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6 Jazz Songs to Listen to Right NowAngel Bat Dawid.Alejandro AyalaI write about jazz for The New York Times.Here are six new and noteworthy tracks, from a recently unearthed Don Cherry radio broadcast to Angel Bat Dawid’s remix of Alan Braufman → More
In ensembles big and small, the prolific musician uses sound to make the world’s complexities a little more graspable.Whether she’s playing solo piano or leading one of her various large ensembles, the pianist and composer Satoko Fujii will tug you toward the details.The leader of a dizzying array of ensembles both large and small, Fujii is arguably the most prolific pianist in jazz — if also among the most underrecognized. Since the 1990s, she has released close to 100 albums, mostly through her own Libra Records label. Two years ago, celebrating her 60th birthday, a milestone known as “kanreki” in Japanese culture, she put out a new album each month, including both solo piano and big-band works.Fujii says that she seems to hear music everywhere, and she feels challenged to channel the sensations of the world as directly as she can. “This probably sounds strange, but when I compose I feel like the music is already there — we just didn’t notice,” she said in a recent interview from her home in Kobe, Japan. “I feel like I’m just looking for something that was hidden, but that is already there.” The sound of an airplane overhead, an overheard conversation, even the rustling of trees can provide a spark.Without access to gigs, jam sessions or a recording studio during pandemic lockdown, she felt herself becoming unmoored. On walks around Kobe, she was touched by the uncanny nervousness of the atmosphere, but she and her husband, the trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, had nobody else to play with. “Everything was canceled,” she said. “I felt like: Who am I?”She decided to outfit her tiny piano room, which barely fits her beloved Steinway grand, with a home-studio setup. Then she continued writing and recording and releasing music, at an even faster clip than before.Across all of Fujii’s work, contradictions come into balance; though her music is abstract and sometimes wild, each element shimmers with clarity. In situations large and small, her tender attention to detail is equaled by her ability to convey enormous breadth and textural range. Listening to her, visual-art metaphors become tempting: These works are as complex and detail-driven as, say, a Mark Bradford canvas, and just as huge in scale.Since the start of quarantine she has posted well over a dozen albums to her Bandcamp page. They include “Prickly Pear Cactus,” a trio disc that she and Tamura made with the electronic musician Ikue Mori, trading sound files via email and building gradually on one another’s work; “Beyond,” a set of serene duets with the vibraphonist Taiko Saito; and a solo-piano album, “Hazuki,” available on CD this Friday, featuring compositions Fujii wrote in the early months of quarantine.Writing by email, Mori said she had started collaborating with Fujii a few years ago, after having heard from other musicians on the scene about a pianist with a “dynamic and diverse style.” The “Prickly Pear Cactus” project had allowed them to collaborate at an unhurried pace. “This time, taking our time playing and working on the details, was a perfect situation for both of us,” Mori said.Born in Tokyo, Fujii was obsessed by music from her early childhood, but she didn’t immediately excel at it. She remembers that classical piano didn’t come easily, and some instructors were less supportive than others. As a teenager, she said, one classical teacher told her: “If you just keep playing, when you get to be my age, like 70, you’d be a great piano player. Anyone can be a good piano player. Just keep playing.”That might sound like faint praise, but it steeled Fujii’s resolve. Speaking via video interview last month, she was bright-eyed and quick to laugh. But she described herself as a restless spirit, saying she feels at ease only when creating.“If people are happy enough with their life, they probably can just sit down and have a good tea and be happy,” she said. “I’m not like that. Somehow — I don’t know how I can explain this — I have to live with my energy. With my effort. That’s the thing that lets me be happy; that’s the way that I can feel I’m living.”After high school, Fujii earned a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, moving there in 1985. As a young pianist, she was still figuring out how to position herself in relation to the jazz tradition, and she hadn’t yet written much of her own music when she attended a composition master class led by Chick Corea.“He said that just as we practice playing an instrument, we also can practice making compositions,” she said. “That was very new for me at that time. I decided, ‘OK, so maybe I can just do that.’” Maybe tirelessly putting in the work really was what mattered most — even when it comes to composing.