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      Tyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest Year

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookTyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest YearAn artist straddling jazz and classical styles had perhaps the most exciting fall in new music.Tyshawn Sorey, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, conducting his song sequence “Cycles of My Being” in a filmed presentation by Opera Philadelphia.Credit…Dominic M. MercierJan. 1, 2021“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes”: Tyshawn Sorey wrote the string quartet that bears that title in 2018. But the sentiment is so tailor-made for the past year that when the JACK Quartet announced it would stream a performance of the work in December, I briefly forgot and assumed it was a premiere, created for these tumultuous yet static times.I should have known better. Mr. Sorey already had enough on his plate without cooking up a new quartet. The final two months of 2020 alone brought the premieres of a pair of concerto-ish works, one for violin and one for cello, as well as a fresh iteration of “Autoschediasms,” his series of conducted ensemble improvisations, with Alarm Will Sound.Mr. Sorey leading a rehearsal for Alarm Will Sound’s virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” one of his series of conducted ensemble improvisations.Credit…via Alarm Will SoundThat wasn’t all that happened for him since November. Mills College, where Mr. Sorey is composer in residence, streamed his solo piano set. Opera Philadelphia filmed a stark black-and-white version of his song sequence “Cycles of My Being,” about Black masculinity and racial hatred. JACK did “Everything Changes” for the Library of Congress, alongside the violin solo “For Conrad Tao.” Da Camera, of Houston, put online a 2016 performance of “Perle Noire,” a tribute to Josephine Baker that Mr. Sorey arranged with the soprano Julia Bullock. His most recent album, “Unfiltered,” was released early in March, days before lockdown.He was the composer of the year.That’s both coincidental — some of this burst of work was planned long ago — and not. Mr. Sorey has been on everyone’s radar at least since winning a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017, but the shock to the performing arts since late winter brought him suddenly to the fore as an artist at the nexus of the music industry’s artistic and social concerns.Undefinable, he is appealing to almost everyone. He works at the blurry and productive boundary of improvised (“jazz”) and notated (“classical”) music, a composer who is also a performer. He is valuable to ensembles and institutions because of his versatility — he can do somber solos as well as large-scale vocal works. And he is Black, at a time when those ensembles and institutions are desperate to belatedly address the racial representation in their programming.From left: Mr. Sorey, the soprano Julia Bullock and the flutist Alice Teyssier in Da Camera’s presentation of “Perle Noire,” inspired by Josephine Baker’s life and work.Credit…Ben DoyleHe’s in such demand, and has had so much success, that the trolls have come for him, dragging him on Facebook for the over-the-topness of the biography on his website. (Admittedly, it is a bit adjective-heavy: “celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery,” etc.)The style for which he has been best known since his 2007 album “That/Not,” his debut release as a bandleader, owes much to the composer Morton Feldman (1926-87): spare, spacious, glacially paced, often quiet yet often ominous, focusing the listener purely on the music’s unfolding. Mr. Sorey has called this vision that of an “imaginary landscape where pretty much nothing exists.”There is a direct line connecting “Permutations for Solo Piano,” a 43-minute study in serene resonance on that 2007 album, and the first of the two improvised solos in his recent Mills recital, filmed on an upright piano at his home. Even the far briefer second solo, more frenetic and bright, seems at the end to want to settle back into gloomy shadows.“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes,” a hovering, lightly dissonant 27-minute gauze, is in this vein, as is the new work for violin and orchestra, “For Marcos Balter,” premiered on Nov. 7 by Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Sorey insists in a program note that this is a “non-certo,” without a traditional concerto’s overt virtuosity, contrasting tempos or vivid interplay between soloist and ensemble.Xian Zhang conducting the violinist Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in Mr. Sorey’s “For Marcos Balter.”Credit…Sarah Smarch“For Marcos Balter” is even-keeled, steadily slow, a commune of players rather than a metaphorical give-and-take between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s deliberate long tones, like cautious exhalations, are met with spectral effects on the marimba. Quiet piano chords amplify quiet string chords. At the end, a timpani roll is muted to sound almost gonglike, with Ms. Koh’s violin a coppery tremble above it.It is pristine and elegant, but I prefer Mr. Sorey’s new cello-and-orchestra piece, “For Roscoe Mitchell,” premiered on Nov. 19 by Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony. There is more tension here between discreet, uneasy minimalism and an impulse toward lushness, fullness — more tension between the soloist receding and speaking his mind.The piece is less pristine than “For Marcos Balter,” and more restless. The ensemble backdrop is crystalline, misty sighs, while the solo cello line expands into melancholy arias without words; sometimes the tone is passionate, dark-hued nocturne, sometimes ethereal lullaby. “For Roscoe Mitchell” feels like a composer challenging himself while expressing himself confidently — testing the balance of introversion and extroversion, privacy and exposure.The cellist Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony perform the premiere of “For Roscoe Mitchell.”Credit…James Holt/Seattle SymphonyBut it’s not right to make it seem like an outlier in this respect; Mr. Sorey’s music has never been solely Feldmanian stillness. In Alarm Will Sound’s inspiringly well executed virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” Mr. Sorey conducted 17 players in five states over video chat, calm at his desk as he wrote symbols on cards and held them up to the camera, an obscure silent language that resulted in a low buzz of noise, varying in texture, and then, excitingly, a spacey, oozy section marked by keening bassoon tones.And he isn’t afraid of pushing into a kind of Neo-Romantic vibe. “Cycles of My Being,” featuring the tenor Lawrence Brownlee and texts by the poet Terrance Hayes, nods to the ardently declarative mid-20th-century American art songs of Samuel Barber and Lee Hoiby, just as “Perle Noire” features, near the end, a sweetly mournful instrumental hymn out of Copland.“Cycles,” which felt turgid when I heard it in a voice-and-piano version three years ago, bloomed in Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of the original instrumentation, which adds a couple of energizing strings and a wailing clarinet. And after a year of protests, what seemed in 2018 like stiffness — in both texts and music — now seems more implacable strength. (Opera Philadelphia presents yet another Sorey premiere, “Save the Boys,” with the countertenor John Holiday, on Feb. 12.)The cellist Khari Joyner playing in “Cycles of My Being.”Credit…Dominic M. MercierThe violinist Randall Goosby.Credit…Dominic M. Mercier“Perle Noire” still strikes me as the best of Sorey. Turning Josephine Baker’s lively numbers into unresolved meditations, here is both suave, jazzy swing and glacial expanse, an exploration of race and identity that is ultimately undecided — a mood of endless disappointment and endless wishing. (“My father, how long,” Ms. Bullock intones again and again near the end.)In works this strong, the extravagant praise for which some have ribbed Mr. Sorey on social media — that biography, for one, or the JACK Quartet lauding “the knife’s-edge precision of Sorey’s chess-master mind” — feels justified. And, anyway, isn’t it a relief to talk about a 40-year-old composer with the immoderate enthusiasm we generally reserve for the pillars of the classical canon?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jazz Onscreen, Depicted by Black Filmmakers at Last

