Jazz

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Thelonious Monk

      by

      We asked Jon Batiste, Arooj Aftab, Mary Halvorson and others to share their favorites.For over a year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz. Now we’re focusing on Thelonious Monk, the innovative pianist and bandleader whose angular melodies and dissonant chords made him stand out among his peers in the bebop era.Where other pianists played light chords with their left hand and quicker notes with the right, Monk played equally complicated notes with both hands, leading to complex arrangements that traversed the entire scale. But he never overplayed; his use of space between the notes elicited peace and tension equally.“Those clashing intervals, you know?” the Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley once said. “Sometimes he’ll play, like, an F and F sharp at the same time.”Monk was born in 1917 in Rocky Mount, N.C., and his family moved to Manhattan when he was 4. At 9, after briefly studying the trumpet, Monk started playing the piano in church and at rent parties. He attended Stuyvesant High School for two years before dropping out to play on the road with an evangelist. Monk’s big break came in 1941 when the drummer Kenny Clarke hired him to be the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. It’s been said that’s where bebop was born: Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams and others would jam all hours of the night crafting this new sound.Monk’s solo career didn’t really take hold until the ’50s when, as a bandleader signed to Prestige Records, he recorded different ensemble sets with Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and Art Blakey, which escalated his momentum. Shortly after he signed with Riverside Records in 1955, he broke through with the album “Brilliant Corners,” an acclaimed LP seen as the true launching point of his career. He played clubs throughout New York City, gigged with the likes of John Coltrane and Gerry Mulligan, then led big bands from the late 1950s to the early ’60s. In 1964, Time put Monk on its magazine cover — the fourth jazz musician in history to appear there.Yet you can’t talk about Monk without acknowledging his erratic behavior. He had mental health challenges and was first hospitalized in 1956; he got into a car accident and was uncommunicative when police arrived. Years later, he was diagnosed with depression. Onstage, he would sometimes get up from the piano and start dancing, leading some to believe these were autistic episodes. Others say he used dance as a way to convey to his band what he wanted to hear musically. Either way, Monk is on the Mount Rushmore of jazz, and deserves all the reverence he gets for shifting its modern sound. Below, we asked 11 musicians and writers to share their favorite Thelonious Monk songs. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own picks in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jon Batiste, pianist and composer“Introspection”It’s not possible for me to choose a favorite Monk song. At 19, I became obsessed with everything Thelonious and spent a year focused exclusively on absorbing as much as I could. Monk is a world. “Introspection,” from the album “Solo Monk,” is borderline atonal while still distinctively melody-rich. The melody is akin to a nursery rhyme in its playful logic and symmetry, all while whistling overtop a bed of through-composed dissonance. Those chords! The way he constructs the harmony to shift between at least three identifiable key centers creates a trance-like quality to the recording that rides the borders of Eastern mysticism and some obtuse sanctified hymn. The chord voicings are constructed for every note to have a deliberate intention. There’s no room for harmonic interpretation here — if you add or take away any of the notes from his chord voicings, the song risks completely losing its identity. Monk’s way of “super syncopation” is utilized significantly in this tune as well, making his charismatic approach to aligning the harmony and melody a defining characteristic of the composition.He named it “Introspection” ’cause he certainly had a lot on his mind with this one. Very concentrated in all harmony, melody and rhythm. The master of repetition. Over the years it’s the least played Monk tune of all. This is significant given that he is one of the most covered and influential composers of the modern age. I love the “Solo Monk” version because he doesn’t even improvise over the chord changes, he just states the melody twice and walks out of the studio (or at least that’s how I envision it). Sometimes that’s all that needs to be played: the tune.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, composer and multi-instrumentalist“Nutty”By my count, Thelonious Monk’s 1957 concert at Carnegie Hall was his 45th time being recorded on anything that was eventually released. He turned 40 years old the month before and was toward the end of his brief, but intense and deeply meaningful, collaboration with John Coltrane. While Monk’s sublime ballads “Ugly Beauty,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “Ask Me Now,” “Pannonica,” “Reflections” and “’Round Midnight” might represent some of his most genius work, I selected “Nutty” from the Carnegie Hall concert because of the depth of sophistication of the composition coupled with the sheer amazingness of his collaboration with Coltrane. It is a masterpiece, complete with disjunctive rhythms in the fourth measure of the form, perhaps most perfectly portraying Monk’s humorous dance style that he often did while getting up from the piano.For my personal taste, the epitome of virtuosity is when artists not only know their instrument and medium thoroughly, but know themselves well enough to be able to communicate highly personal or emotional concepts and stories through their work. “Nutty” is a tour de force of communication at the highest levels. So much happens within these five minutes that is mind blowing to me every time I listen, and I can’t help but to be left in utter awe and gratitude for the lives of these amazing gentlemen who continually chose transcendence and sophistication while the world around them so often chose barbarity.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Arooj Aftab, musician“Reflections”I found my mind kind of walking away from whatever was going on around me when I first heard this tune. I was just smiling and thinking about being at Zinc Bar in the West Village, talking to someone special. And then I kind of came back like, “Whoa, what is this beauty I’m hearing?” It was playing in a scene in some old movie I was watching on a plane. It’s become a beautiful mainstay in my vault of “deeper cuts” and I often head over to the “Thelonious Alone in San Francisco” album to listen to it. I really, really love this one. Every note kind of turns my head upside down and makes my ears smile. I love the way it’s paced, almost like a conversation. Other times it feels like a pendulum. There is an unbelievable amount of swag in the whole piece. I like hearing his voice quietly in the back, too. It perfectly sums up something very sweet and nostalgic, aptly “reflective,” like the “A” is the original story and the rest of what he plays around it is how we feel about the story as the years have gone by.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Andrew Winistorfer, writer and reissue producer“Ugly Beauty”Listening to Thelonious Monk sometimes feels like listening to Monk listening to Monk; he spent much of his recorded output reworking, rerecording and recontextualizing his masterwork compositions like “Ruby, My Dear” and “Crepuscule With Nellie” across multiple albums. His sense of the avant-garde meant not only breaking with established traditions, but also breaking his established songs.Which is why listening to “Ugly Beauty” feels like such a revelation: Here is Monk, on his last album with a quartet (1968’s “Underground”), playing the only waltz of his career. You can hear him roll and flit in and around the tenor work of Charlie Rouse, giving the proceedings a broken, emotional denouement in every key struck. Monk’s playing was always about feeling as much as technical proficiency, and here the entire composition is set up for him to be the emotional ballast, to the point that when he cedes the ground to his band in the song’s middle portion, you feel his return like a gut punch. But it’s not all mood music; he hits chords of dissonance that remind you that though it’s a waltz, Monk is still in there, fighting the fight against normalcy. One of his last original compositions before his semiformal retirement in the early ’70s, “Ugly Beauty” serves as a reminder that the true greats never stop evolving and pushing the bounds of their art.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆King Britt, professor and producer“Evidence”“Evidence” is one of the best examples of shifting time against the meter, and in the process disrupting the status quo. The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall is otherworldly. ’Trane’s tone (timbre) and blazing response to Monk’s time traveling through meters. A transcendent masterpiece. However, I also love the ferocity of this video of the quartet playing “Evidence” live in Japan, in which Monk’s intensity pushes Charlie Rouse’s solo to truly have a serious conversation instead of a humorous one in which Monk always includes in his playing. Watching the performance also adds to the magic as opposed to just listening — truly seeing them as a unit.“Evidence” is the perfect title, as this song is a testimony to the fearlessness of Monk’s compositions and the magic of his playing. In contemporary music, I compare Dilla to Monk because of his placement of samples, challenging our idea of rhythm and hesitation. So much so, it changed the way drummers play.