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      Craig muMs Grant, Actor and Slam Poet, Dies at 52

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      He was a star of the HBO series “Oz” under the name muMs, which he also used on the poetry circuit both before and after finding success on television.Craig muMs Grant’s biggest success as an actor was the role of Poet on the HBO prison drama “Oz,” but fans of that series were accustomed to seeing him credited simply as muMs. It was a name he adopted as a young man when he was exploring rap and slam poetry, influences that he said changed his life.“Before hip-hop,” as he put it in “A Sucker Emcee,” an autobiographical play he performed in 2014, “I couldn’t speak.”Mr. Grant compiled a respectable career as an actor. He appeared on “Oz” throughout its six-season run, which began in 1997, and turned up in spot roles on series including “Hack,” “Boston Legal” and “Law & Order” and its spinoffs, and in movies like Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2000). But before his “Oz” breakthrough he was a familiar presence on the slam poetry circuit in New York and beyond; he was in the 1998 documentary “SlamNation” as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam team.He returned to his poetry/rap roots often, even after “Oz” gave him a measure of fame — appearing onstage with the Labyrinth Theater Company in New York, where he was a member of the ensemble, and performing at colleges and small theaters all over the country.Mr. Grant, third from left, in an episode of the HBO series “Oz” in 1997. He played Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.HBO“I love words,” he told The Indianapolis Star in 2001. “Anybody ever wanted to buy me anything for Christmas or my birthday, they can buy me a dictionary. The bigger, the better.”Mr. Grant died on Wednesday in Wilmington, N.C., where he was filming the Starz series “Hightown,” in which he had a recurring role. He was 52.His manager, Sekka Scher, said the cause was complications of diabetes.Craig O’Neil Grant was born on Dec. 18, 1968, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a locksmith and carpenter at Montefiore Hospital, and his mother, Theresa (Maxwell) Grant, was a teacher.Mr. Grant graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx and was taking college courses in Virginia when, he said, he started exploring writing, seeking to infuse poetry with the energy of the rap music he enjoyed.“The problem with poetry is, a lot of the audience sometimes has a short attention span,” he told the Indianapolis paper years later. “So poetry has to have rhythm to capture people who can’t listen for so long. They’ll just close their eyes and ride the rhythm of your voice.”He took the name “muMs” when he was around 20. He was in a rap group, he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2003, and still had a bit of a youthful lisp, so a friend suggested he call himself “Mumbles.”“I thought about that for a week and shortened it to muMs,” he said, and then he turned that into an acronym for “manipulator under Manipulation shhhhhhh!” That phrase, he told the Indianapolis paper, symbolized the notion that “as great as I want to become or as great as I think I am, I can always go to the edge of the ocean, stand there and realize I’m nothing in comparison to the universe.”Back in New York, he didn’t succeed as a rapper. But he began performing spoken-word poetry at places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is where someone involved in developing “Oz” saw him and recommended that Tom Fontana, the show’s creator, give him a look. Mr. Grant auditioned by performing one of his poems, and he was cast as Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.Mr. Grant, who lived in the Bronx, joined Labyrinth in 2006 and appeared in various roles in its productions. He also began writing plays, including “A Sucker Emcee,” in which he told his life story largely in rhymed couplets while a D.J. working turntables provided a soundtrack.Mr. Grant is survived by his partner, Jennie West, and a brother, Winston Maxwell.In 2003 Mr. Grant released a spoken-word album called “Strange Fruit,” taking the title from the song about lynchings famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.“Today, strange fruit means we’re the product of everything Black people have been through in this country — Middle Passage, Jim Crow, segregation,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2004. “It’s a new way of looking at it. The metaphor of strange fruit means life and birth for me, where it used to mean lynching and death. Blacks have been doing that for years, taking the bad and flipping it, making the best of a bad situation.” More