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookJazz Onscreen, Depicted by Black Filmmakers at Last“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Sylvie’s Love” and “Soul” understand the music and its place in African-American life, a welcome break with Hollywood history.Hitting the right notes: The pianist Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) playing in a combo led by a saxophonist (Angela Bassett) in “Soul.”Credit…Disney Pixar, via Associated PressDec. 29, 2020, 1:33 p.m. ETMidway through “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the new Netflix drama based on August Wilson’s acclaimed stage play, the title character drifts into a monologue. “White folk don’t understand about the blues,” muses Rainey (Viola Davis), an innovator at the crossroads of blues and jazz with an unbending faith in her own expressive engine.“They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there,” she says as she readies herself to record in a Chicago studio in 1927. “They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better, you sing because that’s your way of understanding life.”Time seems to roll to a stop as Rainey speaks. The divide between her words and what white society is ready to hear lays itself out wide before us. That, you realize, is the fertile space where her music exists — an ungoverned territory, too filled with spirit, expression and abstention for politics and law to interfere.But maybe this scene is only so startling because of how rare its kind has been throughout film history. The movies, with few exceptions, have hardly ever told the story of jazz through the lens of Black life.Now, inexcusably late, that is beginning to change.Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) views her music as a way to understand life.Credit…David Lee/NetflixPiloted by the veteran theater director George C. Wolfe, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is one of three feature films released this holiday season that center on jazz and blues; all were made by Black directors or co-directors. The other two are New York City stories: “Sylvie’s Love,” by Eugene Ashe, a midcentury romance between a young jazz saxophonist and an up-and-coming TV producer, and “Soul,” a Pixar feature directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Kemp Powers that uses a pianist’s near-death experience to pry open questions about inspiration, compassion and how we all navigate life’s endless counterpoint between frustration and resilience.The films present Black protagonists in bloom — musically, visually, thematically — giving these characters a dimensionality and a depth that reflects the music itself. It calls to mind Toni Morrison’s explanation for why she wrote “Jazz,” her 1992 novel: She wanted to explore the changes to African-American life wrought by the Great Migration — changes, she later wrote, “made abundantly clear in the music.”The new films outrun many, though not all, of the issues dogging jazz movies past, which have historically done a better job contouring the limitations of the white gaze than showing where the music springs from or its power to transcend. White listening and patronage don’t really enter these new films’ narratives as anything other than a distraction or necessary inconvenience.A jazz musician lands in a relationship that ultimately works in “Sylvie’s Love,” starring Nnamdi Asomugha and Tessa Thompson. Credit…Amazon StudiosEarlier this year, the critic Kevin Whitehead published “Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film,” a survey of jazz’s long history on the silver screen. As he notes, jazz and cinema grew up together in the interwar period. But in those years and well beyond, Whitehead writes, the movies consistently whitewashed jazz history: “In film after film, African-Americans, who invented the music, get pushed to the margins when white characters don’t nudge them off screen altogether.”It was true of “New Orleans,” a 1947 film starring Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday that was supposed to be about Armstrong’s rise but was rewritten, at the behest of its producers, to put a tale of white romance at the center. It was true of “Paris Blues,” a 1961 vehicle for Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, based on a novel about two jazz musicians’ interracial love affairs; that key element, however, was more or less erased in the screenplay. Ultimately the movie is about the struggle of Newman’s trombonist, Ram, to convince himself and others that jazz is worthy of his obsession. He insists that a career as an improvising musician requires such singular devotion that he won’t be able to sustain a relationship.In the past few years, jazz has shown up onscreen most prominently in the work of Damien Chazelle. His “Whiplash” (2014) and “La La Land” (2016) tell the stories of young white men who, like Ram, are torturously committed to playing jazz and the feeling of excellence it gives them. In these movies, jazz is a challenge and an albatross. But in “Sylvie’s Love,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “Soul,” the music is more a salve: a river of possibility running through a hostile country, and — as Rainey says in Wilson’s script — simply the language of life.In “Whiplash,” Miles Teller plays a driven drummer being pushed by J.K. Simmons’s relentless teacher.Credit…Daniel McFadden/Sony Pictures Classics“Whiplash” focuses on the relationship between a demonic music teacher (played by J.K. Simmons in an Oscar-winning performance) and his most committed young student, Andrew (Miles Teller), who is driven by the desire to become a master drummer. The film offers a glimpse into jazz’s current afterlife in conservatories, where students learn its language through charts and theoretical frameworks, but most teachers give little attention to the spiritual or social makings of the music. Here again, we come up against the slightly misogynistic — and deeply depressing — idea that devotion to the music can’t coexist with romantic love and care: Andrew’s dating conduct is disastrous, and he proudly explains that it’s because of the music.“La La Land” follows a pianist, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), who’s a few years out of music school. At the start, he’s seen dyspeptically punching the tape deck in his convertible, trying to memorize the notes on a Thelonious Monk recording as if they’re times tables. He views himself as a guardian of jazz’s past glories, and he’s committed to opening a club that will preserve what’s often framed as “pure” jazz. It’s a cultural legacy that, as a fellow musician played by John Legend gently reminds him, has not exactly asked for his help — though that doesn’t deter him.There’s a stark difference between these characters’ ways of relating to jazz and those of, say, Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha), the saxophonist in “Sylvie’s Love,” or Joe, the pianist in “Soul.” As Sylvie watches Robert play, she’s seeing him settle into himself deeply. There’s no gap between who he is on and offstage, except that he may be freer up there. Performing doesn’t become an unhealthy obsession; it’s life.While “Sylvie’s Love” hinges on a “Paris Blues”-like tension between art and romance, the two are ultimately able to coexist. Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990) and “Crooklyn” (1994) got halfway there, showing what it looks like for jazz musicians to have loving marriages. (Lee, whose father is a jazz musician, does not make it seem easy. But possible? Yes.) “Sylvie’s Love” takes that conflict and melts it away, as a great screen romance can.In “Soul,” Joe says that “the tune is just an excuse to bring out the you.”Credit…Disney Pixar, via Associated PressOn many levels, the most expansive and affecting of the new jazz films is “Soul.” A pianist and middle-school band teacher, Joe, is on the brink of death when his spirit sneaks into the Great Before, where uninitiated souls prepare to enter bodies upon birth. There he meets 22, a recalcitrant soul whom the powers that be have failed to coax into a human body.In his classroom, Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) preaches the glories of jazz improvisation, drawing on a true story that the famed pianist Jon Batiste, who ghosted the music that Joe plays, had told the movie’s director, Docter, and co-director, Powers. “This is the moment where I fell in love with jazz,” Joe says, recalling the first time he stepped into a jazz club as a kid. He caresses the piano keys as he speaks. “Listen to that!” he says. “See, the tune is just an excuse to bring out the you.”After an accident lands Joe in intensive care and his soul drifts out of his body, he and 22 hatch a plan to get him back to life. All souls, he comes to find out, need a “spark” that will touch off their passion and guide them through life. He knows immediately that his is playing the piano. That, he says, is his purpose in life. But one of the spiritual guides-cum-counselors that populate the Great Before (all named Jerry) quickly sets him straight. “We don’t assign purposes,” this Jerry says. “Where did you get that idea? A spark isn’t a soul’s purpose. Oh, you mentors and your passions — your ‘purposes,’ your meanings of life! So basic.”Their conversation is left wonderfully open-ended. But the point becomes clear, subtle as it is: Above meaning, above purpose, above any means to an end, there’s just life. Which is to say, music.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Pixar’s ‘Soul’ Animates Jazz

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Pixar’s ‘Soul’ Animates JazzA look at the ways filmmakers and musicians collaborated to present an accurate view of players’ artistry.Concept art from the movie. The filmmakers consulted several players and worked with the pianist Jon Batiste to convey jazz musicianship.Credit…Pixar/DisneyPublished More

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      Tony Rice, Bluegrass Innovator With a Guitar Pick, Dies at 69

