as almost what looks like this rejected figure,” he said, pointing to the fact that France had offered the statue to the United States in celebration of the end of chattel slavery here.“As this symbol tends to represent freedom in America, it is also tied to abolition,” he said. “So the fact that those concepts are bound is, I felt, important to highlight. They seemed to sit in an uneasy relation to one another, freedom and its opposite.” More

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      Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble’s Spiritual, Funky Escape

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      The Chicago musician’s group is following up its 2019 album, “Where Future Unfolds,” with an LP reacting to the events of 2020 titled “Now.”During the summer of 2020, as protesters took to the streets after the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and the United States once again reckoned with fierce racial and ideological divides, the Chicago-based vocalist, producer and sound artist Damon Locks found himself at a creative impasse.“Where Future Unfolds,” his 2019 album as the leader of the 18-member Black Monument Ensemble, expressed the pain of seeing Black people killed without adequate justice. Should — and could — Locks gather the Ensemble during the pandemic to record new music in response to what was happening around them?“The challenge was, ‘What would I say now?’” Locks, 52, said in a recent phone interview from Logan Square. “And when breath is the most dangerous thing around, how do you record up to six people singing?”He emailed a local studio engineer about recording with a condensed version of the group in the building’s backyard garden. Two obstacles made themselves evident. One, it was hot. “I think it was like 93 degrees the first day, which is a lot,” Locks said. Then there were the cicadas; they were chirping so loudly you would’ve thought they were in the band.“They were seriously right on beat a number of times,” said the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, who plays in the Ensemble.Undeterred, Locks and the Ensemble convened at Experimental Sound Studio in late August and recorded what would become “Now,” the band’s new album, out Friday. Where the group’s 2019 LP spun racial disharmony into a sacred celebration of Blackness, the new record envisions an alternate universe of infinite possibility. “The moment ‘now’ is not accounted for,” Locks said. “So anything can happen, you know?”Partially inspired by sci-fi shows like HBO’s “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” where Black people literally transport themselves out of perilous situations, “Now” uses up-tempo electro-funk and lyrics that spin societal despair into forward-looking optimism. The album — and Locks’s music, in general — also explores the concept of “the Black nod,” or the unspoken mode of communication between Black people in public spaces. In turn, Locks’s Ensemble work — with all its spiritual jazz arrangements, vibrant drum breaks and esoteric movie clips — feels overtly communal, like a private conversation between those who understand the nuances of Black culture.“To me, the nod speaks to this destabilized scenario in the United States and acknowledges that you’re here,” Locks said. “‘I understand that this is crazy, so I see you.’” Locks, who also teaches art in Chicago Public Schools and at the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security men’s prison about an hour outside of Chicago, said he was encouraged by the activism he saw in the wake of protests and the pandemic. “I took inspiration from people checking in on people, people trying to get money from one place to the other, trying to find ways to get food to people who didn’t have food,” he said.Locks grew up in Silver Spring, Md., and was introduced to punk as an eighth-grader. One year later, he started going to punk and hardcore shows just down the road in neighboring Washington, D.C., where he saw now-legendary bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains.As a nascent musician and visual artist, he loved the freedom these groups exercised onstage. That inspired him to create work based on his own feelings, regardless of what was popular. In 1987, as a freshman at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he became fast friends with a classmate named Fred Armisen, who’d only gone to the college to form a band. (“Because all of my favorite bands were art school bands,” Armisen said in a recent interview.) Armisen couldn’t really find anyone to play with, until he met Locks, who had spiky red-and-black dreadlocks.Locks discovered punk rock as a teen and played in the group Trenchmouth with Fred Armisen and Wayne Montana for eight years.Jermaine Jr. Jackson for The New York Times“Damon had a jacket with the Damned painted on it, and I loved the Damned,” Armisen remembered. A year later, Locks transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead of saying goodbye, Armisen dropped out of S.V.A. and moved too. Another friend and bandmate, the bassist Wayne Montana, followed suit. “That’s how much I believed in him,” Armisen said. They started the experimental rock band Trenchmouth in 1988.The band lasted eight years, during which Locks earned acclaim as a powerful vocalist, performer and visual artist. He made the band’s fliers, collagelike drawings mixing intricate sketches and printed images, which he photocopied at Kinko’s. “That’s the first place where I was like, ‘Oh, this guy is just a genius,” Armisen said. “This is a brilliant person who cares