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    Foday Musa Suso, 75, Dies; Ambitious Ambassador for West African Music

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    A master of the kora who worked with Herbie Hancock and Philip Glass, his career was powered as much by experimentation as by reverence for tradition.Foday Musa Suso, a griot, kora virtuoso, multi-instrumentalist and composer whose work with artists like Herbie Hancock and Philip Glass helped thrust West African musical traditions into conversation with the world, died on May 25 in his native Gambia. He was 75.The percussionist Stefan Monssen, a mentee of Mr. Suso’s, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He did not specify a cause, but said Mr. Suso had been in ill health in recent years after suffering a stroke.Mr. Suso was born into a long line of griots, the caste of musician-storytellers who are traditionally responsible for retaining oral histories in the areas of West Africa where the Mande languages are spoken. He traced his lineage back to Jeli Madi Wlen Suso, who is said to have invented the kora centuries ago by attaching 21 strings and a cowhide to a large calabash gourd.Mr. Suso was the rare musician who learned to play in the various regional styles of griots from around West Africa. In a tribute published in Gambia’s major newspaper, The Standard, Justice Ebrima Jaiteh of the country’s high court wrote, “Jali Foday was more than a musician, he was a living archive, a teacher, and a symbol of continuity in a rapidly changing world.” (The honorific “Jali” refers to Mr. Suso’s status as a griot.)And yet Mr. Suso’s career was powered as much by his will to expand as by reverence for tradition.He added three bass strings to his kora’s traditional 21, allowing him to hold a steady beat and make its sound more danceable — and therefore more appealing to young listeners in the 1970s.He wrote many of his own compositions. He also learned to play more than a dozen other instruments, including the balafon (an African predecessor of the xylophone), kalimba (also known as the thumb piano), nyanyer (a one-stringed violin-like instrument), ngoni (an early West African banjo) and talking drum. After moving to the United States, he began experimenting with electronic instruments as well.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In the Age of the Algorithm, Roots Music Is Rising

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      Billy Strings and Chris Thile were singing an old song called “Rabbit in a Log” at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Clouds of weedy smoke rolled up to the stage from below, and thunder echoed from the surrounding mountain peaks as the crowd of 7,000 nodded blissfully and trance-bopped in Dead-show fashion.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinThe song, also known as “Feast Here Tonight,” is about extracting a rabbit from a hollow log when you don’t have a dog (you’ll need to fashion a brier snare), cooking it over an open fire and finding a place to lay your weary bones for the night. So it’s about the techniques and outlook of the hobo, redolent of atavistic physical competence and the unforgiving facts of life. Like a lot of old-timey music heard in our disorienting present, it sounds like equipment for living, shaped and road-tested by hard times. Bill Monroe, the main force behind the merger of Scottish fiddle tunes with blues and gospel that came to be called bluegrass, recorded the song in the 1930s, but its roots extend back to earlier folk traditions in the South.It carries a considerable payload of history, and it also offers an occasion to shred. Billy Strings, who is already regarded at age 32 as an all-time great flat picker, grimaced in concentration as he laid down dense, twisting skeins of guitar notes. Thile, who is known as a wizard of the mandolin able to play anything with anybody, was all smiles and seemed to do everything without effort: impossibly swift runs, chordal washes, daring harmonic touches. Billy Strings told me later that his immediate reaction to hearing Thile warm up on mandolin backstage was “I better get some coffee.”But Billy Strings was the main attraction. Born William Lee Apostol, he is one of the biggest names in the world of roots music and still getting bigger. He consistently sells out arenas, and it seems just a matter of time before he moves up to stadiums. He has been wildly successful in attracting fans of all ages, including devotees of jam bands, heavy metal and other genres beyond the roots-music scene. He told me, “I’ll throw in some diminished runs for metalheads; you know, put some horns on it,” referring to the devil-horns finger gesture favored by fans of heavy metal, who lap up the ominous minor sound of diminished chords.Billy Strings, whose marquee turn with Thile opened the Telluride festival last June, was one of a cohort of youngish, proven-yet-still-rising stars who converged there that also included Molly Tuttle, Charley Crockett and Sierra Ferrell. They are all big fish in the expanding pond of the roots-music scene who have been testing the vaster waters of the mainstream — showing up all over late-night TV, movie soundtracks and music awards shows. Endlessly in demand as guest stars on other artists’ songs, they are both generating and riding the cultural momentum as American popular music makes one of its regular cyclical swings back toward acoustic instruments and natural voices, the values of community and craft and a heightened sense of connection to the soulful experience and hard-won wisdom of those who lived in the past. Like crafting and sewing and other embodied competences also making a comeback, music handmade by flesh-and-blood humans on instruments made of wood and metal has acquired special added meaning. It offers a strong contrast to the disembodied digital reality that more and more of us inhabit more and more of the time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Cowbell Gave Latin Music Its Swing

