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      Yukihiro Takahashi, Pioneer of Electronic Pop Music, Dies at 70

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      A drummer and singer, he was best known as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of Japan’s most successful bands and a major influence on hip-hop, techno and New Wave.Yukihiro Takahashi, a drummer and vocalist whose wide artistic range and gleeful embrace of music technology made him a leading figure in Japan’s pop scene for nearly 50 years, most prominently with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of his country’s most successful musical acts, died on Jan. 11 in Karuizawa, Japan. He was 70.The cause was aspiration pneumonia, a complication of a brain tumor, his management company said in a statement.Mr. Takahashi and Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he founded in 1978 with the musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, were often ranked alongside the German electronic group Kraftwerk as pioneers in electronic music and significant influences on emergent genres like hip-hop, New Wave and techno.Yellow Magic Orchestra was among the first bands to employ in live shows devices like the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer and the Moog II-C synthesizer, which they used to complement Mr. Hosono’s funky guitar and Mr. Takahashi’s tight, driving drums.Unlike their German counterparts, who leaned into the avant-garde nature of electronic sound and referred to themselves as automatons, Yellow Magic Orchestra found ways to bend it toward pop music, blending in elements of Motown, disco and synth-pop.In a 1980 appearance on the television show “Soul Train,” the band performed a souped-up version of Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” after which a bemused Don Cornelius, the show’s host, interviewed Mr. Takahashi. Kraftwerk, it might go without saying, never appeared on “Soul Train.”Mr. Takahashi “was remarkably skilled at taking what were obviously artificial, technologically mediated sounds and using them to build songs that sound fully and organically human,” Michael K. Bourdaghs, a professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Chicago, said in a phone interview.The band and its tech-inflected sound arrived at just the right time. Japan had long since remade itself as a postwar economic engine, but by the late 1970s it was becoming something else: a global emblem of techno-utopianism and futuristic cool. Sony released the Walkman in 1979, just as Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake were taking over Paris fashion runways with their playful, visionary designs.Yellow Magic Orchestra’s eponymous debut album, released in 1978, sold more than 250,000 copies; its 1980 sophomore release, “Solid State Survivor,” sold some one million. Six of the band’s seven studio albums reached the top five in the Japanese pop charts, and all of them provided fodder for covers and samples far beyond Japan.Afrika Bambaataa, 2 Live Crew, J Dilla and De La Soul were among the many acts who borrowed liberally from Yellow Magic Orchestra’s archive. Michael Jackson remade its song “Behind the Mask,” though his version was not released until 2010, after his death.The band’s music also inspired composers of early video game soundtracks who were looking for electronic sounds that could remain compelling even after hours of play. Yellow Magic Orchestra titled the first track on its debut album “Computer Game ‘Theme from The Circus,’” and Mr. Takahashi later wrote music for several games.He and his bandmates were already established musicians when they formed Yellow Magic Orchestra, and they continued to release solo projects during the group’s six-year run. Mr. Takahashi released some 20 albums during his career, not counting numerous remastered reissues and live recordings.Neither he nor the band ever sat still artistically. His first group, the Sadistic Mika Band, brought glam and prog rock to Japan in the early 1970s and was among the first Japanese acts to achieve success outside the country — it toured Britain with Roxy Music and played on the BBC.Mr. Takahashi’s 1978 solo album, “Saravah!,” produced by Mr. Sakamoto, drew on bossa nova and reggae influences, while the album “Yellow Magic Orchestra” later that year tweaked Orientalist stereotypes, most notably in a cheeky cover of Martin Denny’s tiki-inspired “Firecracker.”Yukihiro Takahashi, in hat and shades, performing with Yellow Magic Orchestra in New York City in 1979.Ebet RobertsBoth before and after Yellow Magic Orchestra, Mr. Takahashi was a frequent and eager collaborator, forming bands on the fly and bringing in friends to play on individual tracks. He often worked with the British guitarist and singer Bill Nelson, as well as Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music.Mr. Takahashi wrote much of the music played by Yellow Magic Orchestra; he also played drums and sang lead vocals, though many of their songs were instrumentals.His voice was rich and louche, strikingly similar to that of Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, especially on early hits like “Drip Dry Eyes” (1984). He sported a pencil mustache and, in later years, a fedora and thick-rimmed eyeglasses. Like Mr. Ferry, he came across as effortlessly cool and ever-so-slightly world-weary, a hipster who believed in better days to come.“We had hope for the future, unlike now,” Mr. Takahashi said in a 2009 interview, seated between Mr. Sakamoto and Mr. Hosono. “We used to say we will make music that’ll be a bridge to the future.”Yukihiro Takahashi was born on June 6, 1952, in Tokyo. He began his music career early, playing drums with college bands while still in junior high school and starting as a session musician at 16.He is survived by his wife, Kiyomi Takahashi; his brother, Nobuyuki Takahashi, a music producer; and his sister, Mie Ito.He studied design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, but did not graduate. During the 1970s, he developed his own clothing line, Bricks; he often designed the outfits worn by Yellow Magic Orchestra, including a striking trio of bright red Mao suits.Yellow Magic Orchestra broke up in 1984, its members citing musical differences. All three went on to successful solo careers — Mr. Sakamoto won an Academy Award for his soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987) — but they remained close, and occasionally reunited. They released an album in 1993, “Technodon,” and appeared at a 2012 benefit concert to oppose nuclear power.“We followed a rock band path, so we stopped” playing as Yellow Magic Orchestra, Mr. Takahashi said in 2009. “But on second thought,” he added, nodding toward his bandmates on either side of him, “I couldn’t think of anybody I respect more.”Miharu Nishiyama More

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      ‘Jam Van’ Dares to Ask: What if Family Road Trips Were Actually Fun?

