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      Wilko Johnson, Scorching Guitarist and Punk Pioneer, Dies at 75

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      Known later as an actor on “Game of Thrones,” he helped lay the foundation for a 1970s rock revolution on England’s pub circuit.Wilko Johnson, the searing yet stoical guitarist for the British band Dr. Feelgood, whose ferociously minimalist fretwork served as an early influence for punk-rock luminaries in the 1970s, died on Nov. 21 at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England. He was 75.His death was announced on his social media channels.In 2013, Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 10 months to live. A cancer specialist in Cambridge, England, soon discovered a rare form of tumor — Mr. Johnson called it, at six and a half pounds, “the size of a baby” — and removed it in an 11-hour operation.He lived for nearly another decade and took an unexpected detour into acting, playing Ser Ilyn Payne, a mute executioner, in the first two seasons of “Game of Thrones,” as well as recording and touring with Roger Daltrey of the Who.His legacy, however, is rooted in his tenure with Dr. Feelgood, a rowdy pub-rock band of the 1970s whose high-adrenaline take on rhythm and blues helped lay the groundwork for the punk-rock revolution to follow.In performance, he cut a wild-eyed figure. Often clad in a black suit, Mr. Johnson, who was prone to amphetamine use in his early days, appeared equal parts robotic and manic onstage, glaring murderously at the audience while pacing the stage frantically.His staccato guitar phrasing formed a sound all his own. Mr. Johnson, who was born left-handed and learned to play right-handed, avoided basic rock staples like barre chords and even picks, relying instead on quick, aggressive finger strums — he called them “stabs” — on his black Fender Telecaster. His playing was explosive, as percussive as it was melodic.Mr. Johnson in what was billed as a farewell concert in North London in 2013, after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he had only 10 months to live. Joel Ryan/Invision, via Associated Press“Wilko Johnson was a precursor of punk,” the British singer and songwriter Billy Bragg said on Twitter after Mr. Johnson’s death. “His guitar playing was angry and angular, but his presence — twitchy, confrontational, out of control — was something we’d never beheld before in U.K. pop.”Mr. Bragg added that John Lydon (otherwise known as Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer of the Clash and Paul Weller of the Jam “learned a lot from his edgy demeanor.”The volcanic approach of Mr. Johnson and his bandmates — the singer Lee Brilleaux, the bassist John Sparks and the drummer John Martin — helped make Dr. Feelgood a must-see band on England’s pub-rock circuit in the early 1970s.The band’s second album, “Malpractice” (1975), reached No. 17 on the British album chart. The live album “Stupidity” rocketed to No. 1 the next year, providing “the antidote to all those prog-rock double concept albums,” the British music writer Clinton Heylin wrote in an email, “and not a guitar solo in sight.”While his guitar sound was forward-looking, Mr. Johnson drew from the soulful sounds of the past, working out demons from a difficult childhood on Canvey Island, a once-thriving resort town at the mouth of the Thames that became a hub of the petrochemical industry.“My first inspiration was the blues, but I realized I couldn’t write about freight trains and chain gangs,” he said in a 2013 interview with the London-based music magazine Uncut. “There weren’t any in Canvey. So I tried to keep it all in Essex, to get the landscape, the oil refineries, into songs.”Mr. Johnson in 1981. He often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said were “certainly rooted in my childhood.”David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesWilko Johnson was born John Peter Wilkinson on Canvey Island on July 12, 1947. His father, a gas fitter, was violent and abusive, Mr. Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview with the British music magazine Mojo.“I hated him,” he said. “He wasn’t just uneducated, he was stupid with it. The older I get the more I look like him. Every time I shave, I see that bastard looking back at me. So I thought by eradicating his name I could start my own dynasty.”Mr. Johnson often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said in one interview was “certainly rooted in my childhood.”“But I don’t think you should blame that,” he added. “You grow into an adult and you are what you are, whatever the influences.”By the time his father died, when Mr. Johnson was 16, music had already become an escape for him: He played guitar in local bands while attending Westcliff High School for Boys, where, he said, his mother “used to scrub floors at the gas company to pay for our grammar school uniforms.”He went on to study English at Newcastle University, where he taught himself Old Icelandic so he could read the Icelandic sagas. It was one of many antiquarian literary interests in which he would indulge over the years. Mr. Heylin said he once found Mr. Johnson backstage during a soundcheck reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th-century romance written in Middle English. “So much for the image of a bruiser who took up the guitar,” he wrote.After a trip to India following his university graduation, Mr. Johnson changed his name and joined with the other three musicians to form Dr. Feelgood in 1971. By the middle of the decade, the band was rolling in Britain but had failed to make a mark with record buyers in the United States.Yet the band was not unknown across the Atlantic. In a phone interview, the guitarist Chris Stein of Blondie recalled a party in 1975 at his band’s de facto headquarters, a loft on the Bowery near CBGB, the seminal New York punk club, before any of the major bands from that scene had made an album.Mr. Johnson, at left, performing in 1976 with the other members of Dr. Feelgood: the singer Lee Brilleaux, the drummer John Martin and the bassist John B. Sparks.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“We were having a huge party, and everyone in the scene was there — the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, probably some of the Talking Heads,” he said. “It went on all night.”Halfway through, Clem Burke, Blondie’s drummer, showed up after returning from a trip to London. He was enthusiastically waving a copy of Dr. Feelgood’s new album, “Malpractice.”“We put that on and played it repeatedly,” Mr. Stein said. “Everyone was transfixed. It was so simple and raw. I remember people saying, ‘This is what the Ramones are going to sound like when they make a record.’”Dr. Feelgood would not last long enough to ride the new wave it helped inspire. Rifts between Mr. Johnson and the other members came to a boiling point in 1977.“I think they lost it, they threw me out,” Mr. Johnson told Mojo. “The final argument that split the band came just after they had all my new songs in the can.” He added, “I was in a terrible state for months.”Mr. Johnson formed a new band, the Solid Senders, which released an album in 1978. He served a stint in Ian Dury’s band, the Blockheads, appearing on the group’s 1980 album, “Laughter.” He released “Ice on the Motorway,” the first of several albums under his own name, the next year, and he performed for decades with the Wilko Johnson Band.In 2009, the director Julien Temple released a documentary about Dr. Feelgood, “Oil City Confidential,” which “promotes Wilko Johnson as a 100-1 shot for the title of Greatest Living Englishman,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in a review in The Guardian.Mr. Johnson and Roger Daltrey of the Who, performing in 2014. The two released an album that year.Associated PressMr. Johnson’s survivors include his sons, Matthew and Simon, and a grandson. His wife, Irene Knight, died in 2004.While his pub-rock legacy became something of an obsession for rock connoisseurs and historians, Mr. Johnson experienced an unlikely career renaissance after his 2013 cancer scare. The album he made the next year with Mr. Daltrey, “Going Back Home,” which included songs from his Dr. Feelgood days as well as later compositions, reached No. 3 in Britain.“He’s one of those British guitarists that only the Brits make,” Mr. Daltrey said in a 2014 British television interview. “Wilko is a one-off, he really is.”By that point Mr. Johnson had found an unlikely home on premium cable, earning a role on “Game of Thrones” despite having no acting experience.“I got offered this part and it was a brilliant part, because the character that I play has had his tongue cut out, so I’ve got no lines to learn, right?” Mr. Johnson he said in a 2011 interview with the entertainment website Geeks of Doom. “I say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Just go around giving everyone dirty looks.’ I go, ‘I’m very good at that!’” More

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      Les Rallizes Dénudés: Unraveling One of Rock’s Deep Mysteries

