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      Punk-Rock Teens’ Anti-Hate Anthem, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Blk Jks, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen, City Girls 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.The Linda Lindas, ‘Racist, Sexist Boy’Don’t mess with The Linda Lindas.Watch the full concert: https://t.co/Usv7HJ1lLR pic.twitter.com/pKZ5TKDdiA— L.A. Public Library (@LAPublicLibrary) May 20, 2021
      It can be comforting, in times like these, to be slapped cold by undeniable truth. And so it is with the Linda Lindas, a band made up of four Asian and Latina teens and tweens — Bela, Eloise, Lucia, Mila — who this week had a clip of a recent performance at the Cypress Park branch of the Los Angeles Public Library go viral. The song is “Racist, Sexist Boy,” and it pulls no punches, switching back and forth between Eloise, 13, singing in an urgently aggrieved fashion (“You have racist, sexist joys/We rebuild what you destroy”) and the drummer, Mila, who is 10, whose sections are quick and finger-waving (“You turn away from what you don’t wanna hear”). The Linda Lindas have generated a significant wave of attention in the three years since the band was founded. A couple of the members’ parents are culture luminaries: Martin Wong, a founder of the tastemaking Asian-American cultural magazine Giant Robot; and Carlos de la Garza, a mixer and engineer for bands including Paramore and Best Coast. The band is beloved by Kathleen Hanna, who selected it to open one of Bikini Kill’s reunion shows; and it has appeared in the recent Netflix film “Moxie.” The band’s self-titled 2020 EP is sharp punk-inflected indie pop. And this new song, which Eloise said was inspired by a real-life experience, is a needs-no-explanation distillation of righteous anger. It’s severely relatable, so shout along with the band: “Poser! Blockhead! Riffraff! Jerk face!” JON CARAMANICABlk Jks, ‘Yoyo! — The Mandela Effect/Black Aurora Cusp Druids Ascending’It has been 12 years since the far-reaching South African band Blk Jks released its debut album, “After Robots”; it has returned with “Abantu/Before Humans,” which it describes, in part, as an “Obsidian Rock Audio Anthology chronicling the ancient spiritual technologies and exploits of prehistoric, post-revolutionary Afro bionics and sacred texts from The Great Book on Arcanum.” Blk Jks draw on music from across Africa, including South African choral traditions and West African guitar licks, along with psychedelia, funk, jazz and a fierce sense of political urgency. “They’ll never give you power/You’ll have to take the power” they chant to open the song, heralded by a barrage of drums and pushing into a syncopated thicket of horns and voices with a burst of acceleration at the end. JON PARELESAngelique Kidjo featuring Mr Eazi and Salif Keita, ‘Africa, One of a Kind’On Angelique Kidjo’s next album, “Mother Nature,” she collaborates across boundaries and generations. Kidjo — who is from Benin — shares “Africa, One of a Kind,” with Salif Keita, from Mali, and Mr Eazi, from Nigeria. The lyrics are multilingual, and the rhythmic mesh, with little guitar lines tickling against crisp percussion and choral affirmations, is joyfully Pan-African. PARELESSharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen, ‘Like I Used To’A full-scale Wall of Sound — by way of the glockenspiel-topped “Born to Run” — pumps through “Like I Used To” as Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen grapple with prospects of post-pandemic reopening and reconnecting. The sound and voices are heroic; the lyrics are more hesitant, but hopeful. PARELESCarsie Blanton, ‘Party at the End of the World’“It’s too late now to fix this mess,” Carsie Blanton observes, “So honey put on that party dress.” Blanton shrugs off impending doom in a broad-shouldered Southern rock track slathered with guitars, allowing that she’s going to miss “snow in winter, rain in summer” as well as “banging drums and banging drummers.” PARELESLil Baby and Kirk Franklin, ‘We Win (Space Jam: A New Legacy)’Three types of not wholly compatible ecstasy commingle on the first single from the forthcoming soundtrack to “Space Jam: A New Legacy.” Just Blaze’s triumphalist production finds an optimal partner in Kirk Franklin’s exhortations. Lil Baby’s sinuous, reedy raps are perhaps not as sturdy, though — they feel like light filigree atop an arresting mountain peak. CARAMANICAJaimie Branch, ‘Theme 001’“Fly or Die Live” feels of a piece with the two studio recordings that Jaimie Branch — a trumpeter and composer, loosely definable as jazz, but with a punk musician’s disregard for musical pleasantry — has released in the past few years with Fly or Die, her cello-bass-drums quartet. That’s mostly because those records already had a rich, gritty, textural, semi-ambient vibe: They felt pretty much live already. But “Fly or Die Live,” which is full of long excursions by individual band members and intense, forward-pushing sections driven forward by Chad Taylor’s drums, finds the band clicking in and lifting off in a way that feels different. It’s especially palpable on “Theme 001,” originally a highlight from the band’s debut record, this time with new textures thanks to Lester St. Louis’s reverb-drenched cello. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOCity Girls, ‘Twerkulator’Look, it’s just TikTok-era sweaty talk over “Planet Rock,” which is, in the current pop ecosystem, is really all it takes. CARAMANICAOneohtrix Point Never & Rosalía, ‘Nothing’s Special’Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, traded up with his new remake of “Nothing’s Special,” the closing track from his 2020 album “Magic Oneohtrix Point Never.” He replaced his own processed vocal, which blurred into the track, with Rosalía in her latest unexpected collaboration. She sings a Spanish translation of the lyrics, with thoughts about staring into nothingness after losing one’s best friend. The original electronic track has been tweaked and transposed upward, with its misty descending chords, sampled voices and a hammered dulcimer. Rosalía’s voice is fully upfront: gentle, mournful, tremulous and humbled by grief. Now the song is unmistakably an elegy. PARELESLil Nas X, ‘Sun Goes Down’Less than two months after gleefully stirring up a moral panic with “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” Lil Nas X returns in an unassailably benevolent guise: fighting off suicidal thoughts in “Sun Goes Down.” In a reassuring low purr of a melody, cushioned by kindly guitars, voluminous bass tones and a string section, he acknowledges old wounds and self-destructive impulses, and then determinedly rises above them: “I know that you want to cry/But there’s much more to life than dying over your past mistakes.” PARELESRalph Peterson Jr. featuring Jazzmeia Horn, ‘Tears I Cannot Hide’The drummer Ralph Peterson Jr., who would have turned 59 on Thursday but died earlier this year, was known for the propulsion of his swing feel, and the sheer power of his playing. But he was given to forbearance and tenderness, too, when the circumstances called for it, and on “Raise Up Off Me,” his final studio album, it’s his subtlety that sends the album’s message of frustration and dignity home. That’s true on the semiabstract title track, which opens the album, and on “Tears I Cannot Hide,” a contemplative Peterson-penned ballad, to which the rising star Jazzmeia Horn adds lyrics and vocals. RUSSONELLO More

