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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Max Roach

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      The drummer helped pioneer bebop in the 1940s and delivered a message of resistance and liberation from the 1960s on. Listen to 13 selections from musicians, writers and critics.For the past 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 Max Roach, who, alongside the drummers Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey, helped pioneer bebop in the 1940s.A Brooklyn native, Roach started playing drums at age 10, and was eventually influenced by the personality that Clarke brought to the instrument. He graduated from high school in 1942 and became the house drummer for Clark Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, then played with Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Pettiford, Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker. By the time he played with Miles Davis in the late ’40s, Roach had shifted his style to a more propulsive rhythm that emphasized the ride cymbal.But while history has credited him with de-emphasizing the bass drum in bebop, Roach himself debunked such thinking. “We played the bass drum, but the engineers would cover it up because it would cause distortion due to the technology at the time,” he once said in “The Drummer’s Time,” a book about jazz drumming. “There were never any mics near our feet; they would have one mic above the drum set, and that was all.”In 1960, Roach turned his attention to racial and political issues, releasing the album “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” as a response to injustices in the United States. Featuring the activist and singer Abbey Lincoln (to whom Roach was married for eight years), the LP used equal amounts of rage and silence to convey the angst of Black Americans. “He was not trying to be slick and have a message,” his son Raoul said in the 2021 documentary “Summer of Soul.” Instead, “that is the message. It’s our time. Do it now. We want liberation.”Roach carried that declaration through the rest of his career. Long considered a cornerstone in the world of jazz, his rapid-fire rhythms have influenced scores of like-minded percussionists to explore themes and textures. Below, we asked 13 musicians, writers and critics to share their favorite Max Roach songs. 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.◆ ◆ ◆Nate Smith, drummer and bandleaderMax Roach, “Driva’ Man (Live)”The momentum in Roach’s playing here is captivating: He’s chasing the time, but not pushing it. He hardly deviates from the skeletal pattern he’s playing, even during Clifford Jordan’s mournful solo. The crispness with which the band converges on the downbeat of every bar evokes the sound of James Brown, signifying the undeniable power and impact of a unified Black band. Further, the crackle of the snare (along with Abbey Lincoln’s tambourine) realizes the terrifying snap of the “driva man’s” whip, used to shock and startle the slave into silence and submission.The last minute and twelve seconds of the video are the most compelling, as Roach, unaccompanied, meditatively plays the same 5/4 pattern over and over. A few bars in, he introduces a slightly more complex ride cymbal pattern, using the drumstick’s shank on the crown of the cymbal. Roach dials up the intensity of the drum solo masterfully, choosing dynamics over density, allowing the cadence he’s playing to reveal more and more about itself. A player of Roach’s facility and imagination must deploy a great deal of restraint in order not to play. This, to me, is the most important lesson — what he chooses to leave out is what draws the listener in. When he hits the last note on the cymbal, he leans in as the crash fades to silence, ending a six-minute master class in the power of musical intention.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Patricia (Twink) Little, drummer, producer and songwriterMax Roach, “Ghost Dance”This song takes me on so many different journeys because there are so many different movements within the piece. It feels a lot like life’s highs and lows giving you 12 minutes of emotions, ranging from happiness, melancholy, chill, groovy and peaceful. There’s even an element that feels almost warlike. The way Max uses his toms while accompanying the horn player from about 6:50-9:00 reminds me of African drums. The toms are tuned to perfection and Max’s rhythmic pattern — along with the melodic pattern of the horns — just puts me in a trance.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Chelsey Green, violinist and bandleaderMax Roach, “Abstrutions”Max Roach made yet another indelible mark with his “Members, Don’t Git Weary” album. Released in 1968, the album is an aural representation of avant-garde jazz at its core while serving as musical commentary to the social and political conflicts of the time.The opening track, “Abstrutions,” subtly invites the listener to explore Roach’s innovative approach to rhythm, form, timbre and improvisation. “Abstrutions” arguably challenges the traditional idea of the blues form, extending the final four-bar phrase with a captivating unison horn call met with a powerful drumroll to carry us back to the top. With support from Roach’s increasingly robust playing, the horn lines intensify as they answer the pianist Stanley Cowell’s commanding improvisation. Roach’s rhythmic agility is felt as the phrase restarts with a seemingly displaced downbeat that keeps listeners on their toes. “Abstrutions” has the full essence of avant-garde jazz but feels inherently soulful and funky at the same time. Roach’s intentional play on tension and release speaks to his distinctive compositional style and meaningful inclusion of the sentiment of protest and activism.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Joseph Patel, producer of ‘Summer of Soul’Max Roach, “Drums Unlimited”I discovered and fell in love with jazz while in college. For almost four years, I spent my Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in the listening room of the campus radio station — KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis, Calif. — diving deep into its immaculate record collection. My understanding of the jazz genre came from this place, from playing records, finding something I liked, looking at the personnel and then burrowing through that artist’s discography (this was pre-internet, mind you) in the stacks of vinyl. From this study, I could put my finger on the records, musicians and lineups at the forefront of change in the genre — and at every step of the way, there was Max Roach. “Drums Unlimited” was the first time I heard compositions for the drum and only the drum. Roach seemed to regularly dislodge convention, for decades, but here, on the title track, he is nothing short of a master of the craft — musically, socially, culturally. There he is, with mesmerizing rhythm and beat; a circular thrust that feels like the beginning of revolution. He gives musical voice to what he would later, forcefully, verbally articulate in the Black struggle for liberation. When we were making “Summer of Soul,” Roach’s set at the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 (with his then-wife, Abbey Lincoln) began with a similar drum solo (sorry, it didn’t make the final film!), and all I could think about was this track — a persistent genius, armed with will and intellect, in his element, reaching desperately for freedom.