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTony Rice, Bluegrass Innovator With a Guitar Pick, Dies at 69The nimble king of flatpicking had enormous influence on a host of prominent musicians. And he could sing, too, until he could no longer.Tony Rice in about 2000. “I don’t know if a person can make anything more beautiful” than his guitar playing, the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell said.Credit…Stephen A. Ide/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesDec. 28, 2020Updated 6:26 p.m. ETTony Rice, an immensely influential singer and guitarist in bluegrass and in the new acoustic music circles that grew up around it, died on Saturday at his home in Reidsville, N.C. He was 69.The International Bluegrass Music Association confirmed his death. No cause was specified.“Tony Rice was the king of the flatpicked flattop guitar,” the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell said on Twitter. “His influence cannot possibly be overstated.”Mr. Isbell was referring to what is commonly known as flatpicking, a technique that involves striking a guitar’s strings with a pick or plectrum instead of with the fingers. Inspired by the forceful fretwork of the pioneering bluegrass bandleader Jimmy Martin, Mr. Rice’s flatpicking was singularly nimble and expressive.“I don’t know if a person can make anything more beautiful,” Mr. Isbell went on to say in his tweet, describing Mr. Rice’s fluid, percussive playing, in which feeling, whether expressed harmonically or melodically, took precedence over flash.Mr. Rice left his mark on a host of prominent musicians, including his fellow newgrass innovators Mark O’Connor and Béla Fleck, acoustic music inheritors like Chris Thile and Alison Krauss, and his flat-picking disciples Bryan Sutton and Josh Williams.“There’s no way it can ever go back to what it was before him,” Ms. Krauss said of bluegrass in an interview with The New York Times Magazine for a profile of Mr. Rice in 2014. She was barely a teenager when Mr. Rice first invited her onstage to play with him.Starting in the 1970s with his work with the group J.D. Crowe and the New South, Mr. Rice built bridges that spanned traditional bluegrass, ’60s folk songs, jazz improvisation, classical music and singer-songwriter pop.He was a catalyst for the newgrass movement, in which bands broke with bluegrass tradition by drawing on pop and rock sources for inspiration, employing a more improvisational approach to performing and incorporating previously untapped instrumentation like electric guitar and drums.The bluegrass association named him instrumental performer of the year six times, and in 1983 he received a Grammy Award for best country instrumental performance for “Fireball,” a track recorded with J.D. Crowe and the New South.Not only a virtuoso guitarist, Mr. Rice was also a gifted singer and master of phrasing. His rich, supple baritone was as equally at home singing lead in three-part bluegrass harmony arrangements as it was adapting the troubadour ballads of Gordon Lightfoot under the newgrass banner.But his performing career was abruptly cut short beginning in 1994, when he learned he had muscle tension dysphonia, a severe vocal disorder that robbed him of the ability to sing in public and compromised his speaking voice. He would not sing onstage or address an audience again until 2013, when the bluegrass association inducted him into the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame.Not long after that diagnosis, Mr. Rice learned that he also had lateral epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, which made it too painful for him to play the guitar in public anymore as well.A 1975 album by the band J.D. Crowe and the New South, with Mr. Rice on guitar, modernized bluegrass in ways that shaped the music into the 21st century. From left, J.D. Crowe, Ricky Scaggs, Bob Slone and Mr. Rice. David Anthony Rice was born on June 8, 1951, in Danville, Va., one of four boys of Herbert Hoover Rice and Dorothy (Poindexter) Rice, who was known as Louise. His father was a welder and an amateur musician, his mother a millworker and a homemaker. It was her idea to call her son Tony, after her favorite actor, Tony Curtis. Everyone in the Rice household played or sang bluegrass music.After the family moved to the Los Angeles area in the mid-1950s, Mr. Rice’s father formed a bluegrass band called the Golden State Boys. The group, which recorded several singles, included two of his mother’s brothers as well as a young Del McCoury at one point, before he became a bluegrass master in his own right. The band inspired Mr. Rice and his brothers to form a bluegrass outfit of their own, the Haphazards.The Haphazards sometimes shared local bills with the Kentucky Colonels, a band whose dazzling guitarist, Clarence White — a future member of the rock band the Byrds — had a profound influence on Mr. Rice’s early development as a musician.(Mr. White was killed by a drunken driver while loading equipment after a show in 1973. Afterward, Mr. Rice tracked down Mr. White’s 1935 Martin D-28 herringbone guitar, which he purchased from its new owner in 1975 for $550. Restoring the guitar, he started performing with it, affectionately calling it the “Antique.”)The Rice family moved from California to Florida in 1965 and then to various cities in the Southeast, where Mr. Rice’s father pursued one welding opportunity after another.He also drank, creating a tumultuous home life that forced Mr. Rice to move out when he was 17. Tony Rice struggled with alcohol himself but, by his account, had been sober since 2001.Dropping out of high school, Mr. Rice bounced among relatives’ homes before moving to Louisville in 1970 to join the Bluegrass Alliance. The band’s members, including the mandolinist Sam Bush, went on to form much of the founding nucleus of the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival.Mr. Rice joined J.D. Crowe and the New South in 1971. Three years later, Mr. Skaggs signed on as well, replacing Mr. Rice’s brother Larry in the group. The dobro player Jerry Douglas also become a member of the New South at this time. In 1975, the band released an album titled simply “J.D. Crowe and the New South” (but commonly known by its first track, “Old Home Place”), which modernized bluegrass in ways that shaped the music into the 21st century.Mr. Rice, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Skaggs left the group in August 1975. Mr. Rice then moved to San Francisco and helped found the David Grisman Quartet, a trailblazing ensemble featuring bluegrass instrumentation that fused classical and jazz sensibilities to create what Mr. Grisman called “dawg music.”“The music laid out in front of me was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Mr. Rice told The Times Magazine in 2014. “At first I thought I couldn’t learn it. The only thing that saved me was that I always loved the sound of acoustic, small-group, modern jazz.”After four years with Mr. Grisman, Mr. Rice established his own group, the Tony Rice Unit, which was acclaimed for its experimental, jazz-steeped approach to bluegrass as heard on albums like “Manzanita” (1979) and “Mar West” (1980).Mr. Rice also recorded more mainstream and traditional material for numerous other projects, including a six-volume series of albums that paid tribute to the formative bluegrass of the 1950s.“Skaggs & Rice” (1980), another history-conscious album, featured Mr. Skaggs and Mr. Rice singing seamless, soulful harmonies in homage to the brother duos prevalent in the pre-bluegrass era.Mr. Rice performing in 2009 with his band the Tony Rice Unit at the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee. Credit…Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMost of Mr. Rice’s releases after 1994, the year he got his vocal disorder diagnosis, were instrumental projects or collaborations, like “The Pizza Tapes,” a studio album with Mr. Grisman and Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead fame; Mr. Rice contributed acoustic guitar.His survivors include his wife of 30 years, Pamela Hodges Rice, and his brothers Ron and Wyatt. His brother Larry died in 2006.Mr. Rice cut a dashing figure onstage, complete with finely tailored suits and a dignified bearing, as if to gainsay the lack of respect bluegrass has sometimes received outside the South, owing to its hardscrabble rural beginnings.Mr. Rice was as conscious of these cultural dynamics as he was of the limitless possibilities he saw in bluegrass music.“Maybe the reason I dress like I do goes back to the day where, if you went out on the street, unless you had some sort of ditch-digging job to do, you made an effort to not look like a slob,” he told his biographers, Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, for “Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story” (2010).“Back in the heyday of Miles Davis’s most famous bands, you wouldn’t have seen Miles without a tailored suit on,” he went on. “My musical heroes wear suits.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Whose Music Melded Genres, Dies at 75