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      Bob Koester, Revered Figure in Jazz and Blues, Dies at 88

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      Mr. Koester’s Delmark Records and his Chicago record store were vital in preserving and promoting music the big labels tended to overlook.Bob Koester, who founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds, died on Wednesday at a care center in Evanston, Ill., near his home in Chicago. He was 88.His wife, Sue Koester, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like “Hoodoo Man Blues,” a much admired album by the singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring the guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965.Delmark captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene in records like Junior Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues.” It also documented early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated in Chicago by musicians like Anthony Braxton.“Bob told us, ‘Play me a record just like you played last night in the club,’” Mr. Guy recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, and somehow he caught the electric feel of a live performance. In 2008 the record was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame.About the same time, Delmark was recording early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization formed in Chicago in 1965. The company’s recordings were not, generally, the kind that generated a lot of sales.“If he felt something was significant, he wasn’t going to think about whether it would sell,” Ms. Koester said by phone. “He wanted people to hear it and experience the significance.”As Howard Mandel, the jazz critic and author, put it in a phone interview: “He followed his own star. He was not at all interested in trends.”For decades Mr. Koester’s record store, the Jazz Record Mart, provided enough financial support to allow Delmark to make records that didn’t sell a lot of copies. The store was more than an outlet for Delmark’s artists; it was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections Mr. Koester bought or traded for.“The place was just an amazing crossroads of people,” said Mr. Mandel, who worked there for a time in the early 1970s. Music lovers would come looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Mr. Koester in an undated photo. His store was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections he bought or traded for.Chicago Sun-Times“Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by,” the harmonica player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite, who was a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s, told The Times in 2009, rattling off the names of some fellow blues musicians. “You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”Mr. Mandel said part of the fun was tapping into Mr. Koester’s deep reservoir of arcane musical knowledge.“You’d get into a conversation with him,” he said, “and in 10 minutes he was talking about some obscure wormhole of a serial number on a pressing.”Ms. Koester said the store held a special place in her husband’s heart — so much so that when he finally closed it in 2016, citing rising rent, he opened another, Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart, almost immediately.“He loved going into the studio in the days when he was recording Junior Wells and Jimmy Dawkins,” she said, “but retail was in his blood.”He especially loved talking to customers.“Often they came into the store looking for one thing,” she said, “and he pointed them in another direction.”Robert Gregg Koester was born on Oct. 30, 1932, in Wichita, Kan. His father, Edward, was a petroleum geologist, and his mother, Mary (Frank) Koester, was a homemaker.He grew up in Wichita. A 78 r.p.m. record by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in his grandfather’s collection intrigued him when he was young, he said in an oral history recorded in 2017 by the National Association of Music Merchants. But, he told Richard Marcus in a 2008 interview for blogcritics.com, further musical exploration wasn’t easy.“I never liked country music, and growing up in Wichita, Kansas, there wasn’t much else,” he said. “There was a mystery to the names of those old blues guys — Speckled Red, Pinetop Perkins — that made it sound really appealing. Probably something to do with a repressed Catholic upbringing.”College at Saint Louis University, where he enrolled to study cinematography, broadened his musical opportunities.“My parents didn’t want me going to school in one of the big cities like New York or Chicago because they didn’t want me to be distracted from my studies by music,” he said. “Unfortunately for them, there were Black jazz clubs all around the university.”Music lovers would come to the Jazz Record Mart looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Sally Ryan for The New York TimesHe also joined the St. Louis Jazz Club, a jazz appreciation group. And he started accumulating and trading records, especially traditional jazz 78s, out of his dorm room. The rapidly growing record business crowded out his studies.“I went to three years at Saint Louie U,” he said in the oral history. “They told me not to come back for a fourth year.”His dorm-room business turned into a store, where he sold both new and used records.“I’d make regular runs, hitting all the secondhand stores, Father Dempsey’s Charities, places like that, buying used records,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993 for an article marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of his record label. “And I’d order records through the mail. Then I’d sell records at the Jazz Club meetings. That was the beginning of my retail business.”He had started recording musicians as well. He originally called his label Delmar, after a St. Louis boulevard, but once he relocated to Chicago in the late 1950s he added the K.He acquired a Chicago record shop from a trumpeter named Seymour Schwartz in 1959 and soon turned it into the Jazz Record Mart. His label not only recorded the players of the day but also reissued older recordings.“He loved obscure record labels from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and he acquired several of them,” Mr. Mandel said. “He reissued a lot of stuff from fairly obscure artists who had recorded independently. He salvaged their best work.”Mr. Koester was white; most of the artists he dealt with were Black.“He was totally into Black music,” Mr. Mandel said. “Not only Black music, but he definitely gave Black music its due in a way that other labels were not.”That made Mr. Koester stand out in Chicago when he went out on the town sampling talent.“When a white guy showed up in a Black bar, it was assumed he was either a cop, a bill collector or looking for sex,” Mr. Koester told blogcritic.com. “When they found out you were there to listen to the music and for no other reason, you were a friend. The worst times I had were from white cops who would try and throw me out of the bars. They probably thought I was there dealing drugs or something.”It was the atmosphere of those nightclubs that he tried to capture in his recording studio.“I don’t believe in production,” he said. “I’m not about to bring in a bunch of stuff that you can’t hear a guy doing when he’s up onstage.”In addition to his wife, whom he met when she worked across the street from his store and whom he married in 1967, Mr. Koester is survived by a son, Robert Jr.; a daughter, Kate Koester; and two grandchildren.Ms. Koester said their son will continue to operate Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart. Mr. Koester sold Delmark in 2018.Mr. Koester’s record company played an important role in documenting two musical genres, but his wife said that beyond playing a little piano, he was not musically trained himself.“He would say his music was listening,” she said. More

