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      Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Avant-Garde Jazz

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      This challenging subgenre, including the subset of free jazz, is driven by the fire of spontaneity, and its rules are still being written. Eleven writers, critics and musicians share their favorites.Lately The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with Herbie Hancock, New Orleans jazz, Sun Ra or Mary Lou Williams.Now we’re putting the spotlight on avant-garde jazz, a challenging subgenre born out of the desire to do something that wasn’t as prescribed as bebop or post-bop, a sound carried by the fire of spontaneity by players who weren’t considered to be in the upper echelon of jazz. The definition of avant-garde jazz has been a point of contention since its inception. While the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians often played avant-garde that didn’t feel like jazz at all, others, like Amiri Baraka — on his 1972 album “It’s Nation Time” — fused poetry and polyrhythms to express a different side of the subgenre. Perhaps its biggest public advocate was the saxophonist and bandleader John Coltrane, who took an interest in free jazz — a subset of avant-garde jazz — in the mid-1960s and pushed for the saxophonists Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders to release their music on the mainstream label Impulse! Records.Today, the rules for what is and what isn’t avant-garde are still being written. The list below doesn’t aim to be comprehensive, but it represents a broad cross-section of avant-garde then and now, discussed by some of the foremost experimental musicians today. Enjoy listening to these songs chosen by a range of musicians, authors and critics. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Ana Roxanne, musician“Longview” by Barre Phillips and John SurmanA friend of mine shared this piece with me recently and I’ve been enamored with this album by Barre Phillips, a Bay Area native who has resided in France for most of his life. In “Longview,” save for some flourishes and a couple of brief passages, the piece stays in the same key pretty much the whole time. I appreciate that a bassist who assigned himself to such few notes can keep such dynamicism. This piece has elements of a drone without sounding like one at all. Also, within avant jazz I tend to prefer vocals that lean more toward consonance, and so I admire the singers’ experimentation with sound, syllable and melody all while keeping a steady structure and never sounding stale, creating a soothing element to a lilting frenetic undercurrent of horns and percussion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Julia Holter, musician and composer“Yeh Come T’ Be” by Jeanne LeeIn this loud and hyper-edited era, our ears can be moved most powerfully by the rare work that coordinates thoughtfully with space and breath. The composer, vocalist, improviser and poet Jeanne Lee’s music has been inspiring to me in this way, and one of my favorite pieces of hers is the minimalistic and incantatory rumination on four words, “Yeh Come T’ Be,” from the singular 1975 record “Conspiracy.” As I listen, I lose sense of time in the wild contrapuntal interplay between breathy tones, yelps, sighs, whispers, chants. “Come to be/to become” — a litany of words teases away literal meaning, in preference for a felt sonic meaning. The performance came about decades ago, yet it feels alive, born and bold in each heard instant. Every listen is new and a revelation.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Laura Warrell, author“Peanut” by Sonny SharrockTell me a work of art “isn’t for everybody” and I want to see it. I admire artists who not only push the envelope but also tear it to shreds, and the jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock was that kind of musician. “Peanut,” off 1969’s “Black Woman,” weaves a surreal patchwork of sounds that offers a transcendent musical experience. The opening melody, gently plucked on Sharrock’s guitar against a tumble of drums, promises a conventional, even folksy, tunefulness. Just before the two-minute mark, all sense of harmony disjoints: Sharrock’s warbling, squealing guitar abandons the established melody; rhythmless percussion bashes against a tumult of discordant notes played on an upright bass; piano keys sound like they’re being pounded by an unruly child. Each instrument could be playing a different song.It’s the vocals, performed by Sharrock’s then-wife Linda, that assemble the other instruments into an awkwardly cohesive, slightly unnerving whole. At first, her vocals are operatic and pretty, but soon she shrieks and moans like a woman suffering labor pains or nightmares. I wonder what was in this woman’s scream. Pain? Rage? Ecstasy? Whatever the origin, Sharrock’s voice performs the kind of internal reconfiguration listeners might get from good art or good therapy. Those who make it to the end may wonder whether they truly like “Peanut” or are simply under its spell.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Zoh Amba, musician and composer“Unity, Part I” by Frank WrightI first heard Reverend Frank Wright’s music when I was a child back in Tennessee. The music deeply filled my heart with flowers of gratitude. This record, “Unity,” really makes me go inside myself and search. What I feel is a sacred journey together and great endless love. This record makes me feel grateful to be here and feel the sunshine. The quartet is Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Alan Silva and Muhammad Ali, recorded in 1974 at the Moers Festival in Germany.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elucid, rapper and producer“Science Fiction” by Ornette ColemanI couldn’t help but fall in. Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction” still feels like everything I was looking for and nothing I had experienced before. An electric organism of Don Cherry horn squeals, double drummer cymbal crashes by Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell, and Charlie Haden’s bass line wanderings. Surging. On its toes. Pulsing and gnashing. Melodious and chaotic. Swinging real loose. David Henderson came through with base elemental declarations sounding like a ghost of an old spooky religion: “How. Many. Enemies. Make. A. Soul?” Cue crying baby. For lovers of hyper-aural freak-outs.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Chad Clark, musician and producer“Max Brown” by Jeff ParkerIf I tell you I’m going to play some “avant-garde jazz,” I think I know what you are expecting.You’re expecting to hear something challenging. And we both know “challenging” is a euphemism for “difficult.” And “difficult” sometimes means “unpleasant.” But I’m gonna throw on the guitarist/composer Jeff Parker’s dulcet, winning “Max Brown.” You are met with a soothing electronic soundscape enfolding Parker’s understated, post-Grant Green guitar. The genre will remain indeterminate. But the music feels good. Horns enter and the song begins to feel like a futuristic take on the crepuscular, narcotic blues of Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”So why do I call this calming music “avant-garde jazz” and not the smarmy candy known as “smooth jazz”? Simply: smooth jazz is a category. But this music resolutely defies categorization. Since the 1990s we’ve grown accustomed to hip-hop importing and metabolizing the sonorities and techniques of jazz. But “Max Brown” is jazz that has imported and metabolized the sonorities and techniques of hip-hop. It may not be the first track to ever attempt this, but it is the first track to do it this stylishly and charismatically. Feels like a bellwether. It’s not Parker’s intent to announce this provocation. His innovation works better if you just … enjoy the ride.