“I have to live with my energy. With my effort,” Fujii said. “That’s the thing that lets me be happy; that’s the way that I can feel I’m living.”Bryan MurrayOr is it work at all? For Fujii, sonic inspiration comes from all angles — so the real challenge would be not to constantly spin it into something new. As a kind of diary of her inspirations, Fujii’s music troubles the divide between abstraction and realism. Plucking or scraping the strings of the piano; covering them up as she strikes the keys; letting the low, rustling textures of a horn section coalesce into harmony: All of this amounts to abstract expressionism, in musical form. But it’s equaled by her rich sense of simplicity, sprung from the feeling that she is simply converting the riches of the world around her into music.After Berklee, Fujii returned to Japan for a time, working as a teacher and session musician while developing a reputation in Tokyo as a farseeing bandleader. Then, in 1993, she returned to Boston to attend graduate school at the New England Conservatory. There she studied with the influential pianist Paul Bley, renowned for his wandering, dreamlike approach to improvising. He heard something within Fujii’s playing that she hadn’t completely unleashed, she said, and he encouraged her to cut away as much jazz orthodoxy as she could.“He said, ‘You cannot play like some other person,’” she said. “‘If you play like yourself, there is a reason to get your CD.’”The pair kept in touch after her graduation, and in 1995 they recorded “Something About Water,” a remarkable piano duet that was also one of Fujii’s first self-released albums on Libra. Soon she was getting calls to perform around the avant-garde scene in Brooklyn, where she and Tamura eventually moved for a year and a half.She ultimately returned to Japan, but not before laying the foundation for what would become Orchestra New York, a big band featuring many of the finest improvisers in the city. She has released a handful of albums with the group, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year. She has also maintained Orchestra Tokyo, composed of musicians there, and Orchestra Berlin, which she founded during a five-year stint living in Germany in the 2010s. Each orchestra has a different relationship to Fujii’s music, and perhaps she writes a little differently for each one.The tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby has been playing with Orchestra New York since the ’90s. He said that Fujii’s instructions to the band can often seem maddeningly understated, and she rarely records more than one take of each tune. Sometimes, Malaby said, it’s not until he hears the recording played back afterward that he gets a full measure of the music’s depth. “The simplicity is beyond the imagination,” he said.“You’re done, and you’re on the train, and you’re like, ‘What the hell was that?’” Malaby continued, describing the experience of leaving a recording session with the orchestra. “And then you get the CD in the mail, and it’s so powerful.”He was struck by how ably Fujii applied the language of her solo piano playing to her large ensembles, where she rarely plays a note on the keyboard. “She’s transcended the piano with the orchestra, and it sounds like when she plays trio or solo,” he said.Fujii said that she doesn’t think differently about the process of recording a solo album, or one with a large band. Either way, it’s about using sound to make life’s complexities a little more graspable. “The energy that I spend on a project, whether solo or for big band, it’s pretty much the same,” she said. “I just focus on it, spending time, 100 percent of my energy.”Articles in this series examine jazz musicians who are helping reshape the art form, often beyond the glare of the spotlight. More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeRoast: Thick AsparagusVisit: National ParksRead: Shirley HazzardApologize: To Your KidsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistSZA Teases What’s Next, and 11 More New SongsHear tracks by Lucy Dacus, Jorja Smith, Charles Lloyd and the Marvels, and others.At the end of her video for “Good Days,” SZA hints at an even newer song.Credit…VevoJon Pareles, Giovanni Russonello and March 12, 2021Updated 1:45 p.m. ETEvery 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.SZA, ‘Good Days’[embedded content]SZA gets tangled in both ambivalent feelings and acoustic-guitar filigree in “Good Days.” She’s trying to pull away from an ex — “I worry that I wasted the best of me on you, babe/You don’t care” — but she’s “got me a war in my mind,” still torn between memories and moving on. Her video for the song has her gyrating amid giant mushrooms and doing a pole dance in a library. It also teases a minute of an even newer song, sparse with percussive interruptions and a choppy, leaping melody, as she hints at romantic strife that gets bloody. JON PARELESRosé, ‘On the Ground’“On the Ground” is the debut solo single from the 24-year-old New Zealand native Rosé, who