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Whose Music Melded Genres, Dies at 75A creator of modern music as a teenager, he later juggled a breezy pop sensibility with conceptual rigor. He was an important collaborator with the composer Robert Ashley.The pianist and composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny in performance at La MaMa in Manhattan in 2004.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesDec. 23, 2020, 5:58 p.m. ETRobert Sheff, a composer and pianist who worked under the name “Blue” Gene Tyranny as a solo performer and a collaborator with artists including Iggy Pop, the composer Robert Ashley and the jazz composer and arranger Carla Bley, died on Dec. 12 in hospice care in Long Island City, Queens. He was 75.The cause was complications of diabetes, Tommy McCutchon, the founder of the record label Unseen Worlds, which released several albums by Mr. Tyranny, said in an email.His memorable pseudonym, coined during his brief stint with Iggy and the Stooges, was derived partly from Jean, his adoptive mother’s middle name. It also referred to what he called “the tyranny of the genes” — a predisposition to being “strongly overcome by emotion,” he said in “Just for the Record: Conversations With and About ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny,” a documentary film directed by David Bernabo released in September.Music, Mr. Tyranny explained in the film, was a source of solace, but also a means “of deeply informing myself that there’s another world. Music is my way of being in the world.”A master at the keyboard and an eclectic composer who deftly balanced conceptual rigor with breezy pop sounds, Mr. Tyranny was active in modern music as early as his teenage years.From curating contemporary-music concerts in high school, he went on to participate in the groundbreaking and influential Once Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, Mich., during the 1960s. He taught classes and worked as a recording-studio technician at Mills College, an experimental-music hotbed in Oakland, Calif., from 1971 to 1982. Arriving in New York City in 1983, Mr. Tyranny worked with Mr. Ashley, Laurie Anderson and Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, while also composing his own works.Mr. Tyranny, who had been living in Long Island City since 2002, is survived by a brother, Richard Sheff, and three half siblings, William Gantic Jr., Vickie Murray and Justa Calvin.He was born Joseph Gantic to William and Eleanor Gantic on Jan. 1, 1945, in San Antonio. When Mr. Gantic, an Army paratrooper, was reported missing in action in Southeast Asia during World War II, Mr. Tyranny related in “Just for the Record,” his wife gave up their infant child for adoption.He was adopted 11 months later by Meyer and Dorothy Jean Sheff, who ran a clothing shop in downtown San Antonio, and renamed Robert Nathan Sheff. He began piano studies early in his childhood and took his first composition lessons at 11. By high school, he was performing avant-garde works by composers like Charles Ives and John Cage in an experimental-music series he jointly curated with the composer Philip Krumm at the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio.Invited by the Juilliard School to audition as a performance major, he demurred, insisting even then on being viewed as a composer. Instead he went to Ann Arbor, where he lived and worked from 1962 to 1971 and participated in the Once Festival. Mr. Tyranny’s works from this period, like “Ballad” (1960) and “Diotima” (1963), were abstract and fidgety, chiefly concerned with timbral contrast.Mr. Tyranny preparing for a concert at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 2006.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn 1965, Mr. Tyranny helped found the Prime Movers Blues Band, whose drummer, James Osterberg Jr., would achieve fame as the proto-punk singer-songwriter Iggy Pop. Another founder, Michael Erlewine, later created AllMusic, which became a popular reference website to which Mr. Tyranny contributed, occasionally writing about his own work.In the late 1960s, Mr. Osterberg transformed himself into Iggy Pop and formed the Stooges. After releasing the album “Raw Power” in 1973, he invited his former bandmate to join him on tour. Mr. Tyranny accepted, performing with red LED lights woven into his hair.He also played in the bands of jazz composers like Bill Dixon and Ms. Bley, and in 1976 explored the intersections of contemporary classical music and rock with Mr. Gordon in a groundbreaking concert series in Berkeley, Calif., documented on a 2019 Unseen Worlds release, “Trust in Rock.”An association with Mr. Ashley, whom Mr. Tyranny had met in Ann Arbor and then followed to Mills College, flourished into a close, enduring collaboration. Mr. Tyranny’s best-known work likely was the role he created in “Perfect Lives (Private Parts)” (1976-83), Mr. Ashley’s landmark opera, conceived and eventually presented as a television series: Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player. Their relationship was deeply collaborative. Presented by Mr. Ashley with a blueprint indicating keys and metric structures, Mr. Tyranny filled in harmonies and supplied playfully ornate piano writing.“Blue and Bob had this symbiotic relationship from back in Ann Arbor,” Mr. Gordon, who also participated in the creation of “Perfect Lives,” said in a phone interview. “The character Buddy is like the avatar for the music of ‘Blue’ Gene.”“What we commonly recognize as music in ‘Perfect Lives’ was ‘Blue’ Gene’s,” Mr. Gordon explained, “but the overall composition was Bob’s.” Mr. Tyranny would contribute in different ways to later Ashley operas, including “Dust” (1998) and “Celestial Excursions” (2003).In his own music, much of which he recorded for the Lovely Music label, Mr. Tyranny moved from early efforts with graphic notation and magnetic tape to compositions that drew from popular styles. Some selections on his debut solo album, “Out of the Blue” (1978), like “Leading a Double Life,” were essentially pop songs. “A Letter From Home,” which closed that album, mixed found sounds and dreamy keyboards with an epistolary text, spoken and sung, ranging from the mundane to the philosophical.He worked extensively with electronics and labored throughout the 1990s on “The Driver’s Son,” which he termed an “audio storyboard.” A realization of that piece, a questing monodrama set to lush timbres and bubbly rhythms, will be included in “Degrees of Freedom Found,” a six-CD boxed set of unreleased Tyranny recordings due on Unseen Worlds in the spring. Mr. Tyranny, who lost his eyesight in 2009 and gave up performing after 2016, helped to compile the set, hoping to give his disparate canon a coherent shape.Mr. Tyranny’s compositions divided critical response. “To this taste, Mr. Tyranny’s work too often skirts the trivial,” John Rockwell wrote in a 1987 New York Times review. But Ben Ratliff, in a 2012 Times review of the last new recording issued during Mr. Tyranny’s life, “Detours,” offered a different view: “Mr. Sheff represents a lot of different American energies.”He added, “He does not stint on beautiful things — major arpeggios, soul-chord progressions, lines that flow and breathe — and his keyboard touch is rounded and gorgeous, a feeling you remember.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Pop and Jazz Wrapped Up the Past in 16 Boxed Sets