about every millimeter of what something looks like and sounds like.”After Trenchmouth split, Locks and Montana formed the Eternals, an amorphous outfit with a sound rooted in reggae and jazz. Where Trenchmouth scanned as punk and post-hardcore, the Eternals tried to be even weirder. “We let that free openness overtake the music,” Montana said. “We started using some samples and clips from movies in Trenchmouth, but as we got older and bought more equipment, it allowed tonal things to happen that we were always reaching for.”Locks was doing a studio residency at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2017 when he had the idea of putting singers together to expand the sound of his performances. He contacted Josephine Lee, the director of the Chicago Children’s Choir, who sent him a list of five adult singers who could bring his songs to life. The first performance was in his art center studio, where “I just opened the doors and put chairs out in the hall,” he said. The band landed a gig at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The percussionists Arif Smith and Dana Hall agreed to do the show. The cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, a friend of Locks’s, joined, too.The band’s breakthrough performance came in 2018 at the Garfield Park Conservatory as part of the Red Bull Music Festival, where Locks brought in dancers, a few new singers and Dawid, who filled in for Gay. The Black Monument Ensemble was born; “Where Future Unfolds” is a live recording of the Garfield Park performance. The group’s membership, and size, is fluid: “Some of the singers have changed over time but I consider it a family and possibly folks might show up again,” Locks said.On “Now,” Locks purposely left studio chatter on the album to underline the band’s kinship. (Listeners can experience the joy that comes after the sessions are done, as the melody fades and the Ensemble applauds the take.) “For it to be such a hard time right now, and for us to have this time to record, it was absolutely beautiful,” Dawid said. “We were just thankful to see each other again.”Locks said that his art is designed to speak one-on-one with the receiver. “I’m just trying to communicate as a human being,” he said. “The idea is to be in classrooms talking to students, to be in Stateville talking to artists who are incarcerated, trying to get their voices out there.” And with the collective anguish endured over this past year, he hopes “Now” can bring some positivity: “I’m talking about things that inspire me and passing that along.” More

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      Olivia Rodrigo’s Emotional Road Trip, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Westside Gunn, Rosanne Cash, 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.Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Deja Vu’OK, now that she’s got her license, here comes the road trip. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” opens in the car, with the singer recalling fonder times with an ex. As on “Drivers License,” there are three parties — Rodrigo, that former beau and the specter of that person’s new love, and it’s unclear which of the other two causes Rodrigo more anguish. The lyrics are plain and pinpoint pained: “That was our place, I found it first/I made the jokes you tell to her.” About halfway through, “Deja Vu” turns severely Swiftian, with lyrical asides about listening to music, a yelping section almost directly cribbed from Swift’s “Cruel Summer’” and a familiar power struggle over who taught who about cool music. Rodrigo would like to make it clear, though, that she is no mere student: “Play her piano but she doesn’t know/That I was the one who taught you Billy Joel.” JON CARAMANICAWestside Gunn, ‘Julia Lang’Hazy, pugnacious and glowering, the latest from Westside Gunn is ragged in the best early ’90s way, so convincing in its fuzz and stagger that it’s almost like a recovered memory. CARAMANICARosanne Cash featuring John Leventhal, ‘The Killing Fields’Rosanne Cash considers her own past, her family’s Southern roots, and the South’s history of lynchings and injustice in “The Killing Fields.” She sings, “The blood that runs on cypress trees cannot be washed away/by mothers’ tears and gasoline.” The melody is mournful and minor-key; a lone, lightly strummed guitar supplies most of the accompaniment. And at the end, Cash resolves, “All that came before us/is not who we are now.” JON PARELESHalf Waif, ‘Take Away the Ache’Half Waif — the songwriter Nandi Rose — lets herself be buffeted by the paradoxes of love in “Take Away the Ache.” She sings, “I know that I’m asking for more than you can give/but isn’t love just living like that?” It’s a dizzying three-and-a-half minutes, veering amid minimal electronic abstractions, piano ballad and dance-floor thumper, all held together by passionate yearning. PARELESNaomi Cowan, ‘Energy’The Jamaican singer Naomi Cowan sets her usual reggae aside in “Energy,” an ingenious, multi-leveled mesh of syncopations and silences produced by Izy Beats. Plucked strings, sporadic bass tones, finger snaps, flickering electronic hi-hats and teasing, elusive backup vocals poke in and out of the mix as Cowan chides an ex who ghosted her before declaring, “Love and war, baby, I’m no casualty.” PARELESDry Cleaning, ‘Unsmart Lady’“If you like a girl, be nice — it’s not rocket science,” Florence Shaw deadpans on “Unsmart Lady,” a new single from the London four-piece Dry Cleaning that plays out almost like a psych-rock update of Nada Surf’s “Popular.” On Dry Cleaning’s excellent debut album “New Long