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      in Movies

      4 Surprising Things We Learned From the John Williams Documentary

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      A new Disney+ film about the prolific film composer chronicles his life and career, with a focus on his famous music for movies including “Jaws” and “Star Wars.”The composer John Williams is responsible for some of the most recognizable music in film history: the epic fanfares in “Star Wars,” the two-note dread of “Jaws” and too many other examples to name without sounding like an IMDb tour of popular American cinema.A new documentary, “Music by John Williams” (streaming on Disney+), introduces audiences to the man behind all of that music, featuring extensive interviews with Williams and glowing interviews with filmmakers he has worked with, including Steven Spielberg (also a producer of the movie), George Lucas and J.J. Abrams.Laurent Bouzereau, the documentary’s director, first met Williams while directing making-of features for the home video releases of Spielberg movies, including “Jaws,” “Jurassic Park” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”In a phone interview, he said the project started as part of Williams’s 90th birthday celebration, but it became clear it would be a waste to not do a full documentary combining his interviews with Spielberg’s archival footage of Williams, now 92, scoring his films. “I wanted people to understand his dedication to an art form,” Bouzereau said. “John is an eternal student.”Here are some takeaways from the film.When he first heard the ‘Jaws’ theme, Spielberg thought Williams was joking.Early in the documentary, Williams recounts the first time he played the opening music to “Jaws” for Spielberg.The director thought he was joking. “I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it’s almost like ‘Chopsticks,’” he says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      The Piano Trio: (Still) a Powerful Force in Jazz

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      New releases from Tyshawn Sorey, Kim Cass, Bill Charlap, Tarbaby, Matthew Shipp, Kris Davis and others are showcasing how a classic format can still feel fresh.Two of the most engrossing jazz tracks in recent months, the Tyshawn Sorey Trio’s “Your Good Lies” and Kim Cass’s “Slag,” share a classic trio instrumentation and the presence of Sorey behind the kit.Sorey’s “Your Good Lies,” a cover of a track by the pop-soul group Vividry that features the pianist Aaron Diehl and the bassist Harish Raghavan, is a vortex of downtempo groove, sprawling across 26 zoned-in minutes. “Slag,” in which Sorey performs alongside the bassist-bandleader Cass and the pianist Matt Mitchell, is a meticulous yet marvelously frantic scramble that exhausts itself just shy of the three-minute mark.Taken together, these ultimately very different pieces — drawn from Sorey and Cass’s new albums, “The Susceptible Now” and “Levs” — point to a major theme in jazz in 2024: Piano trios are everywhere, and their potential still feels limitless.The piano-bass-drums combo has been a staple since the late ’50s and early ’60s, when trios led by Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans modeled the crisp elegance and conversational charge that the format could offer. In subsequent years, as new approaches have come and gone, the music has always made room for great piano trios: Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, Brad Mehldau’s three-piece, Jason Moran’s Bandwagon, the Bad Plus.This year’s crop is striking for its robust growth: Many major pianists are involved — Vijay Iyer, Bill Charlap, Kris Davis, Matthew Shipp, Ethan Iverson, Nduduzo Makhathini and Mitchell, at the helm of his own group — plus notable up-and-comers such as Marta Sanchez and Luther S. Allison, and other instrumentalists and composers like Sorey, Cass and John Zorn, and the collective group Tarbaby. And it’s notable for the sheer variety of work these artists have produced. Orthodox approaches to the idiom are easy to find, but so are a wealth of other tacks, ranging from the earthy to the outré.New releases from (clockwise from top left) Matthew Shipp, Kim Cass, Sorey and Kris Davis are part of the year’s surge in trio albums.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway Is Singing Louis Armstrong’s Songs. Here Are 6 Classics.

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      When Christopher Renshaw was growing up in England in the 1950s and ’60s, everybody knew about Louis Armstrong. “He was an icon for me as a child,” he said. “He was just there — he’s smiling, he’s funny.”But when Renshaw — whose directing credits include the 1996 Broadway production of “The King and I” and “Taboo,” which he conceived with Boy George — was approached about creating an Armstrong musical, he quickly learned that the musician was far more than just the affable, popular entertainer he saw on television.Armstrong’s story sprawls across five decades, numerous musical and social upheavals, and his own creative breakthroughs from the revolutionary 1920s recordings with his Hot Five band to worldwide celebrity with the ’60s pop smashes “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World.”That story is now being told on Broadway in “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,” which is in previews at Studio 54, following a 2021 premiere in Miami and runs in New Orleans and Chicago. For the show’s creative team, exploring the offstage struggles and tensions of this cultural and musical titan was as important as illustrating his pioneering, radical work as a trumpeter and singer.“Louis Armstrong was a real Black man,” James Monroe Iglehart, who is portraying Armstrong and is one of the directors, said, noting the ways Armstrong’s image was cleaned up and deracinated for Hollywood and television. “We worked really hard to show that side of him, the good and the bad.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      How Jazz Musicians Like Louis Armstrong Paid Homage to Trains With Music