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Pop and Jazz Wrapped Up the Past in 16 Boxed SetsReissues and deluxe editions of albums by PJ Harvey, Lil Peep, Charles Mingus and others provide fresh looks at familiar works, and the creative processes that birthed them.Iggy Pop’s “The Bowie Years” revisits the two albums David Bowie produced for the Stooges frontman, “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life,” with a host of extras.Credit…UMeJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Giovanni Russonello and Dec. 23, 2020Neneh Cherry, ‘Raw Like Sushi (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’(Virgin/UMC; three CDs, $63.89; three LPs, $75.98)Alive with isolated, collagelike layers and exuberant ad-libs (“Now, the tambourine!”), the Swedish pop artist and rapper Neneh Cherry’s cult classic debut album, “Raw Like Sushi,” is a remixer’s dream. This 30th-anniversary set contains a vibrant remastered version of the original LP, along with two entire discs of imaginative remixes: Massive Attack transforms the synth ballad “Manchild” into a snaking, meditative groove, while the early hip-hop producer Arthur Baker reworks two different extended club mixes of Cherry’s ebullient hit “Buffalo Stance,” furthering its eternal cool. LINDSAY ZOLADZCredit…UMeCream, ‘Goodbye Tour Live 1968’(Polydor; four CDs, 66-page book, $69.98)Cream — Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass, Ginger Baker on drums — was a power trio of flashy virtuosos with big egos; it lasted only from 1966 to 1968. While its studio work was disciplined and cooperative, marrying blues to psychedelia, its live sets were improvisatory free-for-alls, with all three musicians goading one another and grappling for attention. This collection gathers three full California concerts from October 1968 along with Cream’s last show, Nov. 26 at the Royal Albert Hall; half of the tracks, including an entire San Diego concert, were previously unreleased. The nightly set list barely varies, but the performances are explosive jams — tempos shift (listen to the assorted “Crossroads”), vocal lines swerve and stretch, guitar solos take different paths each night. The California shows were carefully recorded, but with historic stupidity, the BBC filmed Cream’s last shows yet only captured the music in muddy, low-fi mono. Cream’s members didn’t think they played well at their farewell, and through the murk, that final show is full of wailing excess and rhythm-section overkill. But it deserved better preservation. JON PARELESBela Fleck, ‘Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions’(Craft; three CDs, one DVD, $49.99)The banjoist Bela Fleck visited Africa in 2005 with a film crew for a five-week trip to Mali, Gambia, Tanzania and Uganda, tracing the banjo’s African origins and collaborating with African musicians. The results were a documentary, “Throw Down Your Heart,” two albums of collaborations recorded in Africa and, in 2009, a tour with Toumani Diabaté, a Malian master of the harplike kora. Live recordings from the 2009 tour were released earlier this year as “The Ripple Effect,” a showcase for tradition-bridging melodies, flying fingers and shimmering plucked-string counterpoint. This box gathers them all, including a newly expanded version of the documentary. The whole project shows Fleck learning from every encounter and figuring out countless ways that his bright, speedy, bluegrass-rooted picking and runs can intertwine with African tunes and rhythms. PARELESCredit…UMePJ Harvey, ‘Dry — Demos’(Island; one CD, $13.98; one LP, $24.98)When a 22-year-old Polly Jean Harvey and her band released their sensual, earth-rumbling 1992 debut album, “Dry,” some listeners and critics regarded its songs as almost feral outpourings of spontaneous intensity. A recently released collection of demos proves, once and for all, they were remarkable and carefully constructed achievements of songcraft. Available for the first time as a stand-alone album, “Dry — Demos” is sparse, often consisting of just Harvey’s mesmeric voice and rhythmic stabs of guitar. But the bones of enduringly sturdy songs like “Dress,” “Sheela-Na-Gig” and “O Stella” are, impressively, already locked in place. As a finished product, “Dry” was hardly overproduced or polished, but the incredible artistic confidence of these demos brings the album’s elemental power, and Harvey’s songwriting gifts, into even greater clarity. ZOLADZElton John, ‘Jewel Box’(UMe/EMI; eight CDs in hardcover book, $109.80; four LP set “Deep Cuts Curated by Elton,” $89.98; three LP set “Rarities and B-Side Highlights,” $59.98; two LP set “And This Is Me…” $35.98)Elton John’s “Jewel Box” is at least three projects side by side; its vinyl versions make them available separately. For two CDs of “Deep Cuts,” John selects non-hit album tracks; he likes sad songs with dark lyrics, collaborations with his idols (Leon Russell, Little Richard) and music that evaded his usual reflexes. Three CDs of “Rarities 1965-71” — with five dozen previously unreleased songs — detail his songwriting apprenticeship with the lyricist Bernie Taupin, a good argument for Malcolm Gladwell’s proposition that expertise requires 10,000 hours of practice. At first they tried to write potential hits that were generic enough for others to cover; John once called them “pretty horrible.” The duo learned by obvious imitation, with near-miss mimicry of both British and American approaches: the Beatles, Motown, Phil Spector, country. They made and scrapped “Regimental Sgt. Zippo,” an album of pop psychedelia. Gradually, they homed in on a distinctive Elton John style: openhearted, big-voiced storytelling backed by two-fisted piano. Two more discs are housekeeping — an archive of B-sides and non-album tracks — and the final pair, “And This Is Me …” is a playlist of songs mentioned in John’s memoir, “Me” — which gives him a chance to end with his 2020 Oscar winner, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again.” PARELESLil Peep, ‘Crybaby’ and ‘Hellboy’(Lil Peep/AUTNMY; streaming services)Platforms change, their overlords get finicky, they get sold to conglomerates that might not respect the historical legacies they contain. Which is why it is crucial for artist catalogs that live in only one place online to be spread as far as possible. It’s a relief that the two key early Lil Peep albums, “Crybaby” and “Hellboy” (from 2016), have finally made it up from SoundCloud to other streaming services (fully cleared, with only minor tweaks). Lil Peep — who died in 2017 — was a critical syncretizer of emo and hip-hop: He was swaggering, dissolute and deeply broken, a bull’s-eye songwriter and a rangy singer and rapper. During this era, he finally figured out how all of those pieces fit together, especially on “Hellboy,” a pop masterpiece that pop just wasn’t ready for yet. JON CARAMANICACredit…Photo by Jochen Mönch, Design by Christopher Drukker‘Charles Mingus @ Bremen, 1964 & 1975’(Sunnyside; four CDs, $28.98)Charles Mingus was stubborn, self-righteous — and open to just about anything. When this bassist and composer gave his first concert in Germany in 1964, at the Radio Bremen studios, he was leading one of the finest bands of his career: a sextet that could carry a ton of weight while turning on a dime, like a dump truck made by Maserati. With Johnny Coles on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on reeds, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone, Jaki Byard on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums, the band followed Mingus’s plucky lead, leaping between Ellingtonian miniatures, bluesy hollers and extended avant-garde improv. The group’s now-legendary performances on that tour might well have represented a high-water mark. But when he returned to Bremen 11 years later, with a quintet, his penchant for misdirection and ludic sophistication had only grown stronger. Both shows are presented side-by-side in this four-CD set, which features remasters of the original radio source tapes. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOCredit…UMeCharlie Parker, ‘The Mercury & Clef 10-Inch LP Collection’(Verve; five LPs, 20-page booklet, $69.99)By the end of the 1940s, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was only a few years into his recorded career as a bandleader but he’d already turned jazz inside-out, contouring the next frontier in American modernism as one of bebop’s lead architects. The impresario and producer Norman Granz recognized Parker’s brilliance — and he saw the potential to broaden his appeal, by shining a softer spotlight on his lemon-cake tone and his richly coiled melodies. The 10-inch LPs that Parker recorded with Granz between 1949 and 1953, for the Mercury and Clef labels, offer portraits of the artist from many angles, including the steaming “Bird and Diz,” the only studio session to feature the Big Three of bebop (Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk); the gauzy orchestral fare of “Bird With Strings”; and “South of the Border,” mixing big-band jazz with Mexican and Afro-Caribbean styles. This boxed set features five newly remastered albums from that period, most of which have been out of print on vinyl since the ’60s. Faithful to their original format, the albums come on 10-inch discs, packaged with David Stone Martin’s now-classic artwork, while the booklet includes new essays from the pianist and jazz historian Ethan Iverson and the Grammy-winning writer David Ritz. RUSSONELLOCredit…UMeIggy Pop, ‘The Bowie Years’(Virgin; seven CDs, $99.98)In 1977, David Bowie restarted Iggy Pop’s career by producing two albums for him — “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life” — and joining Pop’s band on tour. Bowie admired Pop’s pure-id approach to songwriting and performing, but smoothed him out just a little — supplying some glam-rock-tinged backup — and spurred him onward, suggesting concepts and approaches. And the punk rock that Iggy and the Stooges had presaged nearly a decade earlier was taking hold in the United States. The alliance was fertile for both of them; Bowie would have a 1980s hit remaking their collaboration, “China Girl,” a song about acculturalization, imperialism and lust from “The Idiot.” This box includes the two studio albums, the howling 1978 live album “T.V. Eye” (with Bowie in the band on keyboard and backup vocals), a disc featuring rawer alternate mixes from the albums and three live Iggy concerts from 1977. Two of the live discs are low-fi and redundant, but a fierce 1977 set from the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland documents a telling rock moment. PARELESCredit…New West RecordsPylon, ‘Box’(New West; four LPs and 200-page hardcover book, $149.99; four CD version to be released in March 2021, $85.99)Formed in 1978 by art-school amateurs in Athens, Ga., Pylon made hardheaded, pioneering, danceable post-punk. Bass and drums staked out sinewy, deliberate, unswerving riffs. The guitar poked into interstices with pings or echoey chords or scratchy syncopation or dissonant counterpoint. Laced through the instrumental patterns, riding or defying them, were vocals by Vanessa Briscoe Hay: declaiming, rasping, chanting, confiding and yelling while she sang about daily life as a pragmatic revelation — and, onstage, moved like no one else. “Box,” on vinyl, includes Pylon’s first two albums, “Gyrate” (1980) and “Chomp” (1983), plus a disc of extras including Pylon’s brilliantly decisive first single, “Cool”/“Dub,” and a find: the band’s first recording, a vivid 1979 rehearsal tape that shows Pylon already fully self-defined. Pylon was very much of its time, akin to Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Bush Tetras and Pylon’s Athens predecessors and supporters, the B-52’s. But Briscoe Hay’s arresting voice and the music’s ruthless structural economy have made Pylon more than durable. PARELESCredit…Rhino RecordsLou Reed, ‘New York (Deluxe Edition)’(Rhino/Warner Bros.; three CDs, two LPs and one DVD, $89.98)Three decades after its release, Lou Reed’s midcareer 1989 opus, “New York,” retains a haunting present-tense resonance: “Halloween Parade” mourns West Village neighbors lost to an epidemic, “Last Great American Whale” frets about environmental collapse, and Trump and Giuliani even cavort through the appropriately titled “Sick of You.” This deluxe edition, released a year after the record’s 30th anniversary, features both a live album and a previously unreleased concert DVD. But its most revelatory additions are the small scraps of Reed’s “work tapes,” capturing such intimate moments as Reed figuring out the chord progression that would become the album’s hit “Dirty Blvd.,” or humming what the bass should sound like on a demo of “Endless Cycle.” Despite his shrugging exterior, these tapes show how deeply Reed cared about the details. ZOLADZCredit…Rhino RecordsThe Replacements, ‘Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)’(Rhino/Warner Bros.; three CDs and one LP, $64.98)Like their beloved Big Star, the Replacements were never quite in the right place at the right time — or maybe, whenever either band was on the brink of mainstream rock stardom, their self-destructive tendencies kicked in. Regardless, the Mats’s fifth album, “Pleased to Meet Me” from 1987, was at once their record company’s last push for success (see the echoing “Jimmy Iovine Remix” of the great single “Can’t Hardly Wait,” which, apparently, even the Midas-like producer couldn’t turn into a radio smash) and a spiritual communion with their underappreciated heroes (the group recorded the album at Big Star’s former Memphis stomping ground Ardent Studios, with their sometime producer Jim Dickinson). The resulting LP, naturally, was caught in the middle: It was too polished to ascend to the cult status of “Let It Be” from 1984, but too snarling and strange to be a hit. This fantastic and exhaustive deluxe edition (featuring 29 never-before-released tracks), though, finally puts it in its proper context: Raw and unvarnished demos (including the final recordings made with their original guitarist, Bob Stinson) restore these songs’ barbed, punk energy, while a rich spoil of melodic leftovers reassert this period as a golden age of Paul Westerberg’s songwriting. ZOLADZCredit…Janette BeckmanStretch and Bobbito, ‘Freestyle EP 1’(89tec9/Uprising Music; streaming services)For some mid-90s New York rap obsessives, the ne plus ultra collaboration is “The What,” by the Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man. For others, it’s “Brooklyn’s Finest,” from the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z. The connoisseur’s choice, however, might be traced back to the night in February 1995, that Big L brought Jay-Z up to the Columbia University radio station WKCR-FM for “The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show,” then the definitive proving ground for the city’s MCs. The result is startlingly good — an excellent showing from Jay-Z, still shaking loose of the twisty syllables he leaned on in his earliest recordings. But Big L — who was killed in 1999 — is the radiant star here, delivering left-field boasts in ice-cold arrangements. Previously available only on hard-to-find cassette releases and online rips, it appears here in an official release for the first time (though sadly without the between-verse banter). It’s one of three unearthed freestyles on this EP — the others are a Method Man and Ghostface Killah team-up, and also the Notorious B.I.G.’s first radio freestyle, a hellacious rumble from 1992. CARAMANICACredit…Cash MoneyVarious Artists, ‘Cash Money: The Instrumentals’(Cash Money/UMe; two LPs for $24.98 or streaming services)The beats used for many of the late 1990s breakout hits of New Orleans’s Cash Money Records were head spinners, one after the next — Juvenile’s fleet, squelchy “Ha,” B.G.’s prismatic “Bling Bling,” Lil Wayne’s chaotic “Tha Block Is Hot.” This compilation gathers those and many others — made mostly by the in-house maestro Mannie Fresh — for a set that lands somewhere between bounce futurism and avant-garde techno. It’s an expanded version of the label’s “Platinum Instrumentals” compilation from 2000, but a less disciplined one, too — the sleepy funk of “Shooter” is wildly out of place here, one of a few more straightforward Lil Wayne tracks that would have been better left off, inconsistent with the pure digital esoterica that made the label impossible to emulate. CARAMANICAVarious Artists, ‘Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music’(Dust-to-Digital; 100 MP3s and liner notes, $35)Excavated Shellac is a website created by Jonathan Ward, a collector of 78-rpm recordings of global music who shares his finds and his research. The digital collection “Excavated Shellac” unearths 100 of his previously unavailable discoveries from nearly as many countries, most released only regionally and long ago. They are extensively annotated, translating lyrics and delving into musicians’ biographies and each country’s recording history. It’s a trove of untamed three-minute dispatches from distant places and eras, full of raw voices, rough-hewed virtuosity and startling structures. Try the ferocious fiddle playing of Picoglu Osman from Turkey, the blaring reeds and scurrying patalla (xylophone) momentum of Sein Bo Tint from what was then Burma, or the accelerating, almost bluegrassy picking and singing of Tiwonoh and Sandikola, from Malawi. Nearly all the tracks are rowdy; as Ward’s notes explain, disc recording favored performers who were loud. PARELESCredit…David GahrGillian Welch, ‘Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs’(Acony; three CDs and 66-page book, $49.99; three LPs and 66-page book, $79.99)The four dozen songs on this collection were all unreleased until this year — they were recorded by the modern folk hero Gillian Welch and her longtime partner, David Rawlings, in a fevered stretch to fulfill a publishing contract in 2002. And yet these are the sketches of a patient perfectionist. Like most of the music Welch put out in that essential era, these songs are marked by the omniscience she builds with small details and her studiously unhurried voice (bolstered by Rawlings’s sturdy sweetness — see especially “I Only Cry When You Go”). It is a torrent of material from an artist who’s long communicated by trickle. And given the music’s elemental beauty, it seems absurd that it languished for all this time, all but unrecorded by others. CARAMANICAAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Stanley Crouch Was a Critic Who Didn’t Hold Back Punches

