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      Gary Brooker, Singer for Procol Harum, Dies at 76

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      The pianist and singer composed the band’s music for five decades, including the hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”Gary Brooker, the singer and pianist of the early progressive rock group Procol Harum, who co-wrote songs including “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the improbable but overpowering hit during the 1967 Summer of Love, died on Saturday at his home in Surrey, England. He was 76.Mr. Brooker had been receiving treatment for cancer, the band said in a statement confirming his death.With his grainy, weathered-sounding voice and a piano style steeped in gospel, classical music, blues and the British music hall, Mr. Brooker led Procol Harum in songs that mixed pomp and whimsy, orchestral grandeur and rock drive. Mr. Brooker composed nearly all of Procol Harum’s music; Keith Reid, who did not perform with the band, provided lyrics that invoked literary and historical allusions and spun tall tales, sometimes at the same time.Although “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was both its first and biggest hit, and the band steadfastly avoided showmanship, Procol Harum sustained a five-decade career. It recorded and toured steadily until 1977, and it regrouped sporadically in lineups led by Mr. Brooker to continue making albums until 2017. Mr. Brooker, the band’s statement said, “was notable for his individuality, integrity, and occasionally stubborn eccentricity. His mordant wit, and appetite for the ridiculous, made him a priceless raconteur (and his surreal inter-song banter made a fascinating contrast with the gravitas of Procol Harum’s performances).”“A Whiter Shade of Pale” drew on Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Air on a G String” for its chord progression; Matthew Fisher’s organ opened with a stately melody and Mr. Brooker sang a countermelody, somberly offering the surreal paradoxes of Mr. Reid’s lyrics. In 2009, Mr. Fisher successfully sued to receive a shared credit for composing the song.Procol Harum’s combination of classical influences, elaborately poetic lyrics and extended compositions made it a progenitor of progressive rock, but Mr. Brooker habitually shrugged off that category. “Prog — it was not invented when we started,” he told Goldmine magazine in 2021. “We always try to be progressive in what we do. So, we made our first album and then we tried to move on, to progress.”Mr. Brooker performing at the O2 Arena in London in 2020. Procul Harum performed for five decades.Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesGary Brooker was born on May 29, 1945, in London. His father, Harry Brooker, was a musician; Gary learned piano, cornet, trombone, guitar and banjo while growing up. Harry Brooker died when Gary was 11 and his mother, Violet May Brooker, found work on a factory assembly line.Mr. Brooker dropped out of college to work as a musician, and at the end of the 1950s he began playing in the Paramounts, which largely performed American R&B songs. By the time the Paramounts broke up in 1966, they had shared bills with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles; later, Mr. Brooker would play studio sessions and concerts with the former Beatles.Mr. Brooker started a new band, which included Mr. Fisher, to play the songs that he had begun writing with Mr. Reid: the Pinewoods, which were soon renamed Procol Harum, fractured Latin for “beyond these things.” The new band’s combination of piano and organ was uncommon in British rock, though American gospel groups used it, as did the rock group the Band. Mr. Brooker described his initial idea for the band as “a bit of classical, a bit of Bob Dylan, a bit of Ray Charles.”Procol Harum’s first recording session, working with studio musicians, yielded “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” When it became a hit, the guitarist Robin Trower and the drummer B.J. Wilson, who had been in the Paramounts, joined Procol Harum to record its self-titled 1967 debut album. Its structural ambitions expanded on its 1968 album, “Shine On Brightly,” which included the five-part, 18-minute suite “In Held ’Twas in I.”Mr. Brooker married Françoise Riedo in 1968. She survives him.The title track of Procol Harum’s 1969 album “A Salty Dog” featured a dramatic orchestral arrangement by Mr. Brooker, and Procol Harum soon began performing with orchestras. Its 1971 album, “Live in Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra,” brought it an American hit with an expansive remake of “Conquistador,” from Procol Harum’s debut album. By then, both Mr. Fisher and Mr. Trower had left Procol Harum and Mr. Brooker was the band’s clear leader. Its 1973 album, “Grand Hotel,” reveled in orchestration; its 1974 “Exotic Birds and Fruit” emphatically rejected it. The songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller produced “Procol’s Ninth” in 1975.In 1977, Mr. Brooker decided that “For the time being, Procol Harum had nothing more to say.” He joined Eric Clapton’s band in the late 1970s, touring and recording, and he made solo albums. Mr. Brooker’s 1985 album, “Echoes in the Night,” was produced by Mr. Fisher and included contributions from Mr. Reid and Mr. Wilson.Mr. Brooker, left, with Jack Bruce of Cream, Peter Frampton and Simon Kirke of Bad Company. They were honored at RockWalk in Los Angeles in 1997.Fred Prouser/ReutersMr. Brooker restarted Procol Harum in 1990 with Mr. Fisher, Mr. Trower and Mr. Reid to record “The Prodigal Stranger.” During the long gaps between Procol Harum’s studio albums — the band released “The Well’s on Fire” in 2003 and “Novum” in 2017, for which Pete Brown replaced Mr. Reid as the lyricist — Mr. Brooker toured with Procol Harum, performed with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band and Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, and organized charity concerts that brought him recognition as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2013. In 2021, Procol Harum released “Missing Persons” and “War Is Not Healthy,” a final pair of reflective Brooker-Reid songs.Mr. Brooker soberly assessed his band in 2021.“We don’t do a lot of grooves, but we do a good bit of rock,” Mr. Brooker told Goldmine. “Down in the core, though, there’s the music where I’m trying to reach the people and to make them feel something that’s right. And I don’t mean they’re going to jump up and down and want to dance. Fine if they’re going to. But I mean, if I saw a tear roll down their face that would be a good reaction — to reach people in their emotions, in the inside somewhere, not just on the surface.” More

