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      How Tim Flannery, the Giants Coach, Got Back to Writing Songs

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      Night had fallen, spirits were moving and the songwriting baseball coach was rounding third base and headed for home. Twice in the autumn of 2020, doctors had advised a gravely ill Tim Flannery to say goodbye to his family. Both times, he declined to surrender.The right arm that sent home so many San Francisco base runners during the Giants’ three World Series titles from 2010 to 2014 waved away a final coda.The road back from the brink was as unlikely as the man himself. An infielder turned popular coach, Flannery was always something more. A musician who carried a guitar with him on the road, and a surfer who posed with a board on one of his trading cards, he could not help but stand out in the strait-laced world of Major League Baseball.Having transitioned fully into philanthropy and songwriting in his baseball retirement — his foundation has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-bullying causes — he had more people to help and more stories to tell. So giving in to a life-threatening staph infection was not an option.Fate and Flannery eventually reached a standstill during his harrowing, three-month battle with the infection, but doctors still warned him that he might never walk again. He fell into sepsis and required two back surgeries to clear away abscesses and damaged tissue. He went home with a tube that sent antibiotics streaming into his heart. That was the easy part because his wife of 42 years, Donna, administered those doses.Tim and Donna Flannery have been married for more than 40 years.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesEventually, walker in hand, with his little granddaughter Jade riding shotgun on the crossbar, he cut a deal: 25 times up the driveway, slowly, 25 times back, painfully, and Jade would be rewarded with an ice cream sandwich.On particularly productive days, she’d score two.“I’ve definitely changed my life,” Flannery, 65, said on a recent afternoon at a neighborhood coffee shop near the beach, a familiar twinkle — life — back in his eyes. He had rehearsed for two hours earlier that day. Soon, he would nail down details for the next show with his band, the Lunatic Fringe.“I’ve looked at moments and things a lot more clearly,” he continued. “And you do try to create good thoughts and try to remember, like, this moment right here. Because if I ever go back to that situation again, I want to try to bring as many good memories and good hallucinations as I can.”His stay in the hospital was harrowing. “Vicious,” he said of time spent tied down so he did not harm himself or others. The hospital was two miles from his home, but each glance out his window brought more distortion. Not all his visions were awful. His friend Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead, appeared by apparition. So did another friend, Jimmy Buffett.The meaning of those particular visitations would come into focus later, convincing Flannery that they were no coincidence.Flannery and his band played for more than three hours at their show in Solvang.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAuthenticThrough more than four decades of baseball and music, first in San Diego and then in San Francisco, Flannery grew into a beloved player, coach and troubadour — a character — because of an endearing knack for leaving pieces of himself with whomever he met.“Authentic,” said Flannery’s bandmate and producer, Jeff Berkley. “He is exactly who you think he is. He’s not trying to put on any airs. He’s not trying to be from Kentucky; he is from Kentucky. Until he stopped drinking, man, he carried moonshine around with him wherever he went. He’s a total hillbilly. He wears that term proudly. He’s probably the first woke hillbilly.”Because Flannery felt some baseball people viewed his guitar suspiciously during his years in San Diego, he initially intended to keep that part of his life quiet when he agreed to coach for Bruce Bochy in San Francisco.“I was going to come coach third and not let anybody in,” Flannery said. “I thought, ‘No one’s going to tear my heart.’”But in 2011, his music came to the forefront when he founded the Love Harder Project in response to the horrific beating of Bryan Stow, a Giants fan who was attacked in the Dodger Stadium parking lot on opening day in 2011. With the foundation, which has a mission of anti-bullying and anti-violence, Flannery has helped raise around $100,000, mostly through shows with the Lunatic Fringe, to offset the Stow family’s medical costs.Flannery founded the Love Harder project after the beating of Bryan Stow at Dodger Stadium. Stow’s mother says Flannery “an important part of our family.”Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images“Hey, I hit nine home runs in the ’80s,” Flannery said. “I can’t just write a check.”But he could write, and play, and sing.Stow, now 54, sustained a serious brain injury in the attack and today lives at home in the Santa Cruz area with his parents. He is taking memory and mobility courses at a local community college and learned on Father’s Day that he was going to be a grandfather.