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      I.

      He is 73, with a long, woolly beard, like someone’s version of Father Time. He lives in a hand-built shack with no electricity or running water, nearly eight miles up a forgotten dirt road in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, a mile from a creek named for a long-ago settler — Waddell — who was killed by a grizzly bear. They call him a hermit, a holy man, the Unabomber. He could care less. On the night of Sunday, Aug. 16, 2020, a heat wave with temperatures well above 100 degrees brings a rolling cloud from the ocean as the old man sleeps under a canopy of redwood trees. When the lightning comes, it sizzles and snakes, consummates with dry earth.

      II.

      We all start somewhere — and end somewhere too. But how did he come to be here, feeding the jays and squirrels each day, under the redwoods? His vow of silence, one he takes in his early 30s, makes him an enigma to others, for silence is one of our great American fears. But still, he hasn’t annulled himself. He has a history too, born a middle child, to a mother of blighted artistic ambitions and a father who was a traveling salesman, with two sisters, living in a comfortable Sears Roebuck house in Columbus, Ohio. He loved camping and fishing with his father. He loved animals, rabbits first. Patiently played with his younger sister, Jill. Was gravely ill at one point and probably concussed himself after hitting a tree with his sled. He went to college and rambunctiously flunked out. He went into the military, in 1967, and was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam, growing to hate authority figures and command chains. His inheritance was an anger that kept growing; almost a substance: even now it smolders and ignites.

      III.

      By the next day — Monday, Aug. 17 — the lightning has set the grasses and underbrush on fire in the mountains around Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Within miles of these growing fires lives the old man in the remote enclave of Last Chance, in a gully beneath the ridge. He has no plumbing and stores his supplies in plastic barrels. Once a month, he rents a car in town, in Santa Cruz, to procure his supplies, including 800 pounds of seed to feed the animals, and to visit Windy, a friend’s 43-year-old daughter whom he helped raise. Until recently, she had never heard his voice as he took the vow of silence back when Jimmy Carter was president, communicating by chalkboard and jottings on paper. She has only ever known him as that wise, constant presence in her life. “The Bay Area is made up of many microclimates, and the one I am living in is particularly nice,” he tells Windy in one of his letters. “I don’t have the heat of inland or the fog of the coast. So I’ll stay here as long as possible.” The spot fires, left unfettered, now grow and begin to converge. In some places there is 50, 100 years’ worth of fuel on the ground. Though there has been no call for evacuation yet, you can smell the smoke. The forecast projects more heat and wind.

      IV.

      Booze, weed, the Sixties. Tad Jones, for that’s his name when people use it, lives in a school bus, on Sanibel Island in Florida, with a girlfriend. After they split, he lives for a time with his other sister, in her barn. His skin turns a green pallor perhaps because of “alcohol mixed with pharmacology,” as Jill puts it today. But at some point, he lifts himself up and turns himself into a seeker. He finds yoga, which helps with his scoliosis, and a guru: Baba Hari Dass, an Indian yoga master he follows to California. Like his guru, he renounces all but essential material possessions — and seemingly sex too — and takes a vow of silence. Baba Hari Dass wrote: “One who doesn’t want to possess any thing possesses every thing.”

      V.

      At first it’s hard for the Jones family to understand this retreat, his wanton rejection of American society, but he keeps repeating his mantra: He doesn’t want to inflict his anger on the world. Or his growing paranoia. “How uncalm he was,” Jill recalls. “If he was outside his realm, he was overwhelmed.” He carries a knife for protection; he’s careful to wear neutral clothing so as not to be confused for a gang member. He lets his beard grow out, until eventually it reaches his knees. He braids it and often rolls it up, then unfurls it to the surprise of new acquaintances. He lives inside the trunk of a redwood tree, in time with it, in opposition to industrial time, replicating those happy camping trips with his father. In the 1980s he moves out to Last Chance, a back-to-the-land community fed by cold springs and an August barn dance. His work here is to become part of the fauna, to enter the understory, to encode himself in nature. He writes in a letter that the skunks brush up against his legs, not once thinking to spray.

      VI.

      We could use more contemplation, more self-reflection. America — us — we could use more silence. As radical as it seems to subtract yourself from society, to cancel your own voice, and add yourself to the forest floor, the old man, it turns out, is not really radical. He likes the band Rush and the movie “The Big Lebowski.” He reads National Geographic, articles about faraway places and these extreme changes to our environment. The wind direction shifts now from the northwest to the northeast, and the fire leaps into alignment with the topography, lighting duff and branches: More than 43,000 acres are about to burn in a matter of hours.

      VII.

      Windy, who adores him, saves all his letters, which are full of advice written in his big loopy handwriting: here’s how to interact with your grandparents, here are the pros and cons of having children. (“[T]he earth doesn’t need any more people, so if you do give birth you want to give the child a reasonable chance to succeed.”) He tells her about the Mexican radio station he listens to, with the woman’s voice singing so lovely. He cracks slightly profane jokes about Donald Trump. He says he has set redwood trunks in ascending order to a little pet entrance to the shack so the cat can keep safe from predators. When he’s overrun by arthritis — his knees and shoulders and hips, walking with two metal canes — he goes to town to see the doctor, to stay with Windy. “Word is the crabs are meaty and good,” he writes her. “I am including a hunny B” — a hundred-dollar bill — “to buy the dinner.” Guinness beer too. He writes, “Remember I am speaking/talking now so don’t be shocked.”

      VIII.

      After nearly 40 years of silence, the old man starts talking again, at first to communicate with the doctors. It’s 2017, and he still swears like a sailor. Jill, his sister, speaks to him over Windy’s cellphone, and the first words out of his mouth are “How do you make this goddamn thing work?” It’s as if they’ve never missed a beat: he still has that mellifluous, bemused voice, that Midwestern accent. And that hair-trigger temper. As the fire encroaches, on that Tuesday, he buys feed for the animals in town — then returns to Last Chance. The wind is blowing, harder now, created by the fire itself, it seems. A community is its own ecosystem — like a forest — connected through pulses, half aerial, half subterranean. Every person, every cell, communicates in a chain. Still, almost no one here knows the old man’s last name. The fire conjoins and rages, from oak to oak, redwood to redwood. In the mesmerizing face of it, your own anger isn’t much. Even by 8 p.m. no evacuation order has been issued by the state. The residents of Last Chance, over 100 in all, think they’re safe. Only when the smoke blows clear does the fire marshal see wild flames from the ridge, the fine, dry leaf matter catching hot. By the time the conflagration jumps Waddell Creek, she take matters into her own hands, no longer waiting for state officials to raise the alarm, and the evacuation plan goes into effect.

      IX.

      By about 9:30 p.m., all but three people are accounted for at the gate that leads out of Last Chance. The old man — the hermit, the holy man, Unabomber — tries to drive the road out in his rented minivan, but fire suddenly blocks his way. He turns, and drives back, but now more fire blocks the back way. It’s as if napalm has been dropped on the forest, everything lit and storming. Fire personnel are nowhere to be seen. One resident spends the night in a field, fighting off rivers of sparks; another takes to a pond in his backyard, breathing out of a hose to escape the inferno. By 10:30 p.m. Last Chance has mostly burned to the ground. In the days after, only one person remains unaccounted for.

      X.