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Nikki Yeoh, composer, jazz pianist and educator“Trinkle, Tinkle”In the ’90s I was watching TV. An inventor was revealing their latest creation: a suit jacket that could record movement. The clever blazer would “remember” the motions and make the “model” involuntarily move in the same way. My mind wandered — what if you could do this with gloves? How would it feel to experience how Oscar Peterson, Bach or Monk moved across the piano? “Trinkle, Tinkle” is the invisible memory glove and almost the answer to my glove-desiring prayers. So ergonomically written, pianistic in its approach. It embodies ballet finesse, angular jazz-tap punchy stabs, a percussive African ancestral message and a portal into Monk’s movement and mind.I love the 2/4 bar at the end of the A section. The “extra” two beats remind me of when Monk thought the music was “cookin’” and would jump up and dance, a stumbling, twisty-turning dance like a soccer player dribbling the ball, with the utmost grace and purpose, the phrase landing being the “goal.” As with many Monk tunes, this piece is best heard and improvised to, while singing the melody. Just remember to substitute the 2/4 bar with a 4/4 bar in solos. Monk sticks closely to the melody on the original recording. Joshua Redman’s version on his self-titled album is excellent, albeit without piano. In my dreams they called me for that album, but I couldn’t go as my gloves weren’t ready!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Morgan Rhodes, music supervisor“Let’s Cool One”Discovering “Let’s Cool One” was a complete love-at-first-listen experience. Having only heard “Solo Monk” before hearing this record, my introduction to big-band Thelonious was an awakening. While I’ll always appreciate the intimacy of the live recording on “Misterioso,” there’s something so compelling to me about the “Monk’s Blues” version. Oliver Nelson’s arrangement takes it to dramatic new levels. The upbeat tempo makes the song feel bigger and elegant, giving brass every opportunity to shine while marrying Thelonious’s well-known dissonance with traditional harmonies. The result sounds like a really good conversation between horns and piano — a call and response that holds space for both the avant-garde and the conventional. Monk’s playing is masterful on this one.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Anna Butterss, musician“Sweet and Lovely”I love Monk’s own compositions, but there is something exciting about hearing his interpretations of jazz standards. Monk tinkers with these songs, reconstructing harmony and melody alike until he might as well have written them in the first place. “Sweet and Lovely” is one of these standards that Monk revisited throughout his career — when he recorded this solo performance in 1964, he had been playing the song for over 10 years, and had made some characteristic tweaks to the original. The descending sevenths underlying the melody are classic Monk, as is his refusal to resolve the final chord to where we would expect. The lyrics of “Sweet and Lovely” (which we don’t hear, here) speak of a love with seemingly no complications: “Sweet and lovely, sweeter than the roses in May, and he loves me, there is nothing more I can say.”In contrast to this tone, Monk creates a more melancholy vignette. We first hear him play the melody in a lush, almost stylized, romantic manner, leaning into the warmth of his left hand, but the heavy descent of the bass line adds an uneasiness to the mood. Throughout his brief solo his articulation becomes more pronounced, until the melody returns in insistent, rolling octaves. Monk’s ending doesn’t quite seem to wrap things up neatly — leaving the listener slightly unsatisfied, and perhaps keeping the door open for him to return to this song once again.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Mary Halvorson, musician“Crepuscule With Nellie”Thelonious Monk was one of the first jazz musicians I listened to (on an album called “The Composer,” in the form of a cassette tape) as a preteen. At first I didn’t understand it at all, and the improvisations were totally lost on me, but somehow I kept coming back to that tape. What drew me in initially were the melodies. There is a version of “Crepuscule With Nellie” on that album. It’s classic Monk, instantly identifiable. There is so much beauty and strength of melodicism, with rhythmic quirks and whimsy integrated seamlessly, like the most natural thing in the world. You can feel Monk isn’t trying to do anything tricky; he’s just being himself. Underneath the wonderfully twisted logic, it’s still a melody you can sing along to. And once you learn Monk’s melodies, the improvisations unfold from there and enhance everything.Fast forward to 2005: I was happy, as a lifelong fan of Monk, when Blue Note released a live recording from 1957 of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane: “At Carnegie Hall.” This version of “Crepuscule” is spare, as that song often is: essentially just the melody, first with Monk alone, then with the band. It’s a perfect entry point into Monk’s sound. Then, listening to the rest of the record, you’ll hear Coltrane absolutely take off — dancing around Monk’s tunes and then effortlessly plowing through to another dimension. Some of the most inspired moments on that album are when Monk stops playing and simply lets Coltrane go.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Christina Wheeler, composer, musician and multimedia artist“Misterioso”While “’Round Midnight” is Monk’s most well known song, “Misterioso” encapsulates everything I love about his music. This was the first of his blues compositions, which he always wrote in B flat. It begins with a sparse, gentle piano introduction that unspools into a seemingly spare melody of repeating intervals that ascends harmonically. The steady rhythm accents on the two and four, moving with the hypnotic ticktock of a cat clock’s darting eyes or a dog toy’s bobbing head. What I love is how Monk twists the traditional blues structure so subtly, substituting these unexpected minor chords so he can add chromatic note clusters, only to leave the ascending melody dangling on an unresolved note. For me, this amplifies the enigmatic mood of the song’s title. Monk complements Milt Jackson’s limpid vibraphone solo of cascading notes with angular piano jabs. Monk then follows Jackson with a solo filled with all my favorite signature expressions: rhythmically off-kilter melodic splashes counterpointing the steady, 4/4 pulse; flourishes of whole-tone scales that juxtapose quick bursts of dissonant notes; and distinctively empty spaces that emphasize Monk’s flat-fingered, percussive playing. The melody’s reprise bookends the recording with a symmetry that makes “Misterioso” as accessible for dancing toddlers as it is for grown-up listeners like me. Blues is the foundation of jazz, and with “Misterioso,” Monk transmutes the blues so exquisitely and uniquely as his own.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆James Francies, pianist and producer“’Round Midnight”“’Round Midnight” is one of the best-written songs in the canon of American music; it’s a master class in counterpoint, theme and development, and harmony. For me when a song is truly great, most of the time both the harmony and melody can stand independently and still be beautiful. “’Round Midnight” is one of those songs. The melody is so thoughtful that it captures me every time. Hearing it by itself reminds me of when I first heard Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” It also reminds me of hearing Bach chorales for the first time, or Mozart. Each melodic cell develops in a way that truly shows how Monk’s mind was working during that period. The ascending five-note gesture that begins the A section of “’Round Midnight” is one of the most iconic melodic statements in the world of instrumental music; instantly recognizable. “’Round Midnight” is blues with baroque counterpoint and romantic harmony. Perfection.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Mr Eazi’s Anthem of Gratitude, and 12 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Silvana Estrada, Old Dominion, Nadine Shah and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.​​Mr Eazi featuring Soweto Gospel Choir, ‘Exit’Mr Eazi — born in Nigeria and long based in Ghana — has been releasing singles and mixtapes for a decade, becoming one of Africa’s major hitmakers. But he considers his new album, “The Evil Genius,” his official studio debut, tracing a narrative that reaches its finale with “Exit.” The track, produced by the Nigerian studio mastermind Kel-P, merges Nigerian Afrobeats and South African gospel, as Mr Eazi sings about how the paranoia of success — “I’ve seen things go bad/When my family turns to demons around me” — gets overcome by gratitude and faith. The Soweto Gospel Choir harmonizes with worshipful, call-and-response thank yous. JON PARELESNadine Shah, ‘Topless Mother’Loud guitars over a pounding Bo Diddley beat propel Nadine Shah’s vocals through “Topless Mother,” a burst of determined, free-associative, syllabically perfect semi-sequiturs. “I told you all/That I have heard,” she sing-chants. “And do you promise not to breathe a word.” She also blurts out three-syllable rhymes: “Sinatra, Viagra, iguana.” Both words and music are all about brusque momentum and a determination to connect. PARELESFlyte featuring Laura Marling, ‘Tough Love’“This could be real — tough love,” the not-exactly folky duo Flyte sings, in a track from its self-titled new album that starts out with typical folk-rock strumming and harmonies and grows into an avalanche. Will Taylor and Nick Hill sing about self-contradictory behavior — “How do we start healing if we can’t keep out the dark” — while the track swells in a giant crescendo. An intimate conflict becomes an existential struggle. PARELESSilvana Estrada, ‘Qué Problema’The problem in “Qué Problema” (“What a Problem”) is a rapturous infatuation, verging on the mystical, that may never be fulfilled. “Your skin has the color of time,” sings the Mexican songwriter Silvana Estrada. “When you smile, the wind stumbles.” A swaying, flickering rhythm, with a six-beat undercurrent that’s sometimes only implied, carries a vocal that radiates affection, no matter how things turn out. PARELESLulu. featuring the Joy, ‘Yesterdays’Lulu. — a Nigerian-British songwriter, Lulu Ayodele, who’s unlikely to be confused with the 1960s Scottish hitmaker Lulu — works her way from self-doubt to cautious optimism in “Yesterdays.” She sings, “I know I’m changing/I know there is beauty where pain is.” Subdued Afrobeats percussion and diffident guitar picking captures her uncertainty, but the Joy — a South African vocal group, singing in English and Zulu — coaxes her to move ahead, insisting, “Now I found a better place.” PARELESSheherazaad, ‘Mashoor’Sheherazaad, an Indian-American songwriter from San Francisco, draws on microtonal South Asian vocal inflections, Minimalism and hints of flamenco in “Mashoor” (“Fame”), which was produced by another South Asian hybridizer, Arooj Aftab. Singing in Hindi, accompanied only by a meditative classical guitar and hand percussion, Sheherazaad interrogates unearned fame, pondering, “Have you climbed too high?