is one-fourth of the K-pop juggernaut Blackpink. Disillusioned with the empty promises of fame (“suddenly you have it, you find out that your goal’s just plastic”), the song’s brooding verses and lacquered sheen recall Britney Spears’ glittering pop-confessional “Lucky.” But then the chorus hits, a steely beat drops and Rosé finds strength in the sudden realization “Everything I need is on the ground.” LINDSAY ZOLADZLucy Dacus, ‘Thumbs’The situation in “Thumbs” couldn’t be more quietly fraught. The singer’s 19-year-old girlfriend’s father is in town to see her for the first time in nearly a decade. The encounter is tense — “Your nails are digging into my knee” — disguised in smiling politeness: “Do you get the checks I send on your birthday?” Lucy Dacus sings with sweet determination, sustaining a foursquare melody over misty electronic chords while envisioning mayhem. “I would kill him if you let me,” she croons, and it’s clear she means it. PARELESJorja Smith, ‘Addicted’“Addicted,” the new single from Jorja Smith — the English singer-songwriter who first came to prominence on Drake’s 2017 mixtape “More Life,” and released her soulful debut album “Lost & Found” a year later — is at once subtle and devastating. “There’s no light in your eyes since you won’t open them,” Smith sings to an indifferent paramour atop skittering percussion and a drifting, moody guitar riff. The music video, which Smith co-directed with Savanah Leaf, captures not only the solitary, all-dressed-up-nowhere-to-go vibe of lockdown but also the specific kind of loneliness conjured by the song. “The hardest thing — you are not addicted to me,” Smith croons, though by the end of the chorus that lyric turns into something defiant: “You should be addicted to me.” ZOLADZChika, ‘FWB’The rapper and singer Chika is making the most of her attention as a nominee for best new artist at the Grammys; she’s releasing an EP, “Once Upon a Time,” two days before the awards show. It includes “FWB,” as in “friends with benefits,” a song she put out in 2020 that fuses a leisurely, quiet-storm ballad with brittle trap drums, while Chika sings and raps about a strictly unromantic one-night hookup. “I ain’t here for love, so promise not to fall for me,” she instructs, even as the slow groove promises seduction. PARELESSkullcrusher, ‘Storm in Summer’Skullcrusher is something of an ironic name for the solo project of the upstate New York native Helen Ballentine, who makes plaintive, acoustic-driven indie-pop. The drizzly dreamscape “Storm in Summer,” from her forthcoming EP of the same name, is anchored by Ballentine’s yearning voice, which effectively pierces the song’s pastoral atmosphere. “I wish you could see me,” she sings with building intensity. It’s crushing in its own particular way. ZOLADZcehryl, ‘Outside the Party, Inside the Dream’The whispery songwriter cehryl is from Hong Kong, studied at Berklee School of Music and spent time making indie-pop in Los Angeles. “Outside the Party, Inside the Dream” lilts along eccentrically and insinuatingly on a five-note, 5/8-meter guitar lick — fans of Juana Molina will appreciate it — as she ponder absence and anticipation, connection and inevitable distance. PARELESSpoon, ‘Breakdown’/‘A Face in the Crowd’Spoon covering Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers makes almost too much sense. Both are Southern rock bands that don’t really sound like “Southern rock bands,” unafraid of atmospheric empty space and more interested in enduring songcraft than trend-hopping. Spoon first played its impressively faithful cover of the Heartbreakers’ 1976 debut single “Breakdown” last October at the livestreamed “Tom Petty’s 70th Birthday Bash.” Even better, though, is a second cover they’ve released with it today, of Petty’s 1987 solo tune “A Face in the Crowd.” Britt Daniel’s mellifluous croak is, in its own way, as distinctive as Petty’s, and he brings just the right balance of detached coolness and aching wistfulness to the vocal. ZOLADZGary Louris, ‘New Normal’Gary Louris of the Jayhawks wrote and recorded “New Normal” more than a decade ago, only to find himself with a song that suits the pandemic’s sense of time: static but also vanishing. It’s part of a solo album due in June. Steady, up-and-down piano chords pace the song amid ticking drums and stray electronic buzzes and drones; a distorted guitar solo erupts midway through. He sings about “Hours that slip by, never to return,” and at the end there’s a chilling bit of prescience: “Deep breath, you’re leaving what you came here with/Gathering like slow death, nipping at your heels.” PARELESBajofondo featuring Natalia Oreiro, ‘Budem Tantsevat/Listo Pa Bailar’Two kinds of stoic romantic melancholy — Argentine and Russian — converge in “Budem Tantsevat/Listo Pa Bailar,” which translates as “Ready to Dance.” It’s sung in Spanish and Russian by Natalia Oreiro, from Uruguay, as Bajofondo merges the sound of a vintage tango group (topped by piano, violin and bandoneon, the tango accordion) with a