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      Lil Nas X Makes a Coming-Out Statement, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Taylor Swift, Rod Wave, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Iggy Pop 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.Lil Nas X, ‘Montero (Call Me by Your Name)’Lil Nas X was born Montero Lamar Hill, and with “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” he cheerfully rejoices in lust as a gay man. “Romantic talkin’? You don’t even have to try,” he sings, over syncopated guitar and handclaps by way of flamenco. “Call me when you want, call me when you need.” The video — an elaborate CGI production, costume drama and visit to hell — makes clear that his identity has high stakes. (He also posted a note to his 14-year-old self on Twitter.) “In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don’t want the world to see,” Lil Nas X says in the spoken introduction to the video clip. “But here, we don’t.” JON PARELESTaylor Swift featuring Maren Morris, ‘You All Over Me’The teenage Taylor Swift who wrote “You All Over Me” for her second album, the 2008 “Fearless,” largely styled herself as a country singer. The original track was left as an outtake, still unreleased. But Swift probably wouldn’t have opened it with the metronomic, Minimalistic blips that start her newly recorded version, which is part of her reclamation of the early catalog she lost to music-business machinations. “You All Over Me” was a precursor of Swift’s many post-breakup songs. With what would become her trademark amalgam of everyday details, emotional declarations and terse, neat phrases, she laments that it’s impossible to escape memories of how she “had you/got burned/held out/and held on/God knows/too long.” Blips and all — she worked with Aaron Dessner, one of the producers of her 2020 albums “Folklore” and “Evermore” — the track stays largely in the realm of country-pop, with mandolin, harmonica and piano, while Maren Morris’s harmony vocals provide understated sisterly support. It’s hardly a throwaway song, and more than a decade later, its regrets can extend to her contracts as well as her romances. PARELESJulia Michaels, ‘All Your Exes’Tuneful and resentful, Julia Michaels’s latest strikes a blow against kumbaya, trading feel-good pith for the much rawer wounds within. Her enemy? Her lover’s past: “I wanna live in a world where all your exes are dead/I wanna kill all the memories that you save in your head/Be the only girl that’s ever been in your bed.” It’s harsh, funny, sad and relatably petty. JON CARAMANICAAngelique Kidjo and Yemi Alade, ‘Dignity’“Respect is reciprocal” goes the unlikely chorus of “Dignity”; so is collaboration. A year ago, Angelique Kidjo was a guest on “Shekere,” a major hit for the Nigerian singer Yemi Alade; now Alade joins Kidjo on “Dignity,” a song in sympathy with the widespread protests in Nigeria against the brutality of the notorious police Special Anti-Robbery Squad. It mourns people killed by police; it calls for equality, respect and “radical beauty” while also insisting, “No retreat, no surrender.” The track has a crisp Afrobeats core under pinging and wriggling guitars, as both women’s voices — separately and harmonizing — argue for strength and survival. PARELESDr. Lonnie Smith featuring Iggy Pop, ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together” was an old soul tune with an Afro-Latin undercurrent that became the foundation for Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” In this cover, the organist Dr. Lonnie Smith stays mostly faithful to the original, though his solo subtly doubles the funk factor and the band finds its way into a swaggering shuffle. Where Thomas sang the song as an earnest, enervated plea for social harmony, Smith’s guest vocalist, Iggy Pop, does it in an eerie croon, somewhere between a lounge singer and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOInternet Money featuring Lil Mosey and Lil Tecca, ‘Jetski’Not enough has been said about the strain of sweetness running through one sector of contemporary hip-hop. Listen to Lil Mosey or Lil Tecca — not just the pitch of the voices, but the breathable anti-density of the cadences, and also how the subject matter rarely rises past mild irritation. It’s cuddles all around. CARAMANICABrockhampton featuring Danny Brown, ‘Buzzcut’The return of Brockhampton after a quiet 2020 is top-notch chaos — a frenetic, nerve-racking stomper (featuring an elastic verse by Danny Brown) that nods to N.W.A., the Beastie Boys, the Pharcyde and beyond. CARAMANICARod Wave, ‘Tombstone’In a weary but resolute moan, over a plucked acoustic guitar and subterranean bass tones, Rod Wave sings about how he’ll be compulsively hustling “to keep the family fed” until he dies. Halfway through the song, he does. Death turns out to be the ultimate release: “Finally, I’ll be resting in peace,” he sings, his voice rising to falsetto and growing serene, with a gospel choir materializing to commemorate and uplift him. The video adds another story: of a deaf boy shot dead by police and laid to rest, as Wave sings, echoing the Bible and Sam Cooke, “by the river.” PARELESSara Watkins, ‘Night Singing’“Under the Pepper Tree” is the latest album by Sara Watkins, from the lapidary acoustic bands Nickel Creek and I’m With Her, and it’s a collection of children’s songs, mostly from her own childhood. “Night Singing” is her own new song, two minutes of pure benevolent lullaby as she urges, “Rest your eyes, lay down your head,” while the music unfolds from cozy acoustic guitar picking to halos of ascending, reverberating lead guitar. PARELESChristopher Hoffman, ‘Discretionary’The cellist Christopher Hoffman’s unruly, unorthodox quartet — featuring the vibraphonist Bryan Carrott, the bassist Rashaan Carter and the drummer Craig Weinrib — moves around with its limbs loose, but its body held together. On “Discretionary,” the odd-metered opening track from his new album, “Asp Nimbus,” a backbeat is implied but always overridden or undermined; Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, an avant-garde chamber ensemble in which Hoffman plays, might flutter to mind. Carrott’s vibes make a web of harmony that Hoffman’s bowed cello sometimes supports, and elsewhere cuts right through. RUSSONELLO More