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      Curtis Fuller, a Powerful Voice on Jazz Trombone, Dies at 88

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      He was a fixture on the New York jazz scene since shortly after his arrival in 1957. He also made his mark as a composer.Curtis Fuller, a trombonist and composer whose expansive sound and powerful sense of swing made him a driving force in postwar jazz, died on May 8 at a nursing home in Detroit. He was 88.His daughter Mary Fuller confirmed the death but did not specify the cause.Mr. Fuller arrived in New York in the spring of 1957 and almost immediately became the leading trombonist of the hard-bop movement, which emphasized jazz’s roots in blues and gospel while delivering crisp and hummable melodies.By the end of the year, he had recorded no fewer than eight albums as a leader or co-leader for the independent labels Blue Note, Prestige and Savoy.That same year he also appeared on the saxophonist John Coltrane’s “Blue Train,” among the most storied albums in jazz, on which Mr. Fuller unfurls a number of timeless solos. On the title track, now a jazz standard, his trombone plays a central role in carrying the bold, declarative melody.Mr. Fuller’s five-chorus solo on “Blue Train” begins by playing off the last few notes of the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s improvisation, as if curiously picking up an object a friend had just put down. He then moves through a spontaneous repertoire of syncopated phrases and deftly wrought curlicues.In his book “Jazz From Detroit” (2019), the critic Mark Stryker wrote, “The excitement, authority and construction of Fuller’s solo explain why he became a major influence.”Mr. Fuller was also responsible for naming “Moment’s Notice,” another now-classic Coltrane composition on that album. “I made a comment,” Mr. Fuller said in a 2007 interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, recalling the scene at Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey. “‘John, you put this music on us on a moment’s notice. We got three hours to rehearse this music and we’re gonna record?’ And that became the title of the song.”Mr. Fuller carried his knack for a concisely stated melody, and for elegantly tracing the harmonic seams of a tune, into his work as a composer. Among his many original tunes are “À La Mode,” “Arabia” and “Buhaina’s Delight,” all of which are now considered standards.Those three pieces found their way into the repertoire of the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, hard bop’s flagship ensemble, of which Mr. Fuller was a core member from the early to the middle 1960s. The band was arguably at its peak in those years, when its membership included the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Cedar Walton and the bassist Jymie Merritt (later replaced by Reggie Workman).“I owe a lot to Art Blakey, in so many ways,” Mr. Fuller said. “We were all driven by the fact that he encouraged us all to write. There wasn’t such a thing as a leader.”In 2007, Mr. Fuller was named an N.E.A. Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a living jazz musician.In addition to his daughter Mary, he is survived by seven other children, Ronald, Darryl, Gerald, Dellaney, Wellington, Paul and Anthony; nine grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His first marriage, to Judith Patterson, ended in divorce. His second wife, Catherine Rose Driscoll, died in 2010, after 30 years of marriage.Curtis DuBois Fuller was born in Detroit on Dec. 15, 1932. (His birth year was incorrectly reportedthroughout his life — a discrepancy that was not cleared up until after his death — partly because at 17 he had exaggerated his age by two years so that he could join the work force.)His father, John, who hailed from Jamaica, worked at a Ford Motor Company plant, but died of tuberculosis before Curtis was born. His mother, Antoinette (Heath) Fuller, a homemaker, had come north from Atlanta. She died when Curtis was 9, and he spent the next few years at an a orphanage run by Jesuits.While his mother was alive she had paid for Curtis’s sister, Mary, to receive piano lessons. He would listen through the wall, learning the fundamentals of music secondhand. He showed an interest in the violin at the orphanage but was discouraged after a teacher told him it was an unsuitable instrument for Black people to play.Soon after that, he saw J.J. Johnson, bebop’s leading trombonist, in concert alongside the saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, and he became enthralled by the trombone’s “majestic sound,” he told Mr. Stryker in an interview.“Illinois Jacquet was an act: honking and screaming, biting the reed, squealing and that stuff. The crowd would go wild,” Mr. Fuller said. “But J.J. just stood there and played, and he looked like the guy, the person who really knew what he was doing.”Mr. Fuller, center, with two of his fellow N.E.A. Jazz Masters, the saxophonists Jimmy Heath, left, and Frank Wess, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2011.Chad Batka for The New York TimesHe was also impressed by the local trombonist Frank Rosolino, whom he heard perform soon after, and who became his teacher. He fell in with a coterie of young jazz musicians in Detroit, many of whom were destined for jazz prominence, including the pianist Barry Harris and the guitarist Kenny Burrell.“That was like a network in Detroit; we generally stuck together,” he said in 2007. “There was a lot of love and real closeness.”In 1953 Mr. Fuller was drafted into the Army, where he joined one of the last all-Black military bands, whose other members included the future stars Cannonball Adderley and Junior Mance.After leaving the armed forces, he returned to the Detroit scene before traveling to New York in 1957 with the saxophonist Yusef Lateef’s band. When Miles Davis offered him a job, he decided to stay.Playing with Davis led to his meeting two particularly important people: Coltrane, who was the band’s tenor saxophonist, and Alfred Lion, a founder of Blue Note Records, who heard Mr. Fuller onstage with Davis’s band and invited him to record for the label.As he began to make his name as a bandleader, Mr. Fuller also found work alongside prominent musicians including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and James Moody.Holiday, who became a mentor, encouraged him to bear in mind the range and pacing of his own speaking voice when he improvised. “When I came to New York, I always tried to impress people, play long solos as fast as I could — lightning fast,” Mr. Fuller said in 2007. “And all of a sudden Billie Holiday said, ‘When you play, you’re talking to people. So learn how to edit your thing, you know?’ I learned to do that.”In 1959, Savoy released “The Curtis Fuller Jazztet,” a lively album that included the saxophonist and composer Benny Golson as a featured guest. Soon after, Mr. Golson and the trumpeter Art Farmer began a separate band under the Jazztet name, with Mr. Fuller as a side musician. It would be one of the quintessential jazz ensembles of the 1960s, but Mr. Fuller soon moved on to other endeavors. (He and Mr. Golson remained close friends until his death.)The untimely deaths of Coltrane, who was also a dear friend, and Mr. Fuller’s sister in 1967 sent him into a depression, and he left the music business, taking a job with the Chrysler Corporation in downtown Manhattan. But about a year later, Gillespie persuaded Mr. Fuller to join his band for a world tour, and he re-entered the jazz scene for good. He spent two years in Count Basie’s orchestra in the mid-1970s, and also returned to leading his own ensembles.In the 1990s, he survived a bout with lung cancer (despite never having been a smoker) and had part of one lung removed. He spent two years reinventing his trombone technique to accommodate his compromised breathing power. He succeeded, and released a string of well-received albums in the late 1990s and 2000s.But as his health continued to deteriorate he turned more attention to teaching, joining the faculty at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music and at the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program.Asked in 2007 to describe the signature sound that had left such an indelible mark on jazz, Mr. Fuller mentioned the importance of embracing one’s distinct identity. “I try to be warm. Warm and effective, you know. And sometimes I’m cold and defective,” he said. “That’s the way water runs. I’m not God, I’m not perfection. I’m just me.” More

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      Nicki Minaj Reunites With Lil Wayne and Drake, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Olivia Rodrigo, Tony Allen, L’Rain 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.Nicki Minaj with Drake and Lil Wayne, ‘Seeing Green’In honor of Nicki Minaj’s still-incendiary 2009 debut mixtape “Beam Me Up Scotty” finally arriving on streaming services, she’s organized a little YMCMB family reunion. “Seeing Green” is more of a status update than a club banger à la the trio’s classic “Truffle Butter,” but everyone is still in fine form. Wayne, as usual, plays the gonzo court jester, and he seizes the opportunity to unload all of those pandemic-related rhymes he’s been holding onto for the last year (“I put you six feet deep, I’m being socially distant”). Nicki locks back into her standard eviscerate-the-haters flow, and Drake continues to rap with a precision and bite that suggests, as did the recent “Scary Hours 2,” that whenever his promised “Certified Lover Boy” arrives, it might actually be worth the wait. “I played 48 minutes on a torn meniscus,” he boasts, “who’s subbing?” (But maybe see a doctor about that, Drake — it’s serious!) LINDSAY ZOLADZOlivia Rodrigo, ‘Good 4 U’The third single from Olivia Rodrigo’s forthcoming debut album, “Sour,” tells a story that will be familiar to anyone who’s heard her first single, “Driver’s License”: A former flame moves on too quickly after a breakup, leaving Rodrigo alone with all her feelings. But this time the 18-year-old Disney actress refracts it through a different lens and a whole new sonic palette. Though it starts off quiet, by the chorus “Good 4 U” explodes into a kind of “You Oughta Know” for the TikTok era, all righteous anger and pop-punky, primal-scream rage: “Good for you, you’re doing great out there without me — like a damn sociopath!” ZOLADZTorres, ‘Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head’The new song from Mackenzie Scott — who makes brooding, searching indie-rock under the name Torres — might be the most accessible thing she’s ever released. And she knows it: She’s wryly described “Don’t Go Putting Wishes in My Head,” the first single from her forthcoming album “Thirstier,” as “my relentless arena country star moment.” More than anything, though, with its buzzing synths and soaring chorus, “Wishes” recalls the Killers at their most fist-clenchingly anthemic. “Just when I thought that it was over, it was only just beginning,” Scott sings, her voice trembling with intensity. She seems to understand that accepting joy can sometimes be an even more vulnerable act than confessing pain, but by the end of the song she sounds fearless, and ready to move toward the light. ZOLADZTony Allen, ‘Mau Mau’The drummer Tony Allen supplied the rhythmic foundation for Fela Kuti’s Nigerian Afrobeat in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on West African traditions, jazz and funk, he built an architecture of unpredictable offbeats, unhurried but kinetic. Before his death in 2020, he had started a hip-hop project, creating beats and synthesizer bass lines and lining up vocalists. Allen’s new album, “There Is No End,” was completed posthumously by the producers Vincent Taeger and Vincent Taurelle. “Mau Mau” features Nah Eeto, a rapper from Kenya, with multitracked vocals that calmly bounce around the syllables of her lyrics — some in English, some not — to highlight all the ways Allen could dodge the downbeat while constantly flicking the music onward. JON PARELESMaría Grand, ‘Now, Take, Your, Day’The rising tenor saxophonist María Grand wrote the tunes that appear on “Reciprocity,” her new LP, in the middle of a pregnancy, while reading spiritual texts and paying close attention to the bond she was building with her not-yet-born child. (The album’s liner notes include her written reflections on becoming a mother, and how this found its way into the music.) The album, featuring Kanoa Mendenhall on bass and Savannah Harris on drums, is also a testament to the constant regeneration that becomes possible within a close musical partnership; on track after track, Grand dances nimbly over Harris’s subtly shifting patterns, and Mendenhall stubbornly insists on never repeating herself. “Now, Take, Your, Day” begins with all three members singing the song’s title in harmony, before the rhythm section lays down a loosely funky beat and Grand introduces the song’s downward-slanting melody on saxophone. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBella Poarch, ‘Build a Bitch’Like many TikTok stars, Bella Poarch is making a move into her own music. “Build a Bitch” comes across cute and furious. Tinkly toy-piano sounds and perky la-las accompany her as she points out that women aren’t consumer products. “You don’t get to pick and choose/Different ass and bigger boobs,” she coos. “If you need perfect, I’m not built for you.” A post-“Westworld” video set in an android factory ends, inevitably, in mayhem. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Worry With You’The forthcoming, self-produced Sleater-Kinney album “Path of Wellness” will be the first the Portland band releases as a duo, since its longtime power-drummer Janet Weiss departed in 2019, and her absence certainly makes the song feel a bit muted and minor. But there’s still a familiar pleasure in hearing Carrie Brownstein’s snaking guitar riffs and staccato vocals intertwine with Corin Tucker’s, as they sing of a long-term togetherness that’s provided comfort in good times and bad: “If I’m gonna mess up,” they avow, “I’m gonna mess up with you.” ZOLADZMartin Garrix featuring Bono & The Edge, ‘We Are the People’The official 2020 UEFA European Football Championship song is exactly what you’d expect from a soccer anthem by a big-room EDM D.J. collaborating with half of U2: a grand, thumping march with pinging guitars, vast synthesizer swells and determinedly inspirational lyrics. “You’ve faith and no fear for the fight,” Bono sings, “You pull hope from defeat in the night.” The song uses familiar tools for stadium-scale uplift, but they can still work. PARELESHolly Macve, ‘You Can Do Better’Regrets and reverb both loom large on Holly Macve’s second album, “Not the Girl,” a set of country-rooted ballads that place her reedy voice — determinedly sustained through countless breaks and quavers — in wide-screen, retro arrangements. “You Can Do Better” is a stately, swaying waltz, a breakup-and-makeup scenario that builds up to dramatic questions, swirling across voices and strings: “Is it so wrong to love you?