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      Lou Donaldson, Soulful Master of the Alto Saxophone, Dies at 98

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      A player of impeccable technique and a mainstay of the Blue Note label, he recorded constantly as both a leader and a sideman beginning in 1952.Lou Donaldson, an alto saxophonist who became part of the bedrock of the jazz scene and whose soulful, blues-steeped presence in the music endured undiminished for three-quarters of a century, died on Saturday. He was 98.His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not say where he died.A mainstay of the Blue Note record label at the height of its influence and power, Mr. Donaldson recorded constantly as both a leader and a sideman beginning in 1952. He was a leading voice of the more elemental style that came to be called “hard bop,” an evolution out of the bebop revolution wrought by his inspiration on the alto sax, Charlie Parker. The National Endowment for the Arts named Mr. Donaldson a Jazz Master in 2012.A player of impeccable technique, plangent tone, taste and refinement, Sweet Poppa Lou, as he was long known, nevertheless prized the raw gospel of Black church music and the gutbucket sound of rhythm and blues in his improvisations. The blues was at the heart of his sound: His album “Blues Walk,” released in 1958, is regarded as a jazz masterwork, and its title tune, which he wrote, became a jazz standard.Mr. Donaldson also proved to be an acute talent scout for Blue Note’s owners, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, bringing to their attention both the young trumpet giant Clifford Brown and, later, the young guitar virtuoso Grant Green.“I went down to Alfred Lion at Blue Note and gave him Clifford’s number,” he recalled in “A Wonderful Life,” his unpublished autobiography. “He brought him to New York and we made this tremendous date — tremendous date.”Mr. Donaldson said he had also persuaded Mr. Lion to hand his close friend Horace Silver — the pianist and composer who would come to epitomize “the Blue Note sound” — his maiden recording date as a leader.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Jazz-Metal Trio PainKiller’s Classic Lineup Revs Up Again

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      Mick Harris, Bill Laswell and John Zorn’s new album, “Samsara” — their first in 30 years — arrives as Laswell battles health troubles that “opened up a new direction.”In the spring of 1991, John Zorn, the radically eclectic composer and saxophonist, hopped into a cab outside his East Village apartment. Already inside was Mick Harris, a young drummer visiting from Britain whose band, Napalm Death, had become the leading exemplar of grindcore, a caustic, velocity-crazed blend of punk and metal. Their destination: Greenpoint Studios, the Brooklyn headquarters of the prolific bassist-producer Bill Laswell, Zorn’s friend and collaborator.There, in one day, the three bashed out a fully improvised record. Featuring Zorn’s convulsive alto sax over Laswell and Harris’s alternately blasting and lumbering rhythms — seasoned with vocal shrieks from Zorn and Harris — the album represented a new bridge between the jazz avant-garde and underground rock’s most forbidding extremes.On Friday, Zorn’s Tzadik label will release “Samsara,” the first new studio recording in 30 years to feature the original lineup of the trio, collectively known as PainKiller. While the personnel is the same, much else is different this time around.For one thing, the three musicians were never in the same room during the creation of the record. Harris — who has made electronic music for decades and gave up drumming entirely after PainKiller initially parted ways in 1998 — contributed synthetic beats recorded at home in England. Zorn overdubbed his saxophone parts at Orange Music, the New Jersey studio where Laswell shifted his operations in the late ’90s. And Laswell added bass last, via a makeshift mobile studio that his longtime engineer James Dellatacoma set up at his Upper Manhattan apartment.The distance wasn’t just convenient but necessary during a period of profound personal struggle for Laswell. Since 2022, in addition to diabetes and high blood pressure, he has battled a blood infection, and problems with his heart, kidneys and lungs that have kept him in and out of the hospital, left him unable to walk and led to intense pain in his fingers, severely curtailing his playing. He and his team have also been fighting to stave off a possible eviction from Orange Music.Yet the album’s eight tracks of immersive, richly textured beatscapes layered with volatile sax lines still feel unmistakably like PainKiller, joining the band’s catalog following “Execution Ground” from 1994, where the trio embraced desolate long-form dub and hallucinatory ambience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Grammys Snubs and Surprises: Charli XCX, André 3000, the Beatles and More