“Flan was one of the first to come to the forefront and help Bryan out. It was just amazing,” said Ann Stow, Bryan’s mother. “And he’s been that way throughout Bryan’s journey. Flan and Donna are such an important part of our family.”In all, the Love Harder Project has raised around $360,000 in Flannery’s ongoing battle against bullies and violence.In a nod to his musical side, and his long list of connections, Flannery sang the national anthem at a Giants game in 2011 with his friends Phil Lesh and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressAir and WaterDespite what some advised early in his career, Flannery was never going to choose baseball over music.“Like having to choose between air and water,” he said. “I’ve got to have both.”Though Flannery mostly was raised in Anaheim, Calif., his family came from the hills of Kentucky. His uncle, Hal Smith, was a catcher who smashed a three-run homer for Pittsburgh in the eighth inning of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. Had the Pirates’ bullpen held the 9-7 lead, Smith would have been a hero. Instead, the Yankees tied things up and Pittsburgh’s Bill Mazeroski won the game and earned immortality.Smith, who played 10 seasons, regularly carried a Gibson J35 guitar with him on the road. When Flannery signed professionally at 19, he followed suit.Flannery’s first manager, Roger Craig, told him to focus on baseball rather than playing the guitar, but the instrument remained his constant companion. Kids were born — Daniel now is 37; Ginny, the mother of Tim’s three grandchildren, is 35; Kelly is 32 — and the guitar was there for all of it.“If it was a crazy day, having that guitar mellowed him out,” Donna Flannery said.Flannery always stood out from his baseball peers. His 1988 Fleer baseball card featured him holding a surfboard.FleerAnother uncle, George, convinced Flannery that playing music wasn’t enough and that he needed to record his songs to tell the stories of his family’s life. Among them is “Pieces of the Past,” a tribute to Flannery’s preacher father, Ragon, who was dying of Alzheimer’s. Jackson Browne and Bruce Hornsby performed on that recording.On his musical journey, Flannery has opened for Buffett and Emmylou Harris. The Grateful Dead’s Weir entered his life during the benefits for Stow, and Walker, the outlaw country legend and longtime hero of Flannery’s who wrote “Mr. Bojangles,” befriended him during the San Francisco years as well.“The great thing about the Bay Area, one of the greatest blessings, is I found a place where they understand you can be an artist and still coach third,” Flannery said.Playing Through PainWhen the pandemic struck and the world closed, Flannery retreated to a getaway he calls his “treehouse” in the mountains north of Santa Barbara.At his cabin, there is no electricity, no phone service and the water comes straight from a well. The staph infection that nearly killed him started, he believes, as he was building cages to protect the potatoes, corn, tomatoes, okra, spinach and assorted other vegetables he plants there.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesGabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York Times“You’ve got to put everything in cages, because there’s animals,” said Flannery, who retired from coaching after the 2014 World Series but stayed in baseball, doing television analysis, through 2019. “I’ve never done any of that stuff because I never had summers off. Somehow, I got cut, or the soil got in.”As an old ballplayer, when the back pain attacked, he figured he would just play through it.“I took four Advil, drank a huge cocktail and usually I’d polish that off with a bottle of wine to kill the pain,” he said of his nightly regimen.But one afternoon he fell asleep, hard, on the deck, waking up only because it was dinner time for his dog, Buddy. Stubborn as his master, Buddy nudged and licked Flannery until he came to. If not for that, Flannery said, he thinks he would have died right there. Instead, the two somehow drove to his San Diego-area home, where Tim collapsed and was taken away by paramedics.As he was recovering in early 2021, Susan Walker phoned one day. Her husband, Jerry Jeff, had died from cancer in October, and she invited Flannery to perform at a celebration of life in Luckenbach, Texas, that June. At the time, he couldn’t even sit up to play his guitar, but he was determined to make it.The memorial concert was Flannery’s first gig after regaining his health, and both of the men Flannery felt had visited him in the hospital, in spirit only, played a part. Weir, who was scheduled to be in Luckenbach before travel issues kept him away, phoned just before Flannery went onstage. And Buffett, who died this month, was there in person.“Hey, you look just like Tim Flannery, only older,” Buffett teased.The old coach played, at Susan’s request, a Walker original entitled “Last Song” and a tribute Flannery wrote for his friend, “Last of the Old Dogs.”“I think I kind of stunned people,” Flannery said. “I don’t know how it happened, and it was all beyond myself. When I came off, the whole crew had tears in their eyes.”Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesDonna Flannery said she finds her husband to be “a kinder person these days, nicer to everybody.”As one of the lines in a song of his goes, kindness lives on the other side.And so the man who was told to leave his guitar at home and focus on baseball has instead hung up his spikes. And he will keep trying to make the world just a little bit better.“When I play, I pray before each show that the great translator, the holy spirit, shows up and changes everything I say and turns it into whatever people need and stick it in their hearts,” Flannery said. “And a couple of days later, when you start to hear back from people, yeah, there’s a reason why I’m playing.” More