/Is it so wrong to care?” PARELESL’Rain, ‘Blame Me’L’Rain — the songwriter, musician and producer Taja Cheek — opens an ever-widening, ever more disorienting sonic vortex in “Blame Me,” from her second album, “Fatigue,” due June 25. Sparse guitars pick fragments of chords that fall, then rise, as L’Rain muses cryptically on mortality and remorse. Soon, they’re enveloped by a ghostly orchestra and distant voices intoning, “Waste away now, make my way down”; as the track ends, she’s still in a lush harmonic and emotional limbo. PARELESElaine, ‘Right Now’Elaine is from South Africa, where she already has a large audience. But her sound bespeaks international R&B ambitions, with programmed trap drum sounds and an American accent. In “Right Now,” she tries to juggle a damaged relationship against a burgeoning career. “I cannot continue carrying all your insecurities/I got more priorities,” she sings, quietly but adamantly. Her alto is low, intimate and flexible; with her priorities, she’s not about to indulge a cheating ex, even if she’s tempted. PARELESAlan Jackson, ‘Where Have You Gone’“Where Have You Gone,” the title song of Alan Jackson’s new, 21-song album, starts off like a lonely lament for someone who’s left him: “It’s been way too long since you slipped away.” But it turns out he’s lamenting the way “sweet country music” used to sound: steel guitar, fiddle, “words from the heart.” It’s the style Jackson has upheld through his career, looking back to Merle Haggard and George Jones, only to see it supplanted lately by arena-country and infiltrations of hip-hop. “The airwaves are waiting,” he insists; current country radio says otherwise. PARELESSons of Kemet featuring Moor Mother and Angel Bat Dawid, ‘Pick Up Your Burning Cross’Over the rough rhythmic onrush of this United Kingdom-based quartet — featuring Theon Cross’s pulsing tuba, Shabaka Hutchings’s roof-raising saxophone and the interlocked drumming of Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner — a voice hovers, singing and speaking and laughing. It belongs to Angel Bat Dawid, and it’s soon joined by that of Moor Mother, another revolutionary poet and musician from this side of the Atlantic. “I don’t think you remember me/I was in last place,” Moor Mother begins, serving notice as the band presses ahead. The piece is on “Black to the Future,” Sons of Kemet’s fourth album. RUSSONELLOErika Dohi, ‘Particle Of …’Erika Dohi, a Japanese keyboardist and composer now based in New York City, is one of the musicians affiliated with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver’s label 37d03d (“people” upside-down). “Particle Of …” comes from her new album “I, Castorpollux,” and while it was composed by Andy Akiho (who also directed her music video), it fits the album’s aesthetic of Minimalistic repetitions and startling fractures. It uses percussive, single-note patterns on piano and prepared piano, played live and then computer manipulated, equally virtuosic and digitally skewed. Chords arrive at the end, like a surprise visit from 20th-century modernism. PARELES More

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      Bach Invented. Now a Pianist Is Trying to Match Him.

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      With “Inventions/Reinventions,” Dan Tepfer fills out Bach’s missing two-part inventions with daring free improvisations.“Of course Bach is a million times greater than me,” the pianist Dan Tepfer said recently. “I can still have a conversation with him.”That conversation is ongoing. While Tepfer, 39, is best known as a jazz artist, who has worked with giants like the saxophonist Lee Konitz, he has also delved into Bach — with twists.In “Goldberg Variations/Variations,” Tepfer performed that monumental keyboard work, but instead of repeating each variation, as Bach’s score indicates, he improvised his own responses. Last year, homebound and intrigued by the idea that Bach’s contrapuntal lines would work just as well inverted, he recorded himself playing the “Goldbergs” on a Yamaha Disklavier, a grand piano with a high-tech player-piano function. A computer program he devised — Tepfer also has an undergraduate degree in astrophysics — then played back each variation, but flipped.Last Friday at Bargemusic, the recently reopened performance space docked near the Brooklyn Bridge in Dumbo, Tepfer offered his latest Bach project: “Inventions/Reinventions.” Bach wrote 15 two-part inventions as teaching pieces for young students, originally compiling them for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. The pieces, written in just two voices, one per hand, are not technically difficult. But within their limits Bach introduces beginning players to some sophisticated elements of music, including daring harmonic modulations.The pianist and composer Dan Tepfer is best known as a jazz artist, but he has entered into daring conversations with canonical Bach works.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOne aspect of these works has long raised a simple question. Since in his “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Bach wrote paired preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, why did he not explore all those keys in the two-part inventions? Tepfer ascribes to the explanation that Bach wanted to focus beginners on only the “easiest keys” — that is, the ones with the fewest sharps or flats.So in “Inventions/Reinventions,” Tepfer boldly — even audaciously — supplies those “missing” nine inventions in the form of his own free improvisations.“Improvisation is what is dearest to my heart,” he said in an interview, “and has always felt so natural.”When he was a student, Tepfer said, he “spent vastly more time just improvising stuff at home,” even when teachers told him not to. He added that the way he thinks about jazz may well have been the way Bach would have thought about improvising.“And we know from the historical record that improvisation was essential to Bach,” Tepfer said. “He clearly excelled at it to a unique degree.”Of course, for Tepfer to supply his own improvised versions of the missing Bach inventions takes some bravado. “That tension is at the heart of any of these projects that I’ve done where I’ve kind of interacted with Bach and these totemic pieces,” he said. “But the only way these projects can come alive is if is feels like a true conversation, and in any good conversation people speak in their own voice.”That his improvisations are indeed free — created with “no preconceptions going in,” as he put it — came through in the performance at Bargemusic, in part because his “reinventions” sounded nothing like those captured on a video that was made the second time he tried the program out — in 2019 in Paris, where he was born to American parents and studied at a division of the Paris Conservatory.Following the sequence of pieces in Bach’s score, Tepfer begins with Invention No. 1 in C, a piece every elementary piano student learns, and goes right into the Invention No. 2 in C minor — probably the most musically complex of the 15, unfolding as an intricate canon and moving through distant realms of harmony. At Bargemusic, as