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      Addison Rae’s Pulsing Pop Debut, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by glaive, Allison Russell, Lake Street Dive 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.Addison Rae, ‘Obsessed’Perfectly pulsing, pithy and pleasant Pelotoncore from Addison Rae, star of TikTok and, if the machines have their way, all the other media, too. This is her debut single, and the topic is mutual infatuation, an optimal subject for the era of reciprocatory social media. JON CARAMANICAglaive, ‘I Wanna Slam My Head Against the Wall’As hyperpop gets slightly less hyper, it’s coalescing into charming, slurry electro-pop, with melodies inching closer to the fore. “I Wanna Slam My Head Against the Wall,” the new single from the scene star glaive, tilts between breathability and gasping, with squirrelly production and lyrics that are sweetly sung agony: “I’m on the brink of insanity inside my own home/I wanna slam my head against the wall/’Til I cannot feel at all.” CARAMANICALake Street Dive, ‘Anymore’“We keep going through the motions when we should go our separate ways,” Rachael Price sings in “Anymore,” a patient but unsparingly analytical song about the protracted last throes of a relationship. Lake Street Dive, an era-hopping band that can reach all the way back to smalll-group swing, places “Anymore” in the 1970s and 1980s of Steely Dan and Marvin Gaye, with electric keyboards, drum machines and tickling guitars. The gloss doesn’t hide the heartbreak or the anger. JON PARELESAllison Russell, ‘Nightflyer’The lyrics to “Nightflyer” are mostly a list, a poetic and far-reaching one: “I’m the moon’s dark side, I’m the solar flare/the child of the earth, the child of the air/I am the mother of the evening star/I am the love that conquers all.” Allison Russell sings them over a stately blend of country and church as she summons a congregation of her own vocal harmonies, gathering strength as she promises reassurance. PARELESReggie, ‘Ain’t Gon Stop Me’Brief but beautifully textured, “Ain’t Gon Stop Me” is the best single so far from the young Reggie, who raps with a deliciously earthy singsong flow. On this song, produced by Monte Booker and Kenny Beats, he recalls hard times — “The drugs almost got me/my best friend was Oxy” — with an almost gospel-like fever, delivered and breathing easy. CARAMANICANick Hakim and Roy Nathanson, ‘Moonman’Through his friends in the Onyx Collective, the young soul vocalist Nick Hakim came into contact with Roy Nathanson, an alto saxophonist and poet with decades of history on the downtown scene. An afternoon of collaborations in Nathanson’s basement led to recording a full album, “Small Things,” due next month, with help from a few friends around the Onyx universe. Hakim has a voice made of smoke that can rattle you like thunder, and on “Moonman,” a simple jazzy chord progression is all he needs as he wanders through Nathanson’s wistful, stream-of-consciousness poetry. (“The passionate/kiss-in-the-fog,/clammy hand romance/at Bogart Airport view.”) The melody, half-improvised and enchanting, comes surrounded by lush analog sound, clouded with echo and blur. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKasai Allstars, ‘Olooh, a War Dance for Peace’“Olooh” is named after an ancient Congolese village custom: marking a reconciliation with a ceremonial war dance. Musicians and singers from five ensembles collaborate in the multiethnic, 15-member Kasai Allstars, based in Kinshasa. In “Olooh,” a six-beat groove carries a musical variety show: male and female singers, grouped or solo, offering a string of assorted melodies; guitars entwining or leaping into the foreground, bursts of electronic sounds. The track unfurls idea after idea for nearly six minutes, and still sounds like it’s only getting started. PARELESLil Tjay featuring Polo G and Fivio Foreign, ‘Headshot’A turn to the tough for the sugary-voiced rap crooner Lil Tjay, “Headshot” is ominous and sturdy. Polo G has the first guest verse, but it’s the rising Brooklyn drill star Fivio Foreign who steals the show with an extremely au courant barb: “All of your sneakers is beat up.” CARAMANICASorry, ‘Separate’In “Separate,” the English band Sorry melds deadpan, indie-rock understatement — think of the xx drained of romance — with clanky, glitchy electronics. It’s a distillate of late-pandemic, extended-lockdown loneliness, disorientation, frustration and monotony; Asha Lorenz sings, “I like to think I’m walking somewhere even when I walk in circles.” PARELESLoraine James, ‘Simple Stuff’The beat is programmed but never exactly repetitive in “Simple Stuff” by the London electronic producer Loraine James. “I like the simple stuff, you like the simple things, what does that bring to me,” goes a chanted loop that gets distorted and fractured as the track goes on. One thuddy bass note pulses, sputters, disappears and pokes back in; snare hits and log-drum samples spatter and echo across the stereo space, with maracas slipping in for extra polyrhythm. The track is tense and constricted, extrapolating its frustrations inward. PARELESBheki Mseleku, ‘Isango (The Gateway)’Few figures loom larger among South African jazz musicians today than Bheki Mseleku, a pianist and multi-instrumentalist who placed his deep commitment to local traditions and his own spiritual perspective (earned through years spent in self-isolation) into conversation with American jazz influences. Eighteen years ago, and five years before his death at age 53, Mseleku entered a studio in London to record a solo-piano album that was never released. Now it has finally come out, as “Beyond the Stars,” on the Tapestry Works label. On its longest track, “Isango (The Gateway),” Mseleku follows his own lyrical, cycling melody into a rolling three-chord pattern that finally brings the nearly 17-minute performance home. RUSSONELLO More