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      Romeo Santos’s Melodramatic Return, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jack Harlow, Flock of Dimes, Tame Impala 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.Romeo Santos, ‘Sus Huellas’“Sus Huellas,” the first single from Romeo Santos’s forthcoming fifth solo album, “Formula, Vol. 3,” finds him reprising the bleeding-heart theatrics he’s known for, recalling the kind of cortavenas (roughly, “wrist cutting”) torment of bachata classics. This time, the genre’s white-pants-wearing, antics-obsessed lover boy is trying to recover from the despair of a lost love, and the melodrama is in overdrive: “Come, pull out my veins/Because the plasma inside of me has the poison of her love,” he sings. “And take this lighter, I want you to burn my lips/Eliminate the taste of her tongue, which did me harm.” It’s not all tradition though; Santos drops in an EDM interlude that will have uptown clubs losing it. ISABELIA HERRERAJack Harlow, ‘Nail Tech’Last year Jack Harlow went to No. 1 as the guest on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby,” and he’s learned something from that experience. “Nail Tech” has echoes of that song’s horns, and Harlow approaches the beat similarly, with imagistic rapping — “You ain’t one of my dogs, why do you hound us?” — and a confidence that makes this song sound like a victory lap. JON CARAMANICAC. Tangana, Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and Canelita, ‘La Culpa’The Spanish singer-rapper C. Tangana gets top billing on “La Culpa” (“The Blame”), a song added to the deluxe version of his 2021 Latin Grammy-winning album “El Madrileño.” But except for a brief, vulnerable bridge, he spends most of the song merged in harmony with three other singers who are more robust and closer to flamenco — Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and the especially gutsy Canelita — while rock drums and electric guitars join flamenco handclaps to pace the song. While the lyrics profess guilt and regret, they’re delivered with jolly camaraderie, suggesting that male bonding can easily overcome pangs of conscience. JON PARELESTame Impala, ‘The Boat I Row’Kevin Parker, a.k.a. the one-man studio band Tame Impala, took so long to release his 2020 album, “The Slow Rush,” that of course he had outtakes. “The Boat I Row” is from his collection “The Slow Rush B-Sides and Remixes.” It shares the album’s stately, logy, time-warped sound — psychedelically phased drums playing a hip-hop beat, multitracked vocal harmonies suggesting both the Beatles and ELO — and its thoughts about dogged persistence. “Even if it takes a hundred thousand goes/The way’s in front of me ’cause that’s the one I chose,” Parker sings, at once diffident and determined. PARELESFlock of Dimes, ‘Pure Love’Jenn Wasner, who records as Flock of Dimes, ponders unsatisfied desire — material and emotional — in “Pure Love,” recorded with the producer Nick Sanborn from Sylvan Esso: “I keep dreaming of a better moment,” she sings. She’s surrounded by looped voices and instruments, with ricocheting programmed beats that hit like 1980s drums; she sounds like she’ll persist. PARELESAsa, ‘Ocean’The songwriter Asa has forged a long career in Nigeria, singing about adversity and conflict as well as romance. But “Ocean” is pure affection. Asa is about to release her fifth studio album, “V,” and “Ocean” distills the ways Nigerian Afrobeats exalts Minimalism. The percussion is just a few syncopated taps, the bass lines are only two or three notes and Asa’s breathy voice floats with professions of pure devotion: “Boy, you are the ocean,” she coos, and everything about the song promises bliss. PARELESYeat featuring Young Thug, ‘Outsidë’Two generations of surrealists in one liquid pool of syllables. Yeat is still swooning over abstraction, and Young Thug, several years older, has learned how to form word-like shapes while still seeming to melt in real time. CARAMANICASigurd Hole, ‘The Presentation Dance’Like so many, the Norwegian bassist Sigurd Hole — a nimble-fingered player and a composer of sonically expansive, thoughtfully paced music — has been overcome with dismay at the fast-worsening climate crisis. Like too few, in the face of it he’s sought out wisdom and theory from non-industrialized societies. “The Presentation Dance” comes from his newest album, “Roraima,” which he made after reading “The Falling Sky,” a book by the Yanomami shaman and mouthpiece Davi Kopenawa. The rain-like pitter-patter of a marimba interacts with a small corps of strings, playing fluid and intertwined melodies that sometimes fall into a pizzicato repartee with the marimba’s mallets. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOEd Sheeran featuring Bring Me the Horizon, ‘Bad Habits’Last week Ed Sheeran released a new version of his song “The Joker and the Queen,” accompanied by Taylor Swift. Pfft. Predictably pretty. Plain. This is more like it. “Bad Habits” is maybe Sheeran’s most anodyne pop hit, and this version, which is theatrically stomped all over by the British metalcore band Bring Me the Horizon, rescues it, recalling the essential and overlooked “Punk Goes Pop” compilation series. CARAMANICAFrontperson, ‘Parade’Frontperson is the indie-rock duo of Kathryn Calder, from the New Pornographers, and Mark Hamilton, from Woodpigeon. Blooping, calliope-like keyboard arpeggios and layers of nonsense-syllable vocals give “Parade” a blithe, circusy tone as Calder and Hamilton sing about anticipation, connection and disconnection, accepting it all: “Sometimes you’re left/Sometimes you leave.” PARELESAmbar Lucid, ‘Dead Leaves’Ambar Lucid’s music bottles youthful longing. The 21-year-old, whose debut album, “Garden of Lucid,” collected stories about escape and radical self-acceptance, seems to know exactly how to stir the soul. “Should I even bother letting anybody know how I feel?” she wonders on “Dead Leaves.” It’s soft winter balladry that contains all the pain and promise of the change of seasons. HERRERAHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Jupiter’s Dance’“Jupiter’s Dance” is from the newly released “Life on Earth,” the seventh album Alynda Segarra has made as Hurray for the Riff Raff. The new songs contemplate the natural world and humanity’s toll on it. “Jupiter’s Dance” is a quasi-mystical reassurance — “Celestial children coming through/You never know who you’ll become” — with a glimmering bell tones and an undercurrent of Puerto Rican bomba, a brief benediction. PARELESJavon Jackson featuring Nikki Giovanni, ‘Night Song’The poet Nikki Giovanni selected the repertoire for “The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni,” a new album by the strapping tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson that explores the lineage of Black American spirituals and hymns. But her voice appears on only one track, and it’s the one that’s not a church melody: “Night Song.” Rather that recite her own poetry, Giovanni sings this ode to unbelonging — a favorite of her old friend Nina Simone — with wistful conviction, picking up where Jackson’s gentle treatment of the melody leaves off. Her voice crinkles up on the high notes but loses none of its gravitas or tenderness as she sings: “Music, by the lonely sung/When you can’t help wondering:/Where do I belong?” RUSSONELLOChris Dingman, ‘Silently Beneath the Waves’For the vibraphonist Chris Dingman, solo playing was becoming central to his practice even before the pandemic hit. Since then, it’s been his primary mode, and he’s increasingly sought to use the big, chiming instrument as a vehicle for transcendence. That pursuit has guided him into a close study of a far tinier instrument: the mbira, a thumb piano with spiritual applications across southern Africa. On “Silently Beneath the Waves” — the opener to a new album of solo performances, “Journeys Vol. 1” — you can hear evidence of that research, as he repeats fetching, hypnotizing patterns that pull you into their force field before gradually giving way to a different shape. RUSSONELLO More

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      Rokia Koné, From Mali, Sings for the World. Especially Women.

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      Her international debut album, “Bamanan,” enlists an Irish producer, Jacknife Lee, for songs infused with African history and feminism.African musicians don’t need outside help. Lately, Nigerian Afrobeats, South African amapiano and other sleek, high-tech, thoroughly danceable styles have reached listeners worldwide without Western mediators. But the proof of a collaboration is in its sound, not its pedigree, and the album “Bamanan” is a transcontinental alliance that finds its own synergy.“Bamanan” pairs Rokia Koné — a songwriter and singer from Mali who was a core member of the West African collective Les Amazones d’Afrique on their 2017 album “Republique Amazone” — with Garret “Jacknife” Lee, an Irish producer who has worked with U2 and Taylor Swift and is now based in California.Koné’s voice rightfully leaps out of every song. Drawing on West African griot style, she sings with gritty insistence, building up to a sandpapery rasp when her melodies hit their peaks. Her Malian band provides percussion, backup vocals and barbed, modal lead guitar parts that hint at traditional African instruments. Lee adds keyboards, guitars and drumbeats, placing the songs in a swirling, spacious digital realm.It’s an equal partnership that’s clearly enacted in the opening song, “Bi Ye Tulonba Ye” (“Today Is a Great Party”), a call for unity and an end to disagreements. At the beginning, Koné’s vocals are an urgent incantation amid reverent, hovering synthesizer tones, with a steady beat that slowly reveals itself. But the song lifts off as her band joins in, surrounding her with rhythmic and melodic crosscurrents of percussion and guitars.“Bamanan” was constructed gradually and remotely; Koné and Lee never met in person while making the album. During the pandemic, sessions that Koné and her band had recorded in 2016 and 2018 — vocals in Paris, instruments in Mali — were sent to Lee after he heard Les Amazones when judging a remix contest. In 2020, Lee added instrumental parts and production to Koné’s sessions, and he collaborated on a new song with Koné, “N’yanyan.”Koné sang the vocals for “N’yanyan” in Mali in August 2020, on the day a coup toppled Mali’s government. Her melody is based on an ancient song; Lee’s production provides simple, sustained electric-piano chords. On a day of political upheaval, Koné thoughtfully counseled taking a long view while reflecting on mortality: “This life is passing/It’s only a moment in time,” she sang in Bambara, the language she uses throughout the album.Lee adds keyboards, guitars and drumbeats to Koné’s music, placing the songs in a swirling digital realm.Jackie RadinskyThe sweep of history and a sense of indignation both course through “Bamanan.” Although she does not come from a hereditary griot family, Koné writes like a griot: a cultural guardian recalling history and speaking as a community conscience. “Bamanan” is named after the Bamana Empire, two centuries when Bambara leaders ruled much of what is now Mali. “Anw Tile (It’s Our Time)” meshes modal guitar curlicues and glimmering