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Melanie Charles, musician and producer“The Inflated Tear/Haitian Fight Song” by Rahsaan Roland Kirk“True Black music will be heard tonight!” is Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s setup for one of the greatest moments in TV history: when Kirk and his group of artists, playwrights, provocateurs, composers and Eulipions defiantly played on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1971. At first glance, Kirk is a funny-looking blind man whose gimmick is playing three horns at the same time. But the goal of Kirk and his Jazz and People’s Movement was to diversify television and amplify Black voices. Known for hiding in audiences and breaking out into a cacophony of bells and whistles, they forced people to see the value of jazz or, as Kirk preferred, “Black Classical Music.”With a fiery rhythm section of Charles Mingus, Sonelius Smith and Roy Haynes slated to play Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” on the “Ed Sullivan” broadcast, Kirk instead starts by quoting his theme from “The Inflated Tear.” Sounding like a woodwind section all by himself, Kirk displays his idiosyncratic multi-horn technique. He introduces the band members and gives them an opportunity to blow.Finally, Kirk sets up Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song,” written in the 1950s in the midst of the civil rights movement. The climate of social change echoed the success of the Haitian revolution 100 years prior. The players transition into a Dixieland feel as the collective falls into chaos, challenging listeners to wake up. Kirk and company deliver here an electrifying demonstration of public rebellion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Amirtha Kidambi, composer and vocalist“Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” by Max Roach and Abbey LincolnVocalists are woefully underrated in the “avant-garde” or “free jazz” idiom, which tends to favor instrumental shredders in a not-so-subtly patriarchal way. The extremely powerful voice and artistry of Abbey Lincoln is ultra-marginalized, seldom mentioned unless in tandem with Max Roach per their romantic entanglement. Lincoln, who passed in 2010, is to me the definition of avant-garde, light years ahead of her time in her abstract, expressive and wordless vocalizations on the seminal civil rights-era suite “We Insist! Freedom Now” (1964), with Roach, Coleman Hawkins and Olatunji, among other proto-free jazz instrumentalists.What I love about Lincoln is that she is not afraid to get dirty and ugly, to make the listener uncomfortable in a visceral way. She utilizes what is academically referred to as “extended technique” in her growls, screams and harsh vocalizations, a term I detest for its normative Eurocentric bias. Rather than “extending” the vocal instrument, I see Lincoln as mining its absolute essential and maximal emotional range, something only approximated in mimicry by horns and other instruments. She is especially potent and effective on “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace,” in conversation with Roach’s drums, yelping, hollering and screaming in pain, in a real-time response to those turbulent years of American racial violence and struggle. Lincoln was no supper-club singer, uninterested in light entertainment, and more concerned with shaking an audience into consciousness. We could use Lincoln’s voice and message now, too.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer“Steps” by Cecil TaylorWhen we talk about the beginnings of free- and avant-garde jazz, we often go to Ornette Coleman and start there. It makes sense, given the courage it took to title his 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz To Come,” then pepper it with challenging structures that were tough to wrangle. For me, though, I’ve always looked to Cecil Taylor as the foremost purveyor of the avant-garde, his rolling piano chords tucked between tidal waves of unrelenting drums and saxophone. Perhaps no song typifies this better than “Steps,” the opening song of his 1966 album, “Unit Structures.” I’ve always loved how precarious it feels, organized and chaotic at the same time. A complex tune with bright colors and vigorous sonic arrangements, “Steps” also confronts my sensibilities, making me a bit uneasy. But that’s why I appreciate it the most. It’s a reminder that jazz can soothe and agitate, that just because something is easy and relaxed doesn’t mean it’s better.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆V.C.R, recording artist, violinist and composer“The Creator Has a Master Plan” by Pharoah SandersGrowing up as a preacher’s kid in Memphis, my world was filled with cognitive dissonance. In home-school, my father taught me the basics of music theory and songwriting. During this time I was solely allowed to study two genres: gospel and classical. Even though this felt like a daunting disadvantage, I now see how that rigid upbringing served as the foundation for my music career today.Fast forward to 2016 and I’m sitting in my bedroom in Dallas. At the time, I was only experimenting with writing my own songs. I wanted to make music that was audiovisual and edifying to the soul. My art would be healing and palpable. In my search, I stumbled upon Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” From the first second, I was captured by the roaring trumpet. Very different from my classical background; you could feel the musicians breathing together and freely channeling the “holy ghost,” as they say. Suddenly, the song transitions into a trancelike chant but no words are uttered. The melody is repetitive, like the prayer services I grew up in. Then a subtle solo vocalization splits the sea of sound, with “The Creator has a working plan …”Warm tears rolled down my face, and I knew my search was over. This was the blueprint, and Pharoah was my guru. I knew from that moment on, my music would have to flow from the same channel and carry his message. I’m eternally grateful to Pharoah Sanders for my personal paradigm shift and pray everyone gets to experience that level of bliss.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Carlos Niño, producer and musician“Water Music” by Albert AylerAvant Garde?Albert Ayler is/as GodMary Maria Parks his Wife“Water Music” is LifeThey’re open heartsBobby Few and Stafford JamesPlease say their blessed names,Impulse! Fire Music, yes!but labels aside, (1969)Here’s a yearning Lullabyso Beautiful and Alive!Jazz? Because of the Saxophone?I hear a totally unique Gospel …Thank You Ed Michel,this Magic from the same Sessionsthat rang: “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe”Wellness, wholeness, ESP,“Water Music” waves courage,the first time I heard this word,was from Poet Kamau Daáood,Spirits, Bells, Love Cry, Rejoice,that Eternal, Radiant, Inspired Soul VoiceNew Grass, so vibrantly Green, Spiritual Unity,Deeply, inner, Tenor tone, feeling,Flowing, gleaming,Sparkling, infinite,I am so grateful for it.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      in Movies

