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      Joe Louis Walker, Free-Ranging Blues Explorer, Is Dead at 75

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      A product of the San Francisco rock crucible of the 1960s, he fashioned his own brand of the blues, blending gospel, soul, rock and other genres.Joe Louis Walker, a blues master and musical omnivore whose snarling guitar work, gritty vocals and introspective songwriting earned him the praise of Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger and many others over a six-decade career, died on April 30 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 75.His wife, Robin Poritzky-Walker, said his death, in a hospital, was from a cardiac-related illness.Mr. Walker recorded more than 30 albums for a variety of labels, starting with “Cold Is the Night” in 1986. He toured extensively and was a staple of blues festivals around the world. He won the Blues Music Award (formerly the W.C. Handy Award) multiple times and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.” He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013.Mr. Walker was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.”ProvogueAlong the way he traded riffs with blues powerhouses like B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.The keyboard innovator Herbie Hancock deemed him “a singular force” with a “remarkable gift for instantly electrifying a room.” Mick Jagger called him “a magnificent guitar player and singer.” The jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea playfully anointed him “the Chick Corea of blues.”Critics, too, felt Mr. Walker’s power. “His voice is weather-beaten but ready for more; his guitar solos are fast, wiry and incisive,” Jon Pareles wrote in a 1989 review in The New York Times, “often starting out with impetuous squiggles before moaning with bluesy despair.”Mr. Walker in performance in 1995. One reviewer called him “a fluttering blues guitarist” whose “lines seem blown by the wind.”Simon Ritter/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      April Showers Bring May Flowers, the Playlist

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      Hear songs by Lana Del Rey, SZA, Waxahatchee and more.Lana Del ReyMario Anzuoni/ReutersDear listeners,This is Dani Blum, a health reporter and sometime music writer at The New York Times, filling in for Lindsay this week.May is when music leaks outside, when songs start to seep out of car windows, when clusters of speakers clog parks. This always feels like a kind of benediction to me, or a reward for the long slog of murky, soggy spring.You know the saying about the seasonal blossoming — so with that in mind, I put together a playlist focused on flowers, but also on the quiet, thrumming hope that comes this time of year. Call it post-spring, pre-summer, the sweetest form of seasonal purgatory. This playlist features songs from across the last decade, including older tracks from Lorde and Lana Del Rey — two artists whose new music I’m most excited to hear this summer — as well as an understated track from the queen of last summer, Charli XCX.I bloom just for you,DaniListen along while you read.1. Faye Webster featuring Father: “Flowers”The Atlanta-based indie singer Faye Webster can tell an entire story with the quake in her voice. Her vowels seem to cave in as she sings, “Can you just give me all your time?/ I’m gonna try give you mine.” It’s a simple couplet that binds the song together, equal parts pleading and reassuring.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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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      He Spent $12,495 to Be Gene Simmons’s Roadie (and Got More Than Expected)

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      A father-son pair ponied up for the V.I.P. experience last week and got a glimpse behind the scenes of a rock ’n’ roll show, and into a notorious star’s heart.A few years ago, The Financial Times named Kiss “rock’s greatest capitalists.” By the newspaper’s count, the band founded in 1973 had licensed its name to some 5,000 products, including Kiss Kondoms and Kiss Kaskets.The “Kiss thing,” Gene Simmons, the band’s brash founding singer-bassist, once said, “has become this huge monster, despite the fact that critics say that doing games and slot machines and golf courses is not credible. Critics still live in their mother’s basement. We own the world.”Kiss wrapped up its End of the Road (supposed) farewell tour at Madison Square Garden in December 2023, but not before introducing digital avatars designed to perform shows and, in theory, make money in perpetuity. (Actual members of Kiss will play together in November as part of the Kiss Army fan club’s 50th-anniversary celebration in Las Vegas.)Early this month, Simmons started a solo tour with his Gene Simmons Band. And, at the age of 75, he’s still upsetting critics. For each stop, Simmons is offering a “Personal Assistant and Band Roadie for the Day” experience to one fan. The rocker’s website promises that the roadie and one guest will get to help set up for the gig, attend the soundcheck, have a meal with Simmons, get an onstage introduction during the show and receive a signed bass. V.I.P. experiences have become standard in pop, but it was the package’s price tag — $12,495 (show tickets not included) — that set the internet off. “‘Greedy’ Kiss rocker worth $400M is slammed for charging fans insane money to be his assistant,” blared a Daily Mail headline.Dwayne Rosado, right, and his son, Zach, got to attend the soundcheck, have a meal with Simmons, get an onstage introduction during the show and receive a signed bass.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesIt’s not insane to everyone. “This is what I choose to spend my money on,” said Dwayne Rosado, a tattooed 52-year-old retired corrections sergeant from Middletown, N.Y. He and his soft-spoken son, Zach, a 5-foot-11 seventh grader into mixed martial arts, video games and electric guitar, were the roadies for the day at Simmons’s recent concert at the Count Basie Center for the Arts’ 1,500-capacity theater in Red Bank, N.J. On the afternoon of the show, father and son — both wearing the official Gene Simmons Band road crew shirts that had been provided for them — waited at the theater’s loading area for the rock star to arrive.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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      Dance Music Is Booming Again. What’s Different This Time? A Lot.