synthesizers as Koné and her backup singers chronicle the empire’s leaders and geography: “This time is golden,” women’s voices declare in unison. “Those who missed it, it was a great time.”The album also extends the forthright feminism Koné shared with Les Amazones. “Mayougouba” (“Move, Dance”) joyfully tells women worldwide, “You’re perfect as you are.” The album’s most kinetic song, “Kurunba,” paces its call-and-response vocals with galloping percussion and quick synthesizer ripples, as Koné’s narrator rails at being cast aside by her husband after raising their child: “Now my child is of age/Suddenly the door is shut on me,” she reproaches.Koné also remade a song she brought to Les Amazones: “Mansa Soyari,” which celebrates female role models and insists, “A country isn’t great without women.” With Les Amazones, the song was swaggering, distorted, psychedelic rock; with Lee, it’s lighter, more syncopated and more transparent, invoking the kora (harp-guitar) patterns of griot songs, but also hinting at funk and flaunting some otherworldly digital manipulations. With its deep Bambara foundations, the song is certain of where it comes from; it’s just as certain that its passion will be understood anywhere.Rokia Koné & Jacknife Lee“Bamanan”(Real World) More

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      Beverly Ross, Teenage Songwriter in Rock ’n’ Roll’s Youth, Dies at 87

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      With hits like “Lollipop,” she became a top woman songwriter in the early 1960s, but she quit the business in frustration over the theft of her work.Beverly Ross, who with hits like “Lollipop” became one of the top women songwriters in rock ’n’ roll’s early years, but who ended her career early after a work relationship turned sour, died on Jan. 15 in a hospital in Nashville. She was 87.The cause was dementia, said her nephew, Cliff Stieglitz.While in high school, Ms. Ross would ride the bus from her family’s home in New Jersey to hang around the Brill Building, then the center of New York music publishing. There she managed to strike up conversations with songwriters like Julius Dixon.In 1954, when Ms. Ross was only 19, she collaborated with Mr. Dixon on her breakout song, “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere).” A recording of it by Bill Haley & His Comets reached No. 11 on the Billboard singles chart, just months before the band’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” became the first rock ’n’ roll song to reach No. 1.Rolling Stone would later describe “Dim, Dim the Lights” as “the first ‘white’ song to cross over to R&B.” It had bluesy electric guitar riffs, a jaunty walking bass and lyrics of come-hither flirtatiousness, even as it maintained an adolescent innocence, inspired by high school crushes and party games like spin the bottle: “I’m full of soda and potato chips/But now I wanna get a taste/Of your sweet lips.”That combination of upbeat rhythms and lightly romantic themes became Ms. Ross’s formula.She and Mr. Dixon scored another hit with “Lollipop,” a song as sweet and compact as the titular candy. A 1958 recording by the Chordettes reached No. 2 and became an enduring pop-culture earworm, with appearances on “The Simpsons” and in a commercial for Dell computers.The Chordettes’ 1958 recording of “Lollipop,” which Ms. Ross wrote with Julius Dixon, reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart and became an enduring pop-culture earworm.Denver Post via Getty ImagesBy the early 1960s Ms. Ross had become, along with Carole King and a few others, one of the top women writers in rock, “one of only a sprinkling of female writers to make it in a vehemently male structure,” Mark Ribowsky wrote in “He’s a Rebel: Phil Spector, Rock and Roll’s Legendary Producer” (2000).In a memoir published in 2013, Ms. Ross explained why she walked away from the music business.Ms. Ross also co-wrote songs recorded by stars like Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. But in just a few years, her career would abruptly unravel.By Ms. Ross’s telling, in 1960 she struck up a working friendship with a then-obscure aspiring songwriter who stood to benefit from her clout: Phil Spector. The two worked on song ideas, cut a demo tape and confided in each other about troubles in their families. Ms. Ross introduced him to players in the industry.While they were tinkering with a riff together one night, Ms. Ross recalled, Mr. Spector suddenly declared he had business to attend to and ran out the door.Soon, Ms. Ross was shocked to hear the riff, in the hit song “Spanish Harlem” by Ben E. King. Mr. Spector had used it without giving Ms. Ross credit (he and Jerry Leiber were the credited writers) — and he had also begun to ignore her.From then on, she declined to work if it would bring her into the orbit of Mr. Spector, but she was still determined to prove she could write hits and co-wrote several more in the early ’60s, including “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” which as recorded by Lesley Gore reached No. 5.Then she quit, spiraling into what she described to Mr. Ribowsky as “a suicidal depression.”“This strange move I made away from the enormous acceptance and potential I’d worked so diligently to achieve left me hanging in nowheresville,” she wrote in a dishy, score-settling memoir, “I Was the First Woman Phil Spector Killed” (2013), “but I may have saved my sanity by doing it.”Yet Ms. Ross also lived with regret. “I should have just bowed down and realized I’d been asked to write for the ‘royalty of rock ’n’ roll,’” she wrote.Beverly Ross was born on Sept. 5, 1934, in Brooklyn and grew up in Lakewood, N.J. Her father, Aron, worked as a cobbler with his brother in New York City and then as a chicken farmer in Lakewood. Her mother, Rachel (Frank) Ross, worked as a bookkeeper for the shoe business and helped out at the farm.Bev, as she was called, aspired from a young age to a career in music, but she did not know how to get started. She encountered musicians who were performing at a hotel where her sister worked in Lakewood, and she struck a deal with one of them: He would tell her how to break into the industry if she set him up on a date with her sister.All the man had to do, it turned out, was inform Bev of the existence of the Brill Building.Ms. Ross’s burst of songwriting success gave her an income in royalties that she lived on comfortably. She resided for many years in an apartment on the Upper West Side, but later bought a house in Nashville and began writing country music.She is survived by her companion, Ferris Butler, a comedy writer. They married in the mid-1970s and later divorced, but they reconnected and were together for the final years of her life. More