      ‘Wham!’ Review: They Made It Big, Then Broke Up

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      A new movie documents George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s storming of the pop airwaves as the duo Wham! and laughs past the thorny questions.The new documentary about George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley and the music they made as Wham! — it’s just called “Wham!” — found me in a moment of need for a nostalgic, fantastical elixir, something short, sweet and tangential to my feeling of national blues. For one thing, Wham!, the duo, made soul music that popped. And the movie dances past all of the thorny moral and ethical questions of white people making Black stuff. Those questions don’t exist at all in this movie. That’s the fantasy. And I’m here for it. But also: Wham! didn’t have any thorns.Here were two white boys from England of solid Greek Cypriot (George) and Egyptian (Andrew) stock, born during Motown’s ascent in the early 1960s and, in adolescence, bonded to each other as disco was handing the party baton to new wave and rap. They synthesized it all (plus a little Barry Manilow and Freddie Mercury, and some Billy Joel) into a genre whose only other alchemists, really, were Hall and Oates. In every one of the duo’s roughly two dozen songs — including “Everything She Wants,” “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “I’m Your Man,” jams all — there’s influence but, in the movie’s conjuring, no anxiety. Race doesn’t quite exist here.The film doesn’t bother with journalism or criticism or music history. Just a lot of pictures and archival interviews, performance footage, outtakes and music videos. It’s essentially adapted, by the director Chris Smith and some very busy editors, from scrapbooks that Ridgeley’s mother kept, celebrating everything from the duo’s first attempt to storm the airwaves in 1981 to its acrimony-free breakup in 1986. That’s where things end, a year before the release of Michael’s megahit album “Faith,” and decades before his death in 2016 at 53. There’s no mention made, either, of Ridgeley’s misapprehended, out-of-print solo album from 1990, “Son of Albert.”There aren’t even any talking heads. The disembodied voices of Michael and Ridgeley guide the whole thing — rumination and memory as narration. (Most of Michael’s comes from a BBC Radio interview.) They explain how they met as schoolkids in the mid-1970s and took over a mini-block of 1980s culture. You get to hear Ridgeley still warmly call Michael by his nickname, Yog, for he was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, and see both their looks pinball from leather bar to Richard Simmons.Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut. You’re permitted to embrace Michael’s dexterous approach to Black music and Ridgeley’s affable interpretation of Michael’s blueprint as the way — a way — things could be. Easy, frictionless. You hear Michael rhyme on “Wham! Rap” just about as bodaciously as Grandmaster Flash or with some of Kurtis Blow’s humor, and no cold sweats follow. The homework had clearly been done. So, instead you say: He just … had It.I mean, the early 1980s were awash in young white Brits making hits, at least partially, out of slicked-up Motown: ABC, Bananarama, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Soft Cell. I’d say that sound came most naturally to Michael; it seemed most elastic to him. He really could make the most of a “do do do” or a “yeah yeah.” He had a knack for tattoo melodies and chord progressions so juicy that you want to bite into every section of almost every song.Michael learned early on how to shade his singing. He could get it to coo and wail and susurrate; Ridgeley, played a feisty, insinuating, shirt-unbuttoning guitar, an element I can now hear (and thanks to this film, appreciate). They made three albums in as many years, then stopped when the costs of fame became too much for Ridgeley but were barely meeting Michael’s expectations for himself. Wham!, for Michael, was the ground floor. To hear both men tell it, he was the stronger songwriter, and he really knew how to produce a record.My favorite story in the documentary involves a trip to Memphis that Michael took to record “Careless Whisper” with the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section under the supervision of the producer Jerry Wexler, another legend. Michael didn’t like what they did with the song. The movie lets you hear some of it, and the trademark warmth is what seems to be missing. There’s something almost metronomic about it. (If there were a moment for somebody to come in and do some explaining, this would be it. What exactly displeased George and eventually Andrew?) But I love this story because it stars these different generations of white soul musicians with divergent tastes in Black music. Maybe Wexler and the boys didn’t hear “Careless Whisper” the way Michael did. But he had the confidence (and the nerve) to take it home and redo it until it became the screen of silk and smoke we know today.“I’m never gonna dance again, the way I danced with you”? What a work of melodrama! Where’d it come from? Who did Michael do wrong? “Wham!” alludes to personal struggles — Michael with his sexuality; Ridgeley with partying. Michael recounts coming out to Ridgeley early on but to almost no one else. Success becomes his identity. In the film, that identity’s lowest moment happens at the end of 1984, when “Last Christmas,” on its way to being Wham!’s fourth U.K. chart-topper in the calendar year, is kept from the spot by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the all-star charity-for-Africa record, which Wham! is on. Michael is bummed that he keeps himself stuck at No. 2.Michael chose to let ambition define him. But there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet. (The bouncy, blow-dried music videos were always a different story: What closet?) Meanwhile, the movie about the men who made these songs is all bright side. A little desp rarely sounded so good. A pair of more candid, if more conventional, documentaries exist about the darkness and light of Michael’s life. This one? It’s a prequel, one that personifies the Wham! Experience: over before you know it.Wham!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Music