/Where is my reflection in the mirror?” PARELESOld Dominion, ‘Beautiful Sky’Smokey Robinson — who co-wrote “The Way You Do the Things You Do” — might appreciate “Beautiful Sky,” which hijacks standard honky-tonk images into self-pitying analogies for a failed romance: “The way you go to my head, you’d make a really good tequila/The way you’re always on, you’d make a damn good neon light.” Fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitars gather behind Old Dominion’s close-harmony vocals, and of course that “Beautiful Sky” feels blue. PARELESThe Third Mind featuring Jesse Sykes, ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’Dave Alvin from the Blasters, Victor Krummenacher and David Immerglück from Camper Van Beethoven and Michael Jerome from Better Than Ezra get together as the Third Mind to enjoy psychedelic jams. They found an ideal vehicle with “Sally Go Round the Roses,” the mysterious one-hit wonder by the Jaynetts, who sang, “The saddest thing in the whole wide world/is to see your baby with another girl.” The song has also been picked up by Grace Slick, Tim Buckley and the English folk-jazz group Pentangle. It’s a modal, Celtic-flavored tune, mostly a drone, and the Third Mind’s guitar colloquies connect it to Appalachia, the Byrds and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jesse Sykes’s vocals sound frayed and knowing; the guitars tease, probe, tangle and palpitate. PARELESHauschka, ‘Altruism’Volker Bertelmann, the composer who performs as Hauschka — and who won an Academy Award for the score of “All Quiet on the Western Front” — plays piano both on the keyboard and inside on the strings directly. He also uses a prepared piano, with damping and resonating objects on the strings, along with other acoustic and electronic sounds. In “Altruism,” from his new album “Philanthropy,” Hauschka layers terse little riffs and plinking, clanking, rattling tones into something like funk, with a marchlike melody emerging briefly before the track calmly disassembles itself. PARELESRoy Nathanson featuring Nick Hakim, ‘All the Bones Had Names’During the pandemic, the saxophonist, poet, educator and activist Roy Nathanson, 72, convened jam sessions in front of his Brooklyn home for 82 straight days with whichever musicians assembled on the sidewalk that evening. He has funneled the experience into “82 Days,” a scruffy and enchanting new record. “All the Bones Had Names” began with a poem, written when he was getting a somber drumbeat of news about death: of family members, close friends and essential workers living in the neighborhood. Over a droning electric bass and splatters from an un-fancy keyboard, Nathanson reads the poem while the vocalist Nick Hakim, his frequent musical partner, adds a smokescreen of ad-libs. “All the bones had names/no one claimed,” the poem begins. But by the end, Nathanson is refusing to see death as an endpoint. “The bones were stars,” he says, “that had yet/to be discovered.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJ.D. Allen, ‘The Knight of Swords’Since 2011, the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen has released an album a year, typically with a trio. But don’t confuse habit with stillness. His most recent LP, “This,” is Allen’s first full-on encounter with electronics, and it is the sound of a burly toned, bop-steeped saxophonist pushing beyond the familiar. On “The Knight of Swords,” two independent histories seem to circle each other, seeking common ground, as Allen’s spiraling, bittersweet blues meets the ghostly swell of Alex Bonney’s electronics. RUSSONELLOKevin Sun, ‘After Depths’The saxophonist Kevin Sun has been making his mark on the New York scene of late by way of studiousness and subtlety. Sun is not shy about his appreciation for Mark Turner, a shadow-dwelling tenor great one generation his senior, and one way to hear his double LP “The Depths of Memory” is as a callback to the sort of bendable postmodernism that Turner was playing with his Fly Trio back in the early 2000s (and that he’s continued making for ECM Records, in other formats). But Sun has something original going on, too: his own feeling of loose coil and terse freedom, and a personal approach to disrupting time. Leading a quintet here, Sun concludes the album with “After Depths,” a slow-motion action painting with a melody that could almost pass for spontaneous — if it weren’t being doubled with such precise imperfection by the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. RUSSONELLO More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Carla Bley, Jazz Composer, Arranger and Provocateur, Dies at 87

      by

      Her music, which ranged from chamber miniatures to blaring fanfares, was suffused with a slyly subversive attitude.Carla Bley, an irrepressibly original composer, arranger and pianist responsible for more than 60 years of wily provocations in and around jazz, died on Tuesday at her home in Willow, a hamlet in upstate New York. She was 87.Her longtime partner in life and music, the bassist Steve Swallow, said the cause was complications of brain cancer.Ms. Bley’s influential body of work included delicate chamber miniatures and rugged, blaring fanfares, with a lot of varied terrain in between. She was branded an avant-gardist early in her career, but that term applied more to her slyly subversive attitude than to the formal character of her music, which always maintained a place for tonal harmony and standard rhythm.Within that given frame, Ms. Bley found plenty of room to confound expectations and harbor contradictions. In the 2011 biography “Carla Bley,” Amy C. Beal described her music as “vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic, joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time.”Certainly, few composers in Ms. Bley’s generation were as prolific or polymorphic in their output while projecting an identifiable point of view. She wrote elegant, drifting songs that became jazz standards, like “Ida Lupino” and “Lawns”; yearning, cinematic big-band pieces, like “Fleur Carnivore”; iconoclastic rearrangements of national anthems and classical fare; and unwieldy, uncategorizable projects like her jazz-rock opera “Escalator Over the Hill.”Originally issued on three LPs, “Escalator Over the Hill” was named album of the year by the weekly British publication Melody Maker in 1973, the same year it won a Grand Prix du Disque, France’s most prestigious award for musical recordings. With a surrealistic libretto by the poet Paul Haines, a cast including some of the era’s leading jazz renegades and vocals by Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce of the rock band Cream, it captured the woolly, insubordinate spirit of the age, just as it consolidated the elements of Ms. Bley’s style.That style could be a lot to take in, as John S. Wilson noted a decade later in The New York Times: “She made strong and dramatic use of darkly colored ensembles, of the tuba as a solo instrument or the core of a passage, of trombone solos that could be wildly broad and flatulent or warm and snuggling, of brass-band ensembles with a wry, ragged sound, of saxophones that came squirming up out of stolid fundamentalist ground to a shrill avant-garde ecstasy.”Ms. Bley’s portfolio as a leader included a big band stocked with some of the leading musicians in New York; a fusionesque sextet, whose ranks included Larry Willis on acoustic and electric piano and Hiram Bullock on guitar; and a chamberlike trio featuring Mr. Swallow and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard. She was the original conductor and arranger of the Liberation Music Orchestra, the revolutionary-minded ensemble formed by the bassist Charlie Haden in 1969, and continued to lead it in tribute after Mr. Haden’s death in 2014.When she was recognized as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2015, Ms. Bley expressed wonderment, still convinced of her fringe existence. “When I first toured Europe with my own band, the audience threw things at me — and I mean fruit mostly, but bottles too,” she said in 2016. “I loved it. Nobody else got fruit thrown at them. That’s so wonderful! Anything that happened that was out of the ordinary, I appreciated.”Ms. Bley at her home in Willow, N.Y., in 2016. “I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she once said, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesBorn Lovella May Borg in Oakland, Calif., on May 11, 1936, Ms. Bley came to music largely through the ministrations of her father, Emil Carl Borg, a church organist, choirmaster and piano teacher. She was 8 when her mother, Arline (Anderson) Borg, died of heart failure.Ms. Bley’s childhood was dominated by church meetings rather than movies or pop culture. “I was doused in religion, soaked in it, terrified of going to hell,” she recalled in 1974. But she was also an instinctual nonconformist, and