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      Mitski, in and Out of the Spotlight

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher“Laurel Hell,” the new album by the beloved indie-rock singer-songwriter Mitski, continues her shift toward a focus on pop — a move that feels somewhat at odds with the general reluctance she displays in almost every other aspect of being a performer.Over the past several years, Mitski has been circumspect in regards to discussing her personal life in interviews. She avoids many trappings of emergent celebrity. And yet she has a fervent fan base for her emotionally raw songs, and she has become something of a meme, a vessel used by other people to feel deeply, or talk about feeling deeply. (This week, “Laurel Hell” debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart.)On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Mitski’s turn toward bigger sounds, her tug of war relationship with fame, and her relationship with her fans and the press.Guests:E. Alex Jung, features writer at New York magazine and VultureCat Zhang, assistant editor at PitchforkConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      ‘For Lucio’ Review: The Voice of Italy for Four Decades

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      A new documentary pays tribute to Lucio Dalla, a popular and passionate Italian singer whose songs captured the country’s political turmoil.Pudgy and hirsute, favoring floppy hats and round glasses, Lucio Dalla didn’t look much like a pop star. A jazz clarinetist who reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter, Dalla nonetheless became one of Italy’s most beloved troubadours in the later decades of the 20th century. His songs were rhapsodic and discursive, polemical and observant — often within the span of a single verse — and his voice could shift from conversational intimacy to full-throated passion just as quickly.“For Lucio,” Pietro Marcello’s new documentary, offers a portrait of Dalla that is both informative and enigmatic. More an essay film than a standard musical biography, it emphasizes personality over chronology, and dwells more on the work than the life. Instead of assembling the usual squadron of talking heads, Marcello concentrates on just two interview subjects, both of whom knew Dalla well.His manager, Umberto Righi — everyone calls him Tobia — appears alone in the first part of the movie, putting flowers on Dalla’s grave and recalling the early years of their association. Later Tobia is joined by Stefano Bonaga, who knew Dalla when they were children in Bologna. This being Italy, the two men sit and reminisce over a leisurely pasta lunch, pausing to sip wine and light cigarettes. Their conversation sometimes veers into abstraction, and the ways they describe their old friend (who died in 2012, at 68) don’t always paint a vivid picture. We hear that he was unpredictable, brilliant and generous, but there is a curious shortage of anecdotes that might bring those traits to life.More satisfying is the archival material Marcello assembles. We get to see Dalla in concert, on television variety shows, in proto-music-videos and in conversation with journalists. These moments go a long way toward explaining his appeal. They show a plain-spoken intellectual who could be impish, ardent or gnomic, and whose songs captured both the exuberant spirit of Italian popular culture and the country’s political agony and social turmoil in the ’60s and ’70s.Though Dalla released hit records through the ’80s and ’90s, it’s the earlier period that most interests Marcello, in particular the years in the early ’70s when Dalla collaborated with the left-wing Bolognese poet and writer Roberto Roversi. The filmmaker, who has made both documentaries and fictional features (recently, and notably, “Martin Eden”), is fascinated by histories of class struggle, ideological conflict and intellectual agitation. He juxtaposes images of war, poverty and labor unrest with Dalla’s songs to underline their messages and explain their context. A grim climax is provided by the bombing of Bologna’s central train station in 1980, an act of right-wing terrorism that was the deadliest single incident of political violence in an era known in Italy as the Years of Lead.Even when a song’s subject isn’t explicitly political — as in “Nuvolari,” a rambling ballad about a celebrated racecar driver — there is a feeling of urgency and struggle in Dalla and Roversi’s lyrics and in the voice that delivers them. One of the most striking passages in “For Lucio” is a performance, in front of an audience of factory workers, of “Itaca,” a song that evokes Homer’s “Odyssey” from the standpoint of ordinary sailors. That kind of romantic populism links Dalla to the Latin American Nueva Canción movement, while his music incorporates influences from Brazilian bossa nova and tropicália as well as European and North American popular styles.For all his cosmopolitanism, he remains a distinctively Italian figure, and “For Lucio” is a movie preoccupied above all with Italy’s cultural memory and identity. This can make it a bit of a challenge even for Italophiles or students of history, musical and otherwise. This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.For LucioNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      Ian McDonald, of the Bands King Crimson and Foreigner, Dies at 75