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Nicole Sweeney, radio hostMax Roach, “Freedom Day”Often, the drum is a song’s heartbeat. It brings it life and guides it along until the last note. On “Freedom Day,” Max’s drum playing represents a heart dealing with the emotions of becoming a free human being. You feel the anticipation, the anxiety, the strength, and even the uncertainty. Abbey Lincoln’s vocals, while not perfectly in line with the melody, are still perfectly placed as she represents the honesty of not being sure what is to come, and the power that comes with knowing you are ready to face it.Max himself said, “we don’t really understand what it is to be free,” yet you hear him feeling free enough to let out a range of emotions in each lick and snare, which allows other musicians like the trumpeter Booker Little to follow suit. The “We Insist!” album was an especially important one, in that after its release, Max vowed to never play music that was not socially relevant. I would be remiss to not also mention the album cover, which is a staged lunch counter sit-in mirrored from the 1960 Greensboro Four sit-in, which took place months before the recording of this album.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Brandi Waller-Pace, musician, educator and scholar-activistClifford Brown and Max Roach, “Joy Spring”Few drummers have reached the level of innovation and influence Max Roach did throughout his long and prolific career. During the bebop era he, along with Kenny Clarke, transformed the way drummers approached their sets. This approach was part of the foundation of sounds my ears embraced when I first found jazz. “Joy Spring,” recorded with the legendary and tragically short-lived Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet, is a jazz classic and a personal favorite. From the moment the drum hits start, I feel a buoyancy that carries me throughout the tune. Roach’s brushes lay down a steady swing that’s punctuated by deep in-the-pocket hits — he manages to maintain a delicate balance between high energy and smoothness. He gets an attack from those brushes as he flows and accentuates the variations within the melody, the agile soloing filled with his signature triplet motifs. His drumming sings to me as much as Clifford’s trumpet or Harold Land’s sax. I can’t listen to this recording without a smile forming on my face. I’m transported to the days when so much of this music was new. “Joy Spring” remains fresh in my ears at every listening.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elena Bergeron, Times editorCharles Mingus and Max Roach, “Percussion Discussion”I had, for a little while, been fascinated by the gossip around the recording of “Money Jungle.” The album from the trio of Roach, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington was a generational bridge between a swinging idol and progenitors of bop, but Mingus is said to have stormed out of the session in 1962 because of something Roach played, or said, and had to be cajoled to return by Ellington himself.What could go that badly between Mingus and Roach? The pair had by then held down so many bandstands as parts of extraordinary groupings, and had even joined to launch a record company together a decade before the session with Ellington. Listening to “Money Jungle” didn’t clear it up. Mingus opens by scratching out a harsh-sounding challenge; Ellington parries with hard phrasing to jerk the steering wheel the other way. Roach rides it out in the back seat as the song exhausts itself to a stop.I still don’t have an answer for the walkout, but I care less about the speculation because of “Percussion Discussion.” Mingus and Roach did versions of their own push-pull live during the “Mingus at the Bohemia” sets in 1955 and after — sometimes alongside the pianist Bud Powell or with a horn involved, other times as a duet. The version released on 1965’s “The Charles Mingus Quintet Plus Max Roach” (under the title “Drums”) finishes with Mingus sweeping an operatic bow before Roach thumps out a tip of the cap like a matador honored by his provocateur.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Kokayi, M.C., vocalist and producerMax Roach, “Garvey’s Ghost”On “Garvey’s Ghost,” we hear nearly eight minutes of sacred shouts and vibrations, as Roach leads us further into his lexicon of musical language. It’s what I imagine Roach thinking about when writing the work; it’s his concept of sounds that would emanate from the decks of ships on the Black Star Line, a return to the motherland, a going home. It’s Max dropping pins throughout the African diaspora guiding the listener, it’s the call and response of Abbey Lincoln’s haunting vocal standing proxy as the voice of the ancestors, it’s the foundational Bembé drum chant that moves us from West Africa in origin to Cuba thanks to the additions of “Patato” and “Totico” (Carlos Valdés and Eugenio Arango, respectively). It’s Booker Little and Clifford Jordan as street bishops on their soapboxes shouting down Babylon through an aggressive series of solos, it’s Art Davis’s bass sending up kettle prayers, with Max batting cleanup, exhibiting mastery within the spaces of his solo that leads us back to the chorus. “Garvey’s Ghost” is Max’s lead single for the soundtrack of this imagined trans-Atlantic voyage. I would suggest that you add this to your playlist, and get yourself a ticket, so to speak.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Tanya Rahme, jazz radio hostMax Roach, “The Profit”Revolutionary of bebop, guru of time keeping, an O.G. of cool jazz.Max Roach held so many titles, but it was his 1962 recording of “The Profit,” the second track on the B-side of the album “It’s Time,” that paved the way for a young me to fall in love with a sound that would surpass any previous definition I had known for the genre of “jazz.”The seven-minute track encapsulates the very essence of the 1960s Black movement, exploding with skill and expression from start ’til end. I eventually understood this to be one form of the many conversations Max had regarding his stance on civil rights, and the politics surrounding Black American history.The solos by the trumpeter Richard Williams, the tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan and the bassist Art Davis add such rich texture to Roach’s continuous ride cymbal technique. But what is most compelling was his perfected undertone beat — soft yet unmistakably strong and constant — while delivering a killer drum solo throughout.Enter Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s vocal choir, erupting into what sounds like a song of profound protest from the very intro; a deeply moving spiritual chant depicting the ’60s and all its intensities. Through Roach’s “The Profit” began my devotion to the astral jazz of that era and beyond.