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      A new travel series featuring a diverse array of beloved musical artists uses original tunes to help children navigate the world.Few family expeditions are more fraught than long-distance road trips. What parent hasn’t longed to take the kids on a highway journey that is free of bored whines, back-seat battles and the terrifying possibility of having to put “Baby Shark” on endless repeat?Now a new series aims to fulfill that dream: “Jam Van,” on the YouTube Originals for Kids & Family channel and the YouTube Kids app, stakes out novel territory as a tune-filled travel show for children. In each of the season’s eight episodes — the first two will be released at noon Eastern time on Thursday, and a new one each Thursday thereafter — young viewers become the touring companions of Lamb, a detail-obsessed sheep, and Anne, a free-spirited alligator. Together, they explore a distinctive American city (and, in one case, a wide swath of a state) in their sky blue S.U.V.“I felt like this was the best way to sort of make something funny and interesting, both visually and sonically,” said Bill Sherman, one of the series’s creators and a Tony Award-winning music orchestrator and composer whose credits range from “Hamilton” (he won a Grammy as a producer of the original Broadway cast recording) to “Sesame Street” (he is that show’s Emmy-winning music director).Anne and Lamb’s 10- to-12-minute adventures in locations like Seattle, Nashville, Los Angeles and New Orleans involve landmarks, culture, food and, most important, music. On these road trips, however, moms and dads need not cover their ears: Musical artists including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brandi Carlile, Sheryl Crow, Fitz and the Tantrums and Trombone Shorty portray themselves in live action, serenading the cartoon heroes with an original song created for each destination.The series’s animation is a pastiche of real-world footage, live-action performances, stop-motion animation and computer animation.YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyIn some episodes, like the one set in Virginia, featuring the band Old Crow Medicine Show, the artists have written the central tune’s music or lyrics (or both) themselves; in others, they perform the work of an eminent composer like Butch Walker, who wrote the song for Sheryl Crow, or Sherman himself.The result, Sherman said, is “music that you don’t often hear in kids’ shows,” including hip-hop, ’70s funk, bluegrass and country indie tunes.In a joint video interview, Sherman and Brian Hunt, the series’s other creator, explained how they made their show look different, too. Working with the Vancouver animation studio Global Mechanic, they invented a freewheeling collage of styles. Anne, Lamb and the animals’ Grumpy GPS — the series’s own Oscar the Grouch — are computer-animated, while the Big Book of Travel, a talking tome, is stop-motion. In addition to the live-action footage of music stars, the production team included pop-up cameos of children, who offer intriguing details about the destinations.To create the regional backdrops, Hunt said, “we took thousands of photographs in the actual cities” that were treated to give them a “heightened look.” The images include vivid views of the Hollywood sign, the Guggenheim Museum and the Liberty Bell.But the two men, who are fathers and close friends, intend “Jam Van” to be more than sightseeing — a resolve that was heightened by their early brainstorms at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. “No one could travel anywhere,” recalled Hunt, the president of Believe Entertainment Group, a producer of “Jam Van.” “And everybody was mad at each other.”The best buddies Anne and Lamb get mad at each other sometimes, too. (Grumpy GPS, voiced by the comedian Marc Maron, is almost always mad.) The series’s creators hope that through these characters’ interactions, children 4 and older can learn life skills and how to get along, both on and off the road.Anne is “really the one driving the ideas and the adventures,” said the comedian Nicole Byer, who voices the character. Lamb, voiced by the comic Pete Lee, “sometimes is like, ‘I don’t like that, that’s not a good idea,’” Byer added. Ultimately, she said, their friendship “is push-and-pull.”In each episode, the two travel companions face a problem, interpersonal or otherwise, that the segment’s song addresses. During the pilot, set in New York City, Anne grows frustrated when she can’t find her Uncle Salligator (who, naturally, turns out to live in the sewer). She and Lamb bump into Miranda, who sings and raps an encouraging strategy.“Building up a frustration tolerance in children so they can see their goals through to the end is such an important thing to do (as a parent, anyway),” Miranda wrote in an email.The Nashville episode also counsels persistence. Here, a mischievous armadillo keeps running away with the steel for Lamb’s steel guitar, and Crow’s vocal performance urges Lamb not to give up.In an episode set in his hometown, Oakland, Calif., Daveed Diggs advises Anne and Lamb on the importance of following directions.YouTube Originals Kids & Family“The power of song is that it sticks in your head,” said Daveed Diggs, who stars in an episode devoted to his hometown, Oakland, Calif. That segment’s vocal number, written by the rapper Phonte Coleman, with an additional verse by Diggs, focuses on the importance of following directions, using a catchy refrain.In choosing the artists who would perform the songs, “it wasn’t just about who was the biggest name,” Sherman said. “It was who worked well enough for our show, who could really fit in and make it work, because it wasn’t just about singing.”For the Seattle episode, the series’s second, the men sought out Carlile, not only because she’s from the area but also because of the plot they envisioned: Lamb and Anne, who is suffering an uncharacteristic bout of homesickness, meet an octopus whose “family” is a variety of species. Anne, realizing that friends can be as supportive as her own relatives, shakes off her melancholy.“I was just really inspired by the subject matter,” said Carlile, because, she added, “I’m part of a nontraditional family.” (She and her wife, Catherine Shepherd, have two daughters.) The song “One Sacred Thing,” a ballad about love that Carlile wrote and performs in the episode, emphasizes “that family comes in all different shapes and sizes,” she said.Brandi Carlile wrote and performs the “Jam Van” song “One Sacred Thing,” a ballad emphasizing “that family comes in all different shapes and sizes,” she said. YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyAs they put the episodes together, Sherman and Hunt also discovered an unexpected synergy. Frequently, Hunt said, the main characters’ “social-emotional challenge actually served as a great vehicle to help us explore the cities.”The conflict, for instance, that arises in Philadelphia, where Lamb is determined to stick to a schedule and Anne is desperate to eat, allowed the show’s creators to highlight that city’s quintessential dish (the cheese steak). The Philadelphia R&B vocal group Boyz II Men also introduced several Philly references to “The City of Brotherly Love,” the episode’s song about compromise.“We added Ishkabibble’s, which is a Philadelphia cheese steak spot in down south Philly,” said Wanyá Morris, a member of Boyz II Men. They also worked a signature local greeting into the start of the song, a hoot that sounds roughly like “Heer-yoh.”In addition to revising the musical number, the group’s members worked on being “relatable,” Morris said.The Philadelphia R&B group Boyz II Men helped write Philly-specific references into the song they sing for Anne and Lamb, including one for a beloved cheese steak restaurant.YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyThey wanted to act as if they were talking to their own children, he added, “so that the kids cannot look at us like, ‘Who are these old dudes singing to these cartoon characters?’”Including long-established artists, however, was part of a strategy to make “Jam Van” multigenerational viewing. The show also offers historical humor: At one point, Grumpy GPS even evokes the computer Hal in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Craig Hunter, global head of kids and family for YouTube Originals, who acquired the series, praised it for offering insights into “various things that the everyday kid wasn’t necessarily aware of.” Although it is far too early to know if the show will have a second season, he acknowledged that the concept “has legs.”As for the creators of “Jam Van,” they’re already dreaming of places, artists and musical genres that haven’t yet been tapped.“K-pop?” Sherman said. “We’re ready to go.” More

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      26 Years After Its Singer’s Sudden Death, Brainiac (Briefly) Returns