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      As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with King Crimson, he helped propel the progressive rock movement. He found more commercial success with Foreigner.Ian McDonald, a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter whose work with the British band King Crimson helped propel the progressive rock movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and who went on to help found the immensely popular group Foreigner, died on Feb. 9 at his home in New York City. He was 75.The cause was colon cancer, said his son, Maxwell, who is also a musician.Though Mr. McDonald’s work with Foreigner reaped far greater financial rewards than his efforts with King Crimson — his trio of albums with Foreigner sold a combined 17 million copies — his earlier band far outdistanced them in creativity and influence. Their debut album, “In the Court of the Crimson King” (1969), with its radical sound and structure, was a watershed work in the history of rock. It was the only release in the band’s wide catalog in which Mr. McDonald had full involvement.For the album, he was a co-writer of every song, played nine instruments and provided primary production.“Ian brought musicality, an exceptional sense of the short and telling melodic line, and the ability to express that on a variety of instruments,” the band’s leader, Robert Fripp, wrote in the liner notes to a box set of King Crimson’s work released in 1997. In a recent email he said, “In 1969, I trusted Ian’s musical sense ahead of my own.”For the title track of “In the Court of the Crimson King,” Mr. McDonald wrote the music and provided a Mellotron hook that became one of the most recognizable uses of that instrument in rock history. Highly melodic, the sound provided a striking contrast to the fury of the album’s other most famous song, “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Fired by the combination of Mr. McDonald’s shrieking alto-saxophone and Mr. Fripp’s brutalist guitar, “21st Century Schizoid Man” both startled and thrilled listeners.Pete Townshend of the Who was so impressed, he wrote ad copy for the album in Rolling Stone magazine that read: “Twenty-first century schizoid man is everything multi-tracked a billion times, and when you listen you get a billion times the impact. Has to be the heaviest riff that has been middle-frequencied onto that black vinyl disc since Mahler’s 8th.”The album went gold in the United States and made the Top 5 in the band’s native Britain. At the end of a U.S. tour to promote the album, Mr. McDonald left the band, as did the drummer, Michael Giles. “I was probably not emotionally mature enough to handle it, and I just made a rather rash decision to leave without consulting anyone,” Mr. McDonald told Sid Smith in the 2001 book “In the Court of King Crimson.”In 1970, the two departed members released their own album, “McDonald and Giles,” which showcased Mr. McDonald’s vocal skills as well as his Beatle-esque sense of melody. That same year, several long songs he had helped write for King Crimson appeared on the group’s second album, “In the Wake of Poseidon.” In 1974, Mr. Fripp invited him back, and he played on two tracks of the band’s “Red” album, released that year. The band broke up shortly thereafter.King Crimson in 1969; from left, the leader and guitarist Robert Fripp, the drummer Michael Giles, the singer and guitarist Greg Lake, the multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald and the lyricist Peter Sinfield. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen work slowed for him in England in the mid-1970s, Mr. McDonald moved to New York, where he helped form Foreigner with another British transplant, Mick Jones.Foreigner’s debut album in 1977 made Billboard’s Top 5 list and sold more than five million copies. One song Mr. McDonald helped write, “Long, Long Way From Home,” became a Top 20 Billboard hit. He was a co-producer of all three albums that he recorded with Foreigner, including “Double Vision” (1978) and “Head Games” (1979).Ian Richard McDonald was born on June 25, 1946, in Osterley, Middlesex, England to Keith McDonald, an architect, and Ada (May) McDonald, a homemaker. His father played banjo and piano, and, in a house filled with music, Ian played guitar and piano.His multi-instrumental approach broadened at 15, when he left school and entered the British Army as a bandsman. “I was taught clarinet, and from there I taught myself flute and saxophone,” he told Big Bang Magazine in 1999. “I was exposed to a number of different musical styles.”After leaving the army and moving to London, he met Mr. Fripp, who had a whimsical group called Giles, Giles and Fripp, including Michael Giles and his brother Pete. Mr. McDonald recorded songs with them before they evolved into King Crimson, with the singer and bassist Greg Lake replacing Pete Giles.Almost immediately a buzz grew around them, leading to an invitation to perform at a Rolling Stones free concert in London in Hyde Park; the event was originally meant to introduce the Stones’ new guitarist, Mick Taylor, but it wound up doubling as a salute to the musician he had replaced, Brian Jones, who had died two days earlier. Audience estimates for the show range from 250,000 to 500,000. In 2013, The Guardian reported that “King Crimson nearly stole the show.”The trailer for a forthcoming documentary titled “In the Court of the Crimson King” shows Mr. McDonald apologizing to Mr. Fripp for leaving the band so soon after it began. His run with Foreigner also ended when he was fired by Mr. Jones, who, Mr. McDonald said, desired more control. (Mr. McDonald did play with the band for its 40th-anniversary tour in 2017.)In 2002, he formed a group with other ex-members of Crimson (without Mr. Fripp) called the 21st Century Schizoid Band, which toured and released several live albums. Mr. McDonald issued a solo album in 1999, “Driver’s Eyes,” and formed a new rock-oriented group, Honey West, which featured his son, Maxwell, on their album “Bad Old World” (2017).In addition to his son, Mr. McDonald is survived by his sister, Linda Rice.Throughout his life he remained proud of how King Crimson’s debut album had endured.“One thing I tried to do as the main producer was to have every moment be able to be listened to hundreds of times so that, hopefully, the album would stand the test of time,” he told the entertainment blog The Los Angeles Beat in 2019. “Here we are 50 years later, and people are still talking about it.” More