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Martin Johnson, writerMax Roach, “Effi”So much of Max Roach’s extraordinary discography is canonical and progressive that it’s easy to overlook his work for Atlantic Records from 1964 to 1971. Yet, this phase bristles with fury and offers the cool melodicism of his classic earlier recordings with Clifford Brown. No recording bridges these objectives better than his 1968 masterwork, “Members, Don’t Git Weary.” The title tells you that, landmark legislation notwithstanding, there was still much work to be done toward liberation and equality — but the music here shines a light on the paradise for the victors. “Effi,” an elegant six-minute paragon by the pianist Stanley Cowell, one of six greats in the band, is the highlight. The saxophonist Gary Bartz and the trumpeter Charles Tolliver take pointed solos, but Roach drives the sound, rumbling with volcanic force beneath and beside them. There’s beauty, power and catharsis all in one. Roach was not tired, not weary at all, and his music was an energy potion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆aja monet, surrealist blues poet and activistMax Roach, “Tears for Johannesburg”Amiri Baraka sitting shotgun as the Jersey tunnel lights slide through the car window. We were on our way to a poetry reading. In the back seat I bathed in classic and legendary Baraka banter. Max Roach was the star of the ride. I learned about Roach in the firsthand sway and swag of Baraka’s enthused tone. “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” was the album of discussion. I didn’t know what I was listening to until many years later. And as I revisit this album, “Tears for Johannesburg” never fails to amaze. Shhhh. The cymbals slowly weep into Abbey Lincoln’s moan, and the cross stick signals the build. It’s the orchestra of solidarity for me. What I love most about the song is the wordless conversation. Jazz disrupts traditional song structure as a protest against established conventions, and this song declares the sentiment. Max Roach’s heart beats at the time signature of 5/4. The bass keeps the pulse and the horns haunt. The song begs the ear to listen and take heed of our mourning as well as our resistance. The political message crescendos in the rim of Roach’s drum. We feel for the struggle of our comrades in Johannesburg because Roach makes sure of it. There is no need for words.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆John Murph, writer and D.J.Max Roach, “The Dream/It’s Time”I discovered Max Roach’s 1981 LP, “Chattahoochee Red,” in the early ’90s just from casual crate-digging and being semi-autodidactic in learning jazz history to buttress my music journalism career. I was immediately taken by the opening cut “The Dream/It’s Time,” a blistering modern bop composition on which Roach interjected snippets from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Roach’s rhythmic ingenuity, King’s heroic voice, and later the impassioned solos from the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, the tenor saxophonist Odean Pope and the bassist Calvin Hill made me a die-hard Roach fan, even though at the time I knew more of his eminence as a bebop pioneer and influential drummer than I did of his actual discography.I’ve always said that crate digging is the unsung hero in music education. After repeated listening to “The Dream/It’s Time,” my continued investigation into Roach’s music led me to the 1962 incarnation of “It’s Time” that fused strident hard bop with doleful choral singing conducted by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Nevertheless, it’s “The Dream/It’s Time” that became my favorite Roach composition. It was always in heavy rotation during my radio shows on Washington, D.C.’s Pacifica station, WPFW-FM, during the mid-to-late ’90s. And it resurfaced again, this year, in some of my vinyl-only D.J. sets as we mark the 60th anniversary of King’s 1963 March on Washington.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Sam Pollard, film directorClifford Brown and Max Roach, “Parisian Thoroughfare”I remember being around 16 years old and my friend Glenn Laurie would play the Art Blakey Quintet at Birdland, and back then I was confounded at what those musicians were playing. It took a while but finally my ears opened, and I could hear what these great musicians were doing on their instruments. That began my immersion into the world of jazz and learning and listening to everyone from Thelonious Monk to the one of the greatest drummers of this idiom called jazz, Max Roach.It would be a few years later that I would be introduced to a seminal 1954 Max Roach recording with the impressive and ever inventive trumpeter Clifford Brown. It was a phenomenal album with the tenor saxophonist Harold Land, bassist George Morrow and pianist Richie Powell supporting Brown and Roach. The one tune that particularly stands out is their rendition of Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare” that starts with the band replicating the traffic jam of a Parisian street before taking off with the compelling melody of triplets performed by Brown and Harold Land. It is an infectious melody in the key of G major. Brown makes every note swing with joy and sass accompanied by Max’s elegant rhythmic support. Max’s solo, where it is all Max beautifully modulated and direct, is what people are talking about when they say Max is such a musical drummer. And then it finally goes back to the cacophony of Paris streets and then a reprise of the wonderful melody.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      How Pop Stars Turned NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk’ Into Authenticity Theater

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      The concerts have become an incongruous draw for pop stars with something to prove.What does anyone stand to gain from a string quartet accompanying Post Malone? At one of the megastar’s typical performances, you might find Austin Post standing alone on a vast stage, shirtless, mimicking the postures you might see at a rapper’s show, warbling his melodic pop with its intermittent hip-hop gestures. Recently, though, the singer sat down on the set of NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series — in an unassuming, tchotchke-filled corner of a Washington office — to perform a handful of his songs with a larger ensemble: 12 musicians, including four backup vocalists and four string players, rearranging his hits to highlight multipart harmonies and the twinkle of acoustic instruments. Why?Gradually, over its 15 years of existence, the Tiny Desk series has come to host some of the biggest names in music — artists like Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys and Harry Styles. That’s something of a coup, given its roots. In its early days, Tiny