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      Len Chandler, an Early Fixture of the Folk Revival, Dies at 88

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      A singer who performed alongside Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, he was known for his topical songs, some of which he wrote in minutes.Len Chandler, who was an early fixture of the folk music revival that swept through Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s and who sang alongside Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other higher-profile stars at civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, died on Aug. 28 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.Lew Irwin, a longtime friend who in the late 1960s brought Mr. Chandler to Los Angeles to provide music for an unusual new radio show he was creating, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Chandler had recently had several strokes.Mr. Chandler was a classically trained oboist when he arrived in New York from Ohio, where he had graduated from the University of Akron in 1957, and met the singer Dave Van Ronk at the Folklore Center, a Greenwich Village shop that sold records, books and sheet music and was a gathering point for folk musicians.Mr. Van Ronk “introduced me to the Washington Square Park folk scene,” Mr. Chandler said in an essay included in the book “Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival,” by Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen (2015). “Every Sunday it was filled with folk singers. I remember learning to play on borrowed guitars in the park until someone said, ‘Buy your own damn guitar.’ I said, ‘OK’ and bought his for 40 bucks.”Mr. Chandler with Bob Dylan at Newport in 1964. Mr. Dylan recalled playing poker with Mr. Chandler in the back room of the Gaslight Cafe in New York. “Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” he said.Jim Marshall Photography LLCSoon he was playing regularly at the Gaslight Cafe, which opened in 1958 and was later famous as a proving ground for Mr. Dylan and others.“It was mainly a scene for poets,” Mr. Chandler said in an interview for the book “Folk Music: More Than a Song,” by Kristin Baggelaar and Donald Milton (1976), “and there wasn’t much happening for singers, except for me.”An executive from the Detroit television station WXYZ saw him there and in 1959 hired him to be the featured musician on “The After Hours Club,” a late-night variety show. By the time Mr. Chandler returned to New York about six months later, the folk music scene was in full swing at the Gaslight, Folk City and other clubs.That scene that included, among others, Mr. Dylan, Mr. Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Richie Havens and Noel Paul Stookey, later of Peter, Paul and Mary. In “Chronicles: Volume One,” his 2004 memoir, Mr. Dylan wrote of the back-room poker game at the Gaslight where musicians would pass the time waiting their turn to perform.“Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” Mr. Dylan wrote. “‘You’ll never make it in this game if you don’t. Sometimes you even have to get caught bluffing.’”Mr. Chandler performing in New York City in an undated photo.PL Gould/Images Press, via Getty ImagesMr. Chandler, as John Christy of The Atlanta Journal once put it, “possesses a sharply honed guitar-vocal arsenal of ‘message’ songs, blues songs, jazz songs, country songs, and just songs.” But he was especially known for songs he wrote inspired by the news of the day. The first, Mr. Chandler said, was written in 1962 about a disastrous school bus accident the year before in Greeley, Colo.“Then I started writing many songs about the Freedom Riders and sit-ins,” he was quoted as saying in the “Folk Music” book. At the March on Washington in 1963, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech, Mr. Chandler sang the traditional song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (Hold On)” with some updated lyrics. Ms. Baez and Mr. Dylan were among the backing singers.The next year he toured with Dick Gregory, the comedian known for sharp-edged material involving race. In the summer of 1969 Mr. Chandler was on the maiden voyage of the Clearwater, the sloop Mr. Seeger used to raise awareness of Hudson River pollution and other environmental causes, sailing from Maine to New York and staging concerts at stops along the way.In 1970 and 1971 he was part of a troupe led by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland that brought an antiwar revue known as “F.T.A.” (which stood for Free Theater Associates, or Free the Army, or something