by her teens she had broken free of those religious moorings, initially to pursue an interest in competitive roller-skating.She first encountered jazz at age 12, via a concert by the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. At 17, she hitchhiked across the country to New York City, epicenter of the jazz scene. She worked as a cigarette girl at Birdland, where the Count Basie Orchestra was often in residence. “I was just this girl from Oakland in a green dress I made myself, looking totally out of place, un-New Yorkerly, holding cigarettes,” she recalled. “I think I was noticeable.”One musician who took notice was the pianist Paul Bley. They married in 1957, and he encouraged her to write; most of her earliest compositions appeared on his albums. The noted composer George Russell provided further validation when he commissioned her to write for his sextet. Some of her other pieces, like “Ictus” and “Jesus Maria,” were recorded by the clarinetist and saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre’s trio, with Mr. Swallow and Mr. Bley.Jazz was undergoing a creative revolution in the 1960s — and, partly by association, Ms. Bley found herself at the turbulent center of an emerging avant-garde. She was a founder of the Jazz Composers Guild, which sought better working conditions for musicians. Though short-lived, it yielded a productive institution: the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which Ms. Bley formed with the Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler. After she divorced Mr. Bley in 1967, she and Mr. Mantler married.Ms. Bley is survived by a daughter from that marriage, the vocalist, pianist and composer Karen Mantler, and by Mr. Swallow, her partner of more than 30 years.Ms. Bley in concert in Amsterdam in 1989.Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty ImagesBy the late 1960s, Ms. Bley was widely recognized as a composer full of fresh ideas: The prominent vibraphonist Gary Burton featured her music exclusively on “A Genuine Tong Funeral,” an RCA release on which he led an ensemble that included Mr. Mantler, the saxophonist Gato Barbieri and the tuba and baritone saxophone player Howard Johnson, among others.Those and other musicians from the ranks of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra formed the core personnel on “Escalator Over the Hill.” Though it was intended for release on a major label, Ms. Bley and Mr. Mantler grew disillusioned with label negotiations and formed JCOA Records to release it — along with the New Music Distribution Service, a pioneering nonprofit distributor for independent releases.After Ms. Bley received a Guggenheim fellowship for composition in 1972, she and Mr. Mantler formed another label, Watt. It released more than two dozen of her albums over the next 35 years, with distribution through ECM Records.Ms. Bley had more than fleeting contact with rock: In 1975 she joined a band with Mr. Bruce on bass and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones on guitar. And she wrote all the songs for “Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports,” a 1981 album credited to Mr. Mason, the drummer in Pink Floyd, with lead vocals by Robert Wyatt, formerly of Soft Machine.During the 2010s, Ms. Bley focused a good deal of her energies on the Liberation Music Orchestra, preserving Charlie Haden’s musical vision as well as his commitment to left-leaning social activism: She included a new version of her late-’60s composition “Silent Spring” on the orchestra’s fifth album, “Time/Life,” released in 2016. As a performer she worked mainly with Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Swallow, touring internationally and releasing several albums for ECM.Ms. Bley outside her home in 2016.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesFeaturing some of Ms. Bley’s sparest and most beguilingly lyrical compositions, these albums — the most recent of which, “Life Goes On,” was released in 2020 — also naturally put a spotlight on her piano playing, which had long been a source of mixed feelings for her.“I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she told the German journalist Thomas Venker in 2019, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”But speaking with The Times in 2016, Ms. Bley noted with satisfaction that the idiosyncrasies in her playing were her own:“There’s nobody that plays like me — why would they? So if I’ve had an influence, maybe it would be if they decided to play like themselves. In other words, the whole idea of not playing like anybody is a way of playing.” More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Readers Pick the Ultimate Fall Playlist

      by

      Listen to reader-submitted songs that capture the moodiness of fall.Charlie Brown and the gang set the tone.via Everett CollectionDear listeners,Last week, I asked you to submit a song that feels like fall. So many of you responded with such evocatively autumnal suggestions that it became quite a daunting task to whittle them down to a relatively compact and cohesive listening experience — but I somehow managed, and I have that playlist for you today.Autumn, according to many of you, seems like a time of coexisting opposites. It’s about the warmth sought during the season’s first chill. It’s about endings and beginnings, deaths and rebirths, longtime traditions enlivened by new circumstances. Autumn’s signature cocktail is a strange brew of anticipation and nostalgia, like the new-school-year stress dreams that visit so many of us even when we’ve long (long) since graduated.In a word — and one that aptly serves as the title of one of the songs on this playlist — it’s a season that signals change.Your song submissions ranged across genres, generations and moods. But there were also quite a few consensus picks: the Kinks’ “Autumn Almanac,” Tom Rush’s version of “Urge for Going,” and Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” were among the most popular suggestions, and they all make appearances here. (What is it about fall and mandolin solos?) There were plenty of surprising selections too, from the likes of Slowdive, Sade and Warren Zevon.Many thanks to anyone who submitted a song! It’s always such a joy to read your comments and to hear directly from the Amplifier community. As I said, it was difficult to choose from so many great selections, but I think this particular playlist captures something fundamental about the spirit of the season.So throw on some flannel, grab a steaming mug of something and press play.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Vince Guaraldi: “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”It doesn’t truly feel like autumn until my family watches Charlie Brown together. Now that I’m in high school it’s a bit harder to find a time where everyone is available, but we’ll make it work! — Caroline Didizian, Pennsylvania (Listen on YouTube)2. Rod Stewart: “Maggie May”Fall makes me think of change, melancholy, approaching the end. All encapsulated in Rod Stewart’s most famous song as his summer fling comes to an end and he has to “get on back to school.” The reflection in the song feels sad but not spiteful, final but fair. — Matt Zacek, Minnesota (Listen on YouTube)3. The Kinks: “Autumn Almanac”This one covers all the bases — brisk weather, falling leaves and fall colors, cozy times with your people, and the exacerbation of rheumatism. I mean, I’m guessing that the Brits weren’t doing the pumpkin-spice thing in the ’60s, but barring that, it’s pretty darned autumnal. — Sarah Engeler-Young, Location withheld (Listen on YouTube)4. Lucinda Williams: “Fruits of My Labor”Nature plays a game of roulette every fall. After months of growth, some trees turn crimson, some fade to muddy brown. Williams reveals that relationships face a similar moment of reckoning. “Lemon trees don’t make a sound, ’til branches bend and fruit falls to the ground,” she sings, alongside a drawling harmonica that is both warm and heartbreaking. — Alex Skidmore, San Francisco (Listen on YouTube)5. Sade: “The Sweetest Gift”I always remember how the writer Alan Hollinghurst called autumn “the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal.” This is a song that feels wrapped in that same tug between acceptance of the past and a sense of protection over a quieter future. — Tiernan Bertrand-Essington, Los Angeles (Listen on YouTube)6. Warren Zevon: “Tenderness on the Block”I have three daughters and the youngest is still in college — but I associate fall with them going off to school and not needing my wife and I as much as they used to. Zevon captures how melancholy their leaving makes me feel. — John Peebles, Morris Township, N.J. (Listen on YouTube)7. Big Thief: “Change”Fall is a time of transition: the hectic energy of the summer slows, the weather cools, the school year begins. On “Change,” Adrianne Lenker mourns the end of a relationship and recognizes how challenging it can be to adapt to changing circumstances. But she ultimately asks the listener — and herself — to move forward and search for meaning in their new reality: “Would you walk forever in the light to never learn the secret of the quiet night?” — Trammell Saltzgaber, Brooklyn, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)8. Slowdive: “When the Sun Hits”Most of their songs feel like fall to me, but this especially. This is evening walk music. — Zac Crain, Dallas (Listen on YouTube)9. Led Zeppelin: “Ramble On”I have a memory of driving back to Florida for the fall semester after spending a delightful summer working on Cape Hatteras, N.C. This song came on and the leaves were actually falling all around. It’s a specific moment from decades ago, and a vivid visual memory every time I hear this song. — Allison McCarthy, St. Petersburg, Fla. (Listen on YouTube)10. Tom Rush: “Urge for Going”Whenever the sky grows a chilly gray, I have to listen (repeatedly) to Tom Rush’s exquisite version of Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going.” The guitar alone sends chills