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      In late February, just after midnight, a cavernous warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard thumped with the Ibiza-based D.J. and producer Solomun’s dramatic, synth-heavy house music as red light strobed over a sea of raucous 20- and 30-somethings. Two days earlier, he had been at the 20,000-capacity Sphere in Las Vegas opening for Anyma, an Italian American electronic music star whose run of New Year’s Eve shows sold out in under 24 hours, grossing $21 million in ticket sales.Just before 2 a.m. a few weeks later, the London-based D.J. and radio host Moxie was shaking Brooklyn’s Public Records with a classic ’90s house track, smiling ear to ear as she watched over the sweaty 200-capacity nightclub. On a more frigid March night, Zeemuffin, a Brooklyn-based D.J. originally from Pakistan, was onstage at the Bushwick venue Elsewhere, headlining “Azadi” (“freedom” in Urdu), a bill that featured a wide array of global dance music sounds — Chicago house, Jersey club, Baltimore house, dancehall, the Baile funk of Brazil, the gqom of South Africa — while a sold-out crowd went wild.Zeemuffin at Elsewhere in Brooklyn.Zeemuffin (real name: Zainab Hasnain DiStasio) took a trip back to Pakistan around the top of the year to D.J. a club in Karachi where the near pandemonium at her set bordered on ecstasy. “Never in my whole life — and I’m from there — have I experienced anything like this” in the city, she recalled. She described a crowd of “queer people, trans people, Black people, white people, Asian people, all in one space,” and sighed. “It was unbelievable.”Over the past four years, scenes like these are increasingly playing out all over the world, as dance music experiences yet another boom period. Festival lineups are jam-packed with D.J.s, while some of the biggest names in pop music (including Beyoncé, Drake and Charli XCX) have made dance music-inspired or adjacent albums. It’s usually at this point — when a newspaper sees fit to write about it — that the comedown starts.This moment, however, is different.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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      Fiona Apple’s Statement About Jailed Mothers, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis, Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, I’m With Her and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Fiona Apple, ‘Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)’Fiona Apple’s first solo single in five years is topical, focused on poor women who are imprisoned before trial and drawing on Apple’s time spent as a court watcher. Over a percussive track built on hand drumming, Apple sings about a single mother who can’t afford to post bail; by the time her case is dropped, she has lost her home and her family. Her voice is bitterly sympathetic; the video adds stark statistics.Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, ‘I Like It I Like It’Hayley Williams of Paramore joins Mosey Sumney for a song he wrote with a co-producer, Graham Jonson (a.k.a. quickly, quickly) about desire thwarted by its own intensity. “I turn cactus when we touch,” Sumney moans; “My lips clutch when you open up,” Williams admits. Deep, loping, stop-start synthesizer lines and a lumpy beat underline both their hesitancy and their obsession; all they can agree on is, “I like it too much.”Billy Woods and Preservation, ‘Waterproof Mascara’The most harrowing track on “Golliwog,” the new album by the rapper Billy Woods, is “Waterproof Mascara.” A sobbing woman and an elegiac melody share the foreground of the production, by Preservation, as Woods recalls domestic abuse and suicidal thoughts and tries to numb himself with weed. Like the rest of the album, it’s bleak and uncompromising.Kali Uchis, ‘Lose My Cool,’“Sincerely,” the new album by Kali Uchis, is one long, languorous sigh of relief at finding true love, then basking in it. The production luxuriates in relaxed tempos and reverbed guitars in songs like “Lose My Cool,” a two-part song — slow and slower — that shows off her jazzy side with melodic leaps and airborne crooning. She revels in clinginess: “Whenever I’m without you babe, it don’t feel right,” she coos.Hxppier, ‘Aller’Hxppier — the 20-year-old Nigerian songwriter Ukpabi Favor Oru — lets smoldering irritation boil over in “Aller,” singing, “I can’t right now with your wishes / You try but you lie.” The bass-loving production, by ValNtino, is grounded in an earthy low drumbeat and keeps expanding — with call-and-response voices, ululations, shouts, horns, strings, organ, even a crying baby — as if Hxppier is mustering allies from all sides.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 ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ Radiohead Riffs on Shakespeare