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      The indie-rock band from Ohio was poised for a breakout when it lost its frontman, Tim Taylor, in a 1997 car accident. Now the group is releasing an EP of demos and taking the stage once again.On a late May morning in 1997, a mangled lamppost surrounded by the wreckage of a 1977 forest-green Mercedes-Benz stood near Lawn and North Main Streets in Dayton, Ohio. Tim Taylor, the 28-year-old leader of Brainiac, the city’s swiftly ascending synth-punk band, had been driving home alone from a local nightclub at about 3:25 a.m. when his car spun out of control, crashed and exploded in flames.Brainiac — often stylized as 3RA1N1AC — had recently toured with Beck, played Lollapalooza and recorded with Kim Deal, John Peel and Steve Albini. The group was known for its hyper-energetic live performances, where Taylor writhed across the stage. According to the band’s surviving members — the bassist Juan Monasterio, the guitarist John Schmersal and the drummer Tyler Trent — major labels, including Interscope and Elektra, were wooing the group with seven-figure offers. But when Taylor, the son of the cellist Linda Taylor and the jazz guitarist Terry Taylor, died in the accident, so did Brainiac, and the opportunities awaiting the band.In the ensuing years, the group’s influence was cited by figures as varied as Trent Reznor and Fred Armisen. “I still can’t think of an artist that approaches their flavor of mad science — clanging, clashing, vibrant, silly, scary, unafraid,” said Sadie Dupuis of the band Speedy Ortiz, who named her solo project Sad13 as a Brainiac tribute. She called the band’s mix of guitar heroics, processed screams and other experimentation “pure genius.”A 2019 documentary, “Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero,” revived interest in the group and helped reunite Monasterio, Schmersal and Trent. “The documentary was really cathartic,” Schmersal said in a phone interview. “Once the band was done, we all scurried away like ants from a magnifying glass. But we realized how much we enjoyed our friendship that dissipated by Timmy leaving.”With momentum from the documentary and downtime during the pandemic, Schmersal decided to finally open the Brainiac archives — old suitcases filled with cassettes, photos and ephemera. “In the past, whenever I’d open the suitcases, I’d spiral out of control, then run away,” he said. “But I started thinking about why I’ve held on to them for so long. And where they should go.”Now, 26 years after Taylor’s death, Brainiac is releasing “The Predator Nominate EP,” featuring nine never-before-heard demos, on Friday. “There’s an eight-track reel-to-reel floating around with old recordings, but no one knows where it is,” Schmersal said. “But ‘Predator Nominate’ is Brainiac’s last concerted effort, our last complete thought, before the end.”During the band’s brief run from 1992 to 1997, it released three full albums of chugging and sometimes sprawling punk that relied mostly on traditional rock instruments. Taylor, a singer, guitarist and keyboardist, also played a Moog, and often modulated his vocals with synths and effects, inspired by the Dayton funk innovator Roger Troutman. For its final EP, “Electro-Shock for President,” which arrived only weeks before Taylor’s death, Brainiac employed a more fully realized electronic palette that continues on “Predator Nominate.”“Brainiac went electronic when harsh rock music wasn’t really being interpreted via electronics,” said Kelley Deal of the Breeders, whose sister and bandmate, Kim, produced the 1995 Brainiac EP “Internationale.” “They were always more liberal with song structure, but they still made radio-friendly music. Only they made it electronic. And so aggressive.”“Predator Nominate,” which clocks in under 13 minutes, is more haunting than harsh. The title track channels early Cure recordings; “Smothered Inside” recalls Brainiac’s indie-rock beginnings; lighthearted synth vignettes like “The Game” balance sad, jarring songs like “Going Wrong”; and “Kiss the Dog” is a pop gem.The band’s unexpected release of previously unheard music comes with another surprise: a return to the road. Brainiac is playing a handful of U.S. dates and a brief tour of the United Kingdom with Mogwai, whose singer and guitarist, Stuart Braithwaite, shared a bill with the band in the mid-90s as a budding musician. “They were hands down the weirdest and most engaging band I’d seen,” Braithwaite wrote in his recent memoir. “Super melodic but incredibly obtuse.”Schmersal, who traditionally sang backup, will now serve as lead singer. “No one understands the nuances of this music like we do,” he said. “If we don’t perform it, you’ll never hear it this way.” The Dayton guitarist, vocalist and synth player Tim Krug, a student of the band for some 30 years, will join for the tour.Trent, the band’s drummer, emphasized that Taylor is irreplaceable. “For us, this is a way to still be in awe of Tim, to honor him, or else we wouldn’t do it. And I wish people could see how much joy and life and healing Tim’s mom gets out of this,” he said. “Tim was one in a million.”In the years since Brainiac’s premature end, Schmersal, who is now based in Palm Springs, Calif., founded the band Enon and went on to play with Caribou, Crooks on Tape and Vertical Scratchers. Monasterio, a freelance motion-graphics designer, moved to Los Angeles. Trent still lives in Dayton, where he serves as associate pastor at Lifepointe Church and director of a local nonprofit, Hope4 Kettering.Monasterio, who befriended Taylor in fifth grade, called the release “probably the final chapter on Brainiac,” and suggested others might take inspiration from it: “Maybe someone will tap into Tim’s genius and make something beautiful. I think Tim would want that, too.”He recalled a conversation with his bandmate that has eerie resonance today. “One time, I was out with Tim, and I remember him saying, ‘We have to rise like a phoenix from the flames,’” Monasterio remembered. “He was saying Brainiac had to be reborn in some way.” More

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      John Cale’s Musical Journey Knows No Limits

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      LOS ANGELES — Just a few years after he’d left the provincial Welsh mining town where he was born, a 23-year-old John Cale was invited — along with his friend Lou Reed and their budding band the Velvet Underground — to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York.“The first day you walked in, you joined the Academy,” Cale said in the industrial but cozy lounge of his studio on a recent afternoon, recalling the first meeting with the pop-art power broker who would become the band’s manager. “The atmosphere of that place was really special,” he added; artists from all over “came in and unzipped a bag of magic.”The musician, now 80, was reminiscing on an uncharacteristically gloomy January day in Los Angeles. Cale seemed to have summoned the Welsh weather along with his memories, and sat bundled up in a black puffer jacket and wool socks. “That’s the first thing you remember: all the work that was being done,” Cale said. “Andy was nonstop. We were nonstop. And it paid off.”It was, however, just the beginning of one of the most accomplished résumés in rock history, if not 20th-century culture. Cale studied under John Cage and Aaron Copland, and later learned about the transformative power of drone from the avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. He had a fling with Edie Sedgwick and a short marriage to Betsey Johnson. After he was unceremoniously booted from the Velvet Underground in 1968, he became a prolific, risk-taking producer, helming trailblazing albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith. His catalog as a solo artist is unbelievably rich, tonally varied and full of buried treasure. He is arguably responsible for plucking a little-known Leonard Cohen deep cut called “Hallelujah” out of obscurity. He is inarguably the most important electric viola player rock has ever seen.“Something snapped, in a good way,” Cale said of a creative streak during the pandemic.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIt’s possible to chart the eras of Cale’s vast career by his succession of iconic haircuts: the chic, chin-length pageboy of his Velvet Underground days; the greasy bed head of his proto-punk ’70s; an asymmetric art-crop as the ’80s became the ’90s; and the feathery, birdlike style in which he now wears his distinguished, white-gray locks, set off by a playfully Mephistophelian soul patch. Two months before his 81st birthday, he is still spry, sneaking in a pre-interview workout in his studio’s gym. (He’s been a disciplined exerciser since the late 1980s, when he kicked drugs by taking up the most physically demanding sport he could think of: squash. “It got me through,” he said.)On Cale’s new album, “Mercy” — his 17th as a solo artist, due next week — he occasionally glances back, on songs that honor late friends like David Bowie and Nico. But more often he’s making art focused firmly and defiantly in the present, responding to the political turmoil of the day (one song is titled “The Legal Status of Ice”) and collaborating with a supporting cast of younger avant-garde and indie artists: The celestial crooner Weyes Blood, the punky provocateurs Fat White Family and the art-rock dreamers Animal Collective all make guest appearances.