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      Drake Shakes Up the Singles Chart, but Morgan Wallen’s Album Holds On

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ChartsDrake Shakes Up the Singles Chart, but Morgan Wallen’s Album Holds OnThree of the rapper’s new tracks dislodged Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” on the Hot 100, while the country star notched a ninth week atop the Billboard 200.Drake’s “What’s Next,” “Wants and Needs” and “Lemon Pepper Freestyle” take the top three spots on the Hot 100.Credit…Chris Delmas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMarch 15, 2021, 3:09 p.m. ETAfter two static months, the pop charts are finally beginning to change, at least a little.Olivia Rodrigo’s song “Drivers License” has dominated the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for eight weeks, and been a phenomenon on social media, but now it has finally given way. And not just to one song, but three: Drake takes the top three spots with “What’s Next,” “Wants and Needs” and “Lemon Pepper Freestyle” — the first artist in history to do so. (Perhaps not coincidentally, those songs are the first three tracks, in order, on Drake’s recently released EP, “Scary Hours 2.”) “Drivers License” falls to No. 4.The album chart, however, has not budged. “Dangerous: The Double Album,” by the country singer-songwriter Morgan Wallen, notches a ninth week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It had the equivalent of 78,000 sales in the United States, including 98 million steams and 6,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking unit.Despite a rebuke from the industry after Wallen was caught on video casually using a racial slur, “Dangerous” has had the most weeks at No. 1 for any album in five years (since “Views,” by Drake — who else?), and is one of only four country albums in the 65-year history of the chart to spent at least nine weeks at No. 1. The others? Garth Brooks’s “Ropin’ the Wind” (1991), Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Some Gave All” (1992) and Taylor Swift’s “Fearless” (2008).Also on this week’s album chart, Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” is No. 2, Pooh Shiesty’s “Shiesty Season” is No. 3, the Weeknd’s year-old “After Hours” is No. 4 and Lil Durk’s “The Voice” is No. 5.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion Perform 'WAP' at the Grammys

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftCardi B and Megan Thee Stallion present a (slightly) PG version of ‘WAP.’March 14, 2021, 10:56 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 10:56 p.m. ETCredit…Kevin Winter/Getty Images For The Recording AcademyIf you needed any more evidence that Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion remain unbowed by the conservative pearl-clutching that followed the release of their raunchy duet “WAP,” the Grammys had it.In Sunday’s performance of “WAP” — their first ever on television — Cardi B pole danced on the heel of a giant stiletto and the rappers, wearing silver armor-like leotards, crawled around and executed intricate choreography on a massive bed. The women twerked triumphantly in several different positions, and although the song’s trademark line was sanitized to “wet, wet, wet,” much of the original lyricism made it to the prime-time program.When the “WAP” music video debuted in August, it set the internet ablaze with its R-rated lyrics and even more suggestive choreography (Cardi and Megan splashing around in fishnets). The song topped the charts for weeks, inspired myriad TikTok memes and debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100.Megan Thee Stallion, who won best new artist earlier in the show, opened the brief set with two of her hits, “Body” and “Savage,” which is nominated for record of the year. She wore a glimmering leotard and tall white feathers on her head, which, along with the tap dancers, gave the performance a Roaring Twenties feel. Then Cardi B hit the stage in a bubble-gum pink pixie cut to perform her latest single “Up,” before the rappers teamed up for the crowd pleaser.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Megan Thee Stallion Wins a Grammy for Best New Artist