thumping beat, a synthesizer bass line and, eventually, Slavic choral harmonies. Minor-chorded amorousness bridges continents. PARELESCharles Lloyd and the Marvels, ‘Peace’When Charles Lloyd moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he joined a small tradition of Southern improvisers who had moved out west seeking artistic and personal freedoms (he’s from Memphis originally). Lloyd, 82, opens “Tone Poem,” the new album from his quintet the Marvels, with two tunes by Ornette Coleman, a major figure in that little diaspora: A Texan, he had come to L.A. before Lloyd, and became well known in those years for pioneering the music that would be known as free jazz. These two tunes, “Peace” and “Ramblin’,” first appeared on the final two albums from Coleman’s Los Angeles years. The Marvels have both the American West and the South built into their sound, partly thanks to Greg Leisz’s pedal steel guitar. On “Peace,” he fills in the space around Coleman’s quizzical melody, which becomes syrupy and slow and untied from any set tempo. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRalph Peterson Jr., Jazz Drummer and Bandleader, Dies at 58Probably the most prominent drummer of his generation to consistently front his own groups, he was also an insightful educator and mentor.The drummer Ralph Peterson Jr. at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2019. In his more than 30 years as a bandleader, he released roughly two dozen albums with an array of ensembles.Credit…Alan NahigianMarch 7, 2021, 5:34 p.m. ETRalph Peterson, a thunderously swinging drummer who began his career as Art Blakey’s last protégé and finished it as a mentor to a new generation of jazz talent, died on March 1 at his home in North Dartmouth, Mass. He was 58.His publicist, Lydia Liebman, said the cause was complications of cancer, which he had been fighting for six years.Mr. Peterson came to the fore in the 1980s as a member of the so-called Young Lions, a coterie of young improvisers devoted to the core ideals of bebop: swing rhythm, acoustic instrumentation and rigorous improvisational exchange within the constraints of a standard song form. Within that context, he brought a take-no-prisoners style and a bountiful, collaborative spirit.Mr. Peterson was probably the most prominent drummer among the Young Lions to consistently front his own groups, and over the course of more than 30 years as a bandleader he released roughly two dozen albums with an array of ensembles.One particularly successful vehicle was the Fo’tet, an unorthodox group consisting of clarinet, vibraphone, bass and drums. It seemed to prove the joyful flexibility of the straight-ahead jazz format, so long as you defined your own way of playing within it.In a 2011 interview with the pianist George Colligan, Mr. Peterson described his approach to tradition simply: “Take what you need and leave the rest.” When teaching, he said, he told students: “Don’t buy in lock, stock and barrel to any philosophy that is not based in your own experience. Because then you are not living your life.”Mr. Peterson joined the Art Blakey Big Band in his early 20s as the ensemble’s second drummer. He then became only the second person besides Blakey — and the longest-serving — to play in his main band, the Jazz Messengers, on Blakey’s own instrument. As Blakey grew ill, Mr. Peterson increasingly took over drum duties.Mr. Peterson led the band Messenger Legacy, composed of former members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, at Le Poisson Rouge in New York in 2005. Credit…Lev Radin/Pacific Press, via LightRocket, via Getty ImagesFor decades the Messengers had been the premier finishing school for straight-ahead jazz talent, as Blakey brought in an endless stream of young musicians to fill its ranks. From the drum chair, Mr. Peterson came into contact with a Who’s Who of youthful improvisers, many of whom would hire him for their ensembles or play in his own.After Blakey died in 1990, Mr. Peterson became a guardian of his legacy. The Ralph Peterson Quintet’s 1994 album, “Art,” was devoted to the Jazz Messengers repertoire. He later founded the band Messenger Legacy, composed of former Blakey band members, and in later years he and a group of his students recorded “I Remember Bu,” a big-band tribute to Blakey (who had taken the name Buhaina when he converted to Islam in the 1940s).In the mid-’80s, as he began to move beyond Blakey’s shadow, Mr. Peterson played drums in Out of the Blue, a sextet of young musicians assembled by Blue Note Records. In 1988 he released his own debut album for the label, “V,” featuring his quintet.Praising that album in a feature for The New York Times, the critic Jon Pareles called it an “exception” to the trend of albums by Young Lions who seemed partly suffocated by their fealty to tradition. Mr. Peterson’s record, he wrote, “makes hard bop sound daring again.”Ralph Peterson Jr. was born on May 20, 1962, in Pleasantville, N.J. His father was Pleasantville’s first Black police