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      Jazz lovers worldwide know well the passion that Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong had for trains, especially for the elegant Pullman cars that toted them to gigs across the country. Within the velvet-appointed sleeping carriages, African American porters shined the musicians’ shoes, nursed their hangovers, clipped their hair and served them mint juleps and Welsh rarebit — the same service afforded wealthy white passengers.In return, the maestros composed their now famous songs of homage to trains. There’s Duke’s throbbing “Happy Go Lucky Local,” the Count’s bow to the “Super Chief” and Satchmo’s romantic rendering of “Mail Train Blues.” But few fans appreciated the real reason these jazz legends worshiped not just the railroad generally, but George Pullman’s sleeper car: It saved them from the threat of terrifying violence.In that Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Just getting out of an automobile or bus to look for a meal and a bed could prove perilous in unfamiliar cities below the Mason-Dixon line. Wrong choices sometimes led to berating, beating or worse, with racial violence reaching new peaks in the early 1900s. Even the music makers’ fame couldn’t fully protect them. Only on the Pullman cars, where they were served by fellow African Americans, could they truly relax while on the road.“To avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a 70-foot baggage car,” Ellington wrote in his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress.” “Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them.”Duke Ellington’s band members on a train in 1941. In the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Otto F. Hess Collection / New York Public LibraryThe Count Basie Orchestra did, too. Traveling in stylish Pullmans “was my piece of cake,” Basie recalled in his 1985 autobiography, “Good Morning Blues.” “Lots of times, instead of me getting into my bed, I used to sit and look out the window most of the night as we rambled from one place to another. That was music to me.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Claire Daly, Master of the Baritone Saxophone, Dies at 66

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      She was celebrated for both her playing and her love of the jazz community. “My life in music,” she said recently, “is the smartest thing I’ve done.”Claire Daly, who was regarded by both her fellow musicians and critics as a standard-bearer on the baritone saxophone, died on Tuesday on a friend’s farm in Longmont, Colo. She was 66.The cause was squamous cell cancer of the neck and head, said the saxophonist Dave Sewelson, a longtime friend.Thanks to her flexibility on an ungainly instrument and her expressive precision as a soloist, Ms. Daly was a frequent winner of critics’ polls from the Jazz Journalists Association and DownBeat magazine.Thanking the journalists’ group when she received its 2024 award for best baritone saxophonist, she wrote in May on Facebook: “Kudos to all the baritone players — we get to play bari! We are the lucky ones. My life in music is the smartest thing I’ve done.”She spent many of the early years of her career playing both jazz and rock in all-female ensembles. Her sturdy playing formed the foundation of the original Diva Jazz Orchestra, which from its founding in 1992 established itself as one of the most potent big bands in jazz, gender notwithstanding.She left Diva after seven years, tending thereafter toward small ensembles. She collaborated frequently with the pianist Joel Forrester in the quartet People Like Us, with the experimental pop vocalist Nora York, and with Mr. Sewelson in the bottom-heavy trio Two Sisters Inc. (its other member was the bassist Dave Hofstra).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Barbara Dane, Who Fought Injustice Through Song, Dies at 97

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      She was highly regarded as a folk, blues and jazz singer. She was also ardently left-wing and prioritized social change over commercial success.Barbara Dane, an acclaimed folk, jazz and blues singer whose communist leanings and fierce civil rights and antiwar activism earned her both critical plaudits and a thick Federal Bureau of Investigation file, died on Sunday at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.Her daughter, Nina Menendez, said that after suffering shortness of breath for several years because of heart failure, Ms. Dane chose to terminate her life under California’s End of Life Option Act.Over the course of her long career, Ms. Dane, with her rich, woody contralto, built a reputation in a variety of musical genres.She established her bona fides as a folky of the first order while still in her teens, performing with Pete Seeger. “I knew I was a singer for life,” she recalled in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, “but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then. I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Ms. Dane wore her convictions proudly, belting out worker anthems like “I Hate the Capitalist System” and “Solidarity Forever.” She performed at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan would often sit in with her when she was performing at Gerdes Folk City, the Greenwich Village club.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Jack Jones, a Suave, Hit-Making and Enduring Crooner, Dies at 86