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsliveGrammys UpdatesWinners ListThe HighlightsHow to WatchAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyGrammy Awards Live Updates: Megan Thee Stallion Wins Best New ArtistMegan Thee Stallion wins best new artist, the first televised award of the night.March 14, 2021, 8:34 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 8:34 p.m. ETMegan Thee Stallion won one of the “big four” categories at the Grammys, best new artist.Credit…CBSThe Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion won the Grammy for best new artist on Sunday, taking home the first trophy presented on the official telecast. She also won an award during the preshow — best rap performance for “Savage,” a song that is nominated twice more tonight (for best rap song and record of the year).“I don’t want to cry,” Megan Thee Stallion said, already teary-eyed, in a brief speech. “It’s been a hell of a year, but we made it.”She becomes the first female rapper to be named best new artist since Lauryn Hill in 1999, and only the third solo rapper ever, following Chance the Rapper in 2017. (The hip-hop group Arrested Development took home the award in 1993.)Megan Thee Stallion started releasing mixtapes on SoundCloud in 2016, while in college for health administration, but first broke through with muscular, confident freestyles that went viral online. In 2019, singles like “Hot Girl Summer” and “Cash ___” put her into regular radio rotation and the next year, she hit No. 1 twice — first with “Savage,” which featured Beyoncé on its remix, and then as a featured guest on Cardi B’s “WAP.”The best new artist award capped what had been an emotional rise for Megan Thee Stallion, whose success was interrupted last summer when she said she was shot in the feet by the rapper Tory Lanez after a disagreement. Lanez, who denied shooting her, was charged with assault in the incident, which led Megan to become a vocal defender of — and advocate for — Black women.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      SZA Teases What’s Next, and 11 More New Songs