      Peter Brötzmann, 82, Dies; His Thunderous Saxophone Shook Jazz Traditions

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      One of Europe’s most influential free-jazz musicians, he played with “a kind of scream” to exorcise his demons, and those of German history.Peter Brötzmann, an avant-garde saxophonist whose ferocious playing and uncompromising independence made him one of Europe’s most influential free-jazz musicians, died on June 22 at his home in Wuppertal, Germany. He was 82.His death was confirmed by Michael Ehlers, the director of Eremite Records, who served as Mr. Brötzmann’s longtime North American tour manager and business partner.No cause was given, but Mr. Brötzmann had suffered from respiratory issues for the last decade. A self-taught musician — best known for his tenor saxophone work, he also played various clarinets and the tarogato, a Hungarian woodwind instrument — he said that his practice of pushing too much air through his horn might have caused his health problems, which he likened to the lung damage suffered by glassblowers.“I wanted to sound like four tenor saxophonists,” he told the British music magazine The Wire in 2012. “That’s what I’m still chasing.”The force of Mr. Brötzmann’s abrasive squall felt tectonic. “I can’t think of anyone that played with more power than Peter,” the British saxophonist Evan Parker, who appeared on several of Mr. Brötzmann’s early records, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think it can be done, to get more out of a saxophone than that. Sometimes his nose would bleed because he was blowing so hard. He gave everything.”Mr. Brötzmann in performance at the Vision Festival in New York in 2011. He said he “wanted to sound like four tenor saxophonists.”Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesMr. Brötzmann described his style as a means of exorcising demons — particularly those of Germany’s crimes against humanity in World War II.“Younger people don’t understand, but what has happened to us in Germany is a kind of trauma of our generation,” he told The Wire. “There is a great shame there and a terrible kind of trauma. And that’s why maybe the German way of playing this kind of music sounds always a bit different than the music from the other parts of Europe, at least. It’s always more a kind of scream. More brutal, more aggressive.”Hans Peter Hermann Brötzmann was born on March 6, 1941, in Remscheid, an industrial city in western Germany. The city was almost destroyed by Allied bombardment in 1943, and Mr. Brötzmann’s earliest memory was of running through the streets holding his mother’s hand to escape the firestorm.His father, Johannes, a tax officer, had been conscripted into the Nazi Army. Captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front, he didn’t return until 1948, after escaping from a P.O.W. camp in Siberia. Mr. Brötzmann grew up in Remscheid with his family — his father, his mother, Frida (Schröder) Brötzmann, and his sister Mariane — but moved to Wuppertal for school and remained there the rest of his life.He studied graphic design and visual art in the late 1950s at the School of Applied Arts in Wuppertal, where he created his own fonts: striking, blocky alphabets that he later used on the covers of many of his albums. He had his first gallery show in 1959 and participated in early performances staged by the experimental, interdisciplinary art movement Fluxus. In 1963 he collaborated on the first major exhibition by Nam June Paik, the Korean American artist who would become known for his video work, but who at that point was building musically oriented installations and interactive sculptural objects.Mr. Brötzmann continued making artwork prolifically even as music assumed a place of priority in his life.“From the very start, he didn’t love the art-world milieu,” said John Corbett, co-owner of the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in Chicago, who began curating exhibitions of Mr. Brötzmann’s artwork in 2003. “But he continued privately making visual art. He was interested in beauty, but it had to be accompanied by a certain kind of honesty and forthrightness.