“I consider it an honor to watch little decisions he makes,” said the Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz (who records as Geologist), in a phone interview. “He’ll throw out one or two sentences to explain it, and it means the world.”Cale has always been a man of contradiction: a classically trained violist with a penchant for chaos. In our conversation, he casually referenced such thinkers as John Ruskin, Bertrand Russell and Henri-Louis Bergson, but was just as quick to ad-lib a flatulence joke. When interrupted midsentence by a deafening gurgling coming from the building’s pipes, Cale grinned impishly and said “Excuse me” with impressive comic timing.“He could be so formal in a certain way — he’s so learned and classical,” Smith said in a phone interview. (Cale produced her landmark debut album, “Horses,” in 1975.) “But he could also be as wild as any of us.” She recalled a kinetic 1976 gig in Cleveland when Cale played bass with her band during a cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” and “it got to such a fever pitch and the ceiling was so low that John put his bass through the ceiling of the club.” Cale in 1963, studying a musical score.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesThe breadth of Cale’s accomplishments has left his collaborators and admirers in awe. “If you had one part of his career, you’d be a legend,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said in a phone interview. “If you were only the producer that John Cale was, you’d go down in history. If you were only in the Velvet Underground, your ticket’s punched to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But then you did all those Island solo records, and the Eno collaboration, and then ‘Songs for Drella,’” he added, referring to Cale’s 1989 reunion with Reed, before trailing off.For all his creative triumphs, Cale never quite became a household name like Reed, his collaborator and sometimes antagonist. Todd Haynes’s acclaimed 2021 documentary “The Velvet Underground,” though, served as a corrective, arguing that Cale was the band’s secret weapon.“There was no way to overstate John’s absolutely primary role as a conceptual and creative partner with Lou Reed,” Haynes said in a phone interview, describing Cale as “the most elegant flamethrower of ’60s utopianism that I can think of.”Cale loved the film (“The minute I heard Todd was going to be doing it, I relaxed”), but he’s not one to sit around and think too hard about his legacy — he still has work to do. “I think that came to me from Wales and my mother,” he said. “She was a teacher, and I got it all basically from her: You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCALE, THE ONLY child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher, spent the first 18 years of his life in Garnant, a small village in South Wales, “a strange, remote, some said mystical land,” as he wrote in his autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen.” When he was 7, he started learning English, and classical piano. A few years later, the BBC came to his school and recorded the precocious youngster playing a composition he’d written himself. The sheet music went missing, so Cale had to wing the ending. It was a thrill: his first improvisation.“Creatively it liberated me,” he wrote. “I started to take chances.”The viola, the crucial element that would later transform the Velvet Underground’s sound, came into Cale’s hands by chance: When it came time to choose an instrument for the school orchestra, it was the only one left. The local library was his portal to other worlds, especially when he realized he could request sheet music. “I was able to put my fingers in all these scores of the avant-garde,” he said at his studio, citing Webern, Berg, Haubenstock-Ramati and, of course, John Cage.When Cale was 15, he caught “Rock Around the Clock” at the local cinema; all his classmates rushed the screen and started to bop. He was electrified, bewildered — up until then, Stravinsky had been his idea of rock ’n’ roll — and a little scared that everyone was about to get in trouble. After that, he said, “I was confused. Did I want to go into the avant-garde, or did I want to go into rock ’n’ roll?”He went to Goldsmiths’ College in London, a suitable place to figure that out. Cale’s incendiary student performances — including one that involved playing a piano with his elbows — scandalized some of the faculty, but he was already dreaming of America. After exchanging letters with Cage and Copland, Cale received a scholarship from Leonard Bernstein to study at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. In 1963, he came to New York and quickly fell in with Conrad, Young and the boldly minimalist Theater of Eternal Music, joining them frequently to play meditative drones that lasted for hours. At last he’d found community, and the mind-expanding experiences he’d always longed for.“I knew what I wanted from New York,” he said. “And I got it.” Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Lou Reed had been born exactly a week before Cale; “I always knew he had an edge on me!” Cale quipped in his memoir. So began one of the most generative and — still, almost a decade after Reed’s death — tumultuous partnerships in rock.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesEach time I asked Cale about Reed, he slyly rerouted the conversation: “We drifted apart,” he finally said. But maybe everything that needs to be known is right there in the music. As he wrote in a statement shortly after Reed’s 2013 death, “Unlike so many with similar stories — we have the best of our fury laid on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse.” Last year, the archival label Light in the Attic released a collection of 17 previously unreleased tracks from Reed’s earliest recordings, including a May 1965 tape that features folky, self-recorded demos of future classics like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (Cale, who was Reed’s roommate in a drug-fueled Ludlow Street loft at the time, sings backup on some of them.) It’s revelatory to hear the material in this larval stage: They are unmistakably Lou Reed songs, yes, but they’re not yet Velvet Underground songs. “You see that he really hadn’t begun to imagine the potential of this music,” Haynes said of Reed, “and that what he was doing in content and lyrics hadn’t found a correlative energy and sensibility yet in the music.” Enter Cale, with his interest in drone, his connection to the avant-garde, and the low, sonorous viola that melted down traditional rock-song structures like molten lava.“That dialectic, that tension, that attraction, that romance that brought the two of them together,” Haynes said, “therein lies the mystery of this music.”THE GLORY DAYS didn’t last long. “I didn’t quite know how to exist outside the environment of the Factory,” Cale said. Warhol spent the latter part of 1968 recovering from a gunshot wound; by the end of the summer, Reed had given the rest of the Velvet Underground a Cale-or-me ultimatum, and insisted that the guitarist Sterling Morrison break the news. For all their merits, the albums that the V.U. released without Cale are quieter and more conventional. (“Who gets kicked out of the Velvet Underground for being too avant-garde?” Murphy mused. “I love that. That’s John Cale.”)Cale, left, and Lou Reed performing in the Velvet Underground. In 1968, Cale was forced out of the band he had helped found.Adam Ritchie/Redferns, via Getty Images“It made some other people in the band unhappy, but it was just a challenge to me,” Cale said of his ousting. That Welsh work ethic, and his mother’s humble advice, saved him: “I decided, well, OK, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can get up, move your butt and produce some things.” The first album he worked on would change Nico’s image forever, the stark, harrowing “Marble Index.” The second was the Stooges’ 1969 self-titled debut, one of the founding documents of punk.After the refined chamber-pop of his great 1973 album “Paris 1919,” Cale’s solo work grew increasingly feral, too. He unleashed lacerating screams on the 1974 album “Fear” (the recording that made Smith seek him out as a producer) and embraced post-punk on the adventurous “Honi Soit,” from 1981. “There’s this counterpoint of Lou going and doing Zen,” he said and laughed, referring to Reed’s interest in meditation and tai chi, “and then I’m going and doing rock ’n’ roll.”Cale and Reed hadn’t spoken in years when they ran into each other at Warhol’s funeral in 1987. The old spark was back, and they began work on a tribute to their former manager, which would become the theatrical, confidently sparse “Songs for Drella.” By the time it arrived in 1989, they were no longer speaking. A Velvet Underground reunion in the early 1990s was similarly short-lived, also owing to creative differences between Cale and Reed.Cale cleaned up his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle when his daughter, Eden, was born in 1985. He released more classically minded albums and continued to exert an inconspicuous influence on musical culture. In the early 1990s, a small French record label asked him to contribute to a Leonard Cohen tribute album. He chose “Hallelujah” — a song from the quietly received 1984 album “Various Positions” that he’d first heard Cohen perform at the Beacon Theater — and made some tweaks to the lyrics and simplified the song’s arrangement. His version certainly struck a chord. When Jeff Buckley first began playing the song, a magazine editor in the audience told him backstage that he liked his Cohen cover. “I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version,” Buckley is said to have replied. “I know it by John Cale.”Cale said he inherited his work ethic from his mother: “You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCale has remarkably open ears for an octogenarian: He often speaks of “what a boon to music” hip-hop is and, in our conversation, expressed admiration for rap producers like Mike Will Made-It and Dr. Dre. “Hey guys, do you know what’s going on here?” he said to his imagined peers. “Better ideas of mixing, better ideas of melodies — it’s like, get on the train or get off.