chief, and then its first Black mayor. His mother, Shirley (Jones) Peterson, was a manager at an aviation research center.Ralph grew up surrounded by drummers: His grandfather had been one, as had four of his uncles. Ralph started drumming at 3, and never stopped.He is survived by his wife, Linea; two sisters, Michelle Armstead and Jennifer Armstead; a daughter, Sonora Slocum; and two stepdaughters, Saydee and Haylee McQuay. He is also survived by Jazz Robertson, a mentee he considered his “spiritual daughter.”Alongside drums, Ralph studied the trumpet, and he entered Rutgers University’s jazz studies program as a trumpet major. But he soon departed to join Blakey’s band, and he didn’t return to school for two decades. In the early 2000s, having overcome an addiction to drugs, he returned to Rutgers to complete his bachelor’s degree.By then he was already teaching at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he later became a full professor, gaining a reputation as an insightful and positive-minded educator. Toward the end of his career, fed by the energy of his pupils, Mr. Peterson assembled the GenNext Big Band, a group of Berklee students modeled after the original Art Blakey Big Band. The ensemble released two albums on Mr. Peterson’s Onyx Music label, “I Remember Bu” (2018) and “Listen Up!” (2019).In the classroom, he shared his deep knowledge of jazz history, the lessons that had come to him by way of elders like Blakey, and his own life struggles.“Congratulations! You guys have accomplished a lot by arriving here. You are the best in your communities, the best where you come from,” he was quoted as saying to a roomful of Black students, all newly arrived on campus, in a 2018 article for DownBeat. “My job is to fuel your hunger, create more questions in your mind. And my goal is for you to leave with a sense of empowerment.”By then Mr. Peterson was battling Stage 4 cancer, but he framed his own resilience as a resource his students could access.“What I serve is the music, not my ego,” he told the class. “I’ve had enough chances to be dead, but I’m grateful to be alive. And the focus and intensity and pace at which I’m now working and living is directly related to the spiritual wake-up call that tomorrow isn’t promised.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistSt. Vincent’s Synth-Funk ‘Pain,’ and 9 More New SongsHear tracks by Drake featuring Rick Ross, Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, Bebe Rexha and others.St. Vincent previews a new album called “Daddy’s Home” with the squelchy “Pay Your Way in Pain.”Credit…Zackery MichaelJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and March 5, 2021Updated 4:08 p.m. ETEvery 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.St. Vincent, ‘Pay Your Way in Pain’[embedded content]St. Vincent (Annie Clark) piles artifice on artifice on the way to a digitized primal scream in “Pay Your Way in Pain,” from a new album, “Daddy’s Home,” due in May. A throwaway music-hall piano introduction cuts to fat, squelchy 1980s synthesizer tones as she sings, archly but with mounting desperation, about rejection on every front, surrounded by multiples of her own voice processed into gasping, tittering onlookers; they join her to harmonize on the words “pain” and “shame” like decades-later echoes of David Bowie singing “Fame.” It’s droll until it isn’t; at the end, she proclaims, “I want to be loved,” and that last word stretches for a rasping, breathless 17 seconds. JON PARELESNo Rome featuring Charli XCX and the 1975, ‘Spinning’Pros recognize pros. It’s telling that Charli XCX (the Id Girl of hyperpop) and Matty Healy of the 1975 (the most self-conscious yet ambitious arena-rock deconstructionist) both chose to collaborate with No Rome, a Filipino songwriter and producer who melds introversion, melody and electronics. The song ends up on Charli XCX’s turf: teasing, danceable and unstable, flaunting its pitch-shifting and digital edits. But it’s also thoroughly danceable and flirtatious: full of mindless motion. PARELESBruno Mars, Anderson .Paak, Silk Sonic, ‘Leave the Door Open’Both Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars are diligent students of R&B history, especially devoted to its most opulent, funky and idealistic moments in the pre-disco 1970s. So it’s no surprise that their collaboration — Silk Sonic, though they also keep their own search-optimizing names in the billing — harks back, in “Leave the Door Open,” to the close-harmony seductions of groups like the Spinners, the Manhattans and the Stylistics; yes, kids, that’s an analog tape deck rolling as the video begins. The descending guitar glissando, the glockenspiel, the showy key changes, the contrast of grainy lead and perfectionist backup vocals, the detailed erotic invitation of the lyrics — “Come on over, I’ll adore you” — are all good things to revive. PARELESDrake featuring Rick Ross, ‘Lemon Pepper Freestyle’What’s a palate cleanse for Drake is, for most rappers, out of the reach of their