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeRoast: Thick AsparagusVisit: National ParksRead: Shirley HazzardApologize: To Your KidsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistSZA Teases What’s Next, and 11 More New SongsHear tracks by Lucy Dacus, Jorja Smith, Charles Lloyd and the Marvels, and others.At the end of her video for “Good Days,” SZA hints at an even newer song.Credit…VevoJon Pareles, Giovanni Russonello and March 12, 2021Updated 1:45 p.m. ETEvery 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.SZA, ‘Good Days’[embedded content]SZA gets tangled in both ambivalent feelings and acoustic-guitar filigree in “Good Days.” She’s trying to pull away from an ex — “I worry that I wasted the best of me on you, babe/You don’t care” — but she’s “got me a war in my mind,” still torn between memories and moving on. Her video for the song has her gyrating amid giant mushrooms and doing a pole dance in a library. It also teases a minute of an even newer song, sparse with percussive interruptions and a choppy, leaping melody, as she hints at romantic strife that gets bloody. JON PARELESRosé, ‘On the Ground’“On the Ground” is the debut solo single from the 24-year-old New Zealand native Rosé, who is one-fourth of the K-pop juggernaut Blackpink. Disillusioned with the empty promises of fame (“suddenly you have it, you find out that your goal’s just plastic”), the song’s brooding verses and lacquered sheen recall Britney Spears’ glittering pop-confessional “Lucky.” But then the chorus hits, a steely beat drops and Rosé finds strength in the sudden realization “Everything I need is on the ground.” LINDSAY ZOLADZLucy Dacus, ‘Thumbs’The situation in “Thumbs” couldn’t be more quietly fraught. The singer’s 19-year-old girlfriend’s father is in town to see her for the first time in nearly a decade. The encounter is tense — “Your nails are digging into my knee” — disguised in smiling politeness: “Do you get the checks I send on your birthday?” Lucy Dacus sings with sweet determination, sustaining a foursquare melody over misty electronic chords while envisioning mayhem. “I would kill him if you let me,” she croons, and it’s clear she means it. PARELESJorja Smith, ‘Addicted’“Addicted,” the new single from Jorja Smith — the English singer-songwriter who first came to prominence on Drake’s 2017 mixtape “More Life,” and released her soulful debut album “Lost & Found” a year later — is at once subtle and devastating. “There’s no light in your eyes since you won’t open them,” Smith sings to an indifferent paramour atop skittering percussion and a drifting, moody guitar riff. The music video, which Smith co-directed with Savanah Leaf, captures not only the solitary, all-dressed-up-nowhere-to-go vibe of lockdown but also the specific kind of loneliness conjured by the song. “The hardest thing — you are not addicted to me,” Smith croons, though by the end of the chorus that lyric turns into something defiant: “You should be addicted to me.” ZOLADZChika, ‘FWB’The rapper and singer Chika is making the most of her attention as a nominee for best new artist at the Grammys; she’s releasing an EP, “Once Upon a Time,” two days before the awards show. It includes “FWB,” as in “friends with benefits,” a song she put out in 2020 that fuses a leisurely, quiet-storm ballad with brittle trap drums, while Chika sings and raps about a strictly unromantic one-night hookup. “I ain’t here for love, so promise not to fall for me,” she instructs, even as the slow groove promises seduction. PARELESSkullcrusher, ‘Storm in Summer’Skullcrusher is something of an ironic name for the solo project of the upstate New York native Helen Ballentine, who makes plaintive, acoustic-driven indie-pop. The drizzly dreamscape “Storm in Summer,” from her forthcoming EP of the same name, is anchored by Ballentine’s yearning voice, which effectively pierces the song’s pastoral atmosphere. “I wish you could see me,” she sings with building intensity. It’s crushing in its own particular way. ZOLADZcehryl, ‘Outside the Party, Inside the Dream’The whispery songwriter cehryl is from Hong Kong, studied at Berklee School of Music and spent time making indie-pop in Los Angeles. “Outside the Party, Inside the Dream” lilts along eccentrically and insinuatingly on a five-note, 5/8-meter guitar lick — fans of Juana Molina will appreciate it — as she ponder absence and anticipation, connection and inevitable distance. PARELESSpoon, ‘Breakdown’/‘A Face in the Crowd’Spoon covering Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers makes almost too much sense. Both are Southern rock bands that don’t really sound like “Southern rock bands,” unafraid of atmospheric empty space and more interested in enduring songcraft than trend-hopping. Spoon first played its impressively faithful cover of the Heartbreakers’ 1976 debut single “Breakdown” last October at the livestreamed “Tom Petty’s 70th Birthday Bash.” Even better, though, is a second cover they’ve released with it today, of Petty’s 1987 solo tune “A Face in the Crowd.” Britt Daniel’s mellifluous croak is, in its own way, as distinctive as Petty’s, and he brings just the right balance of detached coolness and aching wistfulness to the vocal. ZOLADZGary Louris, ‘New Normal’Gary Louris of the Jayhawks wrote and recorded “New Normal” more than a decade ago, only to find himself with a song that suits the pandemic’s sense of time: static but also vanishing. It’s part of a solo album due in June. Steady, up-and-down piano chords pace the song amid ticking drums and stray electronic buzzes and drones; a distorted guitar solo erupts midway through. He sings about “Hours that slip by, never to return,” and at the end there’s a chilling bit of prescience: “Deep breath, you’re leaving what you came here with/Gathering like slow death, nipping at your heels.” PARELESBajofondo featuring Natalia Oreiro, ‘Budem Tantsevat/Listo Pa Bailar’Two kinds of stoic romantic melancholy — Argentine and Russian — converge in “Budem Tantsevat/Listo Pa Bailar,” which translates as “Ready to Dance.” It’s sung in Spanish and Russian by Natalia Oreiro, from Uruguay, as Bajofondo merges the sound of a vintage tango group (topped by piano, violin and bandoneon, the tango accordion) with a thumping beat, a synthesizer bass line and, eventually, Slavic choral harmonies. Minor-chorded amorousness bridges continents. PARELESCharles Lloyd and the Marvels, ‘Peace’When Charles Lloyd moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he joined a small tradition of Southern improvisers who had moved out west seeking artistic and personal freedoms (he’s from Memphis originally). Lloyd, 82, opens “Tone Poem,” the new album from his quintet the Marvels, with two tunes by Ornette Coleman, a major figure in that little diaspora: A Texan, he had come to L.A. before Lloyd, and became well known in those years for pioneering the music that would be known as free jazz. These two tunes, “Peace” and “Ramblin’,” first appeared on the final two albums from Coleman’s Los Angeles years. The Marvels have both the American West and the South built into their sound, partly thanks to Greg Leisz’s pedal steel guitar. On “Peace,” he fills in the space around Coleman’s quizzical melody, which becomes syrupy and slow and untied from any set tempo. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      For his final shows before the pandemic, Bill Frisell was touring U.S. jazz clubs with his new quartet, HARMONY: Frisell on electric guitar, along with the great, dramatic singer Petra Haden, Hank Roberts on cello and Luke Bergman on baritone guitar. When I saw them in Baltimore, on the first night of March 2020, they seemed to be in a set-long mind-meld. HARMONY is a quiet group, and though each musician is masterly, their goal is to honor the concept the project is named after. Nothing is high-pitched, no instrument overwhelms the others; they play to blend. Bergman and Roberts added their own background vocals at times, and Frisell glided around all their melodies with his electric guitar, sometimes doubling Haden’s vocal parts, sometimes building drama on his own. At moments — especially when they played old songs like “Red River Valley” or “Hard Times Come Again No More” — they sounded like a chamber group gathered around a prairie campfire.

      Frisell turns 70 this month, and at this point, innovation and exploration are so fundamental to his musical identity that even a small, unflashy band where everyone sings except him still beams with his sensibility. HARMONY’s self-titled debut album — released in 2019, the guitarist’s first record as a leader for Blue Note in his 40-year career — contained the same genre-indeterminate mix of music that’s typical of Frisell: jazz standards, show tunes, old folk songs and haunting, melodic originals.
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      In Baltimore, HARMONY closed with a song the group hasn’t recorded but Frisell has played often over the past few years. It’s an uncomplicated tune with a very deep history. Musicologists have traced its origin to an 18th-century hymn, and a version of it was likely sung by enslaved laborers. It was a union song too, sung by striking workers in the ’40s, around the time Pete Seeger first heard it and helped spread it to the folk-festival audiences of the ’60s. The civil rights movement, starting with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, adopted it as an unofficial anthem, making it famous enough that President Johnson quoted its title in his 1965 call for the Voting Rights Act. In all of these cases — and also in Tiananmen Square, Soweto and the many other sites of protest where it has been heard — “We Shall Overcome” has been more a statement of collective hope than a call to arms. It is a proclamation of faith.