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      When life gets loud, let the rhythm get louder.Ran-kan-kan: Long before I could name the source of my excitement, my body responded to the strident signature of Latin dance music. The cowbell strikes like a drum but rings like a horn, the high pitch piercing through salsa’s dense thicket of overlapping patterns. Just when I feel myself drifting from the dance-floor herd, the cowbell summons me back to the rhythm’s raw nerve. Musicians call this function el amarre, from the Spanish amarrar — to fasten, to moor, to seal the deal. A paradox, maybe, that the instrument that brings all the others in line should incite the most euphoric feelings of freedom. I’m already sweating through my silk, so why resist the cowbell’s erotic revelation? When the fever reaches a certain pitch, complexity must give way to relentless repetition — one just-right note, catechized precisely like a prayer. Eso es. Just like that.Prayer, I learned recently, might be the right metaphor: The cowbell we know today is a direct descendant of instruments that spread through West Africa with the early iron-making technology of the Bantu migrations, and that continue to structure the diaspora’s ritual music, from the double-mouthed agogô of Yoruba bembé ceremonies to the triangular ekón of the secret brotherhood known as Abakuá. Like a god, the bell lays down our shared timeline. The sharp attack puts you in your place — enter here, act now — amid the din of drums and dancers. The job of the bell, I’ve been told, is to stay steady.Maybe that’s how these timelines survived the apocalyptic chaos of the Middle Passage. When diverse captives converged on the Caribbean, they sought out substitutes for the instruments they no longer had the freedom to craft. In Puerto Rico, they fashioned bomba drums from rum barrels; in Cuba, they turned the humble wooden crate, used to pack salt cod, into the cajón, whose special resonance later found a place in Spanish flamenco. Soon enough, free people of color gained access to forges for smithing bells from scratch, so I sometimes wonder if it was not only necessity but sheer virtuosity that compelled musicians to play most anything: hoe blades, machetes, paint cans and, yes, ranchland cowbells, struck with the handles of decapitated hammers.In New York City, the improvisations continued: Fania’s Johnny Pacheco stalked the carts in Central Park to steal the copper cowbells hanging from the horses’ necks. Eddie Palmieri, salsa’s founding father, told me how the drummer Manny Oquendo would take his cracked cowbell to a body shop for repair: “What is it with the cowbell?” the welder, used to mending fenders, finally asked. “Well,” Oquendo grunted, “that’s what gives the swing to the band.” By the 1950s, Latin music had become big business, so it’s no surprise the cowbell was perfected and mass-produced right here in the Bronx, by a Puerto Rican auto mechanic named Calixto Rivera: first in his apartment, then, after noise complaints, in a workshop behind Yankee Stadium. If you don’t make the cowbell by hand, Rivera once told The Times, “it doesn’t go coo-coo — it goes blegh-blegh.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      AriAtHome Walks the Streets, Making Beats (and New Friends)