Leg,” out on Friday, Shaw is equal parts frontwoman and spoken-word poet, weaving the random linguistic detritus of modern life into loose, surreal narratives. (She used to collect snippets of overheard conversations and intriguing phrases in her phone’s Notes app; when her friends asked her to join their band, she mined that found material for lyrics.) “Unsmart Lady” begins as a kind of curt, one-sided conversation, but by the end it has transformed into an imagistic meditation on the absurdities of femininity, like a “foot squeezed hopefully into a short boot.” Around her, the band unleashes its fury, but Shaw’s delivery stays steady — the gimlet eye of a storm. LINDSAY ZOLADZMdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’Mdou Moctar, a guitarist, singer and bandleader from Niger, deploys everything he has drawn from Saharan traditions and Western rock in the calm-to-storm buildup of “Afrique Victime,” the title song of an album due May 21. He warns, “Africa is a victim of so many crimes/If we stay silent it will be the end of us,” while the beat gallops ahead. Soon, his electric guitar leaps up from the band’s rhythmic core to trill, twirl, swoop and scream. PARELESAG Club featuring Icecoldbishop, ‘Noho’The excellent “Noho,” from the new album by the consistently refreshing AG Club, features a frictionless collision of Bay Area hip-hop traditions: the slow-and-low and the loopily exuberant. CARAMANICADopolarians, ‘The Bond’Dopolarians began in 2018 as a project uniting free-jazz musicians based in Arkansas with elder luminaries from the free-jazz world: the bassist William Parker, the drummer Alvin Fielder Jr. and the saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Their debut album, “Garden Party,” seesawed between singsong lyricism and reckless entanglement. The group has just released a new LP, “The Bond,” and while the lineup has changed — Brian Blade now fills the drum chair after Fielder died in 2019 at 83; Jordan, now 85, is no longer in the group — the loose but intense feel remains the same. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      Esperanza Spalding’s Quest to Find Healing in Music

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      The bassist, vocalist and producer’s latest project is a therapeutic suite of songs sparked at an artists’ retreat she started during the pandemic.Esperanza Spalding has never been one to sit idle. Her wandering spirit has brought this 36-year-old musician major achievements over the past decade and pushed her work in new directions. In 2017, Spalding, a bassist, vocalist and producer, spent 77 straight hours in the studio, writing and arranging songs. The resulting album, “Exposure,” was pressed directly to CD and vinyl for a limited release of just 7,777 copies. Her next project, “12 Little Spells,” explored the healing power of music; each song correlated with a different body part.Continuing in that vein, Spalding’s new release, a suite of three songs called “Triangle” due Saturday, is meant to bolster listeners, physically and emotionally. But this time, she’s setting her sights on pandemic tension.“I was remembering ways that music had supported me,” she said on a recent call from her native Portland, Ore., “and wondering if we could go deeper into those themes.”Spalding, an easygoing conversationalist who effortlessly accesses a broad range of scientific vernacular, lights up when unpacking the medicinal powers of music. But with her youthful curiosity and considered cadence, it doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a stuffy professor. Over the past year, she spent time building a retreat in Portland where like-minded artists can think and create without real-world interruptions. Occasionally, she jammed with other musicians, including the R&B luminary Raphael Saadiq and the jazz guitarist Jeff Parker.The concerns about health and restoration in “Triangle” have been percolating in Spalding for quite some time. After the release of “12 Little Spells” in 2018, she took a semester off from teaching music at Harvard and moved to Los Angeles to finish writing an opera with the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who had fallen ill.“I was worried that Wayne’s health was not going to hold and we wouldn’t be able to finish his opera while he could see it,” Spalding said.But over six months, he “completely sprang back to life,” she said. “He was like this wilted plant that finally got the water and just completely transformed before our eyes.”When the pandemic took hold just a month later, she returned to Portland to start the retreat, where she and 10 other artists of color spent a month on a 5,000-acre property. It’s an idea Spalding had been considering for years.“People use this weird uninvited breath of the pandemic to start the things that they’ve been putting off,” she said. “That definitely happened for me.”The real spark for “Triangle” came at the end of the retreat, where after an event, she sat alone in a garden and wondered how she could assuage the stress of isolation. “We’ve all experienced being confined in a situation that we didn’t design and didn’t ask for,” she said. “A feeling like we can’t break out of it.”She started drafting sketches for songs, with sounds rooted in Sufism and South Indian Carnatic and Black American music, and sent them to would-be collaborators.Three months after the retreat ended, Spalding drove to Los Angeles to finish the music with Justin Tyson, Phoelix and Raphael Saadiq.Will Matsuda for The New York TimesThe compositions — which were written in consultation with music therapists and neuroscientists — are supposed to elicit different emotions. The hypnotic “formwela 1,” carried by Spalding’s looping falsetto, is meant to aid self-soothing during stressful times. “So you learn the song and then you can play it for yourself in your head when you are stuck in a home and there’s no way the dynamic in that moment is going to change,” Spalding said. The ethereal “formwela 2” and soulful “formwela 3” are designed to calm interpersonal aggression and re-center the listener once the anger has dissipated.Three months after the retreat ended, Spalding drove to Los Angeles to finish the music with the drummer Justin Tyson, a regular collaborator of hers; the keyboardist Phoelix, a go-to producer for the Chicago rappers Noname, Smino and Saba; and Saadiq, who’s worked with D’Angelo, Solange and Alicia Keys.