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      Hollywood’s First Family of Putting It Out There

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      On the first page of Will Smith’s recent memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family entertainer to save his mother, himself and everyone else.“I would be the golden child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break character. Not once.”That he became a perpetual conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “I Am Legend,” a druglord-defeater in “Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “Ali” — might have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s most bankable actors. Off camera, he behaved much as he did on camera, revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.Over the last couple of years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s melting it down.This pivot to transparency makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23, and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there. Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show “Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.From left: Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Will Smith in an episode of “Red Table Talk.”Facebook WatchTheir path has been the opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and garish one, and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking, especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.Inside Will Smith’s WorldFor decades, the global superstar has won over audiences with his charm and charisma. Now, he is showing his more vulnerable side.A Commanding Presence: In a Times interview, the movie star reflects on his career, being a parent and learning to let go of perfectionism. ‘King Richard’: Here is what Smith said after he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the father of Venus and Serena Williams. His Memoir: “Will” is a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune told by an admittedly unreliable narrator, our book critic writes. Hollywood’s First Family: Among his various roles, Smith is also the patriarch of a family that has made intimacy its stock in trade.Theirs is a perfectly timed reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands, especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye, and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt out. It is also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its destigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.Will might be the Smith family member with the highest public profile, but it is Jada who helped draft the template of the family reinvention with “Red Table Talk.” The show, which appears on Facebook Watch, began in mid-2018, and quickly became known for unexpectedly vulnerable conversations, both with celebrity guests, and also between the hosts: Jada, Willow and Jada’s mother, Adrienne. Each woman holds her ground — take, for example, the episode about polyamory, in which Willow seems to baffle her co-hosts — but the inter-family good will prevents the show from ever erupting into true tension.Reality programming has only become an alternate safe space for the most famous in the last couple of decades. Previously, behind-the-scenes confessionals were more the purview of tabloids, an unsavory side effect of fame to be avoided at all costs. But beginning in the early 2000s, the era of “The Osbournes” on MTV, reality programming began to provide an escape hatch in which the famous could leverage their renown before being nudged toward the offramp of career irrelevance.It was novel then, and it ended up fomenting an entire cottage industry of second-chance grasps for attention, typically for C- and D-listers, both family docu-soaps and also shows like “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” and “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars.” Social media extended the available possibilities, granting new oxygen for the well known who were on their way to becoming less well known.For the Smith family, “Red Table Talk” provided proof of concept — it was acceptable, and even desirable, for the most prominent celebrities to make confessionals part of their brand.More than one episode delves into the challenges of Will and Jada’s marriage, offering small brushstrokes of revelation about an oft-gossiped-about couple. They insist they will never split, because after surmounting unspecified challenges, “We don’t have any dealbreakers.” (At the end of the chat, Will aims to dispel some frequent rumors: “We’ve never been Scientologists, we’ve never been swingers,” though Jada does point out that the second is a term for a “specific lifestyle.”)Watch enough “Red Table Talk” after reading Will’s book and absorbing his YouTube series and you might encounter the same tale told a few different ways — he’s been workshopping this unburdening for some time. Unlike Jada, who approaches the show and sharing her truths more casually, Will has fully embraced this shift and is treating it like he would a blockbuster film: rehearsal, polish, flawless delivery.Smith promoting “Will” with Queen Latifah last year. The actor’s memoir is surprisingly candid.Matt Rourke/Associated Press“Best Shape of My Life” begins as a weight-loss show — Will has a mild dad-bod paunch. To address