else involving the Army that is unprintable) to military towns and bases at the height of the Vietnam War.If Mr. Chandler never achieved the name recognition of some of those with whom he shared stages and causes, he did write at least one song with lasting appeal: “Beans in My Ears,” which the Serendipity Singers turned into a Top 30 hit in 1964. Aimed at adults but simple and repetitive like a children’s song, it was about people’s tendency not to listen to others. “I think that all grown-ups have beans in their ears,” the final verse went, with “beans in their ears” repeated again and again.Perhaps the song would have climbed higher on the charts had medical professionals in some cities not denounced it. “‘Beans in Ears’ Alarms Doctors Who Fear Children Will Try It,” a 1964 headline in The Indianapolis Star read over an article that said WIRE in Indiana had stopped playing the song. That step was taken by other radio stations as well.Len Hunt Chandler Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Summit County, Ohio. He started learning the piano at 9, but once he reached high school he wanted to join the school band, and the only instrument available was the oboe, so he began playing that.He continued to study music at the University of Akron, where he also showed the beginnings of the activism that would characterize his singing career. In a sharply worded letter to the editor published in The Akron Beacon Journal in 1954, he told of being barred from a public pool because he was Black.“When will we, the people of the United States, learn to practice the principles of democracy that we preach?” he wrote.After he earned his undergraduate degree, a $500 scholarship helped take him to New York to continue his music studies. He would eventually earn a master’s degree in music education at Columbia University, but by then he was immersed in the folk scene.By the mid-1960s Mr. Chandler was a familiar presence at coffee houses in the United States and Canada, and in 1968 his dexterity with topical songs landed him a seemingly impossible job at KRLA radio in Pasadena, Calif. Mr. Irwin was creating a current-events show there called “The Credibility Gap,” and Mr. Chandler was to write and sing three songs a day for the show, based on the news. The first song was due by 9 a.m., the second by noon and the third by 3 p.m.“Sometimes I start writing a half-hour, 20 minutes before the show,” he told The Los Angeles Times in November 1968, when he’d been doing the job for about five months, “so I rip it out of the typewriter and run upstairs without ever having played it on the guitar, decide what key I want to sing it in and put my capo in place. The engineer says, ‘Go,’ and I sing it.”In a Facebook post, Mr. Irwin estimated that Mr. Chandler wrote 1,000 songs from 1968 to 1970.“Reporters speak to the mind; Len aimed at the gut,” he wrote. “And always with gentleness to make his words land with the fullest impact.”Mr. Chandler was on the job at KRLA in June 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. A song he wrote for that occasion included these lyrics:Long line of mourners,Long lines of the slain,Long lines of teletypeSpelling out the pain.Long lines at the ballot boxCasting votes in vain.Long lines line the long, long trackOf another lonesome train.Mr. Chandler in 2009. After settling in Los Angeles, he was a founder of the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase and helped run it for 25 years.Brendan Hoffman/Getty ImagesMr. Chandler released two albums in the late 1960s, “To Be a Man” (1966) and “The Lovin’ People” (1967), though neither made much impact. He settled in Los Angeles, and in 1971 he and John Braheny founded the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase, where songwriters performed new material for music publishers and recording executives. They ran it for 25 years, providing exposure for up-and-coming artists including Stephen Bishop, Stevie Nicks and Karla Bonoff.Mr. Chandler’s survivors include his wife, Olga Adderley Chandler, who acted under her maiden name, Olga James, and was the widow of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who died in 1975. They also include a son, Michael Fox.“One thing about Chandler was that he was fearless,” Mr. Dylan recalled in “Chronicles.” “He didn’t suffer fools, and no one could get in his way.”“Len was brilliant and full of good will,” he added, “one of those guys who believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Review: This London ‘Ring’ Is on the Met Opera’s Radar