“Honestly, she didn’t need anything,” said Saadiq, who produced “Triangle” with Spalding and Phoelix. “She’s so moving in how she plays and how she thinks. I likened myself to Phil Jackson — like, why was he there when Michael Jordan was on the court?”“Triangle” was recorded in his studio. When he heard the final version, he recalled the sound being so transformative that it helped him mentally reset. The music, Saadiq said, “took everything out of my head. I was 100 percent clear.”When played in one go, “Triangle” burrows into your head and stays there, its meditative blend of chants, the sound of rain and vocal repetition meant to pacify prevailing anxiety. “It’s happening,” said Shorter, who plays on the third track. “It’s out there, but it’s interesting what she’s doing. She’s taking all kinds of chances and not giving up. If you see a fork in the road, which path should you take? Take both of them. She’s done that and is going to need good company.”“Triangle” is being released through Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, where she, other musicians and practitioners in music therapy and medicine will explore how songwriters blend therapeutic sounds into their work. This summer, she will host in-person pop-up labs throughout New York City, where residents can make appointments and have compositions created to fit their mood.“Basically, what we want to do is hear what people are wishing for from the music, like, what do you need?” she said. “It’s an invitation to hear what you need a song for, and then that informs what we look for in our research, in our investigation.”The songs created in the lab will be available on the website. Some of them will be featured when Spalding releases a full album this fall.It seems like she’s not interested — at least not currently — in the conventional rigors of recording albums, putting them out and going on tour. These days, Spalding would rather improvise and see what happens. Still, she understands that her new initiatives might take some getting used to.“It’s a lot,” she said. “I know part of the work I have to do is introducing and making legible the shape of this project and the offering, because it’s not an album and it’s not a concert. It’s not this and it’s not that.”“I want the collaborative truth of it to be legible,” she added. “That’s part of what’s most important to me about sharing music.” More

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      Freddie Redd, Jazz Pianist and Composer, Is Dead at 92

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      He was best known for writing the music for “The Connection,” an Off Broadway play that depicted the lives of heroin-addicted musicians in New York.The pianist Freddie Redd in a scene from the 1961 movie “The Connection.” He composed the music for the play it was based on, which was also used in the film, in addition to appearing in both.Alamy Stock PhotoFreddie Redd, a pianist and composer who released a pair of well-received albums for Blue Note Records in the early 1960s, then spent more than half a century bouncing through different cities as an ambassador of jazz’s golden age, died on March 17 at a care facility in Manhattan. He was 92.His grandson Leslie Clarke said he had died in his sleep, but did not give a cause.Mr. Redd is best known for writing the music for “The Connection” (1959), an Off Broadway play by Jack Gelber that depicted the lives of heroin-addicted musicians in New York, and that two years later became a renowned film directed by Shirley Clarke. Mr. Redd appeared in both.Largely self-taught, Mr. Redd was particularly known for his compositions and for his skill as an accompanist. Even when he was the one soloing, his left hand’s roving chords were often as rich as his right hand’s improvised lines.“The Music From ‘The Connection,’” released in 1960, was Mr. Redd’s first album for Blue Note; it was followed in 1961 by the similarly acclaimed “Shades of Redd,” which featured an all-star band: the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean (who was also in “The Connection”), the tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, the bassist Paul Chambers and the drummer Louis Hayes.He recorded another album’s worth of material in 1961, but those tapes were shelved after Mr. Redd had a falling-out with one of Blue Note’s founders, Alfred Lion. It was finally released as “Redd’s Blues” in 1988. His studio career slowed down, and by the mid-1960s he had moved to Europe, where for audiences his presence became symbolic of a vanishing halcyon age in small-group jazz.A native New Yorker, Mr. Redd did the inverse of the pilgrimage made by most major jazz musicians: He started his career at the center of the jazz universe, then moved out. And moved, and moved again.From the mid-’60s on, he would spend stretches in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Guadalajara, Baltimore and Carrboro, N.C. In his 80s he returned to New York, where he recorded two albums for the SteepleChase label and spent his final years.Mr. Redd told The New York Times that his peripatetic career had provided him creative satisfaction,  if not always fair pay.