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      The Japanese band that emerged in the late 1960s was known for its rumbling rhythms and ear-shredding feedback — but almost nothing was known about its leader, Takashi Mizutani.Makoto Kubota is still amazed by the continuing appeal of his old band, Les Rallizes Dénudés.An accomplished producer and bandleader in Japan, Kubota spent just a few years in the early 1970s playing with the Rallizes, which by the usual measures of rock success barely made a blip. Led by the enigmatic Takashi Mizutani, the band emerged in the late-’60s haze of psychedelia and radical student politics with a scorchingly loud sound, though it ceased performing in 1996 and the handful of raw recordings the group released went out of print long ago. Yet decades later, younger musicians now press Kubota for any information about the band, and fans around the world who likely cannot understand Mizutani’s cryptic Japanese lyrics declare on social media that his music has changed their lives.“I never thought this could touch foreigners’ hearts so deeply,” Kubota said in a recent interview from his home in Tokyo.Les Rallizes Dénudés — known to insiders and acolytes as the Rallizes (pronounced “rallies”) for short — have long held a peculiar place in the annals of underground music as a group more heard about than actually heard, its reputation resting more on legend than fact. Through bootleg live recordings with rumbling rhythms and ear-shredding sheets of guitar feedback, which have been pored over and cataloged by fans, the Rallizes have come to symbolize both the sonic extremes of rock and the ways that online communities can nurture and amplify even the most obscure corners of global culture.David Novak, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation,” describes the band’s influence by referring to an oft-misquoted remark by Brian Eno that relatively few people bought the Velvet Underground’s albums at the time, but each of them (seemingly) formed a band.“The Rallizes are like that, except there was no record to buy,” Novak said. “There was just this fantasy of some incredibly abrasive, mysterious group that created this wall of impenetrable noise. The power of that story drove a huge renaissance.”Now, after decades of intrigue — and almost three years since Mizutani’s death — Les Rallizes Dénudés are getting the archival treatment. Earlier this year, “The Oz Tapes,” a set of recordings from 1973 that were part of a compilation celebrating Oz, a short-lived venue in Tokyo, were remastered by Kubota and reissued by the American label Temporal Drift. “Oz Days Live: ’72-’73 Kichijoji,” an expanded version of the original compilation, with tracks by the Rallizes, Masato Minami, Acid Seven and others from the same scene, is coming out this month.Later this fall will come long-sought reissues of three CDs from 1991, the only albums the Rallizes released during their existence. And Kubota, working on behalf of Mizutani’s estate, has spent months combing through what he called “a suitcase full of master tapes” from Mizutani’s personal archive.The wave of new releases, and related curatorial work by Temporal Drift — “Oz Days Live” comes with a 112-page book with an oral history of Oz, a CBGB for Tokyo’s early psychedelic scene — offer a chance to contextualize the Rallizes for new listeners. They can also fill in the gaps for longtime followers who have subsisted on scantily labeled bootlegs and digital bread crumbs from fan sites.BUT GETTING A full picture of the Rallizes and its reclusive leader may be impossible. Mizutani, usually pictured in a uniform of black shades and black leather, almost never spoke to the media, and some former bandmates still adhere to an unspoken omertà. Maki Miura, a guitarist, declined an interview request about Mizutani and his former band with a statement that said: “During his lifetime there was a silent understanding that no one would ever talk publicly about him. Honestly, it makes me wonder if Mizutani is pissed off.”Still, interviews with former Rallizes members and other associates of Mizutani paint a picture of a man singularly devoted to his art, and perhaps just as obsessed with cultivating an aura of inscrutability. Even the meaning of the band’s name is obscure. It may be an inside joke about suitcases, or perhaps a reference to William S. Burroughs. Kubota said he never asked about it, but that the name was understood to mean something like the Naked and Stoned. “It’s too embarrassing to say,” he said, and laughed.The band was founded in 1967 at Doshisha University, an elite institution in Kyoto, by Mizutani and other students who were members of the school’s Light Music Club. At the time, Japanese rock was evolving beyond its Beatles-inspired “group sounds” era, and Kubota said that Mizutani’s influences in those early years included the Velvet Underground, Blue Cheer, the Grateful Dead and the avant-garde rock and jazz of the New York label ESP.Mizutani was also heavily involved in the student protest movement of the time. By 1970, the Rallizes gained notoriety that would last for decades when its original bassist, Moriaki Wakabayashi, was part of a Marxist group that hijacked a Japanese passenger plane and flew it to North Korea. After that point, any political dimension to the Rallizes’ music, or Mizutani’s public persona, largely disappeared.Kubota in July. The onetime Les Rallizes member has been working on behalf of Mizutani’s estate, combing through what he called “a suitcase full of master tapes” from Mizutani’s personal archive.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times“The Oz Tapes” — with Kubota on bass, Takeshi Nakamura on guitar and Shunichiro Shoda on drums — is a rough blueprint for the Rallizes’ sound, which would develop over years of shifting lineups, with Mizutani as the only constant. Songs like “Wilderness of False Flowers” and the 11-minute “Vertigo Otherwise My Conviction” are built over jagged, repetitive grooves that swell and recede as Mizutani plays long solos that resemble Neil Young crossed with Sonny Sharrock. Like the Velvet Underground, the Rallizes can toggle between modes of paint-peeling noise and surreal quiet, as in “Memory Is Far Away,” a mournful ballad with ambiguous lines about a lost love (“The flames of betrayal burn eternally/The shadow of redemption keeps chasing me”).“It’s almost like the people there were brainwashed by his vibrations,” recalled Minoru Tezuka, the proprietor of Oz, who went on to become the group’s manager.In time the group’s style grew more extreme, with peals of feedback, lasting 20 minutes or longer, that can be hypnotic or painful, though sometimes with intriguing reference points. In “Night of the Assassins,” those screaming guitars are juxtaposed with a bass line that closely resembles “I Will Follow Him,” Little Peggy March’s bubble-gum hit from 1963; whether Mizutani meant that as a joke, we may never know.EVEN TO HIS bandmates, Mizutani was a cipher. “Mysterious but lovable,” Kubota said.Acid Seven, a bandleader and prankster who was a regular at Oz, recalled Mizutani interrupting his stoic silence at jam sessions only to utter existentialist riddles. He described Mizutani once taking a drag from his ever-present cigarette and proclaiming, “The smoke coming out of my mouth is extinguishing my ego,” with no further explanation offered.By being totally uncompromising about the band’s sound, Mizutani effectively exiled himself from the Japanese music industry. Shime Takahashi, who played drums with the Rallizes in the mid-70s, recalled the band once working in a professional studio, only to find that the engineer never pressed record because he thought it was still rehearsing. Mizutani had been playing with the Rallizes for more than 20 years before releasing its three albums in 1991 — two sets of early recordings, and another double-CD live set of the band at its noisiest.“It’s that determination not to be commercial, to remain underground, which is the one constant the group had throughout its history,” said Alan Cummings, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a longtime chronicler of Japan’s underground music.Yet that stance bolstered the Rallizes’ legend, making the band a sort of early inspiration for the so-called Japanoise scene of the 1980s and ’90s — a catchall for a range of aggressive and noisy rock and electronic music that flowered in Tokyo, Osaka and elsewhere — and a symbol for the perseverance of music that was anti-commercial at its core.“You might assume this is just Orientalist reverie on the part of American fans,” said Novak, of U.C. Santa Barbara. “But it’s not, because that sense of mystery is shared by so many in Japan. Rallizes came to symbolize the unknowability of the underground music scene in Japan, for Japanese fans too.”Still, the lovable side of Mizutani comes through in some of his colleagues’ recollections. Kubota remembers him cooking Nagoya-style noodles when they got the munchies in their student days. The dour eminence of noise rock could even break character at times. Kubota sounded stunned when he relayed the story of his friend inviting the Orange County Brothers, a Tex-Mex-style Japanese rock band that Kubota worked with, to spend the night at his parents’ house while on tour.“This is like the Velvet Underground having a party with Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show,” Kubota said, referring to the goofy 1970s country-rock group that sang “The Cover of Rolling Stone.”Les Rallizes Dénudés onstage in 1971.Kyo Nakamura, via The Last One MusiqueTHE LEGEND OF Les Rallizes Dénudés was arguably kept alive through bootlegs — unauthorized recordings, mostly of live concerts, that circulated among fans online and sparked new interest in the band in the 2000s. The source of these tapes has long been a curiosity, with some insiders speculating that Mizutani, or at least someone very close to him, may have been involved, given the high audio quality of some of them.To Temporal Drift, founded by two former employees of the reissue label Light in the Attic who worked on its Japan Archival Series, the popularity of those tapes proves the existence of a broad international fan base, and a potential market for new releases.“The obsession that Rallizes fans have for the band is pretty incredible,” said Patrick McCarthy, one of the label’s founders. “They’re people that are extremely dedicated, in ways you see with the Grateful Dead, where they have to have every article, every version of every bootleg.”The road to the new releases began in 2019, when Kubota traveled to New York to help with a documentary about an old friend, the Japanese folk singer Sachiko Kanenobu, who was playing in Central Park. “Everybody who was there — musicians, radio people — they asked me about the Rallizes. So I said, ‘OK, something is happening. I’ve got to contact Mizutani.’”After leaving the Rallizes in 1973, Kubota went on to a successful career with his bands Sunset Gang and the Sunsetz, and as a producer. But he had not spoken with Mizutani in almost 30 years before that summer. To his surprise, his old bandmate said he wanted to do a “last tour.” Kubota said that Mizutani also denied any involvement in the bootlegs, and expressed a desire to finally release the Rallizes’ music officially. The two had frequent conversations for a month or two, Kubota said, before their text chain went cold that fall. Later, he learned that Mizutani had died in December 2019, at age 71.Kubota then began working with Mizutani’s estate to sort through Mizutani’s archive of recordings; he declined to identify who controls the estate, saying only that it is someone who had been close to Mizutani for many years.Around the same time, he began working with Temporal Drift; Yosuke Kitazawa, the label’s other principal, said that when they began work on the project, they had no idea that Mizutani had died. In October 2021, an official Rallizes site appeared on the internet, announcing that Mizutani had died almost two years before and that a new entity, The Last One Musique — named after a Rallizes epic — had been formed to represent the Rallizes’ music rights, and would begin releasing Mizutani’s work “with far more alive and striking sound than the bootlegs that have been circulating over 20 years.”In a series of interviews this summer, Kubota said he had been working for months to sort through Mizutani’s collection, including numerous studio and live recordings.“Now I have received the material for four full concerts and started working on it,” Kubota said. “It will be monstrous.” More