ambition and skill. In between albums, he tosses off songs that focus on his tougher side, leaning in to wordy verses largely bereft of melody. “Lemon Pepper Freestyle” — from his new “Scary Hours 2” EP — is a relaxed classic of the form, full of sly rhymes delivered so offhandedly it almost obscures the technical audacity within. The song features frequent mischief buddy Rick Ross, but promptly dispenses with him so that Drake can embark upon a four-plus minute verse touching on his notary public, some wild times in Vegas, smooth co-parenting (“I send her the child support/She send me the heart emoji”), the deadening effects of too much fame, the overpriced accouterments of too much fame and the usual confession/braggadocio nexus that even after more than a decade still stings: “To be real, man, I never did one crime/But none of my brothers can caption that line.” JON CARAMANICABebe Rexha, ‘Sacrifice’New year, nü-disco. Bebe Rexha turns whispering diva on “Sacrifice” — “Wanna be the air every time you breathe/running through your veins, and the spaces in between” — on an elegant track that includes the faintest nod to Real McCoy’s mid-90s ultra-bouncey “Another Night.” CARAMANICATank, ‘Can’t Let It Show’Tank pours out his regrets and begs for reconciliation on “Can’t Let It Show”: “I should’ve been everything I promised,” he croons in an aching tenor, going on to confess, “I’ve been stupid, heartless/I’ve been useless, thoughtless.” Then, in falsetto, he answers with what’s supposed to be her side of the dialogue: a repurposed Kate Bush chorus — “I should be crying but I just can’t let it show” — that makes him think he still stands a chance because she cares. Or is it all just his wishful thinking? PARELESMaroon 5 featuring Megan Thee Stallion, ‘Beautiful Mistakes’An awkward night out in a thankless marriage between a partner barely trying to save face and a partner trying very hard to do just enough so that observers might not notice how poorly suited the pair are to each other. CARAMANICAAshe and Finneas, ‘Til Forever Falls Apart’Perhaps Finneas is a little frustrated — though well-compensated — while he keeps things quiet (but deeply ominous) when he collaborates with his sister, Billie Eilish, whose vocals tend to be melodic whispers. He goes full-scale, orchestral Wall of Sound, appropriately, to share big crescendos with Ashe on “Til Forever Falls Apart,” which starts as a vow of fidelity but turns into visions of California apocalypse. PARELESOmar Sosa, ‘Shibinda’When the prolific Cuban pianist and composer Omar Sosa toured East Africa with his trio in 2009, he brought along a small recording setup, and captured himself playing with leading musicians in every country he visited. Afterward, he overdubbed additional layers of percussion and piano atop the original recordings; now he has finally released these recordings as an album, “An East African Journey.” In Zambia, Sosa met Abel Ntalasha, a multi-instrumentalist and dancer, whose song “Shibinda” tells of a young man growing into adulthood and preparing to marry. Ntalasha plays the kalumbu, a single-stringed instrument, and sings the song’s central incantation. Sosa gets involved gradually, contributing vocals and percussion and rhythmic spritzes high up on the piano. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHafez Modirzadeh, ‘Facet Sorey’[embedded content]To make his new album, “Facets,” the saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh brought three leading jazz pianists into the studio. But before they arrived, he retuned many of the piano’s strings to reflect an old Persian technique of finding notes in the spaces between the tempered scale. On “Facet Sorey,” Modirzadeh doesn’t play a lick of sax; instead, the multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey handles the piece alone, conjuring up conflicted clouds of harmony, letting the piano’s slightly sour tuning create a feeling of rich uncertainty. RUSSONELLOAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyPopcastSubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsNew Jazz That Agitates for ChangeA conversation about strong recent debuts, and how canon and community can be in tension.Hosted by Jon Caramanica. Produced by Pedro Rosado.More episodes ofPopcastMarch 2, 2021New Jazz That Agitates for ChangeFebruary 15, 2021Remembering Sophie, Architect of Future PopFebruary 5, 2021The Music Lost to Coronavirus, Part 2January 31, 2021Olivia Rodrigo and ‘Drivers License’ Aren’t Going AnywhereJanuary 19, 2021Inside the Bull Market for Songwriting RightsJanuary 7, 2021How Zev Love X Became MF DoomDecember 23, 20202020 Popcast Listener Mailbag: Taylor, Dua, MGK and MoreDecember 15, 2020Taylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’: Let’s DiscussDecember 9, 2020The Best Albums of 2020? Let’s DiscussNovember 29, 2020Saweetie, City Girls and the Female Rapper RenaissanceNovember 18, 2020Who Will Control Britney Spears’s Future?November 10, 2020Ariana Grande, a Pop Star for the Post-Pop Star AgeSee All Episodes ofPopcastMarch 2, 2021Plenty of genres have anxiety about their relationships to history, but perhaps none more loudly than jazz. The conversation about forward movement vs. reverence of the past is at play constantly, and motivates some of the last year’s most exciting releases by Immanuel Wilkins, Jyoti, Exploding Star Orchestra, even the Sun Ra Arkestra.The anxiety can feel lighter, though, in the genre’s most progressive corners, be it the International Anthem label from Chicago, or the forward-thinking hip-hop of artists including Pink Siifu and Earl Sweatshirt.