“He really could not deal with people who were false, with art that was false, and with music that he felt was false, Mr. Corbett added. “He was quite intolerant of all those things.”In 1967, Mr. Brötzmann released his first album as a bandleader on his own label, BRÖ. If its title, “For Adolphe Sax,” read like a provocation aimed at the 19th-century inventor of the saxophone, then his next BRÖ album, “Machine Gun,” released in 1968 and credited to the Peter Brötzmann Octet, announced all-out war on everything that had come before.“Machine Gun” was a nickname the trumpeter Don Cherry had given him, as well as a reference to the carnage of the war in Vietnam. A milestone of collective improvisation, the album boasted three tenor saxophonists who would become titans of European free music: Mr. Parker, Willem Breuker of the Netherlands and Mr. Brötzmann.Mr. Brötzmann’s violently expressive sounds, combined with confrontational album titles like “Nipples” (1969) and “Balls” (1970), “was something to get used to,” Mr. Parker said. “It wasn’t the gentle school of English ‘after you, sir’ kind of improvising.”In 1969, Mr. Brötzmann co-founded a new label, FMP (the initials stood for “free music production”), for which his poster and album designs helped create a distinctive visual aesthetic. His trio with the Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove — both veterans of “Machine Gun” — lasted a dozen years before Mr. Van Hove, struggling to be heard above the din, departed; Mr. Brötzmann and Mr. Bennink continued collaborating as a duo.But Mr. Brötzmann’s reputation was largely confined to Europe until the mid-1980s, when he joined with the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, the bassist Bill Laswell and the drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson to form Last Exit, a group whose amplified cacophony flirted with heavy metal and raised his profile in North America.Beginning in the late 1990s, reissues on Mr. Corbett’s label Unheard Music Series made Mr. Brötzmann’s early music readily available to a new generation of listeners, while collaborations with younger musicians like the Chicago Tentet (which featured the saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark) established him as a revered figure in that city.Throughout, Mr. Brötzmann toured relentlessly, earning the nickname Soldier of the Road, which was later the title of a 2011 documentary about him.He almost never turned down a booking invitation, regardless of the money involved or the distance to be traveled; he even performed in Beirut in 2005 during the chaotic aftermath of the Cedar Revolution. That concert, like most of his travels, resulted in yet another album.By Mr. Ehlers’s count, Mr. Brötzmann appeared on more than 350 records, including 180 as leader or co-leader.Into his 70s, Mr. Brötzmann was traveling in minivans across North America with Mr. Ehlers, playing at theaters, clubs, do-it-yourself art spaces, community centers and occasionally even squats. He paid his audience back in kind, Mr. Ehlers said, through “the little gesture of playing every concert until he almost collapsed from the effort.”In recent years, he toured in a duo with the pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh and played frequently with the bassist William Parker and the drummer Hamid Drake, whom he considered his favorite rhythm section.“Peter had his own relationship with sound,” William Parker said in a phone interview, “and every time he played, he tried to, as we call it, go to the moon.”Mr. Brötzmann married Krista Bolland in 1962. They eventually separated, but remained close. She died in 2006.Mr. Brötzmann is survived by a son, Caspar, a free-form rock guitarist with whom he recorded “Last Home,” a 1990 album of incendiary duets; a daughter, Wendela Brötzmann; and a grandson. His sister died before him.Mr. Brötzmann’s restless creativity sometimes found unlikely admirers. In a 2001 interview with Oxford American magazine, former President Bill Clinton was asked to name a musician readers would be surprised he listened to.His response: “Brötzmann, the tenor sax player, one of the greatest alive.” More