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      Creed Taylor, Producer Who Shaped Jazz for Decades, Dies at 93

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      He made scores of albums with artists who were well known and others who soon would be. He also founded two important record labels.Creed Taylor, one of the most influential and prolific jazz producers of the second half of the last century, best known for the distinctive work he did for his CTI label in the 1970s, died on Monday in Nuremberg, Germany. He was 93.Donna Taylor, his daughter-in-law, said he had been visiting family there when he had a stroke on Aug. 2. He never recovered, she said.Mr. Taylor began his career as a jazz producer in the 1950s, and in 1960 he founded the Impulse! label, which would become the home of John Coltrane and other stars. He did not stay there long, though, and most of the label’s best-known records were produced later.He moved to another jazz label, Verve. He made a lasting mark there by producing recordings by the saxophonist Stan Getz that popularized bossa nova, including “Getz/Gilberto,” the celebrated 1964 album by Getz and the guitarist João Gilberto that included “The Girl From Ipanema,” with Mr. Gilberto’s wife, Astrud. Both the album and the single, a crossover hit, won Grammy Awards.Mr. Taylor made a lasting mark at Verve Records with recordings by the saxophonist Stan Getz that popularized bossa nova, most notably “Getz/Gilberto.”In 1967, Mr. Taylor was at A&M, where he founded another label, Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI. Three years later it became an independent label, which over the next decade became known for stylish albums by George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Grover Washington Jr. and others — and for a degree of commercial success that was unusual for jazz.“In many ways the sound of the 1970s was defined by CTI,” the musician and producer Leo Sidran said in introducing a 2015 podcast featuring an interview with Mr. Taylor.The records Mr. Taylor released on the label often emphasized rhythm and favored accessibility over esoteric exploration. As J.D. Considine wrote in The New York Times in 2002 when some of these recordings were rereleased, Mr. Taylor “believed that jazz, having started out as popular music, ought to maintain a connection to a broader audience.”Some purists might have scowled at the time, but the effect was undeniable.“The true measure of his impact was that at the height of the 1970s when so many musical styles were jostling for attention, more people were listening to jazz than ever before,” Ashley Kahn, a music historian, said by email. “For most, CTI wasn’t thought of as a jazz label; it was a sound, a musical identity like Motown. When you bought a CTI album you knew it was going to be top-quality on all levels, with at least two or three tracks you’d be grooving to for a long time to come.”Impulse!, still a force in jazz, memorialized Mr. Taylor on Twitter.“He was a genius when it came to finding new and special music that would stay with listeners forever,” the company’s post said.Creed Bane Taylor V was born on May 13, 1929, in Lynchburg, Va. His father was, as Donna Taylor described him, a “gentleman farmer,” and his mother, Nina (Harrison) Taylor, was a personnel director.Mr. Taylor grew up in Bedford, Va., and in a bucolic area known as White Gate, west of Roanoke, where his family had owned land for generations. He played trumpet in high school, inspired by Harry James. He was surrounded by bluegrass and country music, he said in a 2008 interview with JazzWax, but much preferred jazz.“It was cooler music,” he said. “It made you feel hip, not corny.”He enrolled at Duke University, where he studied psychology until the Korean War interrupted his schooling. After finishing his service with the Marines, he completed his psychology degree in 1954 but quickly made his way to New York to pursue his real interest, music. An earlier one-week visit to the city, he said on Mr. Sidran’s podcast, had whetted his appetite.“Fifty-second Street was on fire,” he said. “You could walk into any little club at the base of any brownstone in that whole section and at no charge you could hear Basie, Ellington, Getz, you name it. I could hardly wait to get back again.”Mr. Taylor at the Institute of Audio Research in New York in 2005. With the revival of vinyl in recent years, collectors are valuing the records he made for his CTI label in the 1970s.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesHe was inspired, in a manner of speaking, to go into producing by “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” the long-running series of concerts and recordings organized by Norman Granz, whom he would later succeed at Verve: He didn’t like it.“The long bass solos, the tenor solos, you name it,” he said on the podcast. “Drum solos, and the crowd, and all the excitement — what happens to the music in all that? ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ was, for me, a circus.”In 1954 he landed a job at Bethlehem Records, where he produced albums for the vocalist Chris Connor and others. It was an era when producers did everything for a record, from lining up musicians to trying to get radio stations to play it. Mr. Taylor enjoyed being Mr. Do-It-All.“I was fascinated by the record business,” he told JazzWax, “from how to put a record’s cover and liner notes together to getting the records into stores and selling them.”And sometimes, it meant discovering the artist. He told JazzWax that in late 1954 he moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village and became intrigued by a flute player he could hear practicing as he sat in his backyard garden.“He’d play scales and then launch into amazing jazz lines,” Mr. Taylor recalled. “I decided I had to find out who the devil was playing.”He followed the sound and knocked on the musician’s door. It was Herbie Mann, then still largely unknown; Mr. Mann recorded some of his first albums for Bethlehem.In 1956 Mr. Taylor moved to ABC-Paramount, where he produced all sorts of albums (one was a collection of speeches and other highlights from the career of Dwight D. Eisenhower) but concentrated on jazz, making records with the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, the singer Bobby Scott and countless others before forming Impulse! as a subsidiary label.There and at his later stops, he encouraged his artists to try new things, and not to shy away from other genres. One of his George Benson albums, for instance, was “The Other Side of Abbey Road” (1970), featuring Mr. Benson’s guitar interpretations of songs from that Beatles album.At CTI in the early 1970s, he also packaged artists together in star-studded stage shows. “A real jazz festival has finally come to Atlanta,” The Atlanta Voice wrote in 1973 when the CTI tour played that city with a lineup that included the vibraphonist Milt Jackson, the guitarist Eric Gale and the singer Esther Phillips.Whatever the project, Mr. Taylor’s stamp was distinctive.“The through line to the labels Creed worked for or started — including Impulse, Verve and CTI — was an auteur-like, 360-degree approach to creating high-quality recorded product,” Mr. Kahn, the music historian, said, “recruiting A-list jazz players and being open to familiar pop melodies — like bossa nova, soul and R&B tunes, even the Beatles. He used top studios — Rudy Van Gelder’s most often — arrangers like Don Sebesky, and placed museum-quality photography on the album covers.“He thought and acted like a one-man record company, and then became one: CTI. Think Phil Spector, but with a deep feeling for jazz and soul, and without the guns.”Mr. Taylor’s first marriage, to Marian Wendes in 1956, ended in divorce in 1984. In 1988 he married Harriet Schmidt. She survives him, along with three sons from his first marriage, Creed Bane Taylor VI, Blakelock Harrison Taylor and John Wendes Taylor; a daughter from his second marriage, Courtney Taylor Prince; and five grandchildren.The CTI label, though successful early, ran into financial trouble — Mr. Taylor said he made some ill-advised decisions on distribution matters — and filed for bankruptcy in 1978.He also got into a protracted legal dispute with Warner Bros. over the rights to Mr. Benson’s music. After a jury found in Mr. Taylor’s favor in 1988 and awarded him more than $3 million, he was able to revive the label for a time. By then, 1970s CTI records had begun to be reissued by CBS Records, which had acquired the catalog. Rappers were sampling his records, and, with the revival of vinyl in recent years, collectors were valuing them.In 2012 Mr. Taylor spoke to a jazz studies class at North Carolina Central University, recounting stories of how he got the guitarist Wes Montgomery to try new things, how he talked Nina Simone through the recording of her album “Baltimore,” and more. He encouraged any would-be producers among the class to remain ever curious.“You have to keep your eyes and your ears open the whole time,” he said. More