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      It’s not stage-filling spectacle, but Barrie Kosky’s version of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” the start of a four-opera epic, is eerie, vivid and intense.Two years ago, the Metropolitan Opera went shopping for a new “Ring” in London and came home empty-handed.English National Opera’s first installment of Wagner’s four-part epic of gods and humans, lust and power, was judged a bit too scrappy and bare to transfer to the grand Met. And anyway, the English company was soon reeling from cuts to its government funding, putting the completion of the cycle in jeopardy.The Met would like to bring a “Ring” to New York in four seasons — a blink of an eye given opera’s glacial planning cycles and Wagner’s technical and casting complexities. So its leadership has another London option under consideration: a production directed by Barrie Kosky that opened on Monday at the Royal Opera, the city’s bigger and older company.Eerie, vivid and intense, Kosky’s version of “Das Rheingold,” the first “Ring” opera, is a show that an opera house on either side of the Atlantic could be proud of, accessible and stimulating for Wagner newcomers and connoisseurs alike. The story is crystal clear, and its emotional and political stakes are taken seriously, without oversimplification or overstatement.It would also finally bring to the Met one of opera’s finest, most rangy and resourceful directors. (A collaboration on Prokofiev’s “Fiery Angel” was spiked during the pandemic.) Kosky, who was born in Australia, was celebrated during his recently ended tenure at the helm of the Komische Oper in Berlin, for his revivals of long-forgotten operettas and his giddy disregard for distinctions between high and low art, between “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Moses und Aron.”His signature style is zany, high-spirited and high-kicking, but he can do sober and austere when the piece calls for it, like a starkly savage “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival last year. His Royal Opera “Rheingold,” though not without shots of bitter humor, is in this vein.The work’s single, two-and-a-half hour act is all played atop, around and inside a huge hollow tree trunk, collapsed on its side. This is a dying world, Kosky suggests — and to that end he puts Erda, the earth goddess who intones a climactic warning, onstage almost throughout, in the form of a silent actress: elderly, naked, frail, vulnerable. (For that climactic monologue, the singer is hidden from the audience.)Katharina Konradi with the magic gold, whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion.Monika RittershausThe gold whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion, and from which the central ring of power is forged, is here a shiny, syrupy fluid that flows from the tree. It evokes, appropriately, a union of metal and river, as well as the fossil fuels on which the global economy is disastrously based. Its associations range bodily and geologic — lava, milk, semen, blood, honey — and characters lick it greedily from their hands.Kosky and his set designer, Rufus Didwiszus, have imagined Nibelheim, the inferno in which the stolen gold is worked on, as a steampunkish industrial monstrosity, with clamps gripping the tree. Erda, her torso popping out of a knot in the trunk, is connected to tubes that pump the iridescent batter from her body and drain it into pails. This society is built from — and rotted by — the devaluation of women (particularly the old) and environmental exploitation.Victoria Behr’s costumes are contemporary, and there are hints of British flavor: These wealthy, self-serving gods have a taste for nostalgic old-money activities like polo. But this is a basically placeless, timeless production; its primary location, the theater. Kosky emphasizes this by having the audience enter, curtain up, to see the unadorned expanses around the stage. Stagehands do their work visibly, and Alessandro Carletti’s lighting draws attention to its equipment.Kosky uses steam, lights, loudspeakers and knobby holes in the tree to conjure, in charmingly old-fashioned ways, the magic effects and transformations of Wagner’s libretto. But this staging mostly lacks proscenium-filling spectacle — and it was a similar lack that made English National Opera’s “Ring” a no-go for the Met.The transitions between the scenes in “Das Rheingold,” from the heights of mountains to the bowels of the earth and back again, are played at the Royal Opera with the curtain closed, as if Kosky is thumbing his nose at expectations that he is supposed to provide more of a scenic extravaganza. Instead, those interludes are simply showcases for Antonio Pappano, starting his swan-song season as the company’s music director, and the orchestra.You could call this meager. But on Monday, it felt more like focused modesty.Christopher Purves, center, as Alberich transforms the tree into an industrial monstrosity pumping golden fluid from Rose Knox-Peebles, left, as Erda.Monika RittershausWork that’s powerful in the 2,200-seat Royal Opera House won’t necessarily make the same impact in the Met, nearly double that size. But the last New York production of the cycle, directed by Robert Lepage on a preposterously expensive, 45-ton high-tech set, was, when it opened in 2010, an artistic embarrassment for the company as well as a depressing example of empty-headed excess at a time of financial crisis.The “Ring,” given its size and prominence, is a symbol of an opera house’s values, and the lean vitality of Kosky’s vision, which will unfold in London over the coming years, seems right for an era of budget and programming cuts.At the Royal Opera, Pappano and the orchestra match Kosky with fiery but never overblown playing, especially from the lush yet biting strings, their intimacy startling. This is a “Rheingold” that, first and foremost, supports its