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      On the SoHo corner where Prince and Elizabeth Streets meet, dog walkers, errand runners and lunch breakers squinted through the April sun at the part man, part beat-emanating automaton approaching them.Ari Miller, 25, known by his artist name AriAtHome, is a New York-based wayfaring musician who turns heads with his mobile beat-making rig. Donning a get-up that looks like a cross between a Ghostbusters proton pack and a ballpark-vendor tray, he dishes out on-the-spot hip-hop, neo-soul, funk and house beats throughout the city’s streets, all created entirely from scratch without breaking stride.“I built the rig with New York City in mind,” Miller said. “When you make a good song with a stranger in the street it’s like, ‘Whoa, did we just become best friends?’”Ari Miller (a.k.a. AriAtHome) at work, with his videographer Dylan Goucher capturing the scene and livestreaming. Miller making his way up subway stairs wearing 55 pounds of gear.The guts of the machinery Miller and a friend assembled for his mobile music project.Crammed with keyboards, a looper, six speakers and a controller with dozens of knobs and faders, Miller’s Frankenstein instrument offers a buffet of drum, keyboard and bass sounds, interfaced through the music software Ableton. In the back, a mess of cables hides a Mac Mini M4, a modem and the hot-swappable camera batteries that power it all.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Japanese Engineering Transformed Pop Music

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      On the morning of Monday, Aug. 18, 1969, during the last set of the Woodstock festival, Jimi Hendrix wielded a white Stratocaster to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His guitar solo was one psychedelic peak in a long heritage of experimentation. Almost as soon as guitars were first amplified in the 1930s, musicians began messing with their equipment to create brash tones — from poking holes in speaker cones to increase distortion to plugging into a Leslie speaker, which had horns rotating in a hefty refrigerator-size wooden enclosure, the resulting Doppler effect making the guitar sound rich and otherworldly. More

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      Larry Bell’s Vast Collection of 12-String Acoustic Guitars

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      The artist Larry Bell has amassed a vast collection of acoustic instruments, carefully stored in a climate-controlled room.In My Obsession, one creative person reveals their most prized collection.The artist Larry Bell, 85, was born with severe undiagnosed hearing loss. “I didn’t know it, and neither did my parents,” he said. Unsurprisingly, music lessons were a struggle but, when he was about 17, he saw a strange guitar hanging in a pawnshop window in Downtown Los Angeles. “I had never seen anything quite like it because it had 12 strings instead of six,” he said. “I asked the man behind the counter if I could see it. I just dragged the back of my nails across the strings, and it was a complete epiphany. I heard it. And not only did I hear it, I could feel it.” Bell, who is best known for minimalist glass sculptures that explore the properties of light and color, has been collecting 12-string guitars ever since. Hundreds hang in their own climate-controlled room in his studio in Taos, N.M. Twelve-strings are more sensitive than six-strings: They’re difficult to tune and hard to play, and that’s what Bell appreciates. “My collection is about my passion for improbable things,” he said.The collection: Acoustic 12-string guitars.Number of pieces in the collection: “Roughly 300.”Recent purchase: “I had some spare time [during the run of the retrospective ‘Larry Bell: Improvisations’ at the Phoenix Art Museum], and one of the curators drove me around to see some guitar shops. I came across a fantastic instrument made in Vietnam. The sound’s sort of a cross between a harpsichord and an organ.”Weirdest: “In my mind, they’re all unusual because 12-strings aren’t a popular kind of guitar. Years ago, I commissioned a fantastic musician to make me a 12-string guitar that was small enough to slip under the seat of an airplane.”Most expensive: “Ten thousand dollars for a McPherson [a guitar handmade in Sparta, Wis.].”Most precious: “A little Mexican instrument that was made [about 50 years ago] in a town called Paracho, Michoacán. I paid about $600 [for it] at a store in L.A. It probably cost someone $12 when it was new. As it turned out, it was absolutely extraordinary in terms of its playability. How much a guitar costs is not necessarily what determines how good it is.”One previously owned by somebody famous: “Actually, it’s just the opposite. A few musicians borrowed them and never gave them back.”One that was damaged: “They crack all the time. It’s very dry here. I have four humidifiers that run around the clock to feed these guys water so they don’t turn to dust.”Plans for the collection: “I wonder how many people’s guitars burned up in the terrible situation in Los Angeles. I’m thinking of giving the whole collection to somebody who can put the instruments in the hands of those who might need them.”This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      1984: The Year Pop Stardom Got Supersized