Desk programming was geared toward exactly the kinds of performers you might expect to find playing an intimate set in a mundane corner of an office, with no stage or lights or flashy videography: folk acts, singer-songwriters, crooning indie-rockers. The series has always introduced listeners to new musicians, and it still hosts performances in an impressive array of genres. But its biggest gets, back in the late aughts, were acts like The Swell Season or Tallest Man on Earth — musicians practiced at addressing small, hushed rooms with acoustic instruments. The Tiny Desk series became a prime venue for artists seeking an authenticity baptism. Then T-Pain changed everything. By the time the Tallahassee star performed a Tiny Desk concert, in 2014, his use of Autotune as a musical signature had led plenty of casual listeners to assume the pitch-correcting tool was hiding a weak voice. Even fellow artists complained that he was polluting the industry. (He was depressed for years, he has said, after Usher told him that he had “killed music.”) T-Pain used his Tiny Desk performance to demolish the idea that he lacked talent, sitting beside a single electric-piano player and singing, beautifully, with no digital adornment. The video of his set went viral, not least among those only just learning that his use of Autotune was artistic flair, not a crutch; it remains one of the most watched of the hundreds of sessions Tiny Desk has produced.The Tiny Desk series became a prime venue for artists seeking an authenticity baptism. The series built its audience organically, getting bigger bookings and finding frequent viral successes. If you’re looking to discover young folk, rock or jazz acts, or to rediscover sidelined innovators, its nonpop shows remain a valuable and thoughtfully programmed resource. But for pop artists, it has become a tool with a very specific utility: demonstrating in-the-room chops. It inherits this role from a long line of similar series — chief among them MTV’s “Unplugged,” a pioneer in the field of forcing musicians to spend a set signaling their allegiance to the values of ensemble performance. You don’t have to perform with acoustic instruments on Tiny Desk, but musicians often choose to. (Post Malone, for instance, used the string quartet to replace all the charming synth bleeps and bloops of his recordings; it’s a common Tiny Desk move to render digital production flourishes acoustically.) The audio and video are engineered in-house at NPR, an act of submission that’s rare in a world where stars seek to control every part of their image. And the old air of coffeehouse intimacy has, for big acts, been oddly abandoned, replaced by a new kind of excess geared to the constraints of the format. Post Malone’s Tiny Desk ensemble rivaled the number of musicians on his nationwide arena tour.A Tiny Desk appearance doesn’t just underline musical skill: There’s also star quality. Listeners already knew that Usher, for instance, could sing. But he could still capitalize on T-Pain’s precedent. Last year he used a Tiny Desk set to remind people that he is a charismatic performer even without the benefit of lavish stage production — an effective advertisement for the second leg of his Las Vegas residency shows. The purpose of a Tiny Desk appearance in a pop marketing campaign is now to assert the artist’s performing prowess, an opportunity that has been seized on by artists like Lizzo and Anderson .Paak, whose chops are key parts of their stardom.Often the goal of presenting songs in this format doesn’t feel financial or artistic or even purely a matter of marketing; sometimes it feels almost ideological. Post Malone doesn’t exactly need the exposure Tiny Desk offers. He surely has the resources to stage his own acoustic performance videos. But Tiny Desk offers the perfect venue to present himself as a genre-transcending renegade. The performance that results feels less like a musical idea and more like a statement about his persona — an argument that he’s not “just” a hip-hop artist, that his hit song “I Fall Apart” can be both a stadium banger and cello-adorned chamber music.There are perils in this hybridity. Stripped of the artificial charm he can summon in a recording studio or the collective exhilaration he can rely on in an arena, the Tiny Desk version of Post Malone reveals his songs a little too clearly for what they are. The packaging insists that he’s able to transcend genre, but his blithe transit through rap, pop and ballads shows no commitment to any of these forms beyond ensuring their availability to him. Their meanings are hollowed out; their signifiers are piled up into a thing without a center. The whole set sounds like no one thought much about making it good — only about making the point that Post Malone could do it. Post isn’t the only artist whose Tiny Desk performance revealed a certain shallowness. Take the British producer and electronic musician Fred Again. It’s hard to imagine many of his forebears in dance music capitulating to the notion that “authentic” live performance is the way to justify their work. But Fred Gibson aimed his music at a Tiny Desk funnel, performing alone at a piano amid a nest of samplers and synthesizers. His anthems for crying on the dance floor felt, without the dance floor, like a saccharine, exhausting solicitation of approval — more interested in asserting that Gibson is a composer and a performer than in doing justice to the genre he’s currently dominating. With every year, more and more of pop music moves over into the disembodied world of digital sound production, pushing further into the synthetic, the abstract — sounds that are neither rooted in nor trying to imitate anything in the real world. At the same time, audiences seem to hunger for a certain type of authenticity theater, and artists hunger to perform it. It grows steadily more tempting for musicians to hedge their eccentricities and creative excursions into studio sounds with lavish office-corner performances — sets that are growing steadily more incongruous and strange. The Tiny Desk is where pop stars can go to reconcile all the exquisite contradictions of being a performing musician in 2023. For some, a better option is to leave them be.Opening illustration: Source photographs from NPRAdlan Jackson is a writer from Kingston, Jamaica, who covers music in New York. He runs the Critical Party Studies blog. More

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      Gloria Coates, Composer Who Defied Conventions, Dies at 89

