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      Aaliyah’s Music Will Finally Be Streaming. What Took So Long?

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      Twenty years after one of the most celebrated stars of ’90s R&B died in a plane crash, her songs — like “Try Again” and “If Your Girl Only Knew” — will be widely available.For years, it has been one of music’s most conspicuous, and puzzling, absences: The majority of the catalog of Aaliyah, the groundbreaking R&B singer of the 1990s and early 2000s, has been absent from digital services — rendering the work of one of the most influential pop stars in recent decades largely invisible, and depriving her of a proper legacy. The singer, whose full name was Aaliyah Haughton, died in a plane crash in 2001 at age 22.But on Thursday came a surprise announcement that her music will soon arrive on streaming platforms, starting with her second album, “One in a Million” (1996), on Aug. 20.Fans, including Cardi B, celebrated online. But the return of Aaliyah’s music remains fraught, with a battle still playing out between her estate and the music impresario who signed her as a teenager and retains control of the bulk of her catalog. Here’s an overview of her long unavailability on the services that dominate music consumption today.What music is coming out now?Blackground Records, founded by the producer Barry Hankerson — Aaliyah’s uncle — said it would be rereleasing 17 albums from its catalog over the next two months, on streaming services as well as on CD and vinyl. They include the bulk of Aaliyah’s output — her studio albums “One in a Million” and “Aaliyah,” along with the “Romeo Must Die” soundtrack and two posthumous collections — plus albums by Timbaland, Toni Braxton, JoJo and Tank.The releases, being made through a distribution deal with the independent music company Empire, will introduce a new generation to Aaliyah’s work. In the 1990s, she stood out as a powerful voice in the emerging sound of hip-hop: a forthright young woman — she was just 15 when she released her first album, “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” (1994) — who sang like a street-smart angel over some of the most innovative backing tracks of the time.“Where most divas insist on being the center of the song,” Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times wrote in an appreciation in 2001, “she knew how to disappear into the music, how to match her voice to the bass line — it was sometimes difficult to tell one from the other.”Who is Barry Hankerson?Hankerson is an elusive, powerful and divisive figure in the music business. He was once married to Gladys Knight, and later discovered and managed R. Kelly. He built Blackground into one of the most successful Black music companies of its time, but clashed with artists. Braxton, JoJo and others have sued the label, with Braxton accusing Hankerson of “fraud, deception, and double-dealing,” according to a 2016 article on the music site Complex titled “The Inexplicable Online Absence of Aaliyah’s Best Music.”In 1991, Hankerson introduced his 12-year-old niece to Kelly, who was twice her age. Kelly, then an emerging singer, songwriter and producer, would become the primary force shaping Aaliyah’s early career, writing and producing much of her material and making Aaliyah part of his entourage.It later emerged that Kelly had secretly married Aaliyah in 1994, when she was 15 and he was 27. In the criminal case Kelly now faces in Brooklyn — which is set to begin jury selection next week — prosecutors have alleged that Kelly bribed an Illinois government employee at the time to obtain a fake ID for Aaliyah that gave her age as 18. Their marriage was annulled.After Hankerson moved the distribution of Blackground releases from the Jive label to Atlantic in the mid-90s, Aaliyah began working with two young songwriter-producers from Virginia: Timbaland and Missy Elliott. Their first collaboration, “One in a Million” (1996), went double platinum and spawned the hit singles “If Your Girl Only Knew” and “The One I Gave My Heart To.”Clockwise from top left: “Aaliyah,” “One in a Million,” “Ultimate Aaliyah” and “I Care 4 U,” albums that will be available in physical and digital versions.What happened to Aaliyah’s music?By the time Aaliyah died, she seemed well on her way to a major career. But as the music business evolved in the digital age, and Blackground’s output slowed down, her music largely disappeared.Aside from the album “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,” which remained part of the Jive catalog through Sony Music, and a handful of other tracks, most of Aaliyah’s songs have been unavailable for streaming. Used CDs and LPs of her work trade for eye-popping prices.Her influence has persisted, although sometimes it is more imagined than real. Last month, the singer Normani released a song, “Wild Side,” with Cardi B, that contained what many fans thought was a sample of an Aaliyah drum break. (Billboard said it is not, although Hankerson has said it would have his blessing anyway.) And interest in her story was spurred by the 2019 documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which delved deeply into their relationship.Although the streaming catalog has nearly reached the “celestial jukebox” level of completion that has long been predicted, there are still some other notable absences. De La Soul’s early work, including its classic 1989 debut “3 Feet High and Rising,” is not online, apparently because of problems in clearing samples. (The new owners of that music have pledged to make it