singers.Wotan, the king of the gods, and Alberich, the dwarf who steals the gold from the Rhine, are here almost brotherly figures, both with bald heads and sturdy bodies, and they share certain qualities, too. Christopher Purves’s Alberich has aristocratic reserve, while Christopher Maltman’s booming, tight-smiling Wotan is capable of feverish aggression; it is shocking but not surprising when he cuts off Alberich’s finger to take the ring.Yet the tenderness with which Maltman embraces the fragile Erda, as the voice of the goddess is heard warning him to give up the ring, is just as indelible, and feels just as true. As Fricka, Wotan’s wife, Marina Prudenskaya sings with slicing anxiety; Sean Panikkar is a charismatically grinning, cackling playboy as Loge, the anarchic fire god; Insung Sim is unusually agonized as the giant Fasolt.This is not an ostentatious production. But the finale, which shouldn’t be given away, is proscenium-filling spectacle, and vintage Kosky, in that it uses one of theater’s simplest, most traditional devices with unforgettable showman flair, conveying all the glittering glamour and fundamental emptiness of the gods’ ascent to their new home — a triumph as hollow as the giant tree.Das RheingoldThrough Sept. 29 at the Royal Opera House, London; roh.co.uk. More

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      When Club Music Went Commercial, Remixes Kept It Real

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      Social justice, romance and gay pride are alive in a sound that would seduce the world.We gathered each Sunday. The place of worship: Tracks, a mammoth warehouse-turned-nightclub in Southeast Washington, D.C. We were a congregation of mostly Black gay men, there to celebrate one another, at a time — the early 1990s — when we were losing so many to AIDS. We danced — many vogued — to the music that endured after the anti-Black, anti-gay “Disco Sucks” movement of the late 1970s. This fledgling genre transformed dance music, through synthesizers, drum machines and the scrappiness of youth, into a sound that would seduce the world. Some would “call it house,” as the duo Mass Order sang on “Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away),” from 1991.So many songs reflected my values and interests: social injustice (CeCe Rogers, “Someday”), romance (MAW & Company featuring Xaviera Gold, “Gonna Get Back to You”), recovering from heartbreak (Ultra Naté, “It’s Over Now”) and gay pride (Carl Bean, “I Was Born This Way”). Other cuts I cherished weren’t songs written for the clubs, but remixes: R&B and pop songs reconfigured for the dance floor.Life is a remix. Or at least mine has been. Like many, I grew up exploring identity through pop culture. But being Black and gay, I felt most mainstream entertainment didn’t affirm my place in the world. I nevertheless sifted through mass media, embracing what served me, discarding what didn’t. This process of fashioning custom-fitted couture from cultural ready-to-wear is epitomized by the remix. “Remix” has a range of meanings, but in general it refers to a practice, with roots in Jamaican reggae, in which D.J.s and producers take a pre-existing song and tweak it for a specific audience. I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music.In the 1990s — when the advances from increased gay visibility bucked up against the backlash triggered by AIDS — remixes attested that the music cultivated in Black gay spaces had larger cultural value. It meant something to me when, say, Diana Ross reached out to a younger generation with “Workin’ Overtime (House Mix),” Jody Watley transformed into a sinister cyborg on “I’m the One You Need (Dead Zone Mix)” and Mariah Carey went on a historical Black music journey, evoking jazz, gospel and soul on “Anytime You Need a Friend (Dave’s Empty Pass).”I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music. Remixes can free a song from the dictates of radio trends, marketability and the pop conventions of boy-meets-girl. For example, Watley’s song “When a Man Loves a Woman” was released with the remixes “When a Woman Loves a Woman” and “When a Man Loves a Man.” One of my favorite remixes is Quincy Jones’s “Listen Up (Chakapella Dub Mix),” by Arthur Baker. Baker uses Chaka Khan’s vocals to create a narcotic soundscape. The mix opens with a low bass rumble, the way a storm signals its arrival. An uncharacteristically raspy Khan starts wailing. Her vocals bring to mind sounds Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography, music made by enslaved people: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.” She roars, “I’m in love,” over and over and over again. The wildness of the repeated phrase suggests madness, but a relatable kind. It makes me think about what, on the surface, seems so irrational: a Black queer person risking alienation from the larger Black community to shape a distinct identity around the inexplicable wants of the heart.Other remixes form narratives. On the “Every Woman’s Beat” remix of Whitney Houston’s 1993 cover of Khan’s signature song, “I’m Every Woman,” the producers David Cole and Robert Clivillés of C+C Music Factory use Houston’s vocals to create an impressionistic tale that charts the journey from external