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      A Wisconsin native, she was among the most prolific female composers of symphonies, 17 in all, finding particular prominence in Europe, where she lived.Gloria Coates, an adventurous composer who wrote symphonies — she was one of the few women to do so — as well as other works, pieces that were seldom performed in her home country, the United States, but found audiences in Europe, where she lived much of her professional life, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89.Her daughter, Alexandra Coates, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Ms. Coates composed 17 symphonies, along with numerous works for small ensembles and voice. In 1999, when she was working on her 11th symphony, the composer and critic Kyle Gann wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Coates’s symphonies are dark and sensuous, and distinguished by an imaginative use of orchestral glissandos (gradual rather than stepwise changes of pitch, like slow sirens), which culminate powerfully in drawn-out crescendos.”The glissando continued to be her calling card, Mr. Gann said this week by email.“Gloria owned the orchestral glissando the way van Gogh said he owed the sunflower,” he said. “The slow pitch slides that run across the surfaces of her symphonies and string quartets can be difficult for the performers to coordinate, which has probably made musicians less willing to present her music. But they make it absolutely distinctive and recognizable. And underneath those glissandos there is often a clear discipline of canons, palindromes and other simple musical structures.”“The effect,” he added, “is often like a painting of a beautiful edifice on which rain has impressionistically smeared the surface.”Ms. Coates first came to wide attention when her “Music on Open Strings” was performed by the Polish Chamber Orchestra at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music in 1978. Her work has since received only occasional bursts of attention in the United States — as in 1989, when her “Music on Abstract Lines” was given its world premiere at the New Music America festival in Brooklyn; and in 2002, when New World Records released the first recording of her works on an American label; and in 2019, when “Music on Open Strings” was performed at Zankel Hall in Manhattan by the American Composers Orchestra.In 2021, Edition Peters announced that it would begin publishing her works.Ms. Coates said her music “sometimes is melodic, but often derived from structures of microtones melted together.”“It is a way of thinking of music not as separate tones on a scale, as we have for centuries,” she told The Wausau Daily Herald of Wisconsin, her hometown newspaper, in 2021, “but as sounds gliding through time and space which have their own laws and still have roots in the historical musical tradition.”In 2005, the Crash Ensemble performed her Sixth String Quartet (1999) in Dublin.“Bleak and ascetic, strange and disturbing as her music may be, it’s also got a purity that makes it peculiarly compelling,” The Irish Times wrote then. “It’s not music that’s ever likely to leave even a single listener indifferent.”Ms. Coates and the conductor George Manahan in 2019 at Zankel Hall in New York City, where the American Composers Orchestra performed her “Music on Open Strings.”Jennifer TaylorGloria Ann Kannenberg was born on Oct. 10, 1933, in Wausau. Her father, Roland, was a state senator, and her mother, Natalina (Corso) Kannenberg, worked in weapons manufacturing during World War II and was later a nurse’s assistant.Gloria showed musical inclinations early.“The children in the 5-year-old kindergarten have a rhythm band,” The Wausau Daily Herald reported in early 1939. “Thomas Evenson, Jack Luedtke and Gloria Kannenberg brought drums from home.”By then she was also proficient on the toy piano. By 12 she was creating her own often unconventional music. In 1951, a composition of hers won an “excellent” rating in a national junior composers’ competition. But teachers and contest judges sometimes discouraged her more audacious departures from tradition.She told The Irish Times in 2005 that a key moment in her development came when, as a teenager, she attended a question-and-answer with the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin, who would become a mentor. He told her that it was more important to follow her instincts than to follow predetermined rules.After graduating from high school in Wausau, she studied music and drama for a time at Monticello College in Illinois. She later studied at other institutions, including the Cooper Union in New York and Louisiana State University, which she attended after marrying Francis Mitchell Coates Jr. in 1959 and settling for a time in Baton Rouge. She earned a master’s degree in composition there.She continued her studies in New York, but after her marriage ended in divorce in 1969, she, her daughter and their dachshund boarded a ship for Europe. Ms. Coates, who had studied voice as well as composition, settled in Munich and for a time pursued a career singing opera. But fate intervened.“When I was 7,” Alexandra Coates said by email, “she was hit by another skiing student and was paralyzed in the upper back.”Ms. Coates gave up singing and focused on painting, another interest, along with music. She told The Irish Times that in the early 1970s, amid the terrorist attacks at the Olympics in Munich and the violence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Munich building where she was living was thought to be a possible terrorist target. She moved her music manuscripts out of the building but continued to live there. (Her daughter was living with her father in the United States.) She was, she said, sending a sort of subliminal message to herself.“It was not until several months later that I realized that that music was so important, it was more important than my life,” she said.From then on, music became her primary focus. For years Ms. Coates curated a series in Germany devoted to American contemporary music. Her own compositional output covered a wide range. Her daughter said that for a time Ms. Coates held a job giving tours of the Dachau concentration camp to members of the U.S. Army. Among the works those tours inspired was her “Voices of Women in Wartime,” a setting of writings by women under various circumstances during World War II.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Coates is survived by a brother, Philip Kannenberg; a sister, Natalie Tackett; and a grandson.If her work wasn’t often heard in the United States, critics and other writers admired her originality. Simon Cummings, who writes the contemporary music blog 5:4, said by email that Ms. Coates had set herself apart from other out-of-the-mainstream composers as “one who doesn’t merely surprise or amuse you when you encounter their music for the first time, but who completely knocks you off your feet, and moves you very deeply and powerfully, even if, at the time, you’re not really sure why you’re experiencing such a strong reaction.”In 2014, the Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed called Ms. Coates simply “our last maverick.” More

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      Ghostwriter Returns With an A.I. Travis Scott Song