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      Blondie on the Music That Defined Its Legacy

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      Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and their bandmates built a career rooted in wit, excitement, pastiche and sex. A new boxed set, “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” traces their journey.As Chris Stein searched for rare recordings to include in “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” a handsome chronicle of the new wave band Blondie’s emergence from underdogs to pop stars, he rummaged diligently inside a packed barn on his property near Woodstock and —“I don’t have a barn,” Stein exclaimed in a recent interview, in a tone that was exasperated but also comedic. “The boxed set says I have a barn?” He sighed. “It’s a garage.”Up in the Blondie stratosphere, something has always gone wrong, even when things were going right. “Against the Odds,” out Friday, documents a volatile timeline of massive chart successes accompanied by personal and professional missteps.“I mean, missteps is an understatement,” Debbie Harry said with a chortle.In an hourlong video conversation, Stein, 72, who plays guitar and functions as the abstract mastermind of Blondie, and Harry, 77, the alluring singer who fronts the band and writes its most elegant lyrics, reflected on the unlikely success hinted at in the title of the boxed set. From 1974 to 1982 and beyond, the pair were inseparable lovers who, with their bandmates, built a career rooted in wit, excitement, sex and a Pop Art sensibility that included pastiche and appropriation. Harry and Stein remained close even after their romance ended in 1987. She’s even godmother to his two daughters.Because they combined an omnivorous curiosity with a playful foxiness rarely attempted in that era of rock music, the band was not taken as seriously as its peers — Talking Heads, Television, Ramones — yet found its way to national TV appearances, arena shows and the top of the charts. Its biggest successes came when it traversed styles: Of Blondie’s four No. 1 hits on the Hot 100, two are disco (“Heart of Glass” and “Call Me”), one is reggae (“The Tide Is High”) and one is a prescient celebration of hip-hop (“Rapture”).The boxed set — the first authorized by the band — makes an argument for Blondie’s greatness, both musical and visual. The Super Deluxe Edition includes the band’s first six studio albums, 36 previously unreleased tracks, and a foil-wrapped 144-page hardcover book with liner notes and photos. At 17 pounds, it’s the definitive account of a sound, attitude, look, and aesthetic that proved inspirational to generations of artists across a spectrum of genres. Madonna has called Harry “a role model,” and the band’s songs have been covered or sampled by Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, the Black Eyed Peas, Missy Elliott, the Bad Plus and Def Leppard.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented, “which spoke of what was acceptable for girls at that time, and the way I had steered myself through life, having a certain facade,” she said from her Chelsea apartment, with a garden view behind her. “It was the same thing David Bowie did.” In her flinty 2019 memoir, “Face It,” Harry says she “was playing at being a cartoon fantasy onstage,” much like Marilyn Monroe. She never pretended that men and women didn’t stare at her, never pretended she didn’t like the attention, but also never took herself too seriously.“I loved how she presented herself,” Shirley Manson of the rock band Garbage said in an enthusiastic phone call. “It wasn’t pandering to the male gaze. She looked smart and sassy, and felt a little dangerous. You forget, because Blondie make it seem so stylish and effortless, how good the songwriting is. They’re the complete, untouchable package.”Harry was raised by adoptive parents in Hawthorne, N.J., but frequently wandered off to Manhattan, and moved into a $64-a-month apartment on St. Marks Place after college. She worked as a model, a secretary for the BBC, a Playboy bunny and a clerk at a head shop. None of it was satisfying. “Music was always a huge, haunting influence,” she said. “I wanted to be in the art world. I felt I should be making music.”Harry sang in a short-lived, bucolic hippie band called Wind in the Willows, and was “sort of a hippie” herself, she said. Her next band, the Stilletos, was an almost vaudevillian girl group whose set included a song called “Wednesday Panties,” and when the Warhol associate Eric Emerson brought his roommate Chris Stein to see the band, he was entranced by Harry.Stein, like Harry, had graduated with an art degree, and he had the advantage of growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, as the only child of intellectual immigrant parents who met as members of the Communist Party. When he was 17 and a self-described hippie weirdo, his band opened for the Velvet Underground, and he resolved to never get a job. “I was on welfare,” he said from his Lower Manhattan loft. “And I painted a bathroom once,” he added, deadpan.Both got a jolt of inspiration when they saw the New York Dolls play at the Mercer Arts Center. “They were funny and nasty and naughty,” Harry recalled. “It was everything I needed at that time.”Harry was naughty, too. A 1979 profile of Blondie in this newspaper made note of Harry’s “disregard for underwear.” Her purposeful use of sexuality wasn’t much more explicit than, say, contemporaneous TV ads for Serta mattresses or Calvin Klein jeans, but it was also an era when everyone, especially men, felt entitled to comment on women’s bodies. The attention on Blondie was “all about how I flaunted my underwear. It’s the Madonna/whore dichotomy — those seem to be the two acceptable occupations for women,” Harry said with a laugh.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesTheo Kogan, the singer of the punk band Lunachicks, said she saw Harry as part of a triumvirate of 1970s tough girls that also included Olivia Newton-John’s leather-encased transformation at the end of “Grease” and Pinky Tuscadero, the motorcycle-riding, butch-but-femme character on the hit show “Happy Days.” “They showed that you can be a glamorpuss and also be tough,” Kogan said in a phone interview.A clever and stylish couple, Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground. The two share many qualities, including hard-shelled cynicism and a capacity for not giving two figs about criticism. But Harry admits that at first, criticism “really floored me. It can knock you down, or it can make you want to fight harder. So it has a lot to offer,” she added with a laugh.So about those missteps Harry alluded to: Blondie’s backstage distractions included fights with the band’s manager and accountant, exploitative contracts, internal band squabbles that evolved into lawsuits, and for Harry and Stein, drug addiction. “Heroin and cocaine,” Stein said. “That’s what you did back then.”Much of this narrative becomes clear in “Against the Odds.” The first of the eight discs features early home recordings and demos of the band from 1974, all of them tentative and uncertain of style. Naysayers at CBGB who were unimpressed with the band used the derisive nickname Blandie, and they were relegated to a perpetual opening act.When they released their first album in 1976, Harry was 31 and Stein was almost 27, which was ancient per punk standards. But the material improved in subsequent years, especially with “Dreaming,” one of the best songs ever written about being young, broke and fabulous in the big city. The guys in the band — the keyboardist Jimmy Destri, the bassist Nigel Harrison, the drummer Clem Burke, the guitarist Frank Infante and Stein — perfected a look: dark suits, skinny ties, mod hair. The songwriting took a leap, with key contributions from Destri, Harrison and Infante, right as Blondie paired with Mike Chapman, a sharp Aussie producer who’d had glam rock hits with the Sweet and Nick Gilder. “It was like the Beatles getting together with George Martin,” Stein said.That creative relationship, however, was not without drama. “The first time Mike saw us play live,” Harry recalled, “he said afterward that he’d never laughed so much in his life. I guess I felt it was a compliment.”Chapman produced the band’s first No. 1, “Heart of Glass,” a thumping, synthesized, drum-machined disco track in which Harry finds herself “lost inside adorable illusion” and “riding high on love’s true bluish light,” a poetic summary of romantic ambivalence.Not for the first time, Blondie was accused of “selling out” (that was once a thing) by embracing trendy dance music. “The whole anti-disco movement smacked of class war to me,” Stein said. “When I was a kid, my heroes were 60-year-old Black men — Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf. Disco was just an extension of R&B.”“For me, it was about dancing,” Harry added. “I loved going to clubs.”Blondie earned a second No. 1, “Call Me,” working with the producer Giorgio Moroder, who observed the band working — or more precisely, bickering — in the studio and decided to record the music with players who weren’t wasting his time. “He’s a happy guy,” Harry said. “Why would he want to have that around?”A fifth album, “Autoamerican,” came out in 1980 and featured a smash cover of “The Tide is High,” a 1960s ska song by a Jamaican group, the Paragons, as well as “Rapture,” the first No. 1 song in the United States to feature a rap vocal. Stein and Harry were curious scenesters, always eager to find new trends, and it was inevitable that they’d cross paths with rappers. The “Rapture” video featured the future “Yo! MTV Raps” host Fab 5 Freddy, his fellow graffiti artist Lee Quinones and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Accusations that the group had appropriated music by people of color followed, and Stein doesn’t deny it. “I always say, Black people invented and the white people presented,” Stein said. “It’s just part of the power imbalance in America and elsewhere.”Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground.Stephen SprouseBy 1982, the final year of the boxed set, conflicts within the band were untenable, and Harry was spending most of her time tending to Stein, who was hospitalized with a near-fatal skin disease. “We were pretty stoned,” Stein said. “That’s what exacerbated the illness I had,” he added. Blondie broke up.Stein and Harry did, too, in early 1987. Their split seems to have been more sad and resigned than rancorous, and Stein was heavily involved in Harry’s post-Blondie solo albums. In 1997, they re-formed the band, which has continued to record and tour, now with only one other original member, Burke. When Blondie was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, the former members Nigel Harrison and Frank Infante stood onstage and fruitlessly beseeched Stein and Harry to let them perform at the ceremony. Blondie drama is eternal.Harry and Stein continue to work, both together and apart. He’s an accomplished photographer, has his own memoir coming out next year, and is toiling away on a Blondie documentary, which has been in progress since at least 1978. “We’re still hustling,” Stein said. Perhaps new missteps lie ahead.Harry has acting gigs, a reissue of her first solo album, “Koo Koo,” and is still active in the downtown music scene, braving smelly rock bars in search of inspiration. Well past the age of a Madonna or a whore, she’s inventing another acceptable occupation: the inspirational septuagenarian. “You’re not used to seeing someone Debbie’s age hanging out and going to clubs,” said Kogan, the Lunachicks singer. “That’s the beauty of her — she’s a role model for us as adults, as well as when we were younger.” More