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about strong recent jazz debuts, the ways in which canon and community can be in tension, and the performers who are looking to innovate in the genre without being beholden to the past.Guests:Giovanni Russonello, who covers jazz for The New York TimesMarcus J. Moore, who writes about music for The New York Times, the Nation and othersAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistPost Malone Covers Hootie & the Blowfish, and 10 More New SongsHear tracks by Pop Smoke, Jade Bird, Adrian Younge and others. More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMilford Graves, Singular Drummer and Polymath, Dies at 79His free-jazz drumming style was unlike anything heard before, but his explorations and inventions went far beyond music.Milford Graves in 2018 at his Queens home, where his studies ranged from music to cardiology to botany. Sought after by a wide range of students, he was known to most simply as Professor.Credit…George Etheredge for The New YorkFeb. 19, 2021Updated 6:01 p.m. ETBy the time Milford Graves took up the jazz drum kit, in his early 20s, he had spent years playing timbales in Afro-Latin groups. But on the kit he was confronted with the new challenge of using foot pedals as well as his hands. Rather than learn the standard jazz technique, he drew from what he already knew.In the Latin ensembles, “we’d be doing dance movements while we were playing,” he remembered in a 2018 profile in The New York Times. “So I said: ‘That’s all I’ll do. I’m going to start dancing down below.’ I started dancing on the high-hat.”The resulting style was unlike anything heard before in jazz.Mr. Graves mixed polyrhythms constantly, sometimes carrying a different cadence in each limb; the rhythms would diverge, then vaporize. He removed the bottom skins from his drums, deepening and dilating their sound. Often he used his elbows to dampen the head of a drum as he struck it, making its pitch malleable and introducing a new range of possibilities.But he wasn’t a drummer exclusively, or even first. Mr. Graves, who died at 79 on Feb. 12 at his home in South Jamaica, Queens, was also a botanist, acupuncturist, martial artist, impresario, college professor, visual artist and student of the human heartbeat. And in almost every arena, he was an inventor.“In the cosmos, everything — planets — they’re all in motion,” Mr. Graves said in “Milford Graves Full Mantis,” a 2018 documentary film directed by his longtime student Jake Meginsky.“We’ve got so much cosmic energy going through us, and the drumming is supposed to be very related to the intake of this cosmic energy,” he added. “That’s the loop that we have with the cosmos.”His life had taken one last poetic turn. In 2018, seemingly at the start of a late-career renaissance, Mr. Graves learned he had amyloid cardiomyopathy, a rare heart disease known as stiff heart syndrome. He was given six months to live. But since the 1960s he had been studying the human heart, focusing on the power of rhythm and sound to address its pathologies. So he became his own patient, using remedies and insights that he had developed over decades. He lived for over two more years.His daughter Renita Graves said his death was attributed to congestive heart failure brought on by amyloid cardiomyopathy.Mr. Graves said of his diagnosis: “It’s like some higher power saying, ‘OK, buddy, you wanted to study this, here you go.’ Now the challenge is inside of me.”Milford Robert Graves was born on Aug. 20, 1941, in Queens and raised there in the South Jamaica Houses, a public-housing development. His mother, Gonive (William) Graves, was a homemaker, and his father, Marvin, drove a limousine. (Early in Milford’s career, Marvin Graves would drive his son to performances in the limo.)By the time Milford could read, he was already drumming. The first band he put together, in junior high school, was a drum-and-dance group, and he was soon at the fore of his own Latin music ensembles, including the McKinley-Graves Band and the Milford Graves Latino Quintet.By the mid-1960s he had found his way to the avant-garde, at first through collaborations with the saxophonist Giuseppi Logan. He then joined the New York Art Quartet, whose 1964 debut album prominently featured Mr. Graves’s elusive drumming; it has since become part of the free-jazz canon.Mr. Graves, on drums, playing with his frequent collaborator Giuseppi Logan in 1965 at the opening of a Manhattan bookstore.Credit…Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesMeanwhile he undertook a serious study of the Indian tabla while continuing to push his style toward the brink. In a 1965 column for DownBeat magazine, the poet and organizer Amiri Baraka enthused that Mr. Graves’ drumming “must be heard at once.”