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      The anonymous artist, who stirred conversation with the A.I. track “Heart on My Sleeve,” has been quietly consulting with executives, while also gunning for a Grammy.Earlier this year, when the anonymous musical creator known as Ghostwriter released an unauthorized track that used artificial intelligence voice effects to mimic the pop superstars Drake and the Weeknd, the fallout was immediate and far-reaching.The mostly original song, “Heart on My Sleeve,” was promptly removed from official streaming services, even as experts acknowledged that its use of A.I. fell into a rapidly expanding legal gray area. But while the major record labels sought to protect their intellectual property and scrambled to prepare for disruptions to come, the track also proliferated on social media, earning millions of listens and helping to inspire a wave of similarly novel compositions.Throughout the aftermath, Ghostwriter stayed silent — at least in public.Behind the scenes, however, the shadowy act and its team were making overtures to the very industry figures “Heart on My Sleeve” had unnerved. In the months since, those behind the project have met with record labels, tech leaders, music platforms and artists about how to best harness the powers of A.I., including at a virtual round-table discussion this summer organized by the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards.“I knew right away as soon as I heard that record that it was going to be something that we had to grapple with from an Academy standpoint, but also from a music community and industry standpoint,” Harvey Mason Jr., a producer who is the chief executive of the Recording Academy, said in an interview. “When you start seeing A.I. involved in something so creative and so cool, relevant and of-the-moment, it immediately starts you thinking, ‘OK, where is this going? How is this going to affect creativity? What’s the business implication for monetization?’”Mason said he had contacted Ghostwriter directly on social media after being impressed with “Heart on My Sleeve.” He added that Ghostwriter attended the meeting in character, including using a distorted voice.On Tuesday, Ghostwriter returned with a new track, titled “Whiplash,” this time using A.I. vocal filters to sound like the rappers Travis Scott and 21 Savage and deliver a message to the industry: “Me and Writer raise a toast,” the A.I. version of 21 Savage raps. “Trying to shadowban my boy/but you can’t kill a ghost.”The song — which was posted to social media platforms like TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, instead of Spotify and other proper streaming services — came accompanied by a statement that called on both Scott and 21 Savage to collaborate on an official release. “The future of music is here. Artists now have the ability to let their voice work for them without lifting a finger,” Ghostwriter wrote. “If you’re down to put it out, I will clearly label it as A.I., and I’ll direct royalties to you. Respect either way.”Representatives for Scott and 21 Savage did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A representative for Ghostwriter, who requested anonymity to not expose those behind the project — acknowledging that much of its marketing power comes from its mystery — confirmed that “Whiplash,” like “Heart on My Sleeve,” was an original composition written and recorded by humans. Ghostwriter attempted to match the content, delivery, tone and phrasing of the established stars before using A.I. components.They added that the Ghostwriter team had recently submitted “Heart on My Sleeve” for Grammy Awards in two categories at next year’s ceremony: best rap song and song of the year, both of which are awarded to a track’s writers.“As far as the creative side, it’s absolutely eligible because it was written by a human,” said Mason of the Recording Academy.He added that the Academy would also look at whether the song was commercially available, with Grammy rules stating that a track must have “general distribution,” meaning “the broad release of a recording, available nationwide via brick-and-mortar stores, third-party online retailers and/or streaming services.”Ghostwriter’s representative said they were aware of the commercial availability requirement.The Ghostwriter team noted in a statement that it hoped to raise awareness about the creative and business possibilities of A.I. voice filters, comparing the technology to the early days of hip-hop sampling or user-generated content on YouTube. It offered examples like the ability to do karaoke in the voice of one’s favorite artist; at-home creators making original music à la fan fiction; or artists’ estates using the filters for posthumous original releases.With guidance from Mason, the Recording Academy and its partners in the industry, the team said it hoped to work with stakeholders to build a platform that ensures artists who choose to license their voice can control how it is used and make sure they get paid when it is.“Ghostwriter really has played an important role here to bring awareness and attention,” Mason said. “We know A.I. is going to play a role in our business. We can’t pretend to turn our back on it and try to ban it.”He added, “I’m not scared of A.I., but I do believe work needs to be done to make sure that things are in place so that the creative community is protected.” More

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      Steve Harwell, Former Smash Mouth Lead Singer, Dies at 56

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      He was a founding member of the band, which broke out in the late 1990s with hit songs like “Walkin’ on the Sun” and “All Star.”Steve Harwell, the former lead singer of the rock band Smash Mouth, which was best known for its 1999 hit “All Star,” died on Monday. He was 56.His death, at his home in Boise, Idaho, was confirmed by the band’s manager, Robert Hayes, who said the cause was liver failure.Smash Mouth was founded in 1994 in San Jose, Calif., and was made up of Mr. Harwell, the guitarist Greg Camp, the drummer Kevin Coleman and the bassist Paul De Lisle. Its first success came with the song “Walkin’ on the Sun,” from the band’s debut album, “Fush Yu Mang” (1997).An upbeat track with a dark undertow, calling to mind both the Doors and contemporary ska-punk, “Walkin’ on the Sun,” with songwriting credits going to all four band members, went into steady rotation on MTV and topped Billboard’s alternative chart.The song’s music video laid out the band’s aesthetic and attitude. Dressed in short-sleeve shirts and shades, with fedoras and soul patches, the four members looked like rougher versions of the image-obsessed retro hipsters depicted in the 1996 comedy “Swingers.” The video features a dance party straight out of a 1960s beach movie and ends with a drag-race crash, with Mr. Harwell — beefy, with tattoos on his arms — behind the wheel.