desire to inner fulfillment, similar to the theme of “The Wizard of Oz.” At the start of the track, Houston repeats, “anything you want” as if she’s compelled by craving. Then she yells, “I got it,” before proclaiming, “I’m the one.” It feels as if a glittery Glinda had just whispered to her: “You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”There is another function of the remixes I cherish most: They instigate precious memories. As James Baldwin wrote: “Music is our witness and our ally. The beat is the confession, which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.” Some remixes remind me of the 1980s and ’90s, when music forged in Black queer spaces began reaching the mainstream. Remixes were one way of preserving Black queer aesthetics amid economic incentives to make club music more commercial.The “FBI Dub” of Janet Jackson’s 1997 hit “Together Again,” by Zanzibar DJ Tony Humphries, takes me back to those days. It’s a reminder of the ferocity of many lost to AIDS. Humphries jackhammers a classic M.F.S.B. groove, breaking it into rhythmic slabs that are the perfect accompaniment to an exquisitely executed pose. It’s house music as hoodoo, conjuring angular apparitions trapped in a fierce dance battle. I listen to these and other remixes from the era to help me cope with a phantom past, the feeling I survived a plague that often seems forgotten. Remixes bring me hope because, by definition, they represent the possibility of change. I’m thinking about a line from Indeep’s 1982 club burner “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: “There’s not a problem that I can’t fix/’Cause I can do it in the mix.”Craig Seymour is a music critic and the author of “Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross.” More

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      Richard Davis, Gifted Bassist Who Crossed Genres, Dies at 93

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      He was best known for his jazz work. But he was also heard on Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” and with orchestras conducted by Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein.The bassist Richard Davis in 1989 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a professor of music and music history from 1977 to 2016.Brent Nicastro, via University of Wisconsin-Madison ArchivesRichard Davis, an esteemed bassist who played not just with some of the biggest names in jazz but also with major figures in the classical, pop and rock worlds, died on Wednesday. He was 93.His death was announced by Persia Davis, his daughter. She did not say where he died but said he had been in hospice care for the past two years.Mr. Davis, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2014, appeared on more than 600 albums. A first-call player for some of the most important figures in jazz history, he had fruitful collaborations with the reed player Eric Dolphy (whose composition “Iron Man” was named for him) and the pianist Andrew Hill. He was a member of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, which performed every Monday night at the Village Vanguard in New York, from the ensemble’s debut in 1966 until 1972.His advanced technique, especially with the bow, led to work with classical orchestras under Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. His adaptability resulted in sessions with Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon and Bonnie Raitt.Mr. Davis made 30 albums as a leader or co-leader from 1967 to 2007. He was named best bassist in the DownBeat magazine readers poll from 1968 to 1972.Reviewing a 1986 performance at Sweet Basil in Greenwich Village by a band led by Mr. Davis and featuring Freddie Waits on drums, the New York Times music critic Robert Palmer wrote: “The relaxed, slightly behind-the-beat swing typical of so many jazz rhythm sections is not for them. Their accents fall right up on top of the beat, and they vary their springy forward momentum with rhythmic whirlpools and rapids and an explosive sense of dynamics.”Mr. Davis performed at the Rose Theater in Manhattan in 2014 as part of a ceremony at which he received a Jazz Masters honor from the National Endowment for the Arts.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesRichard Davis was born on April 15, 1930, in Chicago. His mother died in childbirth, and he was adopted by Robert and Elmora Johnson. He was exposed to music through the records his mother had collected in her native New Orleans and the hymns Mr. Johnson would sing around the house.He attended DuSable High School in Chicago, where he studied music under Walter Dyett, who mentored many future jazz stars, and he started playing the bass at 15. As he recalled in a 2013 interview published in the American Federation of Musicians magazine Allegro: “I was just enthralled by the sound. The bass was always in the background and I was a shy kid. So I thought maybe I’d like to be in the background.”Mr. Davis credited Mr. Dyett with pushing him to play across styles, and during high school he also studied with Rudolf Fahsbender of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He would go on to receive a bachelor’s degree in music education from the VanderCook College