creeping up the spine. Hunker up against the wind and enjoy. — Mick Carlon, Barnstable, Mass. (Listen on YouTube)11. Nick Drake: “Time Has Told Me”Of course, being Nick Drake, it is redolent of loss and fallen leaves and short days with rain and wind. Like all his work, it has a pastoral scent and a sense of English melancholy and peat fire. Devastatingly beautiful, as is the fall. — Paul Cameron Opperman, Location withheld (Listen on YouTube)12. Eva Cassidy: “Autumn Leaves”The ache in her voice as she evokes the melancholy that summer’s end brings never fails to make my breath catch. You can picture the leaves falling like tears. — Bonnie Holliday, Arrington, Va. (Listen on YouTube)13. Billie Holiday: “Autumn in New York”The warmth of Billie Holiday’s voice and the cool notes of Oscar Peterson’s piano put me in a smoky jazz club, away from the chill of the sunset. It’s a sense of transformation. Summer is ending, but what is beginning? — Janet Hartwell, Key West, Fla. (Listen on YouTube)14. Nanci Griffith: “October Reasons”The song begins, “I’m gonna open up the window and let in October,” as if October is a friend waiting to be greeted. It’s how I feel about fall: the cooler temperatures, the changing color of the leaves. It’s a friend I want to let in, and Nanci’s song encompasses this feeling. — David Sponheim, Minnetonka, Minn. (Listen on YouTube)It’s late September and I really should be back at school,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Readers Pick the Ultimate Fall Playlist” track listTrack 1: Vince Guaraldi, “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”Track 2: Rod Stewart, “Maggie May”Track 3: The Kinks, “Autumn Almanac”Track 4: Lucinda Williams, “Fruits of My Labor”Track 5: Sade, “The Sweetest Gift”Track 6: Warren Zevon, “Tenderness on the Block”Track 7: Big Thief, “Change”Track 8: Slowdive, “When the Sun Hits”Track 9: Led Zeppelin, “Ramble On”Track 10: Tom Rush, “Urge for Going”Track 11: Nick Drake, “Time Has Told Me”Track 12: Eva Cassidy, “Autumn Leaves”Track 13: Billie Holiday, “Autumn in New York”Track 14: Nanci Griffith, “October Reasons”Bonus TracksMy own personal fall song is a pretty obvious choice: Neil Young’s “Harvest.” It’s right there in the title, sure, but there’s also something so oblique and stirring about the melody of this song and the imagery of its lyrics that continues to haunt me each time I listen. “Harvest” has, to me, that mixture of chill and warmth, of familiarity and strangeness, that make a great fall song. (Plus, you know, it’s literally called “Harvest.” From the album “Harvest.” What more can I say?)Also, on this week’s Playlist, you can hear new music from Bad Bunny, boygenius, Sleater-Kinney, and more. Check it out here. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Bad Bunny’s Surprising Return and 13 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Ice Spice, Sleater-Kinney, Roy Hargrove and more.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Bad Bunny, ‘Mr. October’Bad Bunny surprise-released a new album, “Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana” (“Nobody Knows what’s Going to Happen Tomorrow”). Many of its 22 songs circle back toward the programmed trap beats that helped start Bad Bunny’s career, but now they’re just part of the sonic domain of a world-conquering star. In “Mr. October” he sings and raps about wealth, clothes, fame, sex and celebrity, comparing himself to Michael Jackson and Reggie Jackson and rightfully claiming, “Yo cambié el juego”: “I changed the game.” But the track is far from triumphal; with tolling piano notes, filmy minor chords and skittering electronic tones, the music laces every boast with anxiety. JON PARELESIce Spice and Rema, ‘Pretty Girl’The utterly unflappable Bronx rapper Ice Spice cannily connects with Afrobeats — and with the gentle-voiced, hook-making Nigerian songwriter Rema, who offers slick, robotic blandishments in what sounds like one repeating cut-and-pasted chorus. Ice Spice responds with encouraging, human-sounding specifics: “Think about my future, got you all in it.” But the track ends with Rema’s looped doubts — “Give me promise you ain’t gonna bail on me” — rather than her wholehearted welcome. Why give him the last word? PARELESDesire Marea, ‘The Only Way’The style-melting South African songwriter Desire Marea turns to funk and Afrobeat in “The Only Way.” His voice lofts a sustained melody and layered backup vocals over an arrangement that feels hand-played and organic: all staccato cross-rhythms — drums, bass, guitar, electric piano, horns — with a nervy, constantly shifting beat and one melodic peak topping another. The only lyrics in English are “It’s the only way” — and with such urgent music, there’s no need for more. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Não Ao Marco Temporal’If Esperanza Spalding has been in feeds this week for precisely the wrong reasons, consider this your cue to close that tab. Spalding’s mind has been elsewhere: specifically in Brazil, where the battle over the fate of the world’s largest rainforest is reaching a decisive point. On “Não Ao Marco Temporal,” recorded in Rio de Janeiro, Spalding and a small crew of musicians protest the Temporal Framework, a recent attempt to roll back Indigenous Brazilians’ land sovereignty that would have left the Amazon increasingly vulnerable to deforestation. (The Brazilian Supreme Court recently rejected the framework, but industry’s attempts to undermine that decision have continued.) Over strums on the cavaco and violão, the resounding of drums and the squeals of a cuica, Spalding sings of the “grabbing hands” that seek to violate the rainforest. “There are some men who stop at nothing to have their way with the body of a woman or a girl,” she and a small chorus of voices declare. “Right now they’re calling her Brazil.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBrittany Howard, ‘What Now’Brittany Howard, who led the Alabama Shakes, grapples with a disintegrating relationship in “What Now,” singing “If you want someone to hate, then blame it on me.” Over a fierce, choppy funk groove, Howard restrains her far-ranging voice to make her point about “learning lessons I don’t want to.” She is not happy about the breakup; she sings like she has no choice. PARELESMadi Diaz, ‘Same Risk’Madi Diaz sings about a high-stakes infatuation in “Same Risk,” spelling out both her physical passion and her misgivings. “Do you think this could ruin your life?/’Cause I could see it ruining mine,” she asks, then wonders, “Are you gonna throw me under the bus?” What starts with modest acoustic guitar strumming rises with an orchestral crescendo to match the urgency of her questions. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Hell’“Hell” will be the opening track on “Little Rope,” the album Sleater-Kinney will release in January and which was made in the wake of the sudden deaths of Carrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather. The song breaks wide open with anguish and inconsolable fury, as tolling, elegiac verses erupt into bitter power-chorded choruses. Corin Tucker unleashes her scream on the word “why.” PARELESJamila Woods featuring Saba, ‘Practice’Jamila Woods takes the pressure off a new relationship in “Practice,” the latest single from her excellent album “Water Made Us.” “We don’t gotta hurry up, you ain’t gotta be the one,” she sings in an airy, unburdened voice, carried along by an insistent beat. The Chicago rapper Saba sounds similarly breezy and wise on his verse — “learned from her, moved on, learned more” — and Woods’s lyrics extend the song’s playful basketball metaphor. After all, in the immortal words of Allen Iverson, we’re talking about practice. LINDSAY ZOLADZSen Morimoto, ‘Deeper’“I lost my senses like I’ve lost so many times/Why do the answers seem impossible to find?” sings Sen Morimoto, who plays most of the instruments on his tracks himself, in “Deeper.” A lurching beat, meandering chromatic harmonies and keyboard and guitar incursions that seem to have wafted in from other songs just add to the sense of disorientation. Morimoto’s saxophone solo sounds more sure of itself than he does, but he’s clearly not too perturbed. PARELESRoy Hargrove, ‘Young Daydreams (Beauteous Visions)’The trumpeter Roy Hargrove was just 23, but already near the top of New York’s jazz scene, when his friend and mentor Wynton Marsalis commissioned him to write “Love Suite in Mahogany.” The suite, which he performed with a septet at Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, in fall 1993, begins in a downward slide of moonlit harmony, gesturing toward Gil Evans and Billy Strayhorn (this was the Young Lions era; a direct address to the masters was encouraged). It finds its way gradually into a slowly creeping groove before a false ending gives way to a coda of driving post-bop. The track cuts off as he cues the band into the suite’s next movement. You can hear the rest of the suite’s debut performance, which has just been released as an LP on J.A.L.C.’s Blue Engine Records. RUSSONELLOMendoza Hoff Revels, ‘New Ghosts’There’s gristle and bone in every last satisfying bite of “Echolocation,” the debut album from Mendoza Hoff Revels, a four-piece band co-led by the guitarist Ava Mendoza and the bassist Devin Hoff. There is also a delightfully wide range of musical shapes at play. One moment, they’re descending straight from the slow drag of doom metal and stoner-rock; later, Mendoza’s wily, spiral-bound melodies have more to do with the tactics of John Zorn (both she and Hoff have played on Zorn projects). Her acid-soaked electric guitar rarely leaves center stage here. On “New Ghosts,” Mendoza, Hoff and the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis hover around a heavy minor chord, occasionally repainting it in an uncanny major. Then Hoff and the drummer Ches Smith join, and the improvisation ascends into a gray cloud of swirling saxophone and bludgeoning guitar. RUSSONELLOboygenius, ‘Afraid of Heights’Lucy Dacus regrets confessing her