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom. “I jokingly tell people that it’s like a friendly godfather-type relationship that I have with him,” Animal Collective’s Weitz said. Cale has long been an admirer of the band, and Weitz described their reciprocal appearances on each other’s records — Cale played on the band’s 2016 album “Painting With,” and Animal Collective appear on a track from “Mercy” — as a kind of “music-for-music swap.”Cale still makes art on the edge. In June 2019, he headlined the DMZ Peace Train Festival on the border between North and South Korea. (The wildlife surprised him: “Korean rattlesnakes!”) In 2014, at London’s Barbican museum, he conducted the first-ever orchestra of flying drones. A certain defiance also courses through “Mercy,” a slow, meditative album. The songs have immediate emotional resonance, but they ask the listener for patience, too.LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy admires that. “He always approaches it as, ‘What’s interesting to me right now?’ rather than being careerist,” he said. “Songs made by people like that last in a very different way,” he continued. “They feel alive and current for much longer, because they’re made with respect.”There are plenty more of them coming, too. Cale spent much of the pandemic holed up in his studio, and he estimates that he’s written around 80 new compositions in the past few years. “Something snapped, in a good way,” he said. “It was like, you can’t turn your back on this, this is something that’s going to go on. And I want to go on.” More

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      Fans Mourn Lisa Marie Presley, Daughter of the King, at Graceland

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      At the stone wall outside Elvis Presley’s estate, his only child was remembered as a kind of rock star royalty.MEMPHIS — Some wrote messages on the stone wall in front of Graceland, the storied Memphis mansion that housed Elvis Presley’s studded jumpsuits and his private plane, the Lisa Marie, customized with gold bathroom fixtures. Others left flowers.A day after the death of Lisa Marie Presley, 54, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis, fans mourned her loss and recalled how the Presleys had touched their lives.At Graceland on Friday, Stephanie T. Perez, whose great-aunt taught Elvis in high school and whose grandfather worked for him as an upholsterer, said she had visited the same spot with her mother years ago, when the king of rock ’n’ roll had died. She was 2.“I just felt it was important to be on this street the day his daughter passed away,” Ms. Perez, now 47, said. “You hate it for them. You hate it for Elvis’s legacy. You hate it for her life that was cut short. But most of all, just sorrow for the kids and Priscilla.”Now Lisa Marie Presley, who owns the mansion and original grounds at Graceland, will be buried there, according to the Lede Co., which represents her daughter Riley Keough. “Lisa Marie’s final resting place will be at Graceland, next to her beloved son Ben,” it said in a statement.It was not immediately clear on Friday what had caused Ms. Presley’s death. Her mother, Priscilla Presley, said in a statement on Thursday that her daughter had been receiving medical attention but did not share more information. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known,” Ms. Presley said.Lisa Marie Presley was born to Elvis and Priscilla in 1968. He died when she was 9.Keystone/Getty ImagesLisa Marie Presley was famous from the moment she was born, the daughter of one of the biggest stars in the world. And while she would go on to try to forge her own path as a singer, she remained best known as a kind of rock star royalty: She was the only daughter of Elvis and, from 1994 to 1996, she was married to Michael Jackson.But she led a tumultuous life, one that was buffeted by loss. She lost her father when she was 9. Married and divorced four times, she also struggled with opioid addiction. Her son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020. Less than six months before her own death, she wrote about grieving his loss, saying that it had “destroyed” her but that she kept going for the sake of her three daughters.Fans mourned her outside Graceland, the eclectic eight-bedroom residence in Memphis that Ms. Presley inherited after her father’s death and which opened to the public as a museum in 1982.The plane that Elvis named after his daughter sits at Graceland.Lucy Garrett for The New York TimesGraceland has housed more than a million artifacts, among them a fake-fur cocoon bed with a stereo in the canopy. Then there is Mr. Presley’s private plane, the Lisa Marie, which had four TVs and a stereo with 52 speakers.Within hours of the announcement of Ms. Presley’s death late Thursday, about a dozen Elvis fans arrived at Graceland, bundled up in coats and gloves on a blustery chilly nightKimber Tomlinson, 49, recalled how Elvis fans in Memphis had been smitten from the start with Lisa Marie, who was so well-known here that nobody seemed to feel the need to use her last name. Her first memory of Elvis, she added, was when her mother took her to Graceland about a week or so after his funeral.“It’s sad, so sad,” Ms. Tomlinson said. “Her life was always in the spotlight,” she added, referring to Lisa Marie. “That family has had their share of heart attacks and heartbreaks.”Ms. Tomlinson recited the long history of loss among the Presley family: Gladys, Elvis’s mother died at age 46 in 1958; Elvis died in 1977 of heart failure at age 42; Lisa Marie’s son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020 at age 27; and now there was Lisa Marie’s death.The sprawling estate opened for business as usual on Friday, just days after Ms. Presley had joined fans at the mansion on Sunday to celebrate what would have been Elvis’s 88th birthday.Jason Hanley, the vice president of education at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, observed that Ms. Presley’s death was a cultural touchstone of sorts because she was the daughter of the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” and had been married to the “King of Pop.” Her death, he said, was imbued with a particular wistfulness and nostalgia for an era that had changed American music.“She was the heir to Elvis’s empire and rock ’n’ roll royalty, and she recorded three great albums in which she wanted to say something about herself in the shadow of her father’s legacy,” he said. “Her death is heartbreaking for us because it marks the passage of time.”A bouquet of flowers for Lisa Marie Presley at Graceland.Lucy Garrett for The New York TimesOne of her former husbands, the actor Nicolas Cage, told The Hollywood Reporter he was devastated by Ms. Presley’s death. “Lisa had the greatest laugh of anyone I ever met,” he was quoted as saying. “She lit up every room, and I am heartbroken.” The Michael Jackson estate said in a statement that Jackson had “cherished the special bond” he and Ms. Presley shared and that he was “comforted by Lisa Marie’s generous love, concern and care during their times together.”Ms. Presley released three albums in which she set out to forge her own musical path while drawing from the music of her father, whose singular cocktail of blues, gospel, pop and country made him the first huge rock star and transformed American music.She said she had been hesitant to lean on her family name. But she was overruled by her record label, which made the personal “Lights Out” — “Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis. That’s where my family’s buried and gone” — her debut single in 2003.Her father’s larger-than-life legacy remained with her right until her final days. On Tuesday, she was again conjuring him at the Golden Globes, telling a television host that Austin Butler, who won the lead acting award for drama for his performance in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis,” had perfectly embodied her father.But at Graceland on Friday, it was Lisa Marie that Presley fans remembered. Perez left her own message on Graceland’s wall: “Godspeed, LMP.”Cindy Wolff More

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      Lisa Marie Presley, Singer-Songwriter and Daughter of Elvis, Dies at 54