of Music in Chicago in 1952.As a young player in Chicago, he was mentored by local bassists like Wilbur Ware and Eddie Calhoun. While still in college, he performed with the pianist and bandleader Sun Ra, who at the time was still billed as Sonny Blount.His first major gig was with the pianist Ahmad Jamal in 1952. He then went on the road with another pianist, Don Shirley (whose story was told in the movie “Green Book”); this led to his initial recordings and eventually to his move, in 1954, to New York, where he worked with the singer Sarah Vaughan from 1957 to 1962.In a 2005 interview for The New York City Jazz Record, Mr. Davis spoke of how he used aspects of his classical study and his time with Ms. Vaughan to create his particular bowing technique:“Some of the first bass players used the bow to play the walking bass line. And I heard all of that coming up as a kid. Therefore, when you start to study books of bass methods, you start out with the bow no matter what your intentions are, so there must be some intertwining of what I heard as a kid, what I heard working with Sarah Vaughan, wanting to imitate those vocal sounds.”After his time with Ms. Vaughan, Mr. Davis’s reputation began to grow rapidly, as did his discography. The year 1964 was an especially significant one; he played on Mr. Dolphy’s last studio recording, “Out to Lunch!”; Mr. Hill’s seminal “Point of Departure”; the drummer Tony Williams’s first album, “Life Time”; and the saxophonist Booker Ervin’s “The Song Book.”Mr. Davis’s first album under his own name was a collaboration with the drummer Elvin Jones.Impulse!Three years later, Mr. Davis made his first album under his own name, “Heavy Sounds,” on which he and the drummer Elvin Jones were co-leaders, released on the Impulse! label. Over the next several years, his work outside the jazz world expanded: His credits included acting as musical director for Mr. Morrison’s album “Astral Weeks” and providing the haunting bow work at the end of “The Angel,” on Mr. Springsteen’s album “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.”Mr. Davis continued to release albums regularly through the new millennium. In the late 1960s and ’70s he was also a member of the New York Bass Violin Choir, led by his fellow bassist Bill Lee, playing alongside other luminaries of the instrument like Ron Carter, Milt Hinton and Sam Jones. In the late 1980s he was a founding member of New York Unit, a trio with the pianist John Hicks and the drummer Tatsuya Nakamura, which recorded eight albums for Japanese labels through 1998.In an email, Mr. Carter said Mr. Davis was “an incredible bassist, a great teacher and my dear friend.”In 1977, Mr. Davis left New York to take a position as a professor of music and music history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I got a call offering me a job at the university in Madison because they didn’t have a bass teacher on campus,” he told OnWisconsin, the university’s alumni magazine, in 2011. “I said, ‘Where’s Madison?’ I asked around if anyone had heard of the place because this school kept calling me. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the importance of teaching others, and I had always wanted to teach young people. I thought maybe it was time.”Mr. Davis at his home in Wisconsin in 1978.Brent NicastroHe retired from teaching in 2016. In 2018, Richard Davis Lane in eastern Madison was named in his honor.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.In addition to his recorded work and his influence on generations of students, Mr. Davis leaves behind two legacies — one musical, the other societal.The Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists, which he created in 1993, conducts an annual conference for young players to learn from professionals and perform with one another. And in 2000, Mr. Davis established the Madison chapter of the Center for the Healing of Racism, an outgrowth of his founding in 1998 of the Retention Action Project at the University of Wisconsin to improve graduation rates for students of color.His activism was connected to his earliest experiences trying to be a classical player., he said in the 2005 interview:“My environment with race issues started the day I was born. You’re born with dark skin, and that itself brings on attitudes of other people who are not dark-skinned to see you as someone to be oppressed and not to be given equal chances in society. So that is something that is permanent.“I was 18 years old and I could play any and all of the European classical music,” he continued, “but you weren’t allowed to participate in the symphony orchestra because there were racial issues and prejudices. They didn’t want to see you.”The bassist William Parker, who studied with Mr. Davis as young man in New York, said: “Richard Davis was a beautiful musician and human being. He reminded me of an African king, regal and strong. I praise him not because he could play both classical and jazz. I applaud him because the brother had a big, poetic sound full of freedom.”Mr. Davis, he added, “taught me some things about music, but his main message was ‘Be yourself.’” More

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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