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      A look at the nominations’ unexpected and intriguing story lines, including the role of an absent Drake, the validation of André 3000’s flute music and overlooked gems.The names headlining this year’s Grammy Award nominations make a lot of sense: Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift are perennial favorites with imperial reach. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have stormed the mainstream. Shaboozey and Charli XCX made themselves inescapable.While there was once a time when it was easy to argue that the Grammys were out of touch, barely attempting to be an accurate representation of popular music in a given year, the major acts of 2024 are all accounted for. Shedding some of its fusty baggage under the Recording Academy chief executive Harvey Mason Jr. and a slate of new industry voters, the awards show has brought itself more or less in line with the Billboard charts, radio and streaming services, centering the celebrities of the moment.Still, it’s the Grammy Awards — not everyone can be happy. So after poring over the 94 categories that make up the 67th annual class of nominees, The New York Times’s pop music team — the reporter Joe Coscarelli, the chief pop music critic Jon Pareles, the pop music critics Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz and the Culture editor Elena Bergeron — were left with a few lingering questions: Is Beyoncé’s cross-genre domination really warranted? What are the Beatles doing here? And have the Grammys gotten too safe?We broke down the richest — and most baffling — story lines, snubs and surprises.Sabrina Carpenter’s success on the charts was mirrored in her Grammy nods: six of them.Emma Mcintyre/Getty Images for CoachellaA Mirror to the MainstreamJOE COSCARELLI I must admit, I’m almost sad at how predictable the Big Four categories — album, record and song of the year, plus best new artist — are these days, and this year in particular. Back in my day — not that long ago! — Beck was beating Beyoncé to close the night. And sure, you still have your occasional upsets by Jon Batiste (album of the year, 2022) or Bonnie Raitt (song of the year, 2023). But the odds of a truly destabilizing major win in February feel quite long now, likely by design.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Grammy Nominations 2025: See the Full List of Nominees

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      Artists, albums and songs competing for trophies at the 67th annual ceremony were announced on Friday. The show will take place on Feb. 2 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.Beyoncé is the top nominee for the 67th annual Grammy Awards with 11 nods for her genre-crossing “Cowboy Carter.” The LP and its songs will vie for record, song and album of the year, as well as competitions in pop, rap, country and Americana categories.The superstar — who has already won more Grammys than any other artist — leads a pack of contenders that includes Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone (all with seven nods apiece), followed by Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift, who have six each.The ceremony, which is scheduled for Feb. 2, 2025 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, will recognize recordings released from Sept. 16, 2023 to Aug. 30, 2024.Here is a complete list of the nominations, which were announced on Friday by the Recording Academy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Vibraphone

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      Are the vibes good? These tracks by Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Roy Ayers and others, chosen by 12 musicians and writers, should convince you.We’re living in the era of “vibes.” But before that word was everywhere — before elections had “vibe shifts” and before a first date could be breezily ended because the vibes were just off — there was the instrument that started it all: the vibraphone.If you aren’t quite sure what that sounds like — well, there’s only one way to describe it. It’s vibey.Invented in the 1920s as an electrified variation of the marimba, the vibraphone is made out of tuned metal bars, which the player strikes with mallets; a tubular resonator that carries the sound; and a set of electronically controlled fans affecting how much vibrato goes on the notes (that is, how much they warble). Out of this complex contraption wafts a sound that is mellow and ethereal, but starkly rhythmic. After all, the vibraphone is a percussion instrument: Most vibraphonists who double on something else play the drums.The vibraphone has been a feature of jazz bandstands since about 1930, when a young Lionel Hampton — one of the first improvisers to master it — impressed Louis Armstrong by playing along with the trumpeter’s solos note for note. At Armstrong’s encouragement, he switched from being a full-time drummer to a vibraphonist. As its popularity grew, jazz musicians gave the instrument a nickname: “the vibes,” a term that came to signify not just the instrument’s metal bars and their vibrations but also the hazy, moody feeling that its sound produced.It is little wonder that, amid the revolutionary grooves of the 1960s, that term made the leap from jazz (and from Black American vernacular) to the general population. In the process, it gave us a slightly more musical way of describing everyday life.In the nearly 100 years since Hampton’s innovation, the vibraphone has traveled through the many shifts and stages of jazz and Black American music. These days, it’s being played by a broad range of musicians — from straight-ahead swingers to avant-gardists — a number of whom are quoted below. Read on for an array of vibes-heavy tracks, selected by musicians and writers. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and if you have a personal favorite that wasn’t on the list, go ahead and drop it in the comments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Quincy Jones Orchestrated the Sound of America