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      Her death in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a life tinged with tragedy, came after a medical emergency and brief hospitalization.Lisa Marie Presley, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis Presley, died on Thursday in Los Angeles after a medical emergency and a brief hospitalization. She was 54.Sam Mast, a representative of Priscilla Presley, her mother, announced the death in a statement. Earlier in the day, Ms. Presley said her daughter had been receiving medical attention but did not provide more information. Ms. Presley lived in Calabasas, Calif., west of Los Angeles.The daughter of one of the most celebrated performers in music history, Ms. Presley followed her father’s career path. She released three rock albums, on which she set out to establish a sound of her own while also paying homage to the man who forever changed the American soundscape with his blend of blues, gospel, country and other genres.Hers was a life tinged with tragedy. She was 9 when her father died in 1977, and she lost others who had been close to her along the way, including her former husband, Michael Jackson. The suicide of her only son, Benjamin Keough, at age 27 in 2020 hit her especially hard, an episode she wrote about movingly last year in an essay for People magazine to mark National Grief Awareness Day.“My and my three daughters’ lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death,” she wrote. “We live in this every. Single. Day.”The enormous legacy of her father was a constant presence in her life. On Tuesday, she was again celebrating him at the Golden Globe awards ceremony, telling Extra TV that Austin Butler, who won the award for lead actor in a drama for his performance in the title role of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” had perfectly captured the essence of her father.“I was mind-blown, truly,” Ms. Presley said. “I actually had to take, like, five days to process it because it was so spot on and authentic.”In his speech accepting his award during the televised ceremony, Mr. Butler singled out the Presley family for its friendship and support as the camera panned to a visibly moved Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley seated at his table.Ms. Presley in 2012 beside a display of her childhood crib at Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis. Lance Murphey/Associated PressOn Sunday, Ms. Presley was at Graceland, her father’s estate in Memphis, to commemorate what would have been his 88th birthday.Father and daughter were extremely close. Elvis once flew Lisa Marie to Idaho after she said she had never seen snow. He named his 1958 Convair 880 private jet the Lisa Marie.Ms. Presley owned Graceland and her father’s artifacts, as well as 15 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises, the corporate entity created by a Presley trust to manage its assets.Though Ms. Presley’s music career never reached the heights her father’s had achieved, his influence was evident in her music and lyrics. “Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis,” she sang in “Lights Out,” a song from “To Whom It May Concern,” her debut album, released in 2003. “That’s where my family’s buried and gone.”In 2018, she co-produced an album celebrating Elvis’s love of gospel music and sang along with a recording of him on one of the songs. “I got moved by it as I was singing,” she said in an interview.If her albums produced no signature hits, her last name enshrined her as a celebrity. And her star-studded relationships only deepened that perception. Foremost among those was her marriage, from 1994 to 1996, to Mr. Jackson. Together, the pair — one the daughter of the king of rock ’n’ roll, the other regarded as the king of pop — attracted the glare of cameras and bountiful attention. In August 1994, The New York Times reported on the couple’s revelation that they had married.“After announcing a union that might have been conceived in supermarket-tabloid heaven and proclaiming a need for privacy, the world’s most famous newlyweds were holed up last night in a place not known for its isolation: Trump Tower,” The Times wrote. “At 5:40 p.m., a few hours after the statement was released in Los Angeles, the developer Donald J. Trump emerged from Trump Tower to the kind of reportorial throng normally reserved for the likes of, well, Michael Jackson or Donald Trump, and confirmed that, yes, the couple were ensconced on the top floor of the Fifth Avenue tower.”There was speculation that the marriage was an effort to deflect attention from investigations into allegations by a 13-year-old boy that Mr. Jackson had molested him. For a time the couple portrayed a happy marriage — Ms. Presley said she wanted to be known as “Mrs. Lisa Marie Presley-Jackson.” But by the end of 1995 they had separated, and they divorced the next year.Ms. Presley was married three other times; those marriages ended in divorce as well. She married the singer and songwriter Danny Keough in 1988, the actor Nicolas Cage in 2002 and, most recently, in 2006, Michael Lockwood, a guitarist who was music director of her 2005 album, “Now What.” They divorced in 2021.Her survivors include her daughter with Mr. Keough, the actress Riley Keough, and twin daughters with Mr. Lockwood, Harper and Finley.In a foreword to the 2019 book “The United States of Opioids: A Prescription for Liberating a Nation in Pain” by Harry Nelson, Ms. Presley wrote about her struggle with addiction, which she said began when she was given a prescription for pain medication after the birth of the twins in 2008. She quoted her own response to a point-blank question about her problem posed to her on the “Today” show in 2018.“I’m not perfect,” she recalled saying. “My father wasn’t perfect, no one’s perfect. It’s what you do with it after you learn and then you try to help others with it.”Elvis and Priscilla Presley with their daughter, Lisa Marie, after her birth in 1968. Associated PressLisa Marie Presley was born in Memphis on Feb. 1, 1968. “I’m a shaky man,” her famous father told reporters when his wife was admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital for the birth, an occasion that made international news.In “Elvis by the Presleys,” a 2005 book of recollections by Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley and others, Lisa Marie wrote of her childhood memories of her father.“The thing about my father is that he never hid anything,” she wrote. “He didn’t have a facade. Never put on airs. If he was crabby, you knew it. If he was angry, he’d let you know. His temper could give Darth Vader a run for his money. But if he was happy, everyone was happy.”Home life had its odd moments.“One time in the middle of the night I’m awoken by this incredibly loud noise coming from my father’s bedroom, which was right next to mine,” she related. “I get out of bed and see the guys buzz-sawing down his door so they can move in a grand piano. He felt like playing piano and singing gospel songs.”In the same book, Priscilla Presley wrote of Elvis’s tenderness toward his daughter in her early years.“Twice he spanked her on her bottom,” she remembered. “Once she colored a velvet couch with crayons, and once she ignored his warnings and got too close to the edge of the pool. The spankings were restrained and also warranted. But poor Elvis was a mess afterwards. You would have thought he had committed murder.”As a performer, Ms. Presley, whose most recent album was “Storm & Grace” (2012), knew her name would always be impossible to escape. But she was eager to be taken on her own terms.“It’s my own thing,” she said of her career in a 2003 interview with The Times. “I’m just trying to be an artist. I’m not trying to be Elvis Presley’s child. And I’m not trying to run from it either.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Everything But the Girl’s Long-Awaited Return, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Miley Cyrus, Vagabon, Lonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Everything But the Girl, ‘Nothing Left to Lose’Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt released their last album as Everything But the Girl in 1999. They announce a new one with “Nothing Left to Lose,” a song that shows its danceable desolation from its initial bass note and twitchy, echoey drumbeat, even before Thorn arrives to sing, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” The production opens up a hollow void between throbbing bass tones and just enough single notes to sketch the rhythm and harmony; Thorn’s voice fills it with melancholy longing. JON PARELESSkrillex, Fred again.. and Flowdan, ‘Rumble’Skrillex, PinkPantheress and Trippie Redd, ‘Way Back’On his first singles as a lead artist since 2021, Skrillex explores two different sides of the jungle family tree. On “Way Back,” he takes a pop approach, partnering with the dreamlike vocalist PinkPantheress on a bubbly, quick-stepping flirtation anchored by some anguished pleas from Trippie Redd. On “Rumble,” though, he leans in to a harsher sound more in keeping with the thundering dubstep he first made his name with, but refracted though a jagged lens, with Fred again.. manipulating samples and the grime veteran Flowdan declaiming with cool detachment. JON CARAMANICABizarrap and Shakira, ‘Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53’Shakira’s revenge on her ex-boyfriend of 11 years, the soccer player Gerard Piqué, is as much a canny social media beef as a song. “I was out of your league,” she sings, going on to rap, “So much time at the gym/But maybe work out your brain a bit too.” Dozens of rappers and singers have collaborated with the Argentine producer Bizarrap, but unlike most of his sessions, “Vol. 53” isn’t a beat and a rap; it’s a fully produced electro-pop song with multitracked vocals and a