“I like to move around,” he said in a 1991 interview. “It’s always refreshing because you don’t know the nuances, the tricks of the new place. Unfortunately, the price I’ve paid for being a maverick is living a lifestyle that hasn’t been particularly supportive. But I don’t have regrets. There’s a lot out there to find out about, and sometimes you can’t do it in a week or a month.”Mr. Redd in performance at Smalls Jazz Club in Manhattan in 2011.Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images/Getty ImagesFreddie Redd Jr. was born in Harlem on May 29, 1928, to Freddie and Helen (Snipes) Redd. His father was a porter who played the piano at home, and his mother was a homemaker. His father died when Freddie was 2, but he left behind the instrument on which Freddie would teach himself to play.In addition to his grandson Mr. Clarke, Mr. Redd is survived by a stepdaughter, Susan Redd; two other grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. His wife, Valarie (Lyons) Redd, died before him, as did his children, Stephanie Redd and Freddie Redd III.Mr. Redd was drafted into the Army in 1946. He later remembered first hearing bebop while stationed in South Korea, on a record played by a fellow service member. He was hooked.After returning to New York in 1949, he started playing with leaders on the scene like Art Blakey, Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins and Art Farmer; he recorded his first album, “Freddie Redd Trio,” for Prestige in 1955 and spent time in California performing with Charles Mingus.“During that period, we realized that we were a brotherhood; we were all after the same thing,” Mr. Redd told The Times, remembering his colleagues on the modern jazz scene in the 1950s. “We were drawn to the inspirational aspect of the music. It was a wonderful time.”After being arrested for marijuana possession, he lost his cabaret card, a document issued by law enforcement that was required of anyone performing in nightclubs. Unable to work in clubs, he moved into a loft in Greenwich Village and became part of a scene that included visual artists, poets and other musicians.There Mr. Redd met the actor Garry Goodrow, who had just been cast in “The Connection,” a new play at the Living Theater that put the lives of heroin-addicted musicians on intimate display. That led to an introduction to Mr. Gelber, who hired him to compose the music and perform as a member of the cast.“The Music From ‘The Connection’” was the first of three albums Mr. Redd recorded for Blue Note in the 1960s, although the third was not released until 1988.Blue NoteThough the film version of “The Connection” is now recognized as a classic of indie cinema, its raw and unflinching portrayal came into the cross hairs of censors in the United States, where it was hardly ever screened.A few years later, in one of his few pop studio dates, Mr. Redd was the organist on James Taylor’s debut single, “Carolina in My Mind.”In the liner notes to a Mosaic Records boxed set, “The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Freddie Redd” (1989), Jackie McLean reflected on Mr. Redd’s chimerical career. “You never know what town you’ll see” the pianist in, he wrote. “He’s always been itinerant. Freddie just appears from time to time, like some wonderful spirit.” More

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      How to Pretend You’re in New Orleans Tonight

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      While your travel plans may be on hold, you can pretend you’re somewhere new for the night. Around the World at Home invites you to channel the spirit of a new place each week with recommendations on how to explore the culture, all from the comfort of your home.Over the course of the decade since I first visited, I have often imagined myself at home in New Orleans. I think of the syncopated shuffle of a snare drum, the simple pleasure of an afternoon walk with a to-go beer in hand and the candy-colored shotgun houses that sink into the ground at odd angles. And so it wasn’t a huge surprise when, at the beginning of 2021, I found myself packing up my life and moving to the Crescent City for a few months. Why not be somewhere I love at this difficult time, I thought? Why not live in my daydreams for a little while?From left: Bike paraders on Frenchmen Street the week before Mardi Gras; a shotgun house; the Pete Fountain jazz funeral second line paraded during Jazz Fest in 2016.From left: Emily Kask for The New York Times; Sebastian Modak; Bryan Tarnowski for The New York TimesNew Orleans is above all else resilient. Mardi Gras parades were canceled this year, though it didn’t stop New Orleanians from finding ways to celebrate (nothing ever will). In recent months, brass bands have taken to street corners in front of masked, socially distant spectators instead of packed night clubs. Strangers still chat you up about the Saints from their front porches. My visions of this city may still be filtered through the fuzzy lens of a visitor, but I know I’ll be pretending I’m still there long after I’m gone. Here are a few ways you can, too.A brass band plays on Frenchman Street the week before Mardi Gras.Emily Kask for The New York TimesTurn up that