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      With his smooth voice, he drew crowds to cabarets and music halls for six decades. He also sang the themes for films and TV shows, including “The Love Boat.”Jack Jones, a crooner who beguiled concert fans and stage, screen and television audiences for decades with romantic ballads and gentle jazz tunes that even in large venues often achieved the intimacy of his celebrated nightclub performances, died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 86. His wife, Eleonora Jones, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was leukemia.While his popularity peaked in the 1960s, Mr. Jones found a new audience in later years singing the theme to the hit television show “The Love Boat.” But even then he seemed always to have stepped out of an earlier generation, one that dressed in tuxedos for the songs of Tin Pan Alley and reminded America of its love affairs with the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.He won two Grammy Awards and recorded numerous albums of American Songbook favorites that hit the upper reaches of Billboard’s charts on the strength of his smooth vocal interpretations. He performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the White House and the London Palladium, and for more than 60 years drew crowds to cabarets and nightclubs around the world.At the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, marking his 52nd year in show business, Mr. Jones opened and closed a two-hour retrospective of his songs with Paul Williams’s “That’s What Friends Are For.” He sang to a packed house of longtime fans:Friends are like warm clothesIn the night air.Best when they’re oldAnd we miss them the most when they’re gone.“Those lyrics evoked the vanishing breed of pop-jazz crooner, of which Mr. Jones and Tony Bennett remain the great survivors,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Jones, now 72, draws the same kind of well-dressed sophisticated audiences that used to attend the annual appearances at the defunct Michael’s Pub of his friend Mel Tormé, who died 11 years ago at 73.”Mr. Jones with his fellow vocalist Tony Bennett in 1972.Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      A New Roy Hargrove LP Reminds Us What the Trumpeter Left Behind

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      “Grande-Terre,” recorded in Guadeloupe in 1997, shows off the high-wire, from-the-gut jazz Hargrove played most nights of his life.Unlike most “lost” posthumous jazz albums, “Grande-Terre,” a release from the trumpeter Roy Hargrove and his bebop-goes-Havana band Crisol that arrived on Friday, is no live recording, rehearsal tape or leftover session scraps best suited to die-hard fans. The LP, recorded in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 1998 as a sequel to “Habana” from the previous year, is an ambitious, studio-recorded, global jazz party, sun-kissed and island-hopping.The alto saxophonist Sherman Irby, currently in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, felt a relieved surprise when he recently heard the album for the first time, at a listening party hosted by Aida Brandes-Hargrove, Hargrove’s widow and the co-founder of Hargrove Legacy, LLC. “We were tighter than I thought we were!” he said with a laugh.On “Priorities,” Hargrove’s rousing playing shimmers atop mesmeric Caribbean grooves laid down by four percussionists and two pianists. The album’s ballads are as tender as lovers’ whispers, while sprees like “Afreaka,” a tune by Cedar Walton, swing with such abandon, it feels like the band might spin out of control. It never does, of course, but the very possibility is part of the exhilaration of the high-wire, from-the-gut jazz Hargrove played most nights of his life.Nobody at Verve Records or in Hargrove’s orbit can say precisely why “Grande-Terre” was shelved until Brandes-Hargrove contacted Verve about the sessions in mid-2022. The answer is probably a matter of abundance. “You can only release so many albums at a time,” Brandes-Hargrove said in an interview, and in the late 1990s Hargrove was restlessly productive, planning an album with strings (“Moment to Moment,” from 2000), getting his big band up and running, helping found the nonprofit performance venue the Jazz Gallery, being a father. The “Grande-Terre” blissout “Kamala’s Dance” is named for his daughter, born in 1997.Brandes-Hargrove has overseen two other posthumous Hargrove releases: “In Harmony,” collecting 2016 and 2017 duo performances with the pianist Mulgrew Miller, and “The Love Suite: Mahogany,” Hargrove’s first piece written for a large ensemble. Hargrove was only 23 when he premiered “The Love Suite” at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1993, less than seven years after Wynton Marsalis heard him play as a student at Dallas’s Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and invited him to sit in at a gig that weekend.Hargrove performing with his big band at the Jazz Gallery, the nonprofit venue he helped found in 1995.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More