      Frisell told me that, musically speaking, he likes the song because of how deeply he has internalized it. “Like when you’re walking and humming or whistling, almost unconscious that you’re doing it — that’s what you want,” he says. “That’s what ‘We Shall Overcome’ is. It’s in us, the melody and the words. When I play it, the song is like a jungle gym you can play around in. The song is there, and you can take off anywhere.”

      In Baltimore, Frisell and his bandmates moved through “We Shall Overcome” with joyful purpose, Frisell improvising while all three vocalists joined together. I didn’t know it then, but this would be my last ticketed concert before venues across the country went dark. The last thing I experienced in a full club was Petra Haden raising her hands high and compelling us all — Frisell now included — to sing together for our deliverance.

      Had things gone as planned, Frisell’s next move would have been to focus on a new group, this one nominally a jazz trio, with the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Rudy Royston. Things, of course, did not go as planned. Frisell’s datebook was soon filled with canceled gigs. “It’s been kind of traumatic,” he told me via Zoom, though his ever-present smile never quite wavered. But the new trio’s debut album did eventually come out, in August 2020. It closes with its own version of “We Shall Overcome” — this one instrumental, pastoral in its feeling, a soul ballad at the end of a record spent rambling around the outskirts of high-​lonesome country and spacious modern jazz.

      Royston and Morgan are well established in their own careers, but they’re both younger than Frisell, and each came up in a wide-open jazz world that Frisell helped create. In the early 1980s, Frisell began incorporating digital loops and other effects into his live and recorded playing and wound up crafting an entirely new role for the electric guitar in a jazz setting: creating atmospheres full of sparkling reverb, echoing harmonics, undulating whispers that sneak in from outside the band. As he wove those patches of sound around a trio, with the drummer Paul Motian and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, he brought a new spaciousness and pensiveness to the instrument, completely resetting its dynamic range. His quietest playing was like a distant radio; his loudest was a heavy-metal scream that could sit neatly beside, for instance, the Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid on a 1985 duet album, “Smash & Scatteration.”

      Frisell’s approach to his repertoire was just as innovative. He knew his standards but gained an early reputation for openness to pop music and just about anything else — most famously on his 1992 record “Have a Little Faith,” which features everything from a small-group orchestration of an Aaron Copland ballet score to the same band’s searing instrumental version of Madonna’s “Live to Tell.” There was a similar adventurousness in his originals: Across the ’90s, he composed for violin and horns (on “Quartet”), for bluegrass musicians (on “Nashville”), for film scores and for installation soundtracks.

      This is Frisell’s great accomplishment: He makes a guitar sound so unique that it can fit with anything. This became fully clear around the turn of this century, when his records skipped from improvised bluegrass to “The Intercontinentals” — which featured a band of Greek, Malian, American and Brazilian musicians — and then through to “Unspeakable,” a sample-based record made with the producer Hal Willner, a friend since 1980. Willner also introduced Frisell to artists like Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello and Allen Ginsberg, three of many legends who have invited Frisell into the studio to add his signature to their recordings. Every year of this century, he has appeared on or led a new record, often several records, and yet it would be impossible for even the most obsessive fan to guess what the next one might sound like.

      Frisell has largely swapped his old dynamic range for a stylistic one: He doesn’t play as loud these days, but he plays everything, and with everyone. He is on the young side of jazz-elder-statesman status, but in the past four decades, no one else has taken the collaborative, improvisational spirit of that music to so many places.

      And now, like so many of us, he’s just at home. “I shouldn’t be complaining,” he told me, from the house in Brooklyn that he shares with his wife. “I’m healthy, I have my guitar. But my whole life has been about interacting musically with somebody else.” At one point he held up a stack of notebooks and staff-paper pads: “What am I gonna do with this stuff?” he asked. “Usually I’ll write enough, and I’ll get a group together and make a record. But that’s after like a week or two of writing. Now it’s a year or more of ideas.”

      He has played a few outdoor shows in front yards with his longtime collaborators Kenny Wollesen on drums and Tony Scherr on bass. He has played similar gigs with Morgan and Royston. He has performed streamed concerts, including a recent Tyshawn Sorey show, at the Village Vanguard, with Lovano. Frisell has mourned too: Hal Willner died from Covid-19 in April, right after the two were discussing their next collaboration. And he has practiced — as if he were back in high school, he says, working through songs from his favorite records in his bedroom. Often they’re the same ones he practiced in the mid-1960s, from Thelonious Monk to “Stardust.”