radioNew Orleans music is a collage of sounds: it’s the birthplace of jazz, of the frenetic dance music known as bounce, popularized by superstars like Big Freedia, the call-and-response songs of Mardi Gras Indians, and so much more. For an overview of the sounds of this loud, percussive city there is no better place to start than the wonderfully eclectic WWOZ, a community-supported radio station that has been on the air since 1980. Luckily, you can listen to it from anywhere online. It’s only a matter of time before you start getting to know the various D.J.s and tuning in for your favorites.From left: musicians Big Freedia, Rebirth Brass Band and Kermit RuffinsFrom left: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images; Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times; L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesPut on a curated playlist“New Orleans is not a periphery music scene,” Soul Sister, who has hosted a show on WWOZ for more than 25 years, told me. “New Orleans is the reason for it all.” Soul Sister was one of a handful of local experts I consulted in putting together a playlist that will send you straight to New Orleans. Among her recommendations are a bounce classic by DJ Jubilee and the music of Rebirth Brass Band, which brings her back to afternoons spent celebrating on the street: “It reminds me of the energy and freedom of being at the second line parades on Sundays, dancing through all the neighborhoods nonstop for three or four hours,” she said.On this playlist, you will also find some classics — the rollicking piano of Professor Longhair, for example, starts it off — recommended by Keith Spera who writes about music for the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. By the end of the playlist, you will undoubtedly agree with Mr. Spera’s assessment of New Orleans music: “There is no singular style of ‘New Orleans music’ — is it jazz? Rhythm & blues? Funk? Bounce? — but you know it when you hear it.”The Mosquito Supper Club is a Cajun restaurant in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans. Denny CulbertExpand your cookbook collectionJust like its music, New Orleans food contains multitudes: Creole, Cajun, African, Vietnamese and other flavors collide like nowhere else. A fine place to start is with the Dooky Chase Cookbook, the collected recipes of Leah Chase, who died in 2019, of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, an institution that has hosted civil rights leaders, presidents and countless regulars at its location in Treme, the neighborhood where jazz was born. Next, tap into the Cajun influence on the city with “Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou,” by Melissa M. Martin who oversees a restaurant of the same name in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans. Ms. Martin recommends making her grandmother’s oyster soup. “I can picture her stirring a pot on Bayou Petit Caillou and seasoning a broth with salty Louisiana oysters, Creole tomatoes and salted pork,” Ms. Martin said. “The marriage of three ingredients transports me to the tiny fishing village I call home, where salt was and still is always in the air.”From left: Velma Marie’s oyster soup; President George W. Bush with Leah Chase at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in 2007; Linda Green’s ya-ka-mein.From left: Denny Culbert; Evan Vucci/Associated Press; via Linda GreenCook up some noodle soup, Nola style“It is New Orleans’ best kept secret,” the chef Linda Green, better known as Ms. Linda, told me when I asked about her specialty. Festival and second line crowds come to her for ya-ka-mein, a salty beef noodle soup often eaten as a late-night snack or a next-morning cure (hence its “Old Sober” moniker). The dish’s origins are mysterious: a product of cultural exchange involving, depending on who you ask, Black soldiers returning from the Korean War or Chinese railroad workers arriving in the 1800s. Ms. Linda’s family recipe is also a mystery (she credits the globe-trotting chef Anthony Bourdain for encouraging her to keep it secret). But she has shared versions of her recipe, so you can try your hand at it at home. “That will get you pretty close to the real thing,” she said with a wink I could almost hear over the phone.First Street, in the Garden District, is lined with ornate mansions that are still lived in today. The pink Italianate mansion, above, is the Carroll-Crawford House.Sebastian ModakWalk it offNew Orleans is a city full of history and it can be hard to know what you are looking at without some guidance. You can feel like you are on your own personal walking tour thanks to Free Tours by Foot, which has transferred their expertise to YouTube. You can now stroll the grandiose Garden District, pull away the sensationalism around New Orleans’ Voodoo traditions and take a deep dive into jazz history in Treme. “New Orleans is full of painful history, and it’s also known as one of the most fun cities in the world,” Andrew Farrier, one of the tour guides, said. “I think it’s useful for all of us to know how those two things can live so close to each other.”From left: the Bywater, the Sazerac and the Brandy Crusta — all New Orleans inventions.From left: Drew Stubbs; Craig Lee for The New York Times; Melina Hammer for The New York TimesFix a drinkContrary to so many pop culture depictions of the city, New Orleans’ drinking scene extends far beyond the vortex of debauchery that is Bourbon Street. There are the classic New Orleans inventions, of course, like the Sazerac, but for something a little different, turn to one of the city’s most