“The question of a particular style never once crossed our minds,” Mr. Harwell said in a 1997 interview. “We didn’t want to be labeled as a punk band, a ska band, a surf band, a rock band, a pop band or a whatever band. We just wanted to be us, Smash Mouth, and leave it to the people to interpret what we are.”The band Smash Mouth in 1999. From left, the guitarist Greg Camp, the drummer Kevin Coleman, Mr. Harwell, and the bassist Paul De Lisle.Bob Berg/Getty ImagesThe band’s big-time crossover came with “All Star,” from its next album, “Astro Lounge,” in 1999. Backed by harder-driving guitars, Mr. Harwell, with a slight sneer, sings an outsiders’ anthem to ignore ridicule and shoot for the moon:Hey now, you’re an all starGet your game on, go playHey now, you’re a rock starGet the show on, get paid“All Star” — written by Mr. Camp, the band’s guitarist — went to No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, the band’s best-ever chart position, and found a lasting audience through movie soundtracks. In 1999, it was used in “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” and two years later the song got its broadest exposure when it played during the opening credits of “Shrek,” the animated hit that featured Mike Myers as a grouchy but good-hearted ogre.The “Shrek” soundtrack — which also featured Smash Mouth’s amped-up version of the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer,” in the closing scene — went double platinum, and the film won an Academy Award for best animated feature. “All Star” was everywhere.“We had no clue how big ‘Shrek’ was going to be,” Mr. Harwell recalled in a 2019 article in Rolling Stone. “We sold millions of records off that alone. The song was reborn again.”Since then, “All Star” has lived on, becoming a rich source for online parodies. Nearly 25 years later, the song has garnered nearly a billion streams on Spotify alone, and the sound of Mr. Harwell’s slightly raspy voice is still linked to the song’s recognizable opening lines: “Somebody once told me/The world is gonna roll me/I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”Steven Scott Harwell was born on Jan. 9, 1967, and grew up in San Jose. He began his musical career as a rapper with the group F.O.S., which stood for Freedom of Speech. With a sound reminiscent of West Coast groups of the late 1980s and early ’90s like N.W.A and Cypress Hill, it released a single, “Big Black Boots,” in 1993. But by then Mr. Harwell was already restless.“Around the time we were about to put out our single, this kid Snoop Dogg came out and changed everything,” he recalled in 2017 interview with the music website Stereogum. “I was at a radio convention in Las Vegas watching MC Hammer, of all people, and I just looked at my manager, ‘I’m tired of all this hip-hop’” — he added an expletive — “‘I want to start an alternative rock band.’”After “Astro Lounge,” Smash Mouth released five more studio albums through 2012, with diminishing levels of success. In 2006, Mr. Harwell was a cast member on “The Surreal Life,” a reality show on VH1 in which onetime celebrities live together; his fellow cast members included Sherman Hemsley of “The Jeffersons,” Florence Henderson of “The Brady Bunch” and Tawny Kitaen, known for her appearances in Whitesnake music videos.Mr. Harwell performing in 2003. “We didn’t want to be labeled as a punk band, a ska band, a surf band, a rock band, a pop band or a whatever band,” he said. “We just wanted to be us.”Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesFor the last decade, Mr. Harwell’s career had been marked by health problems and occasionally erratic behavior. In 2013, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a heart condition, and Wernicke’s encephalopathy, a neurological condition that can affect speech and memory.In August 2020, while many parts of the country were still under major restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic, Smash Mouth appeared at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a huge annual event in South Dakota, and performed before thousands of fans — very few of whom, according to reports and videos of the event, were wearing masks or taking any precautions.Mr. Harwell drew cheers from the crowd — but wide condemnation elsewhere — when he said from the stage, “We’re all here together tonight, and we’re being human once again,” and made a crude dismissal of the viral threat.Mr. Harwell performing with Smash Mouth in Brooklyn in 2015. He retired from the band in 2021. Brad Barket/Getty ImagesIn 2021, Mr. Harwell left the band and retired from performing after a live show in upstate New York during which he was seen slurring his words, using profanity and apparently giving a Nazi salute.“I’ve tried so hard to power through my physical and mental health issues, and to play in front of you one last time, but I just wasn’t able to,” he said in a statement at the time.He is survived by his fiancée, Annette Jones; a brother, Mark; and three sisters, Carla Crocker, Michelle Baroni and Julie Harwell.In 2022, Smash Mouth recruited a new lead singer, Zach Goode, and the group has concerts scheduled in coming weeks, including one on Thursday in Madera, Calif. Mr. Hayes, the manager, said the band was still scheduled to perform there.In a statement on Monday, Mr. Goode said: “I love singing these songs every night and carrying on the spirit of rock n roll in front of the best fans in the world. I will continue to try, in my own way, to honor what Steve and the band have created.” More

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      Steve Harwell: How Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ Got a Second Wind From Memes

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      The track, sung by Steve Harwell, took a winding path to evergreen status that illustrates how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music business.Long before it became a soundtrack nugget and an internet meme, it was just a rock band’s attempt to land a radio hit.But the long path to evergreen status for “All Star,” the 1999 track by the California alternative band Smash Mouth, whose founding lead singer, Steve Harwell, died on Monday at age 56, is an illustration of how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music industry.The song took shape while the group was working on its second album, “Astro Lounge,” after its first taste of success with the song “Walkin’ on the Sun” (1997). The group submitted a batch of songs to its record company and was told: “You’re not done. We don’t hear a single, so keep working,” Robert Hayes, the band’s manager, told Rolling Stone in 2019. Greg Camp, Smash Mouth’s guitarist and primary songwriter, said the song’s lovable-loser theme (“I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”) emerged from fan mail. “About 85 to 90 percent of the mail was from these kids who were being bullied” for being Smash Mouth fans, he told the website Songfacts. “So we were like, ‘We should write a song for fans.’”