fear of heights on this wry highlight from boygenius’s new four-song EP, “The Rest”: “It made you want to test my courage, you made me climb a cliff at night.” Though, like all boygenius songs, it’s a collaboration with her singer-songwriter peers Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, here Dacus takes the lead, bringing complexity to a simple chord progression through the specificity of her lyricism. “I never rode a motorcycle, I never smoked a cigarette,” she sings, balancing poignancy with dry humor. “I wanna live a vibrant life, but I wanna die a boring death.” ZOLADZAllegra Krieger, ‘Impasse’The folky, deceptively understated songwriter Allegra Krieger released her album “I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane” in July; now she extends it with “Fragile Plane — B-Sides.” In “Impasse,” she calmly confronts someone who’s been “building quite a big brand,” touting “family values, patriot song” in a culture where “Everyone here is trying to win/Power or paper or recognition.” Over an unhurried modal guitar line, she warns how it could suddenly come crashing down, and she sings like she won’t mind if it does. PARELESNdox Électrique, ‘Lëk Ndau Mbay’Gianna Greco and François R. Cambuzat, who have worked with post-punk artists including Lydia Lunch, have spent recent years traveling the world, documenting and collaborating with musicians who play traditional trance rituals. For their latest project, Ndox Électrique, they collaborated with Senegalese drummers and singers who perform spirit-possession healing rituals called n’doep, layering drones and assaultive noise-rock guitars atop the fiercely propulsive beat, translating and transmuting the music’s incantatory power. PARELES More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      After Viral Beef, Robert Glasper Returns to the Blue Note

      by

      Mounting his fifth annual residency at the Blue Note (after a viral beef at the Grammys), the pianist, producer and composer is hungry for a challenge.In February, on the night of this year’s Grammy Awards, the pianist, producer and composer Robert Glasper was enjoying himself in the audience at the Microsoft Theater when he realized he didn’t have his phone. He had given it to his assistant earlier in the evening, before taking the stage to accept the award for best R&B album — his second win in that category and fifth career Grammy.When he retrieved the phone, Glasper saw that it was filled with messages about the R&B singer Chris Brown, who was among the nominees whom he had just bested. Brown had reacted to the loss with a discourteous post to his 131 million followers on Instagram: “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper,” appending a crying laughing emoji to the word “who.”The comment, which Brown followed with a video comparing his success on the record charts to Glasper’s, was an attempt to undercut his rival’s achievement. But Brown had fallen into a trap. Over the previous 10 years, Glasper had been methodically chipping away at the boundaries between jazz — the music for which he originally became known — hip-hop and R&B. In some ways, his winning album, “Black Radio III,” was designed to force precisely the kind of showdown with contemporary Black popular music that Brown’s intemperate posting had unwittingly supplied.Scrolling through his phone at the venue, Glasper was almost giddy.“Oh yeah,” he thought to himself. “This is going to be great.”Glasper, 45, whose long face and soft features are capped by closely trimmed hair, ascended the ranks of modern jazz nearly 20 years ago. Born and raised in Houston, he arrived in New York to study at the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in 1997, right as the neo-soul movement, pioneered by artists like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, was integrating jazz instrumentation and vocal performance into a chart-topping variant of R&B.At the New School, Glasper befriended the singer Bilal, a member of a loose musicians collective called the Soulquarians with D’Angelo, Badu, the producer J Dilla, and the rappers Common, Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) and Talib Kweli, among others. The group shared recording space at Electric Lady Studios and occasionally attended concerts together. At the same time, Glasper was getting an education in the world of straight-ahead jazz while playing piano in bands led by Christian McBride and Russell Malone — both took him on tour, at the expense of his attendance record — and forming his own acoustic trio.The Blue Note residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites Glasper’s extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHis first album, “Mood” (2004) and two follow-ups for Blue Note Records, “Canvas” (2005) and “In My Element” (2007), hewed largely traditional, with an occasional nod to hip-hop, as on the “In My Element” track “J Dillalude.” But by the release of his fourth album, “Double Booked” (2009) — half featuring the Robert Glasper Trio and half featuring a new electric fusion ensemble called “The Robert Glasper Experiment” — Glasper’s inner Soulquarian was edging into view.“Real jazz is supposed to reflect the times you’re in; that’s the true history and tradition of the music,” he said. “I’m not supposed to sound like Thelonious Monk did when I have so much more music to be influenced by.”The “Black Radio” series, which Glasper described as a distillation of his brand, made breathing room for those influences. The first album, released in 2012, featured several of his neo-soul compatriots — Badu, Bilal, Musiq Soulchild — as well as rapping from Lupe Fiasco and Bey, with covers of songs by David Bowie and Nirvana thrown in for good measure.“Black Radio” earned Glasper his first Grammy Award (for best R&B album) and set him on a collision course with popular culture not seen from a jazz musician this century. He played piano on several tracks of Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released a remix album with the house music producer Kaytranada and was recruited by the actor Don Cheadle to compose the score for “Miles Ahead,” a 2015 biopic of Miles Davis.“He has that desire to get to the next level,” said Common, who appeared on “Black Radio 2” (2013) and formed the group August Greene with Glasper and the drummer/producer Karriem Riggins. “He wants to be the one that people will look to and say, ‘Yeah, he was the greatest of that time.’”Last month, Glasper arrived at a recording studio in Downtown Brooklyn to work on his latest film score, for a documentary about Luther Vandross, one of his mother’s favorite artists. “The first time I fell in love with acoustic piano wasn’t Duke Ellington, or Monk, or Herbie — it was Luther,” he said, crediting Nat Adderley Jr., Vandross’s longtime pianist and arranger. His large frame was draped in a black T-shirt with a portrait of Dilla, whose idiosyncratic production style inspired a generation of hip-hop and jazz musicians before and after his death in 2006.“Watching him work changed the way I play,” Glasper said.A couple of days after the session, Glasper would fly to Johannesburg for nearly two weeks to play festival dates. He is also working on a Christmas EP and composing another film score, for a documentary about Billy Preston. On Wednesday, back in New York, he began his annual, monthlong residency at the Blue Note Jazz club, colloquially known as “Robtoberfest.” The residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites his extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting. It has become known for drawing A-list surprise performers (Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock are fans) and, this year, will mix tributes to giants like Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey with featured performances from Bey, Norah Jones, Yebba, D Smoke, Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington, among others.Glasper finds scoring films a welcome challenge. “Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy,” he said.Jasmine Clarke for The New York Times“It’s a reflection of his unique contribution to music,” said Alex Kurland, the director of programming at the Blue Note. “He enables everyone around him to sound great and to feel great.”Since the pandemic, Glasper has lived full time in Los Angeles. He got an apartment there in 2017 on the suggestion of Martin (with whom he, Washington and the producer 9th Wonder perform as Dinner Party) and to be closer to the film business. He composed the music for the 2020 film “The Photograph,” starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield, and for the television series “Run the World,” “The Best Man: The Final Chapters” and “Winning Time.” (He has also appeared in front of the camera, including in a small role on Showtime’s “Black Monday,” the since-canceled series Cheadle starred in and executive produced.)Of his many jobs, Glasper said he finds scoring the most challenging. It requires two acts of translation — from image to sound, and from director to composer — for which his background as an artist provided little preparation.“Directors will ask you to do weird things: ‘I need this to feel melancholy — but in a calypso way,’” he said, laughing. “But it’s good exercise. Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy.”During the pandemic, he was inspired to make “Black Radio III” in part because his usual, “easy,” recording methods were unavailable to him. Instead of inviting musicians to jam live in a studio, he worked more like a hip-hop producer, crafting beats and soliciting vocal performances remotely. The result — featuring, among many others, H.E.R., Ty Dolla Sign and, on a special edition produced in partnership with the streetwear label Supreme, Mac Miller — is the most accessible and thoroughly modern music Glasper has released.Even Chris Brown eventually had to pay his respects. The day after his viral Grammys outburst, the singer posted a public apology: “After doing my research I actually think your amazing,” he wrote.Glasper gladly accepted — and quickly printed “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper?” on T-shirts. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sarah Vaughan