      Later comes the recovery mission. People with chain saws, an incursion to reclaim what’s left of home. Many of the redwoods are still burning inside and will die later. The old man is found — his bones, his ashes — near his two metal canes and the minivan not far from his shack, next to a scorched ravine, the fire so hot the van’s windows have been vaporized. Jill says there’s a way of seeing her brother’s demise as “terrifying” but “glorious.” “A slow, rusty death — that wouldn’t have been good for him,” she says. “It would have been awful.” After 70,000 people evacuate and nearly 1,500 structures are lost, Tad Jones ends up the only casualty of what comes to be called the CZU Lightning Complex in the most rampant fire year California has ever seen. “He burned on the ground of the place he lived,” Windy says, “the land he loved, the forest he walked through thousands and thousands of times, and he became part of it.”

      [Read an article about Tad Jones’s death.]

      Michael Paterniti is a contributing writer for the magazine and is working on a book about the discovery of the North Pole. More

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      Stanley Cowell, Jazz Pianist With a Wide Range, Dies at 79

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStanley Cowell, Jazz Pianist With a Wide Range, Dies at 79His playing consolidated generations of musical history. He was also a composer, an educator and the founder of an important artist-run record label.The pianist and composer Stanley Cowell in performance at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2017. He was known for his adaptability and his vast command of the jazz language.Credit…Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesDec. 20, 2020, 3:06 p.m. ETStanley Cowell, a pianist, composer, record-label impresario and educator who brought a technician’s attention to detail and a theorist’s sophistication to his more than 50-year career as a jazz bandleader, died on Friday in Dover, Del. He was 79.Sylvia Potts Cowell, his wife, said that the cause of his death, at a hospital, was hypovolemic shock, the result of blood loss stemming from other health issues.Mr. Cowell’s playing epitomized the piano’s ability to consolidate generations of musical history into a unified expression, while extending various routes into the future. And when he needed to say more than the piano allowed, he expanded his palette. He was among the first jazz musicians to make prominent use of the kalimba, a thumb piano from southeastern Africa. In his later decades he worked often with a digital sound-design program, Kyma, that allowed him to alter the pitch and texture of an acoustic piano’s sound.In 1971, together with the trumpeter Charles Tolliver, Mr. Cowell founded Strata-East Records, a pioneering institution in jazz and the broader Black Arts Movement. It would release a steady run of pathbreaking music over the coming decade, becoming one of the most successful Black-run labels of its time.Mr. Cowell and Mr. Tolliver met in the late 1960s, as members of the drummer Max Roach’s ensemble. After recording a now-classic album with Roach, “Members, Don’t Git Weary,” in 1968, they formed a quartet called Music Inc., which released its debut LP, “The Ringer,” on Polydor in 1970. But Mr. Cowell and Mr. Tolliver found themselves unable to find a label that would pay what they considered a fair advance for their next album, at a time when jazz’s commercial appeal was fading.Inspired by the Black musicians’ collectives that had recently sprouted up in cities across the country, and by the artist-run Strata label in Detroit, Mr. Cowell and Mr. Tolliver founded Strata-East. Their second album together, “Music Inc.,” with the quartet fleshed out into a large ensemble, was the label’s first release.“The aesthetic ambition was to compose, play and extend the music of our great influences, mentors and innovators, while keeping the distinguishing features of the jazz tradition,” Mr. Cowell said in a 2015 interview for the Superfly Records website.Over the coming decade, Strata-East would release dozens of albums with a similar goal at heart, including some gemlike LPs by Mr. Cowell: “Musa: Ancestral Streams” (1974), a solo album of understated breadth; “Regeneration” (1975), an odyssey equally inspired by pop music and pan-Africanism; and a pair of singular albums with the Piano Choir, a group of seven pianists, “Handscapes 1” (1973) and “Handscapes 2” (1975).Mr. Cowell was also becoming one of New York’s most in-demand side musicians, known for his adaptability and his vast command of the jazz language. In the coming decade he would play an integral role in the Heath Brothers band and groups led by the saxophonists Arthur Blythe and Art Pepper and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.After becoming a full-time music professor in the 1980s, Mr. Cowell eventually stepped back from public performances and recordings.His quartet’s appearance at the Village Vanguard in 2015 was his first weeklong engagement in New York in nearly two decades. Reviewing one of those shows for The New York Times, Ben Ratliff wrote, “Mr. Cowell can create impressive momentary events, but what’s best about him is his broad frame of reference and the general synthesis he is proposing.”Mr. Cowell leading a quartet at the Village Vanguard in New York in 2015. It was his first weeklong engagement in New York in nearly two decades, after many years in academia.Credit…Michael Appleton for The New York TimesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Cowell is survived by their daughter, Sunny Cowell Stovall; a sister, Esther Cowell; another daughter, Sienna Cowell, from a previous marriage; and two grandchildren. He had homes in Maryland and Delaware.Stanley Allen Cowell was born in Toledo, Ohio, on May 5, 1941, to Stanley Cowell and Willie Hazel (Lytle) Cowell, who kept a wide variety of music playing in the house at all times. The couple ran a series of businesses, including a motel that was among the only places in Toledo where touring Black musicians could stay. Many artists became friends of the family, including the stride piano master Art Tatum, himself a Toledo native.During a visit to the family home when Stanley was 6, Tatum played a version of the show tune “You Took Advantage of Me” that Mr. Cowell would never forget. When he recorded his first album as a leader in 1969, “Blues for the Viet Cong,” he included a dazzling stride rendition of “You Took Advantage of Me” alongside his own forward-charging originals.As a child, Mr. Cowell played and composed constantly. By the time he arrived at the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio at age 17, he had already written a number of pieces, including “Departure,” which would become the opening track on “Blues for the Viet Cong.” He studied for a time in Austria, then went on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received a graduate degree in classical piano while working six nights a week in a jazz trio.Mr. Cowell at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall in 2011.Credit…Ruby Washington/The New York TimesHe also fell in with the experimental improvisers and poets of the nearby Detroit Artists Workshop. That experience opened his mind to new artistic possibilities, while planting a seed of passion for artist-led organizing.His connections in Detroit led him to the saxophonist Marion Brown, who helped him land on his feet after moving to New York City in the mid-1960s. Mr. Brown brought the young pianist to his first recording session, in 1966, for the album “Three for Shepp.”Mr. Cowell recorded “Blues for the Viet Cong” with a trio in 1969, and followed it with “Brilliant Circles,” a sextet date. He went on to make over a dozen albums in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, including a run for the Steeplechase label while in his 40s and 50s that, while generally unsung, represents one of that era’s most consistently brilliant stretches of jazz recordings.In the 1980s, Mr. Cowell began to focus more heavily on his work as an educator — first at the City University of New York’s Lehman College and later at Rutgers. He expanded his inquiries into electronic instrumentation and orchestral composing, becoming adept at Kyma and teaching courses on electronic music. He composed a lengthy “Juneteenth Suite” for chorus and orchestra, inspired by the celebrations of Black Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation.After retiring from teaching in 2013, Mr. Cowell revved up his performing career again. He reconnected with his old cohort, including Mr. Tolliver and other former members of the Strata-East roster, touring under the name the Strata-East All Stars. And in 2015, Mr. Cowell released the album “Juneteenth,” featuring what he called “a solo piano reduction” of the suite.In an echo of his experiences almost 50 years earlier, he had been unable to find a record label willing to invest in recording the suite with a full orchestra. Eventually a small French label, Vision Fugitive, offered to put out the solo-piano version.He often noted the irony of his inability to find an American label for the record, which celebrates a suppressed legacy of American music. But he was proud to have put it out anyway, upholding his understanding of the musician’s role.“We are not just artists, we are citizens of our respective nations, and ultimately citizens of the world,” he told Superfly Records. “In our own personal ways, and when necessary, in unity with others, we should add our ‘fuel’ to the cleansing fire against injustice.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More