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      The band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, created a show with the Royal Shakespeare Company that is both admirably ambitious and a little foolish.Radiohead meets the Bard: a mash-up for the ages — and kryptonite for purists, you might think. But a new, dance-infused take on “Hamlet,” set to the band’s 2003 LP, “Hail to the Thief,” which opened in Manchester, England, on Wednesday, is no mere gimmick.There is plenty in the album, both aesthetically and thematically, that resonates with Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, revenge and self-doubt: the title’s allusion to political infamy, the music’s gloomy timbre, the anxiously introspective lyrics. Immediately, the album’s opening line — “Are you such a dreamer / To put the world to rights?” — has echoes of Hamlet’s famous speech, “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!”“Hamlet Hail to the Thief” — co-directed by Christine Jones and Steve Hoggett for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and co-created by the Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke — runs at Aviva Studios through May 18 before transferring to the company’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon in June. Jones is best known as a set designer, and Hoggett as a choreographer. (They worked together on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” for which Jones won a Tony in 2018.) In this interpretation, the story is drastically abridged — clocking in at comfortably under two hours — and there is a strong emphasis on music and visuals.The onstage action is interspersed with subtly reworked snippets and deconstructed riffs from the Radiohead songs. A group of musicians, supervised by Tom Brady, plays behind glass at the rear of the stage, while two singers belt out vocals from a balcony. The actors periodically slip into trance-like dance moves, combining strange, synchronized gesticulations with an assortment of tumbling, swirling and rolling motions. They dance a creepy waltz to the funky bass line of “Go to Sleep,” and the song’s chorus — “Something big is gonna happen / Over my dead body” — portentously signposts the carnage that is to come.The actors periodically slip into trance-like choreographed dance moves with strange, synchronized gesticulations.Manuel HarlanThe music and movement combine to evoke a suitably eerie sense of menace, although it’s a shame that the production’s smartly rendered monochrome aesthetic has become so commonplace — thanks in large part to to its deployment in successive high-profile Jamie Lloyd productions — that it scarcely registers. Black-clad actors, a little obscured by smoke; a dark stage illuminated by stark spotlights or neon rectangles: It’s a gloaming-by-numbers, almost too crisp to be spooky. (The set design is by the collective AMP Scenography, in collaboration with Sadra Tehrani.)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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      Smokey Robinson’s Victory Lap Upended by Allegations of Sexual Assault

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      The Motown legend, 85, was touring to support a new album when he was sued and accused of sexually assaulting four women who had worked as housekeepers for him.At 85, the Motown legend Smokey Robinson was on something of a celebratory tour. With a new album to promote, he shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen last month, performed last week on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and was in the midst of playing a series of live dates in the United States and the United Kingdom.“I feel wonderful,” he told Entertainment Tonight in a recent interview. “I pray every night before we go on that we can be entertaining and uplifting to the people who are there.”But on Tuesday, Mr. Robinson’s victory lap was upended when four women who had worked as housekeepers for him filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault, claiming in the suit that he abused them dozens of times over many years.The suit, filed in Los Angeles, identifies the women only as Jane Does 1 through 4. They each accuse Mr. Robinson of raping them repeatedly while they were employed cleaning his home in Chatsworth, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, as well as in his other homes in Ventura County, Calif., and Las Vegas.Multiple attempts to reach Mr. Robinson and his lawyers and representatives were unsuccessful on Wednesday. The Daily Mail said it had reached Mr. Robinson by telephone and reported that he had said, “I am appalled.”Mr. Robinson was Motown royalty, writing and performing some of the most beloved hits in the catalog with the Miracles.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWe 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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      Liam Payne Left a $32.3 Million Estate and No Will, Reports Say

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      Mr. Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, died after falling from a third-story hotel balcony in October.Liam Payne, the former One Direction singer who died last year after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, left an estate worth 24.3 million pounds, or $32.3 million, but had not written a will before his death, according to British news outlets.Mr. Payne’s former partner, Cheryl Tweedy, will be an administrator of his wealth and property, the BBC and The Guardian reported on Wednesday. Ms. Tweedy, the mother of his 8-year-old son and a former member of the pop group Girls Aloud, shares oversight of the estate with a music industry lawyer but neither may distribute the wealth, the BBC said.Mr. Payne, 31, died in October, after falling from a third-floor hotel balcony while in Argentina, and a toxicology report found he had cocaine, alcohol and a prescription antidepressant in his system at the time of death. A statement from local prosecutors after the death suggested that it was not a suicide because of the determination that he fell in a state of unconsciousness.After an investigation, Argentine authorities charged three people with negligent homicide. Those charges, against a friend of Mr. Payne’s and two employees at the hotel where he died, were later dropped.A CasaSur Palermo Hotel employee and a local waiter are still accused of supplying narcotics to Mr. Payne in the days leading up to his death. The charge they face carries a sentence of four to 15 years in prison. More