revered mixologists. Chris Hannah, of Jewel of the South, invented the Bywater as a New Orleanian spin on the Brooklyn. “Among the ingredient substitutions I swapped rum for rye as a cheeky nod to our age-old saying, ‘New Orleans is the northernmost tip of the Caribbean’,” Mr. Hannah said.Chris Hannah, making a cocktail behind the bar, is a revered mixologist and the co-owner of Jewel of the South. L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesHave a little partyWhile it’s impossible to fully channel the spirit of a New Orleans dive bar at home, combine the playlist above with your quarantine pod and a “set-up” and you might just get close. What is a set-up, you ask? It’s a staple dive bar order that will get you a half-pint of your liquor of choice, a mixer and a stack of plastic cups. It’s also an often-overlooked part of New Orleans drinking culture, according to Deniseea Taylor, a cocktail enthusiast who goes by the Cocktail Goddess. “When you find a bar with a set-up, you are truly in Nola,” Ms. Taylor said. “First time I experienced a set-up, it was paired with a $5 fish plate, a match made in heaven.”From left: a still from Lily Keber’s documentary “Buckjumping”; the cover of Sarah M. Broom’s book “The Yellow House”; Jurnee Smollett and Samuel L. Jackson in the 1997 film, “Eve’s Bayou.”Mairzy Doats Productions (far left); Trimark Pictures (far right)Wind down with a story or twoIt should come as no surprise that New Orleans, with its triumphant and tragic history, its syncretic culture and its pervasive love of fun, is a place of stories. There is a wide canon of literature to choose from. For something recent, pick up “The Yellow House,” a memoir by Sarah M. Broom, which the Times book critic Dwight Garner called “forceful, rolling and many-chambered.” Going further back in time, try “Coming Through Slaughter,” a fictionalized rendition of the life of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden by Michael Ondaatje.If you are in the mood for a documentary, Clint Bowie, artistic director of the New Orleans Film Festival, recommends Lily Keber’s “Buckjumping,” which spotlights the city’s dancers. For something fictional, Mr. Bowie points to “Eve’s Bayou” directed by Kasi Lemmons. It’s hard to forget New Orleans is a city built on a swamp when you feel the crushing humidity or lose your footing on ruptured streets, and this movie will take you farther into that ethereal environment. “Set in the Louisiana bayou country in the ’60s, we could think of no better film to spark Southern Gothic daydreams about a visit to the Spanish moss-draped Louisiana swamps,” Mr. Bowie said.Glimpses of south Louisiana’s swampy flora can be found in New Orleans’ Audubon Park.Sebastian ModakHow are you going to channel the spirit of New Orleans in your home? Share your ideas in the comments.To keep up with upcoming articles in this series, sign up for our At Home newsletter. More

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      Jack Bradley, Louis Armstrong Photographer and Devotee, Dies at 87

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      His trove of pictures formed the foundation of a vast personal collection that is now part of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Jack Bradley at his home on Cape Cod in 2008. For 12 years he was Louis Armstrong’s fan, friend and photographer, as well as a collector of Armstrong memorabilia.Earl Wilson/The New York Times Jack Bradley, an ecstatic fan of Louis Armstrong’s who became his personal photographer, creating an indelible and intimate record of the jazz giant’s last dozen years, died on March 21 in Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 87.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Nancy (Eckel) Bradley, said.Mr. Bradley first attended a concert by Armstrong and his band on Cape Cod in the mid-1950s. “I never heard anything like that,” he said in an interview in 2012 for a documentary about Armstrong, “Mr. Jazz,” directed by Michele Cinque. “My life was never the same.”Using a Brownie, Mr. Bradley snapped his first photo of Armstrong at another performance — the first of thousands he would take, first as a devotee and then as part of his inner circle. He took pictures of Armstrong at his home in Corona, Queens; in quiet moments backstage; at rehearsals and concerts; during recording sessions; and in dressing rooms.Mr. Bradley photographed Armstrong in his backyard in Queens in about 1960. In all, he took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Louis Armstrong House Museum, Jack Bradley CollectionArmstrong and Mr. Bradley in Framingham, Mass., in 1967. “What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley said, “was this unending love for the music.”Louis Armstrong House Museum, via Associated Press“With that face and his beautiful smile,” Mr. Bradley was quoted as saying in a family-approved obituary, “how could anyone take a bad shot?”Mr. Bradley did more than take photographs. He became a voracious collector of anything related to Armstrong’s life and career: 16-millimeter films, reel-to-reel tapes of recordings and conversations, 78 r.p.m. discs and LPs, magazines, manuscripts, sheet music, telegrams, fan letters, figurines — even Armstrong’s slippers and suits, and a hotel laundry receipt that included “90 hankies,” which he famously used to wipe away perspiration during performances.“One day Jack went into Louis’s study and Louis was ripping up picture and letters into little tiny pieces,” Ms. Bradley said by phone. “Jack said, ‘No, you can’t do that!’ and Louis said, ‘You have to simplify.’ To Jack it was history and shouldn’t be thrown out.”Mr. Bradley’s refusal to simplify brought him renown as an Armstrong maven and led to a deal in 2005 in which the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation awarded Queens College a $480,000 grant to acquire his collection for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where Armstrong and his wife, Lucille had lived.Mr. Bradley’s vast collection of Armstrong material, including fan mail, was acquired by the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Earl Wilson/The New York Times“Our cornerstone is Louis’s stuff,” said Ricky Riccardi, the museum’s director of research collections, referring to the vast trove of material that Armstrong left behind when he died in 1971. “That will always stand on its own. But Jack’s is the perfect complement. Louis was obsessed with documenting his life, and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”The museum’s collections, now housed at Queens College, will be moved to an education center nearing completion across the street from the museum, which has been closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.Mr. Bradley was not a salaried employee of Armstrong but was compensated for each photograph he took by Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser. To earn extra money, Mr. Bradley took some commercial photography jobs as well.“I don’t think he ever made more than $10,000 in any year,” his friend Mike Persico said.Dan Morgenstern, the jazz critic and historian, wrote in a Facebook tribute to Mr. Bradley that he had called him “One Shot” because “he would snap just once, in part to save film but also because he trusted his eye and timing.”Mr. Bradley captured Armstrong and the band leader Guy Lombardo during a rehearsal for a performance at Jones Beach on Long Island in the mid-1960s.Jack Bradley Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum Mr. Bradley once photographed Armstrong naked from behind, in a dressing room. According to Mr. Morgenstern, Armstrong, when he heard the click of Mr. Bradley’s camera, said, “I want one of those!” An enlarged print of the photo hung in Armstrong’s den.John Bradley III was born on Jan 3, 1934, on Cape Cod, in Cotuit. His mother, Kathryn (Beatty) Bradley, had many jobs, including hairdresser. His father left the family when Jack was 10.A love of the sea inspired Mr. Bradley to attend the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, from which he graduated in 1958. He then left for Manhattan, where he immersed himself in jazz clubs and met Jeann Failows, who worked for Mr. Glaser helping to answer Armstrong’s mail. She and Mr. Bradley began dating, and Armstrong, seeing him with her, became convinced that Mr. Bradley was someone he could trust.“What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley told JazzTimes in 2011, using one of Armstrong’s nicknames, “was this unending love for the music. Pops never sought fame for fame’s sake. He just wanted to play his horn. Louis had a message — a message about excellence.“I’ve never met a man who had more genius for music,” he continued. “He could hear something once, and it was locked in his brain forever.”Mr. Bradley was often by my Armstrong’s side from 1959 to 1971, sometimes driving him to engagements and spending hours at Armstrong’s house. In all, the self-taught Mr. Bradley took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Armstrong and the clarinetist Joe Muranyi rehearsing in 1967. Mr. Bradley took numerous photos of other jazz musicians as well. Jack Bradley, via Louis Armstrong House MuseumOne sequence of photos, taken in December 1959, shows Armstrong warming up before a concert at Carnegie Hall and jamming with his band before taking the stage, then performing, greeting friends afterward and signing autographs for fans outside the stage door.Mr. Bradley’s focus was not entirely on Armstrong. He photographed many other jazz artists and is said to have taken one of the last pictures of Billie Holiday in performance — at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village in May 1959. (She died that July.)In the 1960s, he was a merchant marine and managed a jazz club, Bourbon Street, in Manhattan for a year. In the 1970s he was a partner in the New York Jazz Museum, in Midtown Manhattan. He also spent time as the road manager for the pianist Erroll Garner and the trumpeter Bobby Hackett.Mr. Bradley returned to live in Cape Cod after the jazz museum closed in 1977. He became a charter boat captain, lectured locally on jazz and hosted a local radio program on which he interviewed jazz musicians. His wife taught high school Spanish.Mr. Bradley, seated, in 2008 with Michael Cogswell, the executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum and Archives. “Louis was obsessed with documenting his life,” the museum’s Ricky Riccardi said, “and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”Earl Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Bradley crammed his massive jazz memorabilia collection — of which the Armstrongiana was only a part — into his modest house on Cape Cod in Harwich.“He had it in closets, the attic, shoe boxes, sea chests, the basement, the attic, everything but in oil drums,” said Mr. Persico, who has helped organize the archive.Mr. Bradley died in a nursing facility in Brewster. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Emmy Shanley and Bonnie Jordan, and his brother, Bob.Ms. Bradley said she did not mind that her marriage had been, in effect, shared with Armstrong.“That was OK,” she said. “The third guy was a lot of fun.” More