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      Forty years ago, the chemistry of pop stardom was irrevocably changed. Nineteen eighty-four was an inflection point: a year of blockbuster albums, career quantum leaps, iconic poses and an enduring redefinition of what pop success could mean for performers — and would then demand from them — in the decades to come.The indelible albums of 1984 were turning-point releases: Prince’s “Purple Rain,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” among them. Tina Turner reintroduced herself as a bruised but resilient survivor on “Private Dancer.” And Van Halen proved that hard rock could mesh with pop — even synth-pop — on “Jump.” These were pivotal statements from established acts who were decisively multiplying their impact.Those blockbusters were propelled by an unlikely convergence of artistic impulses, advancing technology, commercial aspirations and popular taste, all shaped by the narrow portals of the pre-internet media landscape. The eye-popping novelty of music videos, the dominance of major record labels and the cautious formats of radio stations still made for a limited, recognizable mainstream rather than the infinitude of choices, niches, microgenres and personalized recommendation engines that the internet opened up. It was a peak moment of pop-music monoculture. Listeners in the 1980s absorbed hits that felt like ubiquitous earworms: the fanfare-like synthesizer riff of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the saxophone cushioned by synthesizers in George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” the drone and percussion and bawled vocals of “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Younger generations have definitely heard and seen their repercussions, whether or not they’ve played back the originals. The sounds and lessons of 1984 have been durable and widely recycled by countless synthesizer-pumped 21st-century hitmakers, among them the Weeknd (“Blinding Lights”) and Sabrina Carpenter (“Please Please Please”). More

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      ‘You Can Never Look Back’: How ’70s Rockers Rebooted for the ’80s

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      The year 1984 was a watershed in pop music. The stars who’d made it big the previous decade had to embrace new instruments and MTV or risk being left behind.Don Henley was stuck.It was the fall of 1983, and the former Eagles star was cruising down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, listening to a working tape of a tune for his second solo album. While struggling for words to one section, he glanced to the left lane and saw a gold Cadillac Seville with a curious decoration: a Grateful Dead decal.That image went right into the song, “The Boys of Summer,” a synthesizer-bathed memoir of lost love that Henley delivered with the kind of cutting, resonant zinger that was the signature of all his best Eagles lyrics:Out on the road todayI saw a Deadhead sticker on a CadillacA little voice inside my head said“Don’t look back, you can never look back”“It was an odd juxtaposition, to see a Deadhead sticker on a car that is associated with conservatism,” Henley recalled in a recent interview. “To me, it was a symbol of changing times.”The music had changed too. Henley was far from alone as an A-list 1970s rocker who had arrived in the ’80s to find a music scene transformed in sound and vision, now driven by pop singles and buzzing with electronics. The hallmarks of mainstream ’70s rock — long guitar solos, bushy sideburns — were out. Synthesizers, drum machines and stylized, eye-popping music videos were in.In most tellings of pop music history, the 1980s were primarily the springboard for a fresh crop of stars like Madonna, Prince and Duran Duran, who embraced and defined the flashy artifice of the MTV age. But the new era also had a powerful impact on the generation that preceded it. For rock’s older guard, even those like Henley, who had scaled the heights of fame, the emergence of a new order in pop was a kind of evolutionary event, and its implicit challenge was clear: Adapt or be left behind.“The ’80s ushered in a whole new paradigm,” Henley said. “We all sort of had to get with the program. Some people got with the program, and some didn’t.”Don Henley came up in Eagles, but realized he had to shift his sound for his second solo album.Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty Images More

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      The Revolutionary Sound at the Heart of ‘The Nutcracker’

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      There comes a moment in “The Nutcracker,” a ballet full of fantasy of fantastical music, when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances to a tune you’ve probably heard before.Over plucked string instruments, a glassy, bell-like melody emerges from a celesta, evoking water drops and then more as those drops give way to flowing runs. It’s a transporting sound: mysterious and otherworldly, delicate and playful.This is the famous “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” a highlight of “The Nutcracker” and a holiday staple, born on the stage and heard today in commercials and on movie soundtracks around this time every year.Unmute to listen as Megan Fairchild dances the Sugarplum Fairy in New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.New York City BalletThe “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is so familiar that it’s difficult to imagine that when this music was new, in 1892, it was really new. And that’s because of the celesta.Only recently invented, the celesta was in its infancy when Tchaikovsky began to imagine how he might write for it. Since then, its sound has spread throughout classical music and into pop, often with the same magical effect you hear in “The Nutcracker.” More