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      Jones, who died at 91, erased boundaries, connected worlds and embraced delight. As a producer, he coaxed ingenuity from his players and singers.I have this book called “The Complete Quincy Jones,” from 2008. It’s the sort of grand coffee table experience so ephemera loaded that it all but spills out photos and reproductions of letters and sheet music and newspaper clippings and report cards. It’s a book that requires a plan to transport it from a store to your house. Some of this stuff is affixed to the pages, as if Jones, who died on Sunday, had assembled it just for me, even though my name’s nowhere near Oprah Winfrey’s effusive “thank you” note. One of the unglued news items, from a 1989 edition of The International Herald Tribune, has now become a bookmark that reads, inartfully: “Quincy Jones: Black Music’s Bernstein.”It’s a constellatory, celebratory, classy volume, just like the music Jones devoted the majority of his 91 years to. As you make your way through, you realize how ubiquitous this man was. I mean, I knew he was connected. (Maya Angelou writes the preface. The foreword’s by Clint Eastwood, the introduction is by Bono and the afterword belongs to Sidney Poitier.) But not until I sat down with this thing could I truly appreciate something else: what a connector he was, human ligament.That, of course, was also in the music. He played many brasses — sousaphone, trombone, tuba, horns — but settled on the trumpet and quickly became an ace arranger and producer, someone whose brilliance involves having it all figured out. His approach to music involved not simply the erasure of boundaries but an emphasis on confluence, of putting some of this with some of that, and a little of this thing over here. Bossa nova together with jazz, Donna Summer doing Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Van Halen and Michael Jackson. On records, for movies, in concerts, with “We Are the World” and Vibe magazine. Connections.This wasn’t iconoclasm and, officially, it wasn’t civil rights, either. It was vision, curiosity and taste that aligned with civil rights. Jones didn’t want artificial boundaries dictating that vision. So what you hear in all of that music is a little bit of everything — African percussion and R&B rhythm ideas, percolating alongside fur-coat string arrangements and trans-Atlantic flights of falsetto. It sounds like whatever America is supposed to mean. Often, he was orchestrating the sound of America, complicating it while grasping what makes it pop. It’s worth considering how his music opens one of the most-watched television events ever broadcast (“Roots”) and his production is behind the best-selling album ever recorded (“Thriller”). Two titles that nail the depth and sensation of the Quincy Jones experience.Jones, right, at the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993, with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross among the celebrities in attendance.Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis, via VCG, via Getty ImagesBut there’s another, related aspect of that experience, and it’s all over “The Complete Quincy Jones.” In just about every photo, he seems so happy to be wherever he is. Standing next to Hillary Clinton, chatting with Colin Powell, cracking up next to Nelson Mandela, perched beneath a conductor’s podium alongside Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. In one picture he’s got an arm around Sarah Vaughan and the other around Chaka Khan. Elsewhere, he’s planting a kiss on Clarence Avant’s cheek; pressing his cheek into Barbra Streisand’s (she signed that one: “My big ole black butt is sticking out — isn’t it?”; and I’ll just say her dress is dark). A big spread on “The Color Purple,” which he produced and scored, includes a photo of him and Alice Walker, forehead to forehead. Then there’s the intriguing shot of him looking heavenward with Leonard Bernstein at, we’re told, the Sistine Chapel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      14 Essential Quincy Jones Songs