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      The Stories of Teen Punks That Ruled New York In the Late ’70s

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      High school students spent their nights forging a colorful late-night scene marked by big choruses and few rules. The bands didn’t last, but the taste of art and freedom shaped their lives.The year was 1977, and the first generation of New York City punk and alternative bands had moved on to larger venues and the international touring circuit. The thrash of hardcore was still a few years down the pike. Yet the storied music venues of Manhattan were alive and aloud with excited, underage patrons.They passed their days at Stuyvesant High School. They came from the High School of Performing Arts and Murrow. They went to Friends Seminary, Walden and Dalton, and to Brooklyn Friends, too. Some were dropouts and runaways; some were even from the suburbs. Almost all of them were under 18.Over the next four years, they spent their nights creating their own rock scene, playing aggressive, witty, sophisticated and intense pop and punk for fellow teenagers in places like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, Hurrah and TR3. These weren’t the all-ages shows that would become commonplace in the city a few years later. This was a unique moment in the city’s musical history that changed the lives of many of the artists and audience members who were there, though their stories have gone largely untold. Imagine an upbeat “Lord of the Flies,” styled by Manic Panic and Trash & Vaudeville.Their ranks included Eric Hoffert, who did four hours of homework from Bronx Science each weekday, then practiced his guitar for four hours; weekends belonged to his band, the Speedies. Arthur Brennan, a 16-year-old from Groton, Conn., who regularly hitchhiked 20 miles to the only newsstand where he could buy magazines that covered new music; he renamed himself Darvon Staggard and ran away to New York City to join a band. And Kate Schellenbach, a ninth grader at Stuyvesant who had heard a rumor that groups her age were playing the most famous music clubs in the world, just blocks from where she lived.In September 1979, Schellenbach was 13 and starting high school in an outfit assembled to express her interest in new wave music: overdyed painters’ pants from Unique Clothing Warehouse, white go-go boots from Reminiscence in the West Village, a bowling shirt and an Elvis Costello pin.“I remember going into the girls’ bathroom,” she said cheerfully, speaking via video chat, “and this girl, Nancy Hall, who was the coolest, was sitting on the sink.” Nancy suggested that Kate go see a band playing at CBGB later that week called the Student Teachers. The arty pop combo included a female rhythm section featuring some kids from Friends Seminary and, somewhat improbably, the rather distant Mamaroneck High School.“If I hadn’t seen the Student Teachers that fateful night, I might never have been a drummer,” said Schellenbach, who helped found the Beastie Boys in 1981 and went on to form Luscious Jackson. “Seeing Laura Davis play drums, seeing Lori Reese play bass and how exciting the whole scene was, everything about it made me think, ‘Oh, maybe this is something I can do,’” she added. “These people were still in high school — it seemed attainable.”From left: Joe Katz, David Scharff and Lori Reese of the Student Teachers, onstage at Trax in 1980. The band inspired Kate Schellenbach, who went on to help found the Beastie Boys the next year.Ebet RobertsThe timing was perfect: This was the first generation to grow up with punk as the status quo, not the exceptional rebellion. “Part of the call of history was that you weren’t supposed to just listen and take it in, you were supposed to listen to the conversation and form a band yourself,” the Student Teachers’ keyboardist, Bill Arning, now a prominent gallery owner and curator, said via video chat. “Of course you were supposed to form a band; it didn’t even seem like it was an ‘out there’ idea.”The key groups in the movement were the glam bubble gum Speedies, a high-concept bunch of overachieving teens (plus two very slightly older members) who “wanted to be the fusion of the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and the Bay City Rollers,” according to the founding guitarist Gregory Crewdson; the Student Teachers, who played art pop with elegiac touches reminiscent of Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground; the Blessed, who were the first, sloppiest and most fashionable group on the scene; and the mega poppy mod group the Colors, who like the Speedies were enamored with bubble-gum music and were mentored by Blondie’s drummer, Clem Burke. (Other bands on the edges of the movement included the Stimulators and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan.)If the core bands in the teen punk scene had anything in common, it was an affection for big choruses, flashy, colorful clothes and a near-arrogant certainty that the empowerment promised by punk rock was now theirs to inherit.From left: Nick Berlin, Billy Stone and Howie Pyro of the Blessed onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus,” Berlin said.Eileen Polk“We didn’t know any better,” said Nicholas Petti, who, in 1977 at age 13, started calling himself Nick Berlin and became a co-founder of the Blessed. He spoke to The Times via video chat just before attending the funeral for another founding member of the band, Howie Pyro. Last month at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, Pyro’s inheritors, including D Generation, Theo Kogan of the Lunachicks and Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, paid tribute to the New York mainstay with a memorial show.“We thought this was how you lived. We would watch John Waters movies and, yes, of course we would understand they were actors, but we thought, this is what you are supposed to do,” Petti said from his home in Fort Bragg, Calif., where he works as the head of the Culinary Arts Management program at Mendocino College. “This is your life, this isn’t how you dress up, this is all of it,” he added. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus. When we played an early show and a late show at Max’s, we would bring two complete changes of clothes for each set. This certainly isn’t how we would have expressed it at the time, but it was living life as a performance art piece.”The Blessed (pronounced as two syllables) were the band that Arthur Brennan ran away from Groton to join; after two weeks the money he had saved from his paper route ran out, and when private detectives came to retrieve him, he was happy to leave his new identity as Darvon Staggard behind. “After the first night, it’s really not that much fun sleeping at the all-night Blimpies on 6th Avenue,” Brennan, now a public-school teacher in Los Angeles, said via video chat. “But it was such a sense of relief to meet people who were like you. In your own hometown, you’d be considered a loser-slash-weirdo. We were kids learning how to act in a crazy, artsy adult world.”The author Jonathan Lethem, who wrote about his affection for the Speedies and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan in “The Fortress of Solitude,” noted that childhood was different in New York at that time. “The city was chaotic, in a way, but it was really easy for us to operate,” he said in a video chat. “You couldn’t convince a taxi driver to go back to Brooklyn if your life depended on it, but you could always walk over the bridge! I do feel that we essentially owned the city, that we were the actual ones it belonged to at the time.”Jill Cunniff, a scene patron who later founded Luscious Jackson with Schellenbach and Gabby Glaser, said the city seemed like a nonstop event. “Night was freedom,” she said, “and it felt like we were really safe. If you were a parent, you might think the opposite — those kids are going out to nightclubs, they are only 13, that’s so dangerous. No. My daytime at I.S. 70 was really dangerous,” she added, referring to her public middle school. “My nighttime was safe.”How did the scene keep going? None of the well-traveled downtown venues — CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, TR3 or Studio 10 — regularly checked IDs, the musicians recalled, and they said the ones uptown, like Hurrah and Trax, only loosely enforced age-based alcohol restrictions. (The legal drinking age in the city was 18 until late 1982.) In fact, the CBGB owner Hilly Kristal and Peter Crowley, who managed and booked Max’s, seemed to welcome the wave of underage New Yorkers eager to discover music.“Kids, generally, like to drink,” said Crowley, laughing via phone. “But we tried our best to make sure people were safe — though I did wear a badge that said, ‘I am not your mother.’”But was the safety an illusion? “For a long time, I looked at this period of my life nostalgically and sentimentally,” the author Christopher Sorrentino said in an email. “Only recently have I begun to recognize how vulnerable we all were, how many risks we were exposed to with absolutely no one to apply the brakes. This goes double for the girls, who at 15 or 16 often had ‘relationships’ with men in their late 20s and early 30s.”Laura Albert, who was in the scene from age 13 and later achieved fame (and notoriety) writing under the nom de plume JT LeRoy, agreed. “Access still came with a price, especially for girls and queer boys,” she wrote in an as-yet-unpublished memoir. “That said, there was a sense of possibility, age was not a barrier, I was a teen in foster care but I still had access to the musicians I admired, calling them on pay phones and interviewing them for fanzines.”The Stimulators onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978.Ebet RobertsBy 1980, the teen punk scene was simultaneously evolving and dissolving as its members grew up and moved on. Some of its participants went on to play prominent roles in the local hardcore punk movement: Hoffert and Crewdson of the Speedies produced the first Beastie Boys demo, and the Stimulators became a foundational band of the local hardcore punk scene. Others went to college or took jobs that required leaving their dalliance with late nights at Max’s Kansas City and shopping for brothel creepers on St. Marks Place in the rearview mirror.“As cool as I thought the scene was, I realized I just didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be in college,” Laura Davis-Chanin, the Student Teachers’ drummer, said via video chat. “That was a big thing for me, given the incredible, shocking, thrilling world of rock ’n’ roll that I was a part of.”While the punk scene that preceded this moment has been exceptionally well documented, far less has been written about the teens who ran the night as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s. None of the groups were signed by major record labels and only one of the bands, the Colors, released an LP within the initial span of its career. (The Speedies put out an archival collection in 2007, largely to take advantage of the use of one of their songs, “Let Me Take Your Foto,” in a Hewlett-Packard ad campaign).With only spottily distributed independent 45s to spread the word outside the five boroughs, what was a potent local scene never gained a national or international profile. But several of its members have had notable careers inside and out of the arts world. Crewdson, the Speedies’ guitarist, is an acclaimed tableau photographer; Hoffert, his bandmate, became a data technology pioneer who helped develop the QuickTime media player and is now the senior vice president of video technology at Xandr; Allen Hurkin-Torres played in the Speedies, too, and is a former New York State Supreme Court justice.“There was a magical empowerment from what we did that has carried us through life,” Hoffert said via video chat. “The photography Gregory has done, my work in digital media, is directly related to that.”Schellenbach had a similar outlook: “It spawned so many cool things — art, authors, hip-hop. A magical time in New York City!”Eli Attie, who began going to Max’s before he had even hit puberty, became a speechwriter for Al Gore, then a writer and producer on “The West Wing” and “Billions.” “It made me unafraid,” he said of the scene. “It made me realize your life can be anything you want. If you want to know these people, if you want to experience this music, even if it seems out of reach or not allowed, you can just do it. You can write your own story.” More

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      Revisiting the Pyramids’ ‘Avant-Garde African Jazz,’ Four Decades Later