it, he flies to Dubai to work with his personal trainer, as one does. He wants the process filmed, he says, because “the cameras act like my sponsor — they keep me accountable.” He partakes in intense physical challenges — walking to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet, or navigating the Dubai Police Academy obstacle course — and is also working on his memoir.Soon, he begins to chafe at that accountability. Agonizing over the weight loss goal begins to feel like false tension. So does stress about the deadline for his book (underscored by what feel like staged voice mail messages from his assistant). Instead what unfolds is a tug of war between his compulsion to perform and his need to retreat. The fourth episode is titled “I Quit,” and then he continues for two more episodes — this is, after all, a Will Smith production. But seams are fraying: In the fifth episode, he crows, “[expletive] the budget, [expletive] the deadline — they’ll get what we give them.”Several segments of the show are given over to Will’s reading segments of his memoir to family members and friends. These moments limn vulnerability without ever detaching it from performance — Will cries about the challenges in his childhood home, and his onlookers, including his therapist, nod along. At least a few years past his box-office-domination peak, he has built a more scalable reward system.(And lest you forget that the family rebrand is in no small way a business venture, there are untold cross-promotional opportunities. On “Best Shape,” Will often wears clothes from his Bel-Air Athletics line. When the family gathers in Miami to hear Will read chapters about them, the table is stocked with the signature blue square bottles of Just Water, Jaden’s company.)Jaden Smith holding a bottle of his Just Water at a film premiere in New York.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesOnce the sort of superstar known for smooth maximalism, Will has experimented with this sort of behind-the-scenes content before: “Will Smith’s Bucket List,” a series on Facebook Watch, and “Will Smith: Off the Deep End,” a nature immersion doc. But the last year has constituted a multiplatform career rebrand in which Smith uses all the tools of celebrity in service of peeling back its layers.In his autobiography, he writes movingly of the tug of war he feels in regards to his father, who instilled in Will the discipline with which he would build his astronomically successful career but was also abusive. In one section, he suggests that he considered pushing his elderly father down a flight of stairs as retribution.But the real revelation about Will’s relationship to parental authority comes in “King Richard,” last year’s biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Richard Williams was often maligned for the single-minded way he raised his daughters, but Will plays him empathetically as a stubborn hero, leaning into his doggedness but never making him an object of derision. (He was nominated for an Oscar for the performance.) No means are beyond bounds when the ends are so enviable.It’s likely the role has double meaning for Will — on the one hand, it’s a celebration of the transformative discipline he learned from his own father (in a non-abusive context), and on the other, it’s an argument for his own style of parenting. In both the memoir and at the Red Table, he speaks openly of how his heavy-handed fathering of Jaden and Willow exploded in his face on multiple occasions. When Willow’s first single, “Whip My Hair,” became a hit, she rebelled against the pressures of touring by shaving her head. The action film he made with Jaden, “After Earth,” was a colossal flop. (Will has another son, Trey, from his first marriage, who is a sometime D.J. and occasionally appears on “Red Table Talk.”)And yet the levelheadedness of the younger Smiths is somewhat remarkable. They are untethered thinkers in the way that children of privilege can often be, but they are also curious and empathetic and, all things considered, decidedly warm. (Listen to Jaden talk about learning how to navigate paying for dinner and you’ll melt.) Given their parents’s full-circle journey to untouchable celebrity and back, and given that they were born into a far more transparent generation, it’s easy to adapt to their family’s newfound visibility.Jaden has largely retreated from the spotlight, though he did release an album last year, “CTV3: Day Tripper’s Edition,” full of spacey dream-pop. When he shows up on “Red Table Talk” or in the “Best Shape of My Life” series, he appears almost impossibly wise.Willow has, relatively quietly, released five albums, recently homing in on a wiry pop-punk style that’s both tart and fashionable. Last year’s “Lately I Feel Everything” is her best album, and it includes the scarred anthem about duplicity “Transparentsoul” and raw songs like “Xtra,” in which she seeks space for a deep exhale: “I don’t mean to break so easily under the pressure/Need some time alone to breathe, I need some tree and fresh air.” And the album she released in 2020 as part of the duo called the Anxiety (which also includes Tyler Cole) features “Meet Me at Our Spot,” which became a huge hit on TikTok last year as a soundtrack for young creators to shamanistically lose themselves in dance.At the Red Table, Willow is a beacon of earnestness and humanity. Feeling deeply is the center of her public presentation; her conversation with Paris Jackson was less interview than sympathetic embrace. (At one point, Willow suggested that she’d cut herself in her younger years.) In her music and in her Red Table conversations, she grasps the futility of hiding her feelings, so she doesn’t bother.For Will and Jada, though, the high wire act of confession is, naturally, a reassertion of power. To be this vulnerable, effectively without fear of reprisal or public collapse, is perhaps the ultimate test of celebrity. The only question that remains is what secrets still lurk behind all this transparency. More