      by

      All it might take is a second and a half of hearing her sing to make your spine tingle or your heart drop. Opera singers, jazz vocalists, writers and Vaughan’s biographer share their favorites.For over a year, we’ve been rooting through jazz history five minutes at a time. We’ve covered favorites by Ornette Coleman, Mary Lou Williams, New Orleans’s jazz greats and many others. Now let’s turn our attention to a vocalist who epitomized — but couldn’t be contained by — jazz: Sarah Vaughan, “The Divine One,” owner of perhaps the most impressive vocal instrument in recorded history.Forget five minutes, all it might take is a second and a half of hearing her sing to make your spine tingle or your heart drop. Across her wide contralto range she could easily alternate between thick vibrato and crystal-clear precision. Vaughan began her career as a teenager singing bebop — a then-new style that was almost exclusively the domain of hotshot instrumentalists. But she could improvise an exacting scat solo, right alongside the horn players.Raised in a musical family in Newark, Vaughan first hit the road with Earl Hines’s big band in the mid-1940s, after its other singer, Billy Eckstine, saw her win a talent show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She became an integral part of the band, and then a star. Though naturally shy, she made it clear early on that she was to be treated as any other musician, and her bandmates soon started calling her “Sailor,” because of her fluency with four-letter words.Heading off on a tour with Hines in 1944, she and the pianist John Malachi were lugging their suitcases into Union Station in Washington when he made the mistake of chivalry, holding the door open for her. “What are you standing up there looking at me for, fool?” she demanded. “Go on through the door! You damn fool.” Maybe that’s the moment when he gave her another of her many nicknames: “Sassy.” In any case, it stuck, and it’s the one she is still known by today.As her career progressed, Vaughan — who died in 1990, at 66 — ventured into rock and Brazilian music. Read on for a sampling of standout Vaughan performances selected by opera singers, jazz vocalists, critics, fiction writers and Vaughan’s biographer. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Lizz Wright, vocalist“Tenderly”Sarah Vaughan’s voice is a whole atmosphere. In a few exquisite phrases, the current of her vibrato and the richness of her tone usher the listener into a place in time, into the poetry of song, and hint at the wealth of a great mind. As a Black woman in America, Sarah found a way to stand before masses of people around the world commanding their patient attention, respect and admiration through her powerful vocals and masterfully whimsical phrasing. Her enchanted voice gently opened doors that were often closed to women, people of color and vocalists. Everything under Sarah’s voice is draped in a playful and sacred charm that makes the moment richer than it was. She was aptly called “The Divine One.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Wesley Brown, novelist“Send in the Clowns”Sarah. Words fail to measure up. Like Beckett, I try to fail better. A hush steadies all in the club. The mic rests ready against her chest where voice and heartbeat greet. Me on the ground, she in midair with her usual flair. Every breath a parachute, full of rumbles and quivers and flavors of sass. Such a flirt she is, the shimmy in the shoulders, much girlish mischief in the mouth. Isn’t it bliss? Me still on the ground, she in midair. Words not up to snuff. Quick. Don’t bother. She’s here!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Cécile McLorin Salvant, vocalist“Maria”The most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard is Sarah Vaughan singing this. I believe this is one of the most luxurious vocal recordings of all time. I go back to this video very often when I want to treat myself. I’m so fascinated by her vibrato and by the moments when she gives us those sweeps in range. This version of “Maria,” a song from “West Side Story,” has an intimate, secret quality at crucial moments, and yet it is overwhelmingly grandiose, regal. I have always loved this about Sarah Vaughan. She can take you to these incredible heights with her voice, but with a word, a note, is able to infuse her interpretations with a quotidian, offhand quality. She does not keep her voice in the same place — it is heterogenous, which is what makes it so fun, so rich, so moving. She is divine and human.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Emily Lordi, writer“I’ll Be Seeing You”Many artists have performed “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal’s ballad of lost love and longing. But no one has lingered in it as languorously as Sarah Vaughan. Her version of the song, recorded live with her veteran trio at Tivoli Gardens in 1963, expresses no interest in moving on or “healing.” Instead, Vaughan initiates a long, slow waltz with heartache. By casting herself into every phrase, she implies that the pain of imagining her lover in their old haunts (carousels, cafes) not only revives him; it enlivens her (hence the protracted “I” with which she begins). In a feat of breath control, she bridges the song’s two opening statements — inviting, even willing, a world made more vibrant by the afterlife of love, as it smudges the edges of everything.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Samara Joy, vocalist“Time After Time”I admire how much care she puts into every word, making sure that the story of the song is heard and felt. Any improvisatory changes made to the melody are done with taste and feeling. I also love how she uses the full range of her voice to deliver the song. I almost thought the song ended once she hit that final high A-flat, but after descending two octaves lower, oscillating between G and A-flat, this Sarah performance became an instant favorite.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Ben Ratliff, former Times jazz and pop critic“The Thrill Is Gone”I like hearing Sarah Vaughan tear it up on an extra-slow-tempo ballad, 50 beats per minute or lower. With small groups, her unremitting virtuosity made a certain kind of design sense: She filled in the canyon-like spaces between beats. But I also like hearing her singing at slug tempos with thick, commercial, easy-listening studio arrangements: In an atmosphere of languid appeasement, she bounces off the walls. For the front half of “The Thrill Is Gone,” on “Vaughan and Violins” (1958), the arrangement by Quincy Jones clears open space for her to go full Sarah, strange Sarah, with her feats of breath control, mic technique, timbral shifts, trilling and sliding notes, hard emphatic gestures. But she keeps doing it after the tide of violins enters. I mean, the first “gone” is more than three seconds long, most of it the letter “n”; at 0:34, she delivers a pinched, acid “… si-ii-ighs”; at 0:38, “a-hand re-ee-huh-a-lize”; at 0:51, “the nights: the nights are so cold.” At a certain point you’re noticing every detail. Most affective ballads work their affect intermittently — there are a few select peaks, which makes them easier to remember. Vaughan’s were nearly all peak, and in that she took a risk.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Charenee Wade, vocalist“Once in a While”Sarah Vaughan, my first musical love, always brought newness to everything she sang each time she stepped onto the stage. There is a great early recording on MGM in 1949 of this song where, if one listens closely, her undeniably infectious tone and masterful phrasing speak through. This particular clip of her live performance of “Once in a While” is filmed almost 30 years later, and that essence is still there, but even more enriched. Her vocal range was unparalleled and became even deeper as she “seasoned.” She is a soulfully spontaneous and playful improviser. Her stage presence is transfixing, and her comedic timing is delightfully charming. She holds the entire room in the palm of her hand with each story she tells and intimate moment she shares. Her vocal technique is flawless, no matter which decade of her career, and one would be blessed to be able to witness her sitting down at the piano and accompanying herself just as well as any pianist had for her in the past. She is iconic, and quintessentially the definition of a True Jazz Vocalist. My first love, and I know you will love her too!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elaine M. Hayes, biographer“Whatever Lola Wants”Sarah Vaughan’s “Whatever Lola Wants,” released in 1955, is a pop masterpiece. In less than three minutes, she perfectly embodies her role as a provocative temptress while demonstrating her vocal prowess, technical mastery, and savvy as a storyteller. On the surface, she sings straight. But she in fact infuses the Broadway tune with her trademark vocal inflections and nuances. A delicious slide here, a microtonal bend there. With each verse she adds layers of complexity that build momentum, pulling the listener through her performance. And while Vaughan keeps a strict beat, she deftly conveys uncertainty and spontaneity, constantly pushing the boundaries between control and the loss of control to produce a delightful tension between the two. Musically, she has re-created the dynamics of a successful seduction. By the time she sings the final “I’m irresistible, you fool/Give in, give in, give in,” her success — and the success of her single, which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard and Variety charts — seems a foregone conclusion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, scholar“The Shadow of Your Smile”The older I get, the more I revel in listening to grown women’s voices. We often think of what age subtracts, but I’m attracted by what it adds. Growing up in church, people would say, “You have to be a certain age to sing that song.” Sometimes, life experience has to catch up with lyrics. One recording that always makes me feel this way is Sarah Vaughan’s 1966 interpretation of Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster’s “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Sarah Vaughan is a master interpreter of song, both melodically and narratively. I know there are countless recordings of this song, but whenever someone mentions it, I only ever think of hers.This is Vaughan in her 40s singing with an alluring alchemy of tender reflection with the gravitas of life experience. All of her soulful vocal virtuosity paired with an orchestral arrangement infused with a bossa nova groove lulls the listener into a dreamscape. It is nearly four minutes of her starting deep in her rich contralto voice and carrying us higher into her lilting soprano. Her vocal ascent reflects the lyrical joy of remembrance, and then toward the end, she gently descends and places us back into reality. It’s an expertly crafted blend of shadow and sun, light and dark, in the colors of her voice and the story she tells. This is Sarah Vaughan in full bloom as a singer and as a woman.