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      The group that started at Antioch College in Ohio went to Africa and returned “transformed,” one of its members said. A new boxed set collects its little-heard albums from the 1970s.In the early 1970s, as many jazz musicians looked directly to Africa for rhythms and inspiration, a group of students from Antioch College pushed even further, creating music that was so overtly African, you would have thought it was coming direct from Kenya or Senegal, not a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio.Between 1973 and 1976, the Pyramids released their music independently and sold albums hand-to-hand to classmates and during their travels on the road. Though the group earned a smattering of fans, its music — “avant-garde African jazz,” its bassist Kimathi Asante called it in an interview — was impossible to market.“It was a little bit too much for people,” said Margaux Simmons, who played flute in the group. “We were so eager and open and we went there.”On Friday, a new boxed set titled “Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings” will mark the widest release of the Pyramids’ music to date, reintroducing the band’s first three studio albums — “Lalibela,” “King of Kings” and “Birth/Speed/Merging” — and unearthing a 1975 live session for KQED TV in San Francisco.The group’s members started to come together after its future leader, Idris Ackamoor, returned to Antioch following a work-study period in Los Angeles, where he was mentored by the saxophonist Charles Tyler. Ackamoor founded a band with Simmons called the Collective, which Asante later joined. For the next year, they played original compositions influenced by Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, mid-60s-era John Coltrane and classical music.In the fall of 1971, the three students joined the Black Music Ensemble, a group started by the free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor, who came to teach at Antioch in the late 1960s, and began an intense period of musical training. “He would have us practice from 10 o’clock at night until 2 in the morning, seven days a week, for months on end,” Asante said. “We had chops that were just off the charts.”Nine months into their tenure with Taylor, Ackamoor had an idea: Antioch had a work-study program that allowed students to travel overseas, so he wrote a proposal to study the source of Black art. “I said, ‘I want to go to Europe, I want to form a band, and then I want to go to Africa for nine months and just study African music,’” Ackamoor recalled in a video interview.The school approved the request, requiring six weeks at a university in France. Ackamoor and Simmons flew to Paris in July 1972, where they befriended a young percussionist named Donald Robinson, who was studying there under the drummer Sunny Murray. At a university in Besançon, Ackamoor, Simmons and Asante played their first show as a trio, then played gigs around Amsterdam after Robinson officially joined the group. In France, they had lived in separate dorms that formed a triangle, giving the group its name. (An unrelated band called the Pyramids produced surf rock in the 1960s.)But the most pivotal part of the band’s journey was yet to come. After a week in Morocco and Senegal, the Pyramids spent seven months in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, engaging in spiritual practices, playing in drumming circles and buying instruments. As Black Americans, an almost indescribable feeling set in once they landed there.Ackamoor in Ghana in 1973. He applied for a program at Antioch College that allowed students to study overseas and traveled with fellow musicians to Europe, then Africa. Margaux Simmons/Pyramids Archive“It was the sense of community,” Simmons said. “It came from a place of spirituality, rather than something just to make music.”Ackamoor said when the group was in Africa, “We just wanted to be vessels,” adding, “We wanted to take in as much as we could, and fortunately, we were blessed and we were directed to the right sources.”The Pyramids returned to Ohio “transformed,” Asante said. “We were not the people or the musicians that had left Yellow Springs a year before.” The group bolstered its sound with Moroccan clay drums, a bamboo flute and Ugandan harp, giving its music a distinct African flair.Back in Ohio, the conga player Bradie Speller joined the Pyramids, adding even more percussive depth. The band played shows on campus and even opened for the jazz fusion band Weather Report in Dayton and Cincinnati. The Pyramids emphasized theater and costumes as a part of their live shows, eschewing street clothes for colorful face paint, ornate kente cloth and interpretive dance. “We had a pageant going on,” Ackamoor said, “a ritual pageant that was a visual feast, not only for the music, but for the eyes and the movement and the dance. We were a multimedia spectacle.”There was a consciousness-raising element to the group’s music, akin to experimental jazz luminaries including the Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble of Chicago. But Ackamoor said concerns about “humankind” were top of mind. “Although we were Afrocentric, we never defined ourselves as being Afrocentric,” he said. “We, at a very early point, were talking and speaking to all languages, all colors, all races, but we were African American doing it.”The Pyramids recorded their 1973 debut, “Lalibela” — inspired by Ackamoor and Simmons’s trip to the city in Ethiopia of the same name — in a friend’s Yellow Springs living room on a four-track tape. “A lot of it was on the first take,” Asante said. “It was a very pure album.” Its 1974 follow-up, “King of Kings,” was made during a marathon all-night session at a studio in Chillicothe, Ohio. Both albums contain long percussive suites, with searing saxophone wails and upper-register flute solos that work best when played front to back without interruption. The results were daring then and now.Simmons performing as part of the Collective, a group that pre-dated the Pyramids, in 1970.Idris Ackamoor/Pyramids Archive“We were more concerned with the progression of the music and creating a sound that was our own,” Speller said in a phone interview.By the time the Pyramids recorded their third album, “Birth/Speed/Merging,” in 1976, they had moved to the Bay Area to be closer to some sort of music industry. Ackamoor’s brother, who lived in San Francisco, helped fund the LP and put the band in a studio with better facilities and multitracking equipment. The Pyramids printed 5,000 copies of the LP, but they couldn’t find a record company to distribute it. Then the group began to splinter, and members relocated around the world.The Pyramids were trying to make a living as an avant-garde band when even the most popular jazz musicians struggled to find their footing in a marketplace dominated by funk. “It got deep,” Ackamoor said. “Those early days I had to pawn my instrument, do different things to survive. We were in the serious red, and once we were out of the college environment, we ran smack up to the reality of Black creative musicians trying to survive in America.” The Pyramids opened the Berkeley Jazz Festival in 1977, then broke up.The band was defunct until 2007, when Ackamoor organized a reunion concert after fielding requests to reissue the Pyramids’ 1970s music. By then, the music had reached a new generation of listeners, and the group’s albums were selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Three years later, a German agency organized a European tour for the band.In the years since, Ackamoor has resurrected the group in different forms, releasing the albums “We Be All Africans” in 2016, “An Angel Fell” in 2018 and “Shaman!” under the name Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids in 2020. But you don’t get those albums without the foundation laid by the original Pyramids in the ’70s, and the courage it took to trek into the unknown.“We were the original Do It Yourself musicians, producers, label, the whole nine yards,” Speller said. “Everything cats are doing now, we did 50 years ago.”Ackamoor isn’t done with the Pyramids yet — a new album is in the works — but he said the boxed set captures a bold moment. “It is an amazing historical document, but it’s also a living document,” he said. “The past is a wonderful thing, but I’m in the future and the band is in the future.” More

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      Kool & the Gang Get the Dance Floor Moving. Have They Gotten Their Due?