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      As a producer, arranger, composer, bandleader and recording artist, he made a powerful mark on nearly every genre he touched. He died Sunday, at 91.Quincy Jones, who died at 91 on Sunday, was a colossus of American music, leaving a profound influence on nearly every genre he touched, from the 1950s on — jazz, funk, soundtracks, syrupy R&B and chart-topping pop.The scope of his career is so vast, it seems almost impossible that it’s the work of a single person. He cut his teeth as a trumpeter in Lionel Hampton’s touring band in the early ’50s, then studied in Paris under the great classical pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He produced jazz albums for Mercury Records, made fast friends with Frank Sinatra — who called him “Q,” a nickname that stuck — and recorded “It’s My Party,” a No. 1 hit by a teenage Lesley Gore.Then came gorgeously textured movie scores, slithery funk and a fantastically successful partnership with Michael Jackson, whose 1982 LP “Thriller,” produced by Jones, is the biggest seller of all time. And it didn’t end there. In 2018 documentary, “Quincy,” Kendrick Lamar, the reigning rap laureate, is seen bumping fists with Jones and crediting him as the inspiration for “combining hip-hop and jazz.”Here is a sampling of some of Jones’s essential work, as a producer, arranger, composer, bandleader and recording artist in his own right.‘Evening in Paris’ (1957)Jones was a jazz journeyman in the 1950s, playing trumpet with Hampton, working at Mercury and putting together his own albums. This gorgeous ballad, from “This Is How I Feel About Jazz,” his standout early LP, was composed by Jones and features an all-star band including Herbie Mann, Zoot Sims, Hank Jones and Charles Mingus.Ray Charles, ‘One Mint Julep’ (1961)Jones and Ray Charles met as teenagers in Seattle in the 1940s, as dramatized in the 2004 film “Ray.” By the time of his big band LP “Genius + Soul = Jazz,” Charles was a giant who seemed to remake American music with every step. Jones arranged half the tracks on the album, including “One Mint Julep,” a hot and swinging instrumental take on the Clovers’ original that Charles — leading from the organ — made a Top 10 hit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Quincy Jones, Giant of American Music, Dies at 91

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      As a producer, he made the best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” He was also a prolific arranger and composer of film music.Quincy Jones, one of the most powerful forces in American popular music for more than half a century, died on Sunday in California. He was 91.His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist, Arnold Robinson, that did not mention a cause. The statement said that he had died peacefully at his home in Bel Air.Mr. Jones began his career as a jazz trumpeter and was later in great demand as an arranger, writing for the big bands of Count Basie and others; as a composer of film music; and as a record producer. But he may have made his most lasting mark by doing what some believe to be equally important in the ground-level history of an art form: the work of connecting.Beyond his hands-on work with score paper, he organized, charmed, persuaded, hired and validated. Starting in the late 1950s, he took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art, eventually creating the conditions for a great deal of music to flow between styles, outlets and markets. And all of that could be said of him even if he had not produced Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the best-selling album of all time.Mr. Jones’s music has been sampled and reused hundreds of times, through all stages of hip-hop and for the theme to the “Austin Powers” films (his “Soul Bossa Nova,” from 1962). He has the third-highest total of Grammy Awards won by a single person — he was nominated 80 times and won 28. (Beyoncé’s 32 wins is the highest total; Georg Solti is second with 31.) He was given honorary degrees by Harvard, Princeton, Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, the Berklee School of Music and many other institutions, as well as a National Medal of Arts and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master fellowship.His success — as his colleague in arranging, Benny Carter, is said to have remarked — may have overshadowed his talent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More