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Will Friedwald, author“Misty”Back in the ’80s, my favorite selection on the jukebox at the Angry Squire was the 1959 single of Sarah Vaughan singing “Misty,” with Quincy Jones’s orchestra and Zoot Sims on tenor. Even at that noisy bar in Chelsea, the first notes of that 45 would cause the whole room to instantly freeze — as if the voice of a goddess were beaming in from another world. Some critics accused Vaughan of not paying enough attention to lyrics in general, but here was a song where she didn’t just sing the words, she actually became them. She didn’t just get “Misty” in the sense of teary-eyed, but she seemed to dissolve bodily into the atmosphere and cling “to a cloud.” Even 30 years after her passing from this world to the next, that record still has that effect on me.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Angel Blue, vocalist“They Can’t Take That Away From Me”The brilliance of Sarah Vaughan reaches far beyond her exquisite sound. Perhaps her most intriguing quality is her vocal ability. Going from a high soprano range to a low contralto range effortlessly seems to be something that she was able to do within any song. One of the songs that I find particularly fascinating is “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”: She demonstrates her ability to catch the listener’s ear with a simple melody by her strong use of diction, straight tone singing, and embellished vibrato to highlight a specific word or end of the phrase.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic“Like a Lover (O Cantador)”In the last chapter of her career, Vaughan built herself a new home in the music of Brazil, recording three albums of bossa, jazz and contemporary Brazilian pop. At the end of the first LP, “I Love Brazil,” she’s joined by the Rio de Janeiro-born balladeer Dori Caymmi on his song “Like a Lover (O Cantador).” Caymmi adds the occasional cascade of wordless vocals, as if to provide Vaughan with her string section, but mostly it’s just his acoustic guitar and her voice, singing lyrics in English about an unrequited love. In her mid-50s, Vaughan sounds like someone who knows the feeling of desire inside and out: its urgency, its unreason, the sting that can sometimes be its only reward. But enough with all that. You don’t get very far weighing Sarah Vaughan down with conversations about “authenticity” or “message.” She is concerned almost completely with the joy of singing: the variety of shapes that her notes can take, how they feel, how they taste, whether they’ll sit still or wriggle in her grasp. And that’s where the optimism that you can hear in this track comes from: She knows a song is a lover that will always requite. Sure enough, if you go back to the original Portuguese lyrics, they aren’t actually about a lover at all, they’re about a singer’s devotion to song. One of them translates to: “If only I knew how to cry/Alas, I’m a singer, I can only sing.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      I Started Playing My Sax Outdoors. Then the Fans Came.

      by

      When your rehearsal space is the bank of the Hudson, the audience is a bit unconventional.It was Year 2 of the pandemic, in the spring, that I hit on the idea of having my high school saxophone refurbished. My 48-year-old horn came back from the repair shop in Midtown Manhattan a week later. I put it together in my Upper West Side apartment and … for the love of God, it was loud. A couple of days later, I saw my downstairs neighbor in the lobby, and he asked, “Is that a sax I hear?” He professed to be OK with my rudimentary jazz stylings, but I was uncomfortable.My building is directly adjacent to Riverside Park. The day after that encounter, I walked 10 minutes down to the bank of the Hudson, found an arrangement of boulders where I could put my case and started to improvise to some 1960s soul jazz playing through my headphones. I was loud. Gloriously, triumphantly loud. Within minutes, bike riders and strolling couples stopped to listen. Some took photos. After that, I took my sax to the park almost every day. Over the next few weeks and on through this summer, paddleboarders, canoers and motorboats on the river hove to the shore to listen for a few minutes. When the traffic on the nearby West Side Highway ground to a halt, I got a round of applause. I had at least two cameos on Instagram.I find it hard to practice inside now, even in my building, where the jazz pianist and composer Billy Strayhorn once lived. It’s inhibiting. I miss the expansiveness of playing outside. And I’ve found nature surprisingly attentive, despite the noise. Robins and sparrows — and only one word is possible here — flock to me as if I’m St. Francis of C Minor. Squirrels stand on their hind legs and fix me with hard stares, like miniature critics. My most cherished fan, though, was Zippy, a goose with whom I had a prior relationship. (My wife is known as the Goose Lady of Riverside Park, but that’s a subject for another essay.) One summer day, Zippy and his extended family were paddling south down the Hudson but then circled back and flew up to the riverbank next to me. Zippy sat there quietly for the next 45 minutes until I packed up to head home. There is nothing more satisfying than entertaining a goose you’re fond of.But, of course, it’s the interactions with people that mean the most. Little kids in matching T-shirts on day-camp outings are delighted. They clap for the noisy man. The guy with the wild hair, eating a sandwich on a nearby bench, loved it too. “Do you know Hall and Oates?” he asked. “You should learn ‘Maneater.’ You could make a lot of dough playing that. Hey, if you need some grub, that church on 99th is pretty good.” I wasn’t sure if I looked like I could use a square meal or just sounded like it.Robins and sparrows — and only one word is possible here — flock to me as if I’m St. Francis of C Minor. To be honest, I stink. This is not humble-bragging. I’m just realistic about my abilities. I imagine that for many people, what I’m playing sounds “jazzy.” (Common questions from passers-by: “Are you professional?” “Do you play in a club someplace?”) But if I showed up at Smalls, the Greenwich Village jazz spot, for one of their jam sessions, and someone said, “Let’s do ‘How High the Moon’ in D flat,” it wouldn’t take more than a few measures for the drummer to toss one of his cymbals at me. (It happened to Charlie Parker in Kansas City in the 1930s, although he went on to great things.) I’m OK with simple chord progressions or, better yet, just wailing to a Jimmy Smith recording. But I still can’t throw in those diminished-seventh licks or tritone substitutions at will. It’s shocking, really, how little I have progressed since fourth grade. I don’t care. When I play outdoors, perfection is neither possible nor expected.In 1960, Sonny Rollins, already one of the greatest tenor-sax players ever, quit recording and appearing in public so he could concentrate on getting better. He was living on the Lower East Side. He tried to practice in a closet (I’ve been there). Still too loud. There was a pregnant neighbor. “I felt real guilty,” he said, according to a 2022 biography. So he walked over to the Williamsburg Bridge and played outside day and night until he returned two years later with an LP called “The Bridge.” I’m not Sonny Rollins, but I can hear progress.I can be pretty jumpy in public. It’s New York: You pay attention (and a sax is not cheap). I was playing a few weeks ago at another spot I like, just off the main path that runs through the upper park. My sax case and music were on a stone wall. At some point, I noticed a man squatting a few feet behind me, fumbling through some kind of bag. I thought, Here we go! He stood up and lurched over to me, his hand raised. And then he said, “Do you want me to put it there?” indicating my open case. He had a few coins in his hand. This guy wasn’t in good shape — maybe under the influence of something, maybe just struggling with life — but he wanted to share what he had.I said: “That’s really nice of you, but I’m just practicing. Keep that for yourself.”“You sure?”“Yeah, I’m sure.” I did two taps on my heart.“I love what you’re doing,” he said, quite emotionally. He gave me a soul shake and then brought me in for a bro hug. “I love you, man.”“I love you too, man,” I said.Really, what I should do is go to the park with a case full of dollar bills and pass them out to the people (and geese) who stop to listen, because I owe them for a music lesson I didn’t know I needed.Harvey Dickson has been a staff editor at The Times since 1997, for the last 16 years at the magazine. He has also worked at The International Herald Tribune in Paris. More