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      in Music

      London Tours on Opera and Classical Music Offer Looks Behind the Curtain

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      Fans of music from centuries past will find a wide variety of experiences and collections. One even comes with a side of rock ’n’ roll.Have you ever wondered what happens behind the red velvet curtains at the Royal Opera House? Do you relish a bit of backstage gossip or enjoy looking at centuries-old instruments? London has a rich variety of tours and collections for opera and classical-music enthusiasts. Here’s a selection.Royal Opera HouseWho were some of the women who made history at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden? It’s a question that the opera house is answering in detail in a tour that runs through Aug. 12.Among the many stars the tour is spotlighting is a soprano who gave a whole new meaning to the word “diva”: Adelina Patti (1843-1919), an Italian who made her opera debut in New York at 16, then crossed the Atlantic for a 23-year Covent Garden career.She was admired for her coloratura singing and feared for her business chops. According to the tour organizers, she demanded to be paid in gold at least half an hour before each stage appearance and commanded $100,000 per show (in today’s money). And in a performance as Violetta in “La Traviata,” she wore a custom gown encrusted with 3,700 of her own diamonds.The singer comes up in another tour: an outdoor one organized jointly by the Royal Opera House and the Bow Street Police Museum that runs through Aug. 31. During Patti’s diamond-studded performance of “La Traviata” at the Theatre Royal (the precursor of the current opera house), security had to be reinforced in a big way because of the precious stones embedded in her gown. Covent Garden at the time teemed with pickpockets, robbers, criminals and even murderers. So police officers surreptitiously joined the chorus onstage — where they could get as close as possible to the soprano and go unnoticed.The Royal Albert Hall, named for Prince Albert and inaugurated in 1871, a decade after his death, has featured luminaries from Albert Einstein to Adele. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesRoyal Albert HallWith 5,272 seats, Royal Albert Hall is more comparable in size to an arena than to a classical-music concert hall; in fact, the Cirque du Soleil regularly performs there. It’s named after Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, and was inaugurated in 1871, a decade after his death. You can hear that royal back story and get the lowdown on the hall’s tricky acoustics in an hourlong tour. The tour also covers some of the luminaries who graced the main stage (such as Albert Einstein and Muhammad Ali) and some of the more outlandish events held in the hall, including a séance and an opera performance for which the auditorium was flooded with 56,000 liters (nearly 15,000 gallons) of water.Handel Hendrix HouseThe museum, in a Georgian townhouse at 25 Brook Street in Mayfair, has a rich history: George Frideric Handel lived there from 1723 until his death in 1759. (Jimi Hendrix rented an apartment on the top floor in the late 1960s, but that’s another story.) The house is now a museum where you can visit Handel’s bedroom, the dining room where he rehearsed and gave private recitals, and the basement kitchen. This is where Handel composed “Zadok the Priest,” the British coronation anthem, which was recently performed for King Charles III. Here, too, Handel wrote “Messiah,” which took him about three weeks to compose.Speaking of “Messiah,” if you would like to see the first published score of songs from the oratorio, head to the Foundling Museum, on the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, a children’s home in Bloomsbury. The score was donated by Handel, one of the hospital’s major benefactors, who gave benefit concerts there and even composed an anthem for his first one. Also on display: Handel’s will.A new exhibition at the Royal College of Music features hidden treasures such as this yuequin, a stringed instrument from China, which was brought to London in the early 19th century and acquired by King George IV.HM King Charles III; photo by Claire ChevalierRoyal College of MusicThe Royal College of Music has a collection of more than 14,000 objects covering five centuries of music making. That includes about 1,000 musical instruments, such as the world’s earliest-dated guitar.A new exhibition features hidden treasures from the collection, including a photograph of Mary Garden. She was a Scottish-born soprano who moved to the United States in the late 19th century, joined the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1900 and premiered the role of Mélisande in “Pelléas et Mélisande,” the only opera that Debussy ever completed.Also on display is a yuequin, a stringed instrument from the ancient city of Guangzhou in China, which was brought to London in the early 19th century and acquired by King George IV. More

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      Madonna Hospitalized with Infection, Postpones ‘Celebration’ Tour

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      The 64-year-old pop icon was hospitalized for several days and remains under medical care, her agent said. A new start date for her tour has not been announced.Madonna was hospitalized for several days with a “serious bacterial infection,” forcing her to postpone her forthcoming “Celebration” tour, her manager said on Wednesday.The 64-year-old pop icon developed the infection on Saturday, leading to a stay in an intensive care unit, her manager, Guy Oseary, wrote on Instagram.“Her health is improving, however she is still under medical care,” he said. “A full recovery is expected.”Madonna’s world tour was set to begin on July 15 in Vancouver and to last seven months, highlighting songs from the past 40 years of her career.A new start date for her tour has not been announced.Madonna announced her tour, which would be her 12th, in January, with a five-minute black-and-white video that showed her speaking at a dinner party with a group of famous friends. Her conversation and party games made references to her some of her songs, like “S.E.X.” and “La Isla Bonita,” as well as her documentary and concert film “Truth or Dare.”“I am excited to explore as many songs as possible in hopes to give my fans the show they have been waiting for,” Madonna said in the video.Tickets for her “Celebration” shows in New York, London, Paris and Amsterdam sold out in minutes, according to Billboard.The tour, produced by Live Nation, was to span about 40 cities before concluding in Mexico City on Jan. 30, 2024.In North America, she had stops planned in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Miami and Los Angeles. In Europe, she was scheduled to perform in London, Barcelona, Paris and Stockholm.Caldwell Tidicue, a New York comedian better known as Bob the Drag Queen, was slated to appear as a guest on all dates of the tour.“The Celebration Tour will take us on Madonna’s artistic journey through four decades,” the tour announcement said.After announcing the tour, Madonna collaborated with the pop and R&B singer The Weeknd and rapper Playboi Carti on the single “Popular.” The collaboration brought her back to Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the first time in years. More

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      Marcos Witt, the Pop Star Bringing Latino Evangelicals to the Pews

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      The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      How Shahzad Ismaily Became Musicians’ Favorite Musician