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      The group’s funk, disco and pop songs have been sampled over 1,800 times, but haven’t collected the same accolades as many contemporaries. A new boxed set takes a look back.“Do something,” the producer Gene Redd instructed the drummer George Brown and the bassist Robert “Kool” Bell during an early recording session in New York. “Say something! Sing something.”That prompt in the late ’60s was what Kool & the Gang — a jazz group with a crack horn section that evolved into funk, then transitioned to disco — needed to get moving. “Right off the top of the heads,” Brown, 73, said of group’s early years, when it was making instrumental tracks influenced by both James Moody and James Brown. “We’d just start, and bingo, there it is: ‘Raw Hamburger’ and ‘Chocolate Buttermilk,’” he added, referring to two memorable tracks. “It just flowed. And we’re just grooving.”Over nearly six decades, Kool & the Gang have released 25 albums and toured worldwide, playing Live Aid in 1985 and Glastonbury in 2011. Their 12 Top 10 singles are funk, disco and pop classics, underpinning movies including “Pulp Fiction” and “Legally Blonde”: “Jungle Boogie,” “Ladies Night,” “Hollywood Swinging,” the undeniable 1980 party anthem “Celebration.” They are foundational for hip-hop and have been sampled over 1,800 times, according to the website WhoSampled, including memorable turns on Eric B. & Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique” and Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind.” (Questlove played a three-hour-plus set of songs featuring the group’s samples during a 2020 livestream.)Yet Kool & the Gang haven’t collected the same accolades as many of their contemporaries. They haven’t even reached the ballot for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Why?“We’re asking the same question,” said Bell, 71, in a separate interview. The bassist and singer left the Imperial Lords street gang and joined the first version of the group in Jersey City, N.J., in 1964.A new boxed set out this week, “The Albums Vol. 1: 1970-1978,” makes an argument for the band’s influence — 199 tracks over 13 CDs, celebrating a transitional period, one that would push the group to the edge of megastardom. (Part 2, covering the ’80s, is due in the fall.)Bell was video chatting from Orlando, Fla., wearing a leopard-print dress shirt, with a bass, a Kool & the Gang-branded guitar and framed gold and platinum records behind him. He’s an animated storyteller, delighting in remembering the band’s early days in Youngstown, Ohio, when he and his brother Ronald Khalis Bell, often credited under his Muslim name, Khalis Bayyan, pounded on empty paint cans to make rhythms.Their father, Bobby, was a boxer who hung out with the jazzmen Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk; Monk later became Robert’s godfather. Robert tried boxing, but only lasted a year. When the family moved to Jersey City, he fell in with local gangs.Music eventually pulled him out: The group sparked when Ronald visited the home of a high-school classmate, Robert “Spike” Mickens, who could flawlessly play the jazz classic “Desafinado.” Soon the Bell brothers were hanging around Mickens’s house, and Kool picked up a guitar, learning the one-note bass part in Herbie Mann’s “Comin’ Home Baby.” His instinctive style, with help from his more accomplished brother, became the group’s rhythmic foundation.“Didn’t take no lessons. Nothing like that,” Bell said. “Just listening.”Through most of the band’s early period, Kool & the Gang had no bona fide singer, and for a while, it didn’t matter. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThey formed the Jazz Birds, then the Jazziacs, then Kool and the Flames, after Bell’s street nickname, modified from a friend called Cool. In 1969, wanting to avoid trouble from James Brown and His Famous Flames, they renamed themselves Kool & the Gang.The group found a manager and began playing gigs, learning Brown and Motown hits, backing minor R&B stars in their swings through town. “So now you have the jazz and the funk coming together,” Bell said. The band’s live, mostly instrumental 1970 debut “Kool and the Gang” reflected this combination.Kool & the Gang were prolific, and their sound evolved over a long period. Michael Neidus — global commercial manager for the British record label Demon Music Group, which licensed the Kool & the Gang catalog from their longtime label, Universal Music, for the boxed sets — decided to separate the group’s more grooving ’70s phase, when the band frequently worked with the producer Redd, from the smash-hit era that begins with “Ladies Night” in 1979 and “Celebration” in 1980.“It’s too much in one go,” he said. “There are two distinct periods of the band’s success.”Even in the band’s first decade, it was clear that other musicians were paying close attention to their sound. In Indianapolis in the early ’70s, Funk Inc. was studying early Kool & the Gang albums. Funk Inc. interpolated “Kools Back Again” into its own “Kool Is Back,” which was memorably sampled many times.“They pitched a good pocket,” said Steve Weakley, Funk Inc.’s guitarist, in an interview. “They had single-note lines in the melodies.”“Celebration” is one of the most recognizable songs in pop, appearing on numerous best-of playlists for weddings and sporting events.Frederic REGLAIN/GettyThrough most of the band’s early period, Kool & the Gang had no bona fide singer, and for a while, it didn’t matter. When a record executive requested they make their own version of Manu Dibango’s hit “Soul Makossa,” Kool & the Gang came up with “Jungle Boogie,” “Funky Stuff” and “Hollywood Swinging” during a one-day marathon rehearsal session in New York for their “Wild and Peaceful” album.“These guys could make hit records with no singers,” said Pete Rock, the D.J. and producer whose Jamaican family in the Bronx owned all the Kool & the Gang singles and albums. “Funky as hell — that’s the only way to describe that rhythm section.”Rock said once the pioneering hip-hop D.J. Kool Herc of the Bronx popularized the isolation of breakbeats grabbed from other artists’ records, Kool & the Gang became essential: “Everybody was on a James Brown kick in hip-hop, but certain producers listened to other music by other groups.”By the late ’70s, Kool & the Gang had survived long enough to realize they could be even bigger if they found their elusive frontman. Dick Griffey, a concert promoter, was the first to suggest the idea, and the group hired James “JT” Taylor.A small detail at the end of “Ladies Night” turned out to be crucial — Meekaaeel Muhammad, a member of the group’s songwriting team, fleshed out the chorus with a countermelodic “Come on, let’s celebrate.” It pointed to the band’s next hit: “Celebration,” based on an idea from Ronald Khalis Bell. “The track had that kind of down-home feeling, almost like you’re somewhere in Alabama, with grandma sitting on the porch with some lemonade. A rocking-chair vibe,” Bell said. “One of the guys came up with that ‘yahoo!’”