“All Star” was quickly placed on film soundtracks, including “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” in 1999. (The original music video had clips from “Mystery Men,” a superhero sendup starring Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo, among others.) But the song’s immortality began with its placement in “Shrek,” the 2001 animated favorite starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, where the song plays in the opening credits. The film grossed a total of $484 million around the world, according to the site Box Office Mojo.A decade or so later, generational nostalgia kicked off another level of success for “All Star,” when the children who grew up on “Shrek” began meme-ing on it relentlessly. There was the version made up entirely of samples of Bill O’Reilly saying his name. And the one, from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” with lyrics stitched together from “Star Wars” clips. There were the ones sung by Jon Sudano, a YouTuber, showing him melding the song — sometimes painfully — to hits like Adele’s “Hello” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or with the vocal line maddeningly shifted one beat from the original. And don’t forget the guy who recreated Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” using samples of Harwell’s voice.Perhaps the most popular take was “Mario, You’re a Plumber,” a Mario Bros.-theme adaptation — with actual effort taken to write new lyrics — that has garnered 1.6 million views on YouTube.Those were all iterations of what has become a key avenue for artists to find wide success in a fragmented media environment, with user-generated content ricocheting through social media to propel a new song (see Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road”) or point younger listeners to an old one (Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”).In the case of “All Star,” this process kept an old track alive for years and led to gigs like the band performing a snippet of the song on a Progressive insurance ad in 2020. All of that activity tends to drive listeners back to streaming services, and “All Star” has garnered just under a billion streams on Spotify alone.In an interview with the music site Stereogum in 2017, Harwell expressed the contrasting opinions artists sometimes have about such memes. On the one hand, it’s valuable exposure, and that can lead to money in their pocket. On the other … it’s not always fun to have one’s work flattened into a joke.“It’s entertaining, I get it,” Harwell said. “It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it.” More

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      Jimmy Buffett Died of Rare Form of Skin Cancer

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      The singer’s website said he had Merkel cell carcinoma for four years and died at his home on Long Island.Jimmy Buffett died of skin cancer at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on Long Island, according to a statement on the singer-songwriter’s website.After Mr. Buffett died on Friday at age 76, his site announced the death but did not give a cause or specify where he died. In an update over the weekend, the website said that he had Merkel cell carcinoma for four years. A rare and aggressive form of skin cancer, Merkel cell is diagnosed only about 2,500 times a year in the United States, and until recent years it had carried a life expectancy of five months.Mr. Buffett’s 1970s hits like “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which mingled country-rock with bits of calypso melodies and had wry lyrics about the carefree life of boating and loafing at beachside bars, made him a cult hero on a huge scale.He sold at least 23 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, on par with Jimi Hendrix and the Beastie Boys. And Mr. Buffett’s annual tours — in which he usually appeared barefoot, in a comfy T-shirt or Hawaiian button-down — were hugely successful, drawing millions of fans who sang along, drank prodigiously and called themselves Parrot Heads.Mr. Buffett was one of pop music’s most successful and ambitious businessmen, building a huge empire on the brand of good times and island escapism that he sang about in his songs. That included Margaritaville restaurants and resorts, footwear, drink mixes and a 2018 Broadway jukebox musical, “Escape to Margaritaville.”This year, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion, with $570 million attributed to his tours and recording and $140 million in planes, homes and his shares in Berkshire Hathaway — the holding company whose chairman and CEO is multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett, who had been a longtime friend. More

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      ‘Jamaica Mistaica’: Jimmy Buffett Song Inspired After Plane Sprayed by Gunfire

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      In 1996, the police in Jamaica mistook Buffett for a drug smuggler after he landed his seaplane with the singer Bono and others on board and opened fire on it.Jimmy Buffett’s life evokes images of boozy chill-outs by the beach and a certain carefree calm, but in 1996 the singer’s seaplane came under a hail of gunfire in a dramatic encounter with the Jamaican authorities that inspired a song.Buffett’s song “Jamaica Mistaica” is a laid-back account of a dramatic near-death experience in which his plane, Hemisphere Dancer, was mistaken by the Jamaican authorities for a drug-smuggling aircraft.It’s one of the many tales that have resurfaced after his death on Friday.While on tour on Jan. 16, 1996, Buffett, an avid pilot, had just landed at an airport in Negril, Jamaica, accompanied by Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, of the band U2, when a sudden burst of shots rang out, according to one of Buffett’s Margaritaville websites.“We flew the plane in, got off, and as the plane took off to go get fuel, we were surrounded by a Jamaican S.W.A.T. team,” Buffett said in a 1996 Rolling Stone interview. “I thought it was a joke until I heard the gunfire.”As Bono recalled, according to Radio Margaritaville: “These boys were shooting all over the place. I felt as if we were in the middle of a James Bond movie.”“I honestly thought we were all going to die,” he added.Also on board the HU-16 Grumman Albatross plane was Bono’s wife, Ali, their two young children, and Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records.Later that year, Buffett released his album “Banana Wind,” in which he recounts the story on “Jamaica Mistaica”:Just about to lose my temper as I endeavored to explainWe had only come for chicken we were not a ganja planeWell, you should have seen their faces when they finally realizedWe were not some coked-up cowboy sporting guns and alibis.“Like all things, it made for a good song,” Buffett told The Spokesman-Review in a 1996 interview.“I know that there are times in my life where I probably should have been shot at for a lot worse behavior,” he added. “But on this particular instance, I was innocent. Not even a spliff.”The plane, now an artifact of the Buffett universe, was struck by bullets but nobody was hurt.He later received an apology from the Jamaican government, according to an MTV News report at the time.“Some people said, ‘God, you could have sued them, you could have sued the government,’” Buffett said in The Spokesman-Review interview. “But I went, ‘No, it’s probably karma. We’re even now.’” More