“Graves has a rhythmic drive, a constant piling up of motor energies, that makes him a distinct stylist,” Mr. Baraka wrote.Mr. Graves joined the band of the saxophonist Albert Ayler in 1967; its historic performances included an appearance at John Coltrane’s funeral. That same year Mr. Graves won the DownBeat critics’ award for the brightest young talent.He began to appear more often as a leader, or in duos, and embraced a full-body approach to performing. He vocalized more from behind the drum set, usually in a babble or a rhythmic cry. As his career went on, his performances came to include philosophical, humorous lectures in roughly equal measure to the music.Mr. Graves performing in 2013 on opening night of the Vision Festival in Brooklyn, where he was honored.Credit…Ruby Washington/The New York TimesWith Black Nationalism gaining steam, Mr. Graves helped lead the way for a cadre of musicians seeking self-determination in the industry. He started the Self-Reliance Project record label to release his own albums and became involved in actions on behalf of student protesters and revolutionary groups.For much of the 1960s he lived with his wife and children in the East New York section of Brooklyn, then returned to his old neighborhood in 1970, moving into the South Jamaica house where his grandparents had lived.They had once used the house’s basement as a neighborhood speakeasy, but when Mr. Graves moved in he converted it into a dojo, where he practiced and taught Yara, a martial art of his own creation. Its name is the Yoruba word for agility, and its practices mixed East Asian traditions with West African dance, as well as insights from Mr. Graves’s close study of live praying mantises.The basement eventually became his laboratory, where he focused on cardiology, acupuncture and herbalism. He also worked in a veterinary lab during the 1970s, where he set up and ran clinical tests to investigate new medicines.In the house’s garden, he mixed plants from all parts of the world. “I have a global garden,” he said in the documentary. “My garden’s not like people. You’ve got all these people of different ethnicities, they all hang out in their own communities. This don’t work like that. They all hang out together.”In addition to his daughter Renita, Mr. Graves is survived by his wife of more than 60 years, Lois Graves; three other daughters, Kim, Monifa and Lenne’ Graves; his son, Kevin; and grandchildren.At the invitation of Bill Dixon, a trumpeter and organizer, Mr. Graves joined the faculty of the Black Music Division at Bennington College, where he taught for 39 years, traveling to Vermont once a week for classes.But he also ministered to musicians who traveled from afar to seek him out and to a devoted following of men living in the neighborhood who respected him as a community elder. For decades he hosted martial arts workshops, herbalism clinics and salons that doubled as drum lessons. To all the participants, he was known simply as Professor.Mr. Graves often demanded that visitors submit to recording their heart beats for research purposes. Initially he worked with analog tape recorders, attaching speakers to people’s chests. After receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000, he bought a full suite of computers and loaded them with the LabView application, which he programmed to measure and document the wide range of sonic frequencies created by the human heart.Mr. Graves in 2018 in his lab at his Queens home. He programmed computers to measure and document the wide range of sonic frequencies created by human heart.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesHe then created a kind of electronic music out of the frequencies and sought to use this music to strengthen the natural heartbeat. In recent years he developed a partnership with Carlo Ventura, a cardiologist at the University of Bologna, doing research that demonstrated, they said, that his heart music could be used to stimulate stem cell growth as well.Late in life, Mr. Graves began creating sculptural works inspired by his research into the heart, and he was quickly embraced by the visual art world. In the months before he died, he was the subject of a far-ranging and well-received retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia.In a 2009 interview for All About Jazz, Mr. Graves said he had always sought to treat every second of the waking day as a chance for inquiry.“Don’t tell me how many years you’ve been doing something,” he said. “I want to know how completely you’re filling that time, how you’re spending each nanosecond.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