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      Shahzad Ismaily cannot regulate his body temperature. He was born without sweat glands, or at least, not very many.When he was a month old, his parents rushed him to the hospital because he was beyond feverish and struggling to breathe. They learned their only child had ectodermal dysplasias, a rare genetic disorder that produces abnormalities at the body’s surface, including fingernails and teeth. Five decades later, Ismaily has become one of music’s most in-demand collaborators, flitting like a mischievous butterfly through genres as diverse as honeyed folk, rambunctious free jazz and spectral meditations sung in Urdu. He does not think these facts are unrelated.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily, 51, recently wondered by phone from a tour stop in the Netherlands, as he briefly warmed himself in his hotel room’s bedside bathtub, during one of several extended interviews. “The hardest part of playing music with people is a kind of nonverbal, total empathetic awareness of how another person feels, how a room feels. I’m moving with the world around me. I’m not a sealed object.”Though he’s never released a solo album, Ismaily has played on or produced nearly 400 records since moving to New York in February 2000, including work by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Yoko Ono. His Brooklyn studio, Figure 8, remains an affordable and inclusive hub for experimental musicians, even as Ismaily becomes a marquee session player.This year alone, his subtle keyboards lit the darkened corners of Feist’s “Multitudes”; his elastic bass provided the combustible matter inside “Connection,” a rock record from Ceramic Dog, his trio with the iconoclastic guitarist Marc Ribot; and his prismatic keyboards and askance rhythms shaped “Love in Exile,” the acclaimed debut from his improvisational group with the singer Arooj Aftab and the pianist Vijay Iyer. But summarizing exactly what Ismaily does — let alone, how he’s so good at it — can feel a little like bottling wind.“If you listen to my last record, you could not know he’s on it, because he’s not the most present musician,” Sam Amidon, the soft-voiced singer who has worked with Ismaily for nearly 20 years, said by phone. “But every moment he was in the room, he brought out the most beautiful stuff in other people through his energy. He’s just sneakily there.”For Ismaily, the invitation to play may be the most important part. “Since 30, I have been asked to walk into a room and be myself musically — an incredibly intense, intensely fortunate situation,” he said. “My preferred way to work is to walk into a room and feel, intuitively, what we should do today.”The self-confidence to play the part of himself did not come easily for Ismaily. Soon after that early emergency room visit, surgeons split his prematurely fused skull, adding space for it to expand as he aged. The scar cuts horizontally across his head, a reminder of his tenuous health as a child. Intense allergies and asthma often caused him to wake up in panics about catching his next breath. For several months, he was blind.When Ismaily was 4, his mother became a psychiatrist for the state of Pennsylvania, and the family shuttled among the campuses of mental hospitals where they stayed for years at a time. Ismaily quickly learned not just to live with people whose worldview he could not comprehend, but to communicate with them, to try and glimpse their reality. He befriended the bipolar, the depressed, the manic.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesFriends his own age, however, were much harder for the lanky Pakistani boy with, as he put it, “a very thin amount of hair, no teeth or one tooth or dentures, and a compressed head” in small-town Pennsylvania. Kids would tease him about why he dressed for Halloween all year. His mother worked long hours on hospital grounds, and his father battled cancer when Ismaily was 3, leaving him emotionally withdrawn. Left alone, Ismaily slipped into science fiction, particularly the postapocalyptic escape of Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” series. These books taught him to drift into other realms beyond his physical surroundings.“When something opens up in front of you that you love, you dive headfirst into it,” he said.Music soon revealed the world he has spent his lifetime since exploring. His home was very quiet, with no instruments or even a stereo. Still, when Ismaily was 2, he began to crave the act of making sound. He specifically wanted rhythm, banging spoons against hot radiator coils until his parents relented and bought a tiny Muppets drum kit. A high school marching band was the source of his only childhood friends, offering respite from judgment.He shipped off for a lifesaving stint at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts, which he called “a school of misfits, of 300 oddballs.” He headed to Arizona to join friends in bands and, ultimately, study biochemistry; too busy playing music to attend class, he stopped one credit short of his masters. Playing in bands there, he realized he could get just enough shows to pay his meager bills. Making the same scenario work in New York, however, presented new challenges, and Ismaily filled every ostensible day off with an extra recording session or one-off concert. The over-commitment kept him afloat; it also cost him romantic partnerships and rankled bandmates. But after almost two decades together in Ceramic Dog, which is Ismaily’s longest-running relationship, Ribot understands the need.“It’s not a coincidence, the challenges Shahzad had growing up and the way he plays rock. It’s about being forced into confrontation with mortality,” Ribot said in a phone interview. “He’s the most natural-born anarchist I ever met, because he has the natural desire to exceed whatever limit he’s standing next to.”“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIsmaily is an expert at lending others that superpower, or reminding them that they have it. Beth Orton recalled the frustrating process of making her 2022 album, “Weather Alive,” and how label woes and abandoned sessions prompted her to believe she no longer belonged in the music business. But then she began sending demos to Ismaily, who replied to her uncertain hymns with tizzies of pre-dawn gut reactions. “I was so down, and I think he knew how tender I felt,” Orton said in an interview. “There was a sense of being met during a very cold winter.”Ismaily is still, however, trying to muster such temerity within his own work. He has often played shows in the nude, including memorable gigs on a very hot boat on the East River or covering the Counting Crows at a Brooklyn benefit cloaked only by an acoustic guitar. These stories stem in part from the body temperature troubles that will last him a lifetime and in part, he admitted, from confronting the shame of the body that long caused him grief.“I feel ecstasy when those performances are over,” Ismaily said. “It’s the ecstasy of feeling good in your own skin, just showing someone who you really are and surviving it.”He worried, though, that he still lacks the conviction — or “artistic depth,” as he called it — to put something permanently on record that takes his own name. For a decade, he has run a record label that shares a name with his studio. The imprint specializes in first albums by veteran collaborators and role players, the musicians who make albums by the more famous better. Ismaily knows that description encapsulates so much of his work. He hopes someday to be brave enough to own that mantle for himself, to make his own record in his own studio for his own label.“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said, still energetic after nearly five hours of conversation about that very trauma. “It still feels like a non-mountaineer casually driving past the bottom of Mount Everest, but I would be so excited about that outcome.” More