“Celebration” is one of the most recognizable songs in pop, on best-of playlists for weddings and sporting events — it was even played on the International Space Station. The track kicked off a commercially rich period in the ’80s (“Get Down On It,” “Cherish,” “Fresh”), but after so many years of funky polyrhythms, disco and pop got “a little boring, if you know what I mean,” Brown said. “You eventually get into it, but it wasn’t like playing jazz or funk. Those two genres, you can stretch out.”The hits mostly dried up by 1989, and the group continued to make albums and tour internationally throughout the ’90s and 2000s, replacing original members with younger artists. In 2011, David Lee Roth saw Kool & the Gang perform at Glastonbury and invited the band to open for Van Halen on its tour the following year. The group’s tracks have streamed 2.8 billion times worldwide to date, according to the tracking service Luminate.But the last few years have been difficult. Ronald Khalis Bell and the saxophonist Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, died; Robert Bell lost his wife and another brother. When the pandemic hit, the group’s remaining members had to cut off their touring schedule. Discussing this period, Bell’s smile drooped, and he turned contemplative. “A lot of memories,” he said. “But we continue to move on.”Brown said a new album is scheduled for October, and the band is on the road once again.Perhaps it will eventually reach the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, too. Bell smiled wryly. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Maybe next year.” More

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      Jim Seals, Half of a Popular 1970s Soft-Rock Duo, Dies at 79

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      Teamed with Dash Crofts, he hit it big with “Summer Breeze” in 1972. The two went on to have chart success with “Diamond Girl” and other songs.Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft-rock duo who had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the Top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died on Monday evening at his home in Nashville. He was 79.His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”Mr. Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, were still teenagers when they were asked to join an instrumental group, the Champs, which had had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “Tequila.” By the mid-1960s they had tired of the band and of the loud, sometimes angry strains that were infusing the hard rock of the time.Adherents of the Baha’i faith, they sought to make a calmer brand of music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and delivering their lyrics in close harmony.“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of their second album, “Down Home,” “and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; together they sing coolly intertwined, and quite colorful, vocal harmony.”With the lilting, nostalgia-seeped single “Summer Breeze,” released in 1972, the two found international stardom. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they found out when they arrived in Ohio to play a show.“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly in 2020. “That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon.”The song, written jointly by the two men, featured the kind of chorus that sticks in the brain:“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”The single reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a follow-up, “Hummingbird,” made the Top 20. “Diamond Girl” in 1973 reached No. 6. “Get Closer” in 1976 also reached No. 6.But the duo’s run of success basically ended when the decade did, and they called it quits for a time.“Around 1980, we were still drawing 10,000 to 12,000 people at concerts,” Mr. Seals told The Los Angeles Times in 1991, when the two revived the act. “But we could see, with this change coming where everybody wanted dance music, that those days were numbered.”Six years earlier, though, the pair had begun to fall out of favor with some listeners and critics because of their sixth album, “Unborn Child,” which was released in 1974 not long after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights. The title track urged women who were considering an abortion to “stop, turn around, go back, think it over.”Mr. Seals, in a 1978 interview with The Miami Herald, acknowledged that the record damaged the duo’s career.“It completely killed it for a while,” he said. Radio stations refused to play the record. Some Seals & Crofts concerts were picketed, although there were also hundreds of letters of support. In the 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Seals said the pair never intended the song to be a lightning rod.“It was our ignorance that we didn’t know that kind of thing was seething and boiling as a social issue,” he said. “On one hand we had people sending us thousands of roses, but on the other people were literally throwing rocks at us.“If we’d known it was going to cause such disunity,” he continued, “we might have thought twice about doing it. At the time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say in our music.”James Eugene Seals was born on Oct. 17, 1942, in Sidney, Texas, to Wayland and Susan Seals. His father worked in the oil fields, and Jim spent much of his childhood in Iraan, a boomtown in southwest Texas.“There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.”His father played a little guitar and his mother played the dobro, so informal jam sessions were a common way to pass the time in the household. When a fiddler came by one evening, young Jim was taken with the instrument, and his father ordered him one from a Sears catalog.Later he took up the saxophone, which led to an invitation to join a rockabilly band called the Crew Cats that played at dances and in local clubs. The band’s drummer quit right before a show at a junior college, and the drummer from another band on the bill sat in — Darrell Crofts, known as Dash.The two became friends and played with the Champs for several years out of Los Angeles. Both mastered other instruments, including the guitar. Once they hit it big as a duo, they knew the image they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they were about to tour England, Mr. Seals told a reporter that they had pulled out of a previous European engagement.“We were going to tour there earlier, but we had a last-minute change of mind when we found out that we’d be playing with Black Sabbath,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a fine band, but I’m not sure that the audience would be quite right for us.”Mr. Seals, left, and Mr. Crofts in an undated promotional photo.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Seals is survived by their two sons, Joshua and Sutherland; a daughter, Juliet Crossley; and three grandchildren. A sister, Renee Staley, and a half brother, Eddie Ray Seals, also survive him. His brother, Dan Seals, a singer who had success in the late 1970s as a member of another soft-rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Coley, died in 2009. The two brothers toured together for several years before Dan Seals’s death, with Jim Seals’s two sons sometimes playing with them.Maia Coleman More