in Paris, Tepfer played with transparent, articulate touch; a jazz musician’s feel for lithe, bouncy rhythms; and tastefully expressive lyrical freedom.Tepfer plays Bach:Bach didn’t write inventions in C-sharp major or minor, so Telfer supplied them. In Paris, his free improvisation in C-sharp major opened with a quizzical motif — a quick note that leapt to a repeated tone and hesitated, until that motif was echoed up and down the keyboard, becoming a hook for expanded passages of intersecting voices, wistful melodic stretches and some poignant episodes of dark, chromatic chords.Tepfer improvises:The equivalent improvisation at Bargemusic was more insistently rhythmic and spiky, driven by an invention-like motif that popped up everywhere and led to beautiful flights of harmony and some restless, agitated episodes.In Brooklyn, his improvisation in C-sharp minor was gently jazzy, with passages of jumpy riffs alternating with delicate filigree. In Paris, it was jazzy in a more assertive, punchy way, with a clipped three-note riff that shot downward one moment, then segued into fleeting passages that wanted to turn pensive but never gave in.And improvises again:Some of the improvisations in Brooklyn had a searching, mellow quality, as if Bill Evans were meeting Debussy. Perhaps the occasion, a return to live music in an intimate setting with just 25 people in attendance, brought out Tepfer’s ruminative side, as the performance continued and the improvisations turned impetuous, reflective, almost Romantic.“With the inventions, I’m not taking any material from Bach,” he said; instead, he tries to respond to the “concept” of the piece.“I try to come up with a musical idea,” he said, “and it’s not something preplanned.”That idea could be a short motif, like an intervallic figure. Then Tepfer wants to take this idea on a harmonic, fraught dramatic adventure, before finally getting the idea — the hero — safely home; he connects the inventions to ancient Greek rhetoric and drama. “That’s the DNA of Bach’s inventions,” he said. The quality of a dramatic scenario came through in all of Tepfer’s improvisations.In one sense, this conversation with Bach was a little unbalanced: Bach’s inventions mostly last a minute or two, while Tepfer’s improvisations tend to be five minutes or longer. Both in Paris and Brooklyn, the whole program lasted about 75 minutes. I could imagine another approach in which he tried, as a discipline, to constrict himself more to Bach’s time frame.Yet it was hard not to be swept away by Tepfer’s vision and compelling realizations. With disarming seriousness and extraordinary musicianship, he is honoring Bach by going all out in creating a conversation with him that is true to both artists.“We know from the historical record that Bach was very kind and respectful to his students,” Tepfer said. “So it’s perfectly OK to be fully yourself.” More

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      An Anthem About Hugging Your Friends Again, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Rostam, Marcellus Juvann, Gogo Penguin 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.Frank Turner, ‘The Gathering’Who better than Frank Turner, the punk-intense British folk singer, to underscore the imminent joy of reconnecting with others? Turner is barking on “The Gathering” — which casually features Dom Howard (from Muse, on drums) and an inquisitive guitar solo from Jason Isbell — and fully in pulpit mode: “I’ve been missing the feeling when we close up the gaps between us/It’s better than the best benediction, more bracing than blood lust.” Generally, this sort of earnestness can be wearying (even after a very wearying year-plus of isolation), but Turner succeeds because he sounds like he’s just stomped out of a stuffy meeting to go yell on a street corner, frantic with euphoria. JON CARAMANICALump, ‘Animal’In Lump, which releases an album called “Animal” in July, Laura Marling sets aside her virtuosic acoustic guitar to collaborate with Mike Lindsay, the electronics wizard from the folktronica group Tunng. For the album’s title song, she gives herself terse syllable counts — “All that you want/Is to be heard” — as Lindsay supplies steady pulses and blips. But midway through, the metronomic pulse breaks down and Marling leaves her deadpan monotone to wail, “I need more.” Then she submits once again to the digital grid. JON PARELESKhaira Arby, ‘Ferene’The Malian singer Khaira Arby, who died in 2018, was a clarion vocalist who led an incendiary band, fusing Malian modes and rhythms and combining traditional string instruments — the tehardant and ngoni — with a psychedelic electric-guitar attack. “New York Live,” a newly released recording from her first concert in North America, magnificently captures the spiraling energy of her concerts. Listen to the whole remarkable set, or jump in near the peak with “Ferene,” with its intricate cymbal cross-rhythms, its exultant call-and-response vocals and its bursts of fuzz-toned guitar frenzy. PARELESRostam, ‘From the Back of a Cab’Rostam, formerly of Vampire Weekend, zeros in on the awkward intimacy of a particular moment: the cab ride to the airport, a last bit of togetherness before a strictly defined parting. “I am happy you and I got this hour,” he croons, over a nervous six-beat rhythm and echoey piano chords and guitar tones; the relationship stays tentative, conditional. PARELESRodrigo Amarante, ‘Maré’“Maré” means tide, and in his new single, the Brazilian songwriter Rodrigo Amarante compares destiny to a tidal ebb and flow, singing with a tone of weary acceptance. His music has its own push and pull, with three-against-two rhythms and a tangle of instrumental lines — guitars, percussion, a nasal synthesizer, a horn section, some whistling — that interlock but sound like they might collide at any moment. It sounds charmingly ramshackle; it’s not. PARELESGogo Penguin featuring Cornelius, ‘Kora (Cornelius Remix)’Gogo Penguin looks like a jazz trio — piano, bass and drums — but its music also has plenty in common with the repetition, terse motifs and inexorable evolution of electronica. Its new album, “Gogo Penguin Remixes,” hands over tracks from the 2020 “Gogo Penguin” to electronica wizards like Squarepusher, Machinedrum, 808 State and, on “Kora,” the Japanese producer Cornelius. The original’s pecking, stop-start piano theme hints at the plucking of an African kora; Cornelius extrapolates the implied harmonies of that theme to build a sustained, whooshing, buzzing, superstructure, as if he’s unveiling the tune’s futuristic inner life. PARELESJoe Lovano and Dave Douglas, ‘Life on Earth’The saxophonist Joe Lovano and the trumpeter Dave Douglas recorded the tracks that would become “Other Worlds,” the new album from their quintet, Sound Prints, in January 2020, just weeks ahead of a global shutdown. Most of the tunes on the album were done in just one take, and the band’s natural comfort comes through here. On “Life on Earth,” a swiftly shuffling Douglas tune, the pianist Lawrence Fields plays less and less as the trumpeter’s solo develops, moving from a colorist’s role to that of a jagged percussion instrument. Lovano’s tenor saxophone solo brings a sluice of energy flooding back in, until Fields and the bassist Linda May Han Oh finish off the solo section with briefly suspenseful, dashing statements of their own. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMarcellus Juvann, ‘Wrong’“Hardheaded,” the fascinating new self-produced EP from the Houston rapper Marcellus Juvann, is full of clever, quirky, urgent and oddball beats. They’re uniformly potent, and a strong match for Juvann’s rapping, which he delivers in a lightly croaky, lightly stumbling, lightly swinging voice that telegraphs confidence and disaffection all at once. CARAMANICATrippie Redd featuring Playboi Carti, ‘Miss the Rage’A fan edit of this track has been making the rounds on TikTok, but this version is different, with a new Playboi Carti verse. Trippie Redd remains underappreciated and committed to SoundCloud rap staccato, and Carti sticks with his mewling yelps, all over a beat that suggests a starship shifting into warp gear. CARAMANICAElohim and Big Freedia, ‘Strut’As if 21st-century life weren’t surveilled enough, the Los Angeles producer and songwriter Elohim has enlisted the New Orleans bounce icon Big Freedia to join her in saying that even a sidewalk is a runway, a place to perform and be judged. The beat is downright perky, even if the message is oppressive. Still, sometimes a sidewalk is just a sidewalk. PARELESCarlos Niño, ‘Ripples, Reflection, Loop’Ambient music is having a moment, fed partly by our urge for peace amid the anxiety of a pandemic, but also by a need for contact with the outside world — for physicality and touch. A lot of the quiet-seeking, time-stretching music that’s coming out from artists like Claire Rousay, Lea Bertucci and Ben Seretan isn’t primarily electronic; it lives up to the “ambient” designation more literally, ensconcing voices or instrumentals in the sounds of the outdoors. The Los Angeles-based percussionist and producer Carlos Niño’s new album, “More Energy Fields, Current,” places him and a small coterie of musician friends inside a wider environment, playing loops and gentle improvisations and long synthesizer chords. On “Ripples, Reflection, Loop,” he’s joined by the New Age pioneer Laraaji, the pianist Jamael Dean and the vocalist Sharada, who’s heard from what feels like a distance — and then startlingly, comfortingly up close. RUSSONELLO More

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      Billie Eilish’s Portrait of Power Abuse, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Willow featuring Travis Barker, girl in red, DJ Khaled featuring Cardi B, 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.Billie Eilish, ‘Your Power’Cozy, pristine, Laurel Canyon-style acoustic guitars accompany Billie Eilish as she whisper-sings “Try not to abuse your power.” Then she proceeds to sketch a creepy, controlling, exploitative and possibly illegal relationship. The quietly damning accusations pile up: “You said she thought she was your age/How dare you?” Meanwhile, in the video that she directed, an anaconda slowly tightens around her. JON PARELESWillow featuring Travis Barker, ‘Transparentsoul’The return of Willow — daughter of Will and Jada — is brisk, breezy pop-punk throbbing with a very particular sort of famous-child agonizing. She lashes out at deceptive former friends (and maybe some current ones, too) who “smile in my face then put your cig out on my back.” JON CARAMANICAgirl in red, ‘Serotonin’Whatever slams, girl in red — the Norwegian songwriter Marie Ulven — can use it. In “Serotonin,” from her new album “If I Could Make It Go Quiet,” she sings about trying to stabilize her wildly whipsawing, self-destructive emotions with therapy and medications: “Can’t hide from the corners of my mind/I’m terrified of what’s inside,” she announces. The music veers from punk-pop guitars to EDM crescendos and bass drops, from distorted rapping to ringing choruses, only to crumble as it ends. PARELESDJ Khaled featuring Cardi B, ‘Big Paper’It is perhaps the strongest testament to the A&R savvy of DJ Khaled that on an album filled with glossy cameos from Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Baby, and contemplative elder moments from Nas and Jay-Z, he opts to include the endlessly charismatic and exceedingly famous Cardi B on “Big Paper,” a song that sounds like she’s rapping on an old D.I.T.C. beat. It’s relentless, sharp-tongued and slick: “House with the palm trees for all the times I was shaded.” CARAMANICAQ, ‘If You Care’The power of “If You Care” isn’t in the conventional come-on of lyrics like “If you care you’ll come a little closer.” It’s in the persistent rhythmic displacement, top to bottom: the way beat, bass line, vocals and rhythm guitar each suggest a different downbeat, enforcing disorientation from the bottom up. They only align when the vocals turn to rapping at the end; it had to finish somewhere. PARELESPriscilla Block, ‘Sad Girls Do Sad Things’If you didn’t know better, you’d think the young country singer Priscilla Block was perennially gloomy, the sum of one bad decision after the next. That’s the mood on her impressive debut EP, which is sturdy, shamelessly pop-minded and full of songs about regret like “Sad Girls Do Sad Things”:Don’t get me wrong, I love a beer on a FridayBut lately I’ve been at the bar more than my placeAnother round of shutting it downTwo-for-ones ’til too far goneBlock has a crisp and expressive voice, and she telegraphs anguish well. But this EP skips over the rowdy cheer and randy winks of her breakthrough single, “Thick Thighs.” Which is to say, there’s more to Block’s story than heartbreak. CARAMANICABrye, ‘I’d Rather Be Alone’The teenage pop songwriter and producer Brye Sebring lilts through the wreckage of an overlong relationship in “I’d Rather Be Alone.” Everything is crisp: her diction, her rhymes and the pinging syncopations of an arrangement that builds from single keyboard tones through percussion and handclaps to teasing back-and-forth harmonies. “I doubt you’ll even bother listening to this song,” she notes, one more good reason to break free. PARELESHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The drama never stops building in “Swimmer,” from the coming album “Mythopoetics” by Half Waif: the electronics-driven songwriter Nandi Rose Plunkett. It’s a song about everlasting love — “they can’t take this away from me,” she vows — that evolves from an anxious rhythmic pulse to a chordal anthem, all larger than life. PARELESChristian McBride, ‘Brouhaha’The eminent bassist Christian McBride has just released “The Q Sessions,” a three-song collection that he recorded in high-definition for Qobuz, an audiophile streaming platform. The EP features three top-flight improvising musicians who, like McBride, tend to play their instruments in hi-def already: the saxophonist Marcus Strickland, the guitarist Mike Stern and the drummer Eric Harland. The group chases McBride’s syncopated bass line through the ever-shifting funk of “Brouhaha,” which he clearly wrote with Stern — and his roots on the frisky 1980s fusion scene — in mind. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJen Shyu and Jade Tongue, ‘Living’s a Gift — Part 2: Everything for Granted’The singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu draws on jazz, Asian music and much more. Her new album, “Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses,” reflects on loss, memory and perseverance. It opens with “Living’s a Gift,” a suite of songs using lyrics written by middle schoolers during the pandemic: “We’ve lost our minds, lost our time to shine.” The music is ingenious and resilient; leading her jazzy quintet, Jade Tongue, Shyu multitracks her voice into a frisky, intricately contrapuntal choir, folding together angular phrases as neatly as origami. PARELESBurial, ‘Space Cadet’The elusive English electronic producer Burial has re-emerged yet again, splitting a four-track EP, “Shock Power of Love,” with the producer Blackdown. “Space Cadet” hints at post-pandemic optimism — a brisk club beat, arpeggiators pumping out major chords, voices urging “take me higher” — but Burial shrouds it all in static and echoey murk, letting the beat collapse repeatedly, until the track falls back into emptiness. PARELESSofía Rei, ‘La Otra’As she prepared to make her forthcoming album, “Umbral,” Sofía Rei embarked upon a trek through Chile’s mountainous Elqui Province. She brought a charango and two backpacks full of recording gear; on the trip, she recorded herself playing and singing, as well as the babbling sounds of the natural world around her. The album begins with “La Otra,” out Friday as a single, on which Rei sets a poem by the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral to music. Flutes flutter over ricocheting synth bass, a stop-and-start beat and strummed charango, as Rei’s overdubbed voice harmonizes with itself in fierce exclamations, lapping at the sky like a flame. RUSSONELLO More