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      Robert Black, Bass Virtuoso of the Avant-Garde, Is Dead at 67

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      As part of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars, he helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums.Robert Black, a virtuoso bassist who collaborated with prominent composers including Philip Glass and John Cage and was a founding member of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble, died on Thursday at his home in Hartford, Conn. He was 67.His partner, Gary Knoble, said the cause was colon cancer.Mr. Black was already a prominent interpreter of modern music for bass when he was invited, in 1987, to perform at the first Bang on a Can festival, a freewheeling marathon of contemporary music in downtown Manhattan.“He had a beautiful sound,” the composer Michael Gordon, one of the founders of Bang on a Can, said in an interview. “He did everything with the bass: He danced with it, he drummed on it, he scraped it, he coached all kinds of amazing sounds out of it.”At that festival, Mr. Black performed Iannis Xenakis’s “Theraps” — an extraordinarily difficult piece that traverses five octaves through uncanny glissandos — and Tom Johnson’s “Failing,” which asks the performer to play increasingly complex passages on the bass while at the same time reading aloud a humorous text that self-consciously describes the possibility of failure.“When I fail to succeed, I will succeed in communicating the essence of the piece,” Mr. Black stated while playing a tricky line — as per the composer’s instructions — to laughter from the audience, captured in a definitive live recording.In 1992, Mr. Gordon and his fellow Bang on a Can directors David Lang and Julia Wolfe asked Mr. Black to join the newly formed All-Stars sextet, which brought further renown and attention to the festival’s visceral, rock-inflected music. His technique was central to the group’s sound: In Ms. Wolfe’s 1997 piece “Believing,” written for the All-Stars, he improvised frenzied passages that Ms. Wolfe once called “quintessential Robert Black-isms.”As a soloist and a chamber musician, Mr. Black championed contemporary music and commissioned work from dozens of composers. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument, a double bass nicknamed Simone that was made in Paris in 1900.Mr. Black’s theatrical approach to performance extended to dramatic speaking — he commissioned a large-scale work from Philip Glass that includes the recitation of poetry by Lou Reed and Patti Smith — and even dancing, as a member of Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks, an interdisciplinary troupe.Mr. Black in 2021. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesRobert Alan Black was born in Denver on March 16, 1956, to Ned Black, an engineer, and Frances (Canzone) Black. Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, he began playing bass in middle school. He attended the University of North Texas before transferring to the Hartt School in Connecticut, where he studied with Gary Karr. While in college, he started performing music composed by his friends, and he freelanced in the New York area after graduating in 1979.“It felt like nobody really trusted me,” he recalled of this time in a 2015 interview. “I would go to the orchestra rehearsal, playing along, and my colleagues were going, ‘Yeah, but you also do that strange contemporary music, you play John Cage.’ And then I would go to a hard-core new music thing, and they’d go, ‘Yeah, you’re really not one of us because you also play in an orchestra.”But, inspired by his longtime partner, the composer James Sellars, as well as the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, Mr. Black increasingly dedicated himself to contemporary composition, at a time when few classical virtuosos were committed to new works. An early showcase was Mr. Sellars’s “For Love of the Double Bass,” a piece for bass and piano that combines music and theater, in which Mr. Black seduced his instrument, buying it a dress, dancing with it and ultimately taking it to bed.As part of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Mr. Black helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums. He and the guitarist Mark Stewart, the only two original members to remain with the sextet, performed together for more than three decades.“He was deeply kind, often playful, gently yet fiercely devoted to the composer and his colleagues onstage,” Mr. Stewart wrote in an email. “His humility was real because his wisdom came from listening.”Mr. Black also pursued a solo career, building a sizable new repertoire for his instrument and recording the complete bass music of Giacinto Scelsi and Christian Wolff. A dedicated pedagogue, he taught at the Hartt School for 29 years. In 2017, he formed the Robert Black Foundation to support contemporary music. He frequently commissioned work from young and emerging composers, whose music he performed as part of a monthly Friday series during the pandemic, live-streamed from his home.At Mr. Black’s final concert, which was in April amid a grove of trees in Philadelphia, he took part in “Murmur in the Trees,” a piece for 24 basses composed by Eve Beglarian.In an unconventional arrangement, Mr. Black had been partners since 1974 with both Mr. Sellars, who died in 2017, and Mr. Knoble, and he had also been married to Elliott Fredouelle since 2016. (They all lived together.) He is also survived by a sister, Debbie Walker.In 2013 Mr. Black, a gifted improviser, trekked into the culverts of Moab, Utah, with his bass to make a new album — a duet with the desert. The recording captures not just the vast array of strange sounds he drew from Simone, but also the murmurs of birds and insects. It was, he explained, an attempt to “make the environment start to sing.”“I would just fool around on the instrument, getting used to the space and the sound,” he told Colorado Public Radio. “When it came time to record — this sounds like such a cliché, but it really is true — I would just try to empty my mind, start listening, and just let my hands move.” More