      But that is the extent of recent musical connection for a guy who describes playing guitar as his preferred method of “speech” — a guy who got a guitar in 1965 and, since joining his first garage band, has rarely gone a day without playing with somebody else.

      Frisell says he can’t remember when he first heard “We Shall Overcome,” but it would have been sometime during his school days in Denver. “I grew up in a time with a music program in public schools,” he told me. “I’m in seventh grade, and that song was coming around that time. And my English teacher, Mr. Newcomb, is playing us Bob Dylan records, because he said it was like poetry. This was 1963, ’64. On TV you see ‘Hootenanny’ along with Kennedy’s assassination. January 1964, I saw M.L.K. speak at our church. A couple weeks before that, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ came out. Then a couple weeks after that, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. It was in the air.”

      The neighborhood he grew up in, he told me, was very “Leave It to Beaver” and overwhelmingly white. It was Denver East High School, and its band threw him together with a wider group of kids, including the future Earth, Wind & Fire members Andrew Woolfolk, Philip Bailey and Larry Dunn. “When Martin Luther King was killed, our high school concert band was performing and the principal came in and told everyone,” Frisell says. “It was horrible. I was in the band room, with Andrew Woolfolk, with my Japanese-American friend whose parents were in the internment camps, and we were comforting each other.” It gave him the sense that music transcended personal differences and that the camaraderie shared by collaborators was a model for other forms of strife. “From that time, I carry with me this idea that the music community is ahead of its time trying to work things out.”

      “We Shall Overcome” became a regular part of his repertoire in 2017. It’s not the first time he has gone through a phase of ruminating on a particular tune, working through it in different settings: Surely no one else has recorded so many versions of “Shenandoah,” and he played “A Change Is Gonna Come” a lot during the George W. Bush presidency. But as we moved through the past four years, he was drawn back to “We Shall Overcome,” this tune from his childhood. “I was just trying to make a small hopeful statement,” he says. He didn’t know that by the time his trio released the song on their debut, it would be the summer of the George Floyd protests and John Lewis’s death. They reminded him, he says, that “We Shall Overcome” is “one of those songs that is always relevant. That song kind of sums it up. Every time I think about giving up, there are these people like John Lewis — we owe it to them to keep going and trying.”

      Frisell appeared on at least nine albums in 2020, including his trio’s “Valentine,” records from Elvis Costello and Ron Miles and Laura Veirs, tributes to the music of T. Rex and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and “Americana,” a collaboration with the Swiss harmonica player Grégoire Maret and the French pianist Romain Collin. “Americana” is the closest to a “typical” Frisell album, meaning it features not just his languid, layered playing but also his heart-tugging sense of emotional drama. The tempos are slow, and the track list includes recognizable pop covers, such as “Wichita Lineman” and Bon Iver’s “Re: Stacks.”

      The album is improvisational, but it’s cozier and more melodic than most contemporary jazz. This is another mode that Frisell pioneered. If you watch solemn documentaries about heartland struggles or are familiar with public radio’s interstitial music, you’ve heard his influence. Younger guitarists in the cosmic-country realm, like William Tyler and Steve Gunn, also have a bit of Frisell’s unassuming lope. He’s one of the quietest guitar heroes in the instrument’s history.

      His only trick, as he explains it, is “trying to stay connected to this sense of wonder and amazement. That’s where it helps to have other people. Even just one other person. If I play by myself or write a melody, it’s one thing. But if I give it to someone else, they’re going to play it slower, faster, suddenly you’re off into the zone. Being off the edge of what you know, that’s the best place.”

      This attitude has earned him a lifetime spent on stages and records with artists that he revered and studied as a boy, jazz players like Ron Carter, Charles Lloyd and Jack DeJohnette. But now that this journey is on pause, for the first time in 55 years, it’s as though Frisell has no choice but to take stock of what he has learned from these artists and his relationship with their legacies. “It’s just overwhelming what we owe to Black people,” he said at one point in our conversation. “Our culture, we would be nothing. Nothing. But personally, too.” He recalled, again, his teenage years: “In Denver, I was always welcomed into it. It didn’t matter that I was white. I remember a great tenor player named Ron Washington. He was in a big band where you just read the charts, and I could do that and get through the gig. An agent set up those gigs, and he called me once, and I showed up, but it wasn’t the big band. It was just Ron, a drummer and me. I didn’t know any tunes at all.” He laughed again, then described something reminiscent of the second verse of “We Shall Overcome,” the one about walking hand in hand: “Ron was so cool. He just said, ‘Let’s play a blues.’ Then another. And another. He led me through.”

      John Lingan is the author of “Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk.” Celina Pereira is a Brazilian-American graphic designer and artist based in Los Angeles. More