contemptuous, self-branded hook: “A she-wolf like me isn’t for guys like you.” PARELESMiley Cyrus, ‘Flowers’Miley Cyrus exudes a cool confidence on “Flowers,” the breezy leadoff single from “Endless Summer Vacation,” due March 10. At first, the song seems like a brooding breakup post-mortem, but that turns out to be a ruse: “Started to cry, but then remembered I can buy myself flowers,” Cyrus sings, and the mood suddenly lifts. The relatively subdued chorus melody may not demand much of Cyrus, but her vocals are imbued with a laid-back maturity and convincing self-assurance. “I can take myself dancing, and I can hold my own hand,” she sings with her signature huskiness. “Yeah, I can love me better than you can.” LINDSAY ZOLADZParamore, ‘C’est Comme Ça’Latching on to the deadpan, spoken-word sarcasm of post-punk groups like Dry Cleaning, in “C’est Comme Ça” Hayley Williams takes on the isolation and enforced introspection of the pandemic era. “Sit still long enough to listen to yourself/Or maybe just long enough for you to atrophy to hell,” she deadpans over a disco thump with scrubbing guitars. The nonsense-syllable chorus — “Na na na na!” — is where Paramore’s pop-punk reflexes kick in. PARELESVagabon, ‘Carpenter’On her buoyant new single “Carpenter,” Laetitia Tamko, who records as Vagabon, opts for a sound that’s sleeker, lighter and more playful than her previous material. Rostam Batmanglij’s coproduction provides a reset, but the sweet melancholy of Tamko’s vocals gives the song an added emotional weight. “I wasn’t ready for what you were saying,” she sings on this tale of gradual maturity. “But I’m more ready now.” ZOLADZGracie Abrams, ‘Where Do We Go Now?’Here is pop’s verbal compression at its most distilled, to single syllables: “When I kissed you back I lied/you don’t know how long I tried.” Gracie Abrams, the definitive online sad girl, breathily sings, continuing a question — “Where do we go now?” — that has an open-ended answer. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Aselestine’The word “Aselestine” sounds like a cross between a crystal and an over-the-counter medication, but in Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo’s mouth, it becomes a conduit for mellifluous, vowel-y beauty. “Aselestine, where are you?” she sings with numb serenity. “The drugs don’t do what you said they do.” Like “Fallout,” the previous single from the indie legends’ 16th album “This Stupid World,” “Aselestine” is vintage Yo La Tengo, a timeless, quietly poignant distillation of the band’s singular essence. ZOLADZYahritza y Su Esencia, ‘Cambiaste’The teenage singer Yahritza Martinez of the family band Yahritza y Su Esencia is powerful and peculiar. She sings with preternatural theatricality and emotional heft, yet somehow maintains a youthful casualness. On “Cambiaste,” she yearns in stops and starts, lamenting someone who’s cast her aside. The song moves slowly, almost erratically, as if she’s staggering through sludge in search of refuge. It’s the latest in a slew of Yahritza songs that might be heard as unerringly odd if they weren’t so instinctually pop. CARAMANICAMoneybagg Yo featuring GloRilla, ‘On Wat U On’A tug of war of toxicity between two of Memphis’s finest rappers, “On Wat U On” is unsentimental and testy. Moneybagg Yo is the cad, rapping about needing freedom (“Tryna see me every weekend, damn/I need space to miss you”). And GloRilla is aggrieved, constitutionally fed up — she’s had enough: “I be busting out the windows/got him switching up his cars.” After two minutes of back and forth, there is, notably, no resolution — just recrimination and resentment. CARAMANICAIggy Pop, ‘New Atlantis’Most of Iggy Pop’s new album, “Every Loser,” circles back to the bone-crushing riffs and surly bluntness of his glory days in the Stooges — sometimes pointedly (in “Frenzy” and “Neo Punk”), and sometimes approaching self-parody. But there are glimmers of Iggy’s other eras in songs like “New Atlantis,” a cowbell-thumping, mock-admiring tribute to his current home, Miami. Being Iggy, he appreciates the city for its seaminess and its vulnerability to climate change: “New Atlantis, lying low/New Atlantis, sinking slow,” he sings. PARELESLonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe, ‘Oh Me, Oh My’The songwriter and outsider visual artist Lonnie Holley previews a new album, “Oh Me, Oh My,” with its elegiac title track: two slowly alternating piano chords underpinned by a bass fiddle and surrounded by echoes and, later, electric guitars and more mysterious sounds. Holley merges preaching and singing, as he declaims “I believe that the deeper we go, the more chances there are for us to understand.” He invokes family and faith, joined by Michael Stipe from R.E.M. intoning, “Oh me, oh my”; it’s thick with atmosphere and memory, offering no conclusions. PARELES More

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      Jeff Beck, Guitarist With a Chapter in Rock History, Dies at 78

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      His playing with the Yardbirds and as leader of his own bands brought a sense of adventure to their groundbreaking recordings.Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday in a hospital near his home at Riverhall, a rural estate in southern England. He was 78.The cause was bacterial meningitis, Melissa Dragich, his publicist, said.During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his own bands, Mr. Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make the recordings by those groups groundbreaking.In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution.Three years later, when Mr. Beck formed his own band, later known as the Jeff Beck Group — along with Rod Stewart, a little-known singer at the time, and the equally obscure Ron Wood on bass — the weight of the music created an early template for heavy metal. Specifically, the band’s 1968 debut, “Truth,” provided a blueprint that another former guitar colleague from the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, drew on to found Led Zeppelin several months later.The Jeff Beck Group in 1967, including, from left, Ron Wood, Mr. Beck, Mickey Waller and Rod Stewart.Ivan Keeman/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn 1975, when Mr. Beck began his solo career with the “Blow by Blow” album, he reconfigured the essential formula of that era’s fusion movement, tipping the balance of its influences from jazz to rock and funk, in the process creating a sound that was both startlingly new and highly successful. “Blow by Blow” became a Billboard Top 5 and, selling a million or more copies, a platinum hit.Along the way, Mr. Beck helped either pioneer or amplify important technical innovations on his instrument. He elaborated the use of distortion and feedback effects, earlier explored by Pete Townshend; intensified the effect of bending notes on the guitar; and widened the range of expression that could be coaxed from devices attached to the guitar like the whammy bar.Drawing on such techniques, Mr. Beck could weaponize his strings to hit like a stun gun or caress them to express what felt like a kiss. His work had humor, too, with licks that could cackle and leads that could tease.“Even in the Yardbirds, he had a tone that was melodic, but in your face — bright, urgent and edgy,” wrote Mike Campbell, of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, for an article in Rolling Stone magazine to accompany a poll that named Mr. Beck the fifth greatest guitar player of all time. “It’s like he’s saying: ‘I’m Jeff Beck. I’m right here. You can’t ignore me.’”“Everybody respects Jeff,” Mr. Page said in a 2018 documentary titled “Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story.” “He’s an extraordinary musician. He’s having a conversation with you when he’s playing.”Despite the accolades, Mr. Beck never achieved the sales or popularity of the guitarists considered to be his peers, including Mr. Page, Mr. Clapton and one of the players he admired most, Jimi Hendrix. Only two of his albums achieved platinum status in the United States, including “Wired,” his 1976 follow-up to “Blow by Blow.”“Part of the reason is never having attempted to get into mainstream pop, rock or heavy metal or anything like that,” he told the arts website Elsewhere in 2009. “Shutting those doors means you’ve only got a limited space to squeeze through.”It hurt, too, that the mercurial Mr. Beck often worked without a lead singer, and that his groups seldom lasted long. His first band, with Mr. Stewart and Mr. Wood, stood on the cusp of superstardom, with an invitation to play Woodstock. But Mr. Beck turned down the offer, and the group dissolved shortly thereafter.Another band he led that held commercial promise, Beck, Bogert & Appice (featuring the rhythm section of Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, formerly of Vanilla Fudge) earned a gold album in 1973, but Mr. Beck scotched the project after less than two years. Not that he minded his status in the industry.“I’ve never made the big time, mercifully,” Mr. Beck told Rolling Stone in 2018. “When you look around and see who has made it huge, it’s a really rotten place to be.”Mr. Beck performing in London in 1976, where he was opening for Alvin Lee. “I’ve never made the big time, mercifully,” he told a reporter.Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music, via Getty ImagesGrammys and GoldEven so, he earned eight gold albums over more than six decades. He also amassed seven Grammys, six in the category of best rock instrumental performance and one for best pop collaboration with vocals. He was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame twice, as part of the Yardbirds in 1992 and as a solo star in 2009.“Jeff Beck was on another planet,” Mr. Stewart said in a statement on Wednesday. “He took me and Ronnie Wood to the USA in the late 60s in his band the Jeff Beck Group, and we haven’t looked back since. He was one of the few guitarists that when playing live would actually listen to me sing and respond. Jeff, you were the greatest, my man.”Geoffrey Arnold Beck was born on June 24, 1944, in South London to Arnold and Ethel Beck. His mother was a candy maker, his father an accountant. Mr. Beck told Guitar Player Magazine in 1968 that his mother had “forced” him to play piano two hours a day when he was a boy. “That was good,” he said, “because it made me realize that I was musically sound. My other training consisted of stretching rubber bands over tobacco cans and making horrible noises.”He became attracted to electric guitar after hearing Les Paul’s work and was later drawn to the work of Cliff Gallup, lead guitarist for Gene Vincent’s band, and the American player Lonnie Mack. He became entranced not only by the sound of the guitar but also by its mechanics.“At the age of 13, I built two or three of my own guitars,” Mr. Beck wrote in an essay for a book about his career published in 2016 titled “Beck 01: Hot Rods and Rock & Roll.” “It was fun just to look at it and hold it. I knew where I was headed.”He enrolled in Wimbledon College of Art but spent more time playing in bands. Dropping out of school, he began to do studio session work and in 1965 was invited to join the Yardbirds through Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Beck had befriended as a teenager and who had just turned that job down.Though he was with the Yardbirds for only 20 months, Mr. Beck played on most of their successful songs, starting with “Heart Full of Soul,” which broke the Top 10 in Billboard and got to No. 2 in Britain. It was fired by his burning lead guitar line, which took influence from Indian music and which served as the song’s hook.In 1966, the Yardbirds’ single “Shapes of Things,” which got to No. 11 in the United States (No. 3 in Britain), included a frantic double-time solo by Mr. Beck that became one of the band’s most celebrated showcases.Mr. Beck at a rehearsal in 2010. He released a new album that year, “Emotion & Commotion,” which won a Grammy.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesAt the suggestion of his manager, Mr. Beck recorded an instrumental piece for a potential solo project in May 1966 titled “Beck’s Bolero.” It featured on rhythm guitar Mr. Page (who received writing credit on the song), the Who’s Keith Moon on drums, the future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and the in-demand session pianist Nicky Hopkins.A signature instrumental with a complex, unfolding structure, the song wasn’t released at the time, dashing Mr. Beck’s hope that this lineup would comprise his next band. Instead, he soldiered on with the Yardbirds, who then added Mr. Page, first on bass and later in a dueling lead guitar role with Mr. Beck. That fleeting lineup was immortalized in “Blow Up,” the Mod-era film by the director Michelangelo Antonioni, in which they performed a manic version of their song “Train Kept A-Rollin,’” recast as “Stroll On.”Tensions which had been brewing between Mr. Beck and the rest of the Yardbirds came to a boil on an exhausting U.S. tour that fall, compelling him to quit. He later considered this period the low point of his career.“All of a sudden, you’re nobody,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. “Because the band were able to carry on” with Mr. Page, “it was almost like I was airbrushed out of it.”Even so, a single was released under his own name in March 1967, “Hi-Ho Silver Lining,” which featured a rare vocal by Mr. Beck, which he abhorred. “I sound unbearably bad,” he told Music Radar in 2021.Still, the song got to No. 15 in Britain, and its B-side provided a home for “Beck’s Bolero.”He found more satisfaction by forming the first Jeff Beck Group, with Mr. Stewart, Mr. Wood, and Mr. Hopkins along with the drummer Mickey Waller. Columbia Records signed them and issued their debut, “Truth,” in the summer of 1968. It boasted a new, heavier version of the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things,” along with “Beck’s Bolero.” “Truth” got to No. 15 in Billboard and went gold, fired by its fresh mix of booming rock and emotive soul. Its follow-up, “Beck-Ola,” which subbed the drummer Tony Newman for Mr. Waller, was released a year later and mirrored the debut’s success. But the band imploded almost immediately after.“I don’t know what happened,” Mr. Beck told Music Radar. “It was a lack of material,” he said, plus, he surmised, Mr. Stewart “wanted to see his name up there instead of mine.”Mr. Beck performing at Madison Square Garden in 2010 on a tour with Eric Clapton, the guitarist he had replaced in the Yardbirds.Chad Batka for The New York TimesOne Band, Then AnotherIn the fall of 1969, Mr. Beck tried to rally by planning a new group with Mr. Bogert and Mr. Appice, but that fell apart after Mr. Beck fractured his skull in a car accident. In the meantime, the two other musicians formed the blues-rock band Cactus.Following a long convalescence, a new version of the Jeff Beck Group emerged in 1971, with the soul singer Bobby Tench, the drummer Cozy Powell and the keyboardist Max Middleton, who encouraged Mr. Beck to explore jazz.Their debut, “Rough and Ready,” released in October, featured more original compositions from Mr. Beck than usual, but it barely made Billboard’s Top 50. Its chaser, “Jeff Beck Group,” which tipped toward the soulful side of their sound, did better, breaking Billboard’s Top 20 and going gold.Again, however, the changeable Mr. Beck yearned for something new, so when Cactus broke up, he reconvened with Mr. Bogert and Mr. Appice — the rhythm section he had considered earlier — to form the power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice.A notable track on their 1973 debut album, “Beck, Bogert & Appice,” was a version of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” But Mr. Beck was dissatisfied with both his band’s version of the song and the band itself, and so, during the recording of a second album, produced by Jimmy Miller, he broke up the group, although a live album, “Beck, Bogert & Appice Live in Japan,” came out afterward, in 1975 — a year that changed Mr. Beck’s career.Daringly, Mr. Beck devoted most of the “Blow by Blow” solo album, recorded in 1974 and released in 1975, to instrumentals, inspired by the creativity of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the soaring work of the band’s fusion guitarist, John McLaughlin. To help capture that group’s feel, Mr. Beck hired the producer George Martin, who had overseen Mahavishnu’s album “Apocalypse” the year before (and who had achieved his greatest renown with the Beatles). Mr. Beck told The New Statesman magazine in 2016 that Mr. Martin had provided “a massive pair of wings.”“Just knowing that somebody with such sensitive ears was approving of what was going on, you were flying,” he said.Mr. Beck’s follow-up album, “Wired,” featured two players from Mahavishnu: the drummer Narada Michael Walden and the keyboardist Jan Hammer, expanding the fusion element in the music. Mr. Beck later toured with Mr. Hammer’s band, resulting in the album “Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group Live,” which went gold in 1977.Mr. Hammer was also instrumental in Mr. Beck’s 1980 album, “There & Back,” which got to No. 21 on Billboard’s chart. In 1985, Mr. Beck returned to working with vocalists for his “Flash” album, on which Mr. Stewart sang a version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” (The video became an MTV hit.) Another instrumental recording, “Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop,” issued in 1989, became his final gold album.Starting in the 1990s, Mr. Beck began to do prodigious session work, providing solos on albums by Jon Bon Jovi, Roger Waters, Kate Bush, Tina Turner and others. He showed the continued breadth of his style with his “Emotion & Commotion” album in 2010, which included the standard “Over the Rainbow” and Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.” The latter track won a Grammy, and the album reached No. 11 in Billboard.Over the next few decades, Mr. Beck continued to tour and to record, most recently yielding a collaboration album with the actor and guitarist Johnny Depp, titled “18,” in 2022.Mr. Beck married Sandra Cash in 2005, and she survives him.To his fans, and to himself, Mr. Beck was so deeply identified with his guitar — particularly the Fender Stratocaster — that he seemed inseparable from it.“My Strat is another arm,” he told Music Radar. “I’ve welded myself to that. Or it’s welded itself to me, one or the other.”He added: “It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time. It’s forever sitting there, challenging you to find something else in it. But it is there if you really search.”Alex Traub More