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      Jill Corey, 85, Coal Miner’s Daughter Turned Singing Sensation, Dies

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      The subject of a Life magazine cover story, she found early fame as a star of ’50s era television and drew comparisons to Judy Garland.Jill Corey, a torch singer who soared to fame as a teenage television star in the early 1950s, at one point becoming one of Columbia Records’ top vocalists, died on April 3 at a hospital in Pittsburgh. She was 85.The cause was septic shock, her daughter, Clare Hoak, said.Ms. Corey was irresistible to the mythmakers of the time. A stirring contralto with a pixie haircut, wide expressive mouth and enormous eyes, she drew comparisons to Judy Garland and had quite an origin story.The youngest daughter of a widowed coal miner, she was born Norma Jean Speranza in Avonmore, Pa. When she was 17, a local DJ helped her record a tape singing unaccompanied, except for the sound of a train rattling as it passed by the studio. They then sent the tape to Mitch Miller, the bandleader turned hitmaker for Columbia Records in New York City. He invited her to audition in person and sent a plane ticket.By the end of the day, she had a record deal, auditions with television show hosts and the attention of Life magazine, which decided to make her a cover girl next to the headline “Small Town Girl Gets New Name and a New Career.” A seven page spread with photographs by Gordon Parks, the article recorded (or re-enacted in some cases) her auditions, her leave-taking from Avonmore and her first night on television. She had just turned 18.She earned a spot on “The Dave Garroway Show,” a Friday night variety series hosted by a low-key former radio host otherwise known as the Communicator. Mr. Garroway was a television omnipresence at the time, part of the team that hosted the “Today” show when it began in the early 1950s. He was the one who renamed her Jill Corey — a name plucked from the phone book. On that first Friday night, Life magazine reported, she sang the classic jazz standard “I’ve Got the World on a String.”“An upturned face that’s cuter than a French poodle,” wrote Jack O’Brian, a television columnist for The New York Journal-American. “She sings like a warmhearted little angel.”Silver Screen magazine said she had a “voice as lovely as a glass slipper, and a personality to match.”Ms. Corey in 1957. A stirring contralto with a pixie haircut, wide, expressive mouth and enormous eyes, she drew comparisons to Judy Garland.Denver Post/Denver Post, via Getty ImagesBefore the end of the decade, Ms. Corey had a spot on the “Johnny Carson Show” (a variety show precursor to his late-night talk show) and the NBC series “Your Hit Parade,” in which a regular cast of vocalists sang the top-rated songs of the week.For a time Ms. Corey even had her own show, 15 minutes of song that followed the news once a week, a programming format that placed many popular singers in similar slots across the networks.She recorded many records and performed at Manhattan nightclubs like the Copacabana and the Blue Angel. (Mr. Miller, in tight control of her career, turned down Broadway roles for her because her nightclub work was more lucrative.) And she was courted by heartthrobs like Eddie Fisher and Frank Sinatra (as he and Ava Gardner were divorcing).She also made a “terrible movie,” in her words, called “Senior Prom” (1958).Ms. Corey was engaged to a Brazilian diplomat when Don Hoak, the third baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, began a campaign to woo her. She had sung the national anthem at one Pirates game, and he had become smitten. He haunted her live performances — once sitting in as a trumpet player, at the invitation of her band, who colluded with him, and once walking onstage with a magnum of Champagne and two glasses. Finally she relented.They married in 1961, and she gave up her career. Their daughter, Clare, was born in 1965. Mr. Hoak died of a heart attack at the wheel of his car in 1969 while chasing his brother-in-law’s stolen automobile.Ms. Corey returned to performing a few years later — “Jill Corey Returns With Voice Intact,” The New York Times declared in 1972 — and continued to work steadily at small nightclubs and in musicals around the country. But she never recaptured her early fame.“Her voice has darkened and ripened,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in 1988, reviewing a performance at Danny’s Skylight Lounge on West 46th Street, “acquiring a vulnerable maturity that evokes an interesting mixture of Judy Garland and Rosemary Clooney.”“I’d arrived a star and done it all,” Ms. Corey told a reviewer in 1972, “so I didn’t know how to knock on doors, but what else could I do? Since I was 4, all I’ve ever done is sing. When you have talent, and they won’t let you do your thing, it’s very crushing; especially when you’re used to the red carpet.”Ms. Corey in 2018. “Her voice has darkened and ripened,” one critic wrote in 1988 after she had mounted a comeback, “acquiring a vulnerable maturity.”Becky Thurner BraddockNorma Jean Speranza was born on Sept. 30, 1935, the youngest of five children. Her father, Bernard Speranza, worked in a coal mine in Kiski Township, Pa.; when Norma Jean became Jill, she bought it for him, renamed the Corey Mine. Her mother, Clara (Grant) Speranza, died when she was 4.Her first performances, at school amateur hours, were not memorable: typically, enthusiastic Carmen Miranda imitations for which she earned last place. At 13, however, she won a talent contest sponsored by the Lion’s Club, the prize for which was a spot singing on local radio. The next year, she was hired by a local orchestra to sing standards, $5 a night, 7 days a week. For the demo she sent Mr. Miller, she sang a Tony Bennett song, “Since My Love Has Gone.”She sang often at home, said Ms. Hoak, her only immediate survivor. Ms. Corey would sing her daughter to sleep — Judy Garland and Billie Holiday, mostly, and to such an extent that her daughter complained, “Don’t you know any happy songs?”Ms. Corey’s voice remained distinctive, and she kept her flair. A few years ago, she fell in her home and called 911. When the fire department emergency team arrived, she received them with typical aplomb, a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other.The firefighters balked at the cigarette.As Ms. Hoak recalled: “Mom told them, ‘Oh come on! You boys know how to put out a fire, don’t you?’ ” More