available, although no concrete plans have been revealed.)Why is the music becoming available now?Exactly what led to the current release of Aaliyah’s music is unclear.According to a new article in Billboard, Hankerson began seeking a new deal for her music about a year ago, after Aaliyah’s estate made a cryptic announcement that “communication has commenced” between the estate and “various record labels” about finally getting her music online. “More updates to come,” it said.But the estate does not control Aaliyah’s recordings; Hankerson does, through his ownership of the Blackground label. For months, fans have followed more mysterious statements from the estate, including one in January, around what would have been Aaliyah’s 42nd birthday, that “these matters are not within our control.”When Blackground announced its rerelease plans, the estate responded with yet another confusing statement, saying that for 20 years it has been “enduring shadowy tactics of deception in connection with unauthorized projects targeted to tarnish,” yet expressing “forgiveness” and a desire to move on.A more direct explanation of what has been going on behind the scenes came from a lawyer for the estate, Paul V. LiCalsi, who said: “For almost 20 years, Blackground has failed to account to the estate with any regularity in accordance with her recording contracts. In addition, the estate was not made aware of the impending release of the catalog until after the deal was complete and plans were in place.”Billboard quoted a representative for Blackground in response, saying that the estate “will receive everything that it is entitled to” and that a royalty payment had been made earlier this year.For fans, the behind-the-scenes battling may matter less than the music finally becoming available online.“Baby Girl is coming to Spotify,” the service announced on Twitter, with a picture of Aaliyah. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this.” More

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      Willie Winfield, Angelic-Voiced Doo-Wop Singer, Is Dead at 91

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      For more than 60 years, he sang with various incarnations of the Harptones. “His voice was unique,” one concert producer said, “and it lasted his whole life.”Willie Winfield, whose silken lead vocals with the Harptones in the 1950s made him a favorite of doo-wop connoisseurs, even though the group never achieved wide mainstream commercial success, died on July 27 in a hospital in Brooklyn. He was 91.The cause was cardiac arrest, his daughter Tina Winfield said.Mr. Winfield’s angelic voice was first heard in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, and he continued to sing when doo-wop groups turned into nostalgia acts in the 1970s. He toured with various incarnations of the Harptones until he retired in 2019, when he was 89.“He had one of the best voices around,” Dick Fox, a producer who booked the Harptones dozens of times on his live oldies shows, said in a phone interview. “His voice was unique, and it lasted his whole life. He never lost the higher register.”During the 1950s, Mr. Winfield and the Harptones performed at the Apollo Theater and at shows promoted by the influential disc jockeys Alan Freed (at the Brooklyn Paramount) and Murray the K (at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey). They were seen in the 1956 musical revue film “Rockin’ the Blues.”Among the group’s best-known songs were “A Sunday Kind of Love,” “Since I Fell for You” and “My Memories of You.”“Singing the songs for me feels fresh every time,” Mr. Winfield told the critic David Hinckley in a 1985 interview for The Daily News. “It’s the way people respond. All of a sudden, I forget my age. I lose all sense of everything except the song. I go back to the first time we recorded, when we had no idea what would happen.”Robert Palmer, the chief pop music critic of The New York Times, wrote in 1982 that Mr. Winfield’s voice had “immaculate pitch and an insinuating way with a phrase.” But despite Mr. Winfield’s memorable voice, the Harptones’ exquisite harmonies and the jazz-inspired arrangements of Raoul Cita, their pianist, they never reached the same level of commercial success that contemporaries like the Drifters, the Cadillacs and the Flamingos did.Willie Lee Elijah Winfield was born on Aug. 24, 1929, in Surry, Va. His father, also named Willie, was a merchant seaman. His mother, Christine (Cooke) Winfield, was a homemaker.Mr. Winfield sang in a church group in Norfolk and with his brothers Clyde and Jimmy. After he moved to New York in 1950, he and his brothers sang on street corners with two other men and practiced under the Manhattan Bridge.In 1953, some members of another doo-wop act, the Skylarks, merged with some from the Winfield brothers’ group, forming a new group, which they first called the Harps and, soon after, the Harptones. In addition to Mr. Winfield and Mr. Cita, the lineup consisted of William Galloway, Billy Brown, Nicky Clark and William Dempsey. Mr. Dempsey is the only member of the original group who is still alive.The Harptones “demand consideration in any serious discussion of the truly immortal acts of the doo-wop era,” Jason Ankeny wrote on the website AllMusic. But success proved elusive.Charlie Horner, who runs the Classic Urban Harmony website, said in an interview that the Harptones were popular in New York and other cities in the Northeast, as well as in Chicago, but that their local successes did not add up to any national hits.However, he said, if Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart had a Top 100 (instead of a Top 10 or 20) during the Harptones’ most productive years, in the mid-1950s, they might have had as many as 10 hits. Their only chart hit, “What Will I Tell My Heart,” peaked at No. 96 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.The fact that the Harptones recorded for a succession of small labels with limited distribution did not help their cause.Mr. Winfield received a lifetime achievement award at the East Coast Music Hall of Fame Awards ceremony in Wildwood, N.J., in 2019. He gave his final performance that same year.George Napolitano/Media Punch, via Alamy Live News“At one time we decided to try to promote our own records,” Mr. Winfield said in the 1985 Daily News interview, which Mr. Hinckley repurposed last week on the website Medium. “It was like, give the D.J. $75 to play the record. Our producers should have been taking care of that.”In the mid-1960s, Mr. Winfield began delivering prayer cards to funeral homes; he retired from that job in 1995. He continued to perform part time with versions of the Harptones, notably as background vocalists on “René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” a tender song on Paul Simon’s album “Hearts and Bones” (1983) that recalls the doo-wop music that Mr. Simon grew up listening to.In addition to his daughter Tina, Mr. Winfield is survived by another daughter, Stephanie Winfield; his sons, Vincent, Timothy and DeWayne; two sisters, Serita Alexander and Goldie Bronson; two brothers, Clyde and Abraham; 44 grandchildren; and 22 great-grandchildren. His wife, Alice (Battle) Winfield, died in 2011.At Mr. Winfield’s final performance, at a doo-wop weekend in April 2019 at Half Hollow Hills East High School in Dix Hills, N.Y., he wrapped up his career with another signature ballad, “Life Is But a Dream.”He sat on a stool until the end of the song and, after the group sang “Will you take part in,” he rose, steadying himself on his cane, and finished the line and the song in his familiar tenor — “my life … my love? That is my dream.”And he hit the high notes. More

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      Chuck E. Weiss, Musician Who, in Love, Inspired a Hit Song, Dies at 76

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      He and Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones were inseparable in the late ’70s, and when Mr. Weiss’s romantic life took a turn, Ms. Jones memorialized it in “Chuck E.’s in Love.”Chuck E. Weiss, blues musician, club owner and outsize Los Angeles character immortalized in Rickie Lee Jones’s breakout hit song, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” died on July 20 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 76.His brother, Byron, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Weiss was a voracious musicologist, an encyclopedia of obscure jazz and early R&B artists, a drummer, a songwriter and a widely acknowledged rascal who in the mid-1970s landed in Los Angeles from his native Denver with his friend the singer-songwriter Tom Waits.At the Troubadour, the venerable West Hollywood folk club, where Mr. Weiss worked for a time as a dishwasher, they met another young singer-songwriter, a former runaway named Rickie Lee Jones. Mr. Waits and Ms. Jones became an item and the three of them became inseparable as they caroused through Hollywood, stealing lawn ornaments and pranking people at music industry parties (like shaking hands with dip smeared on their palms).Ms. Jones’s song about Mr. Weiss, “Chuck E’s in Love,” was the opening track of her debut album, in 1979. “It seems sometimes like we’re real romantic dreamers who got stuck in the wrong time zone,” Ms. Jones told Rolling Stone in 1979, describing Mr. Weiss and Mr. Waits as her family at the time.They lived at the Tropicana Motel, a seedy 1940s-era bohemia on Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was a regular DMZ,” Mr. Weiss told LA Weekly in 1981, “except everyone had a tan and looked nice.”In the fall of 1977, on a trip home to Denver, Mr. Weiss called his buddies back in Los Angeles, and when Mr. Waits put down the phone, he announced to Ms. Jones, “Chuck E.’s in love!”Two years later, Ms. Jones’s fanciful riff on that declaration — “What’s her name?/Is that her there?/Oh, Christ, I think he’s even combed his hair” — had made her a star. (Though the last line of the song suggests otherwise, it was not Ms. Jones whom Mr. Weiss had fallen for; it was a distant cousin of his.)The song was a hit single, the opening track of Ms. Jones’s debut album, “Rickie Lee Jones,” and a 1980 Grammy Award nominee for song of the year. (“What a Fool Believes,” performed by the Doobie Brothers, took the honor.)Mr. Weiss in an undated photo. “He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are,” Ms. Jones said. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn an essay in The Los Angeles Times on July 21, Ms. Jones wrote that when she first met Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss, she couldn’t tell them apart. “They were two of the most charismatic characters Hollywood had seen in decades, and without them I think the entire street of Santa Monica Boulevard would have collapsed.”In a phone interview since then, she said of Mr. Weiss: “There was mischief in him, he was our trickster. He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are.”Charles Edward Weiss was born in Denver on March 18, 1945. His father, Leo, was in the salvage business; his mother, Jeannette (Rollnick) Weiss, owned a hat store, Hollywood Millinery. Chuck graduated from East High School and attended Mesa Junior College, now Colorado Mesa, in Grand Junction.His brother is his only immediate survivor.In his early 20s, Mr. Weiss met Chuck Morris, now a music promoter, when Mr. Morris was a co-owner of Tulagi, a music club in Boulder, Colo. When blues performers like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker came through, they often traveled alone, and it was up to Mr. Morris to find them a local band. He would ask Mr. Weiss to fill in as drummer.In 1973 Mr. Morris opened a Denver nightclub called Ebbets Field (he was born in Brooklyn), which drew performers like Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mr. Waits. Mr. Weiss filled in there too.Mr. Weiss performing in 1999 at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Ebet RobertsAt the time, as Mr. Weiss recalled in 2014, he was trying to record his own music and in the habit of asking performers to play with him. That’s how he met Mr. Waits. “And I think what happened was I saw Waits do some finger-poppin’ stuff at Ebbets Fields one night,” he said, “and I went up to him after the show. I was wearing some platform shoes and a chinchilla coat, and I was slipping on the ice on the street outside because I was so high, and asked if he wanted to do some recording with me. He looked at me like I was from outer space, man.”Nonetheless, he said, they became fast friends.Mr. Waits, interviewed by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999, described Mr. Weiss as “a mensch, a liar, a monkey and a pathological vaudevillian.”Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss ended up collaborating on a number of things, in one instance co-writing the lyrics to “Spare Parts (A Nocturnal Emission),” a barroom dirge on Mr. Waits’s album “Nighthawks at the Diner,” released in 1975. Mr. Waits produced two albums for Mr. Weiss; the first, “Extremely Cool,” in 1999, was described in one review as “a goofy, eclectic mix of loosely-played blues and boogie-woogie.”Though his songwriting was singular — “Anthem for Lost Souls” was told from the point of view of a neighbor’s cat — Mr. Weiss was best known for his live performances. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Mr. Weiss in 2002 in Los Angeles.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressFor much of the 1980s Mr. Weiss played at a Los Angeles club called the Central, accompanied by his band, The Goddamn Liars. He later encouraged his friend Johnny Depp to buy the place with him and others. They turned it into the Viper Room, the celebrity-flecked ’90s-era nightclub.He was often asked how he felt about his star turn in Ms. Jones’s hit. “Yeah, I was flabbergasted,” he told The Associated Press in 2007. “Little did we know that, all in all, we would both be known for that for the rest of our lives.”But the rest of their lives would no longer be intertwined.“When ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’ passed from the heavens and faded into the ‘I hate that song’ desert, from which it still has not really recovered, he and I became estranged, and everyone fell away from everyone,” Ms. Jones wrote of Mr. Weiss in her Los Angeles Times essay. “Waits left, the brief Camelot of our street corner jive ended. I had made fiction of us, made heroes of very unheroic people. But I’m glad I did.”Later, on the phone, she said, “Two of the three of us became very successful musicians, but not Chuck, and he knew a lot of people.” She added: “We think being the famous one is winning, but I’m not sure. Chuck did all right.” More

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      Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow’s Prison Break, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Remi Wolf, Camila Cabello, the War on Drugs 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 featuring Jack Harlow, ‘Industry Baby’Lil Nas X continues his victory lap around a world of his own making on the triumphant “Industry Baby” with Jack Harlow, featuring appropriately brassy production from Take A Daytrip and Kanye West and a video in which the duo busts out of Montero State Prison. “Funny how you said it was the end, then I went and did it again,” he sings, his braggadocio packing extra bite since it’s directed not just at generic haters but pearl-clutching homophobes. (“I’m queer,” he proclaims proudly, in case there was any confusion there.) The wild video’s most talked-about set piece will probably be the joyous dance scene in the prison showers, but its most hilarious moment comes when Lil Nas X catches a guard enjoying the video for his previous single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” LINDSAY ZOLADZRemi Wolf, ‘Liquor Store’“Liquor Store” (and its “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” meets Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” music video) is a perfect introduction to the neon-Brite imagination of Remi Wolf, a charismatic 25-year-old pop singer from California. The song is a catchall repository of Wolf’s anxieties about sobriety and long-term commitment, but she tackles these subjects with such idiosyncratic playfulness that it all goes down smoothly. ZOLADZCamila Cabello, ‘Don’t Go Yet’Fifth Harmony’s original defector Camila Cabello returns with the fun, exuberant first single from her upcoming album, “Familia.” Cabello leans harder than ever into her Latin-pop roots here, but there’s also a sassy rasp to her vocals that brings Doja Cat to mind. “Baby don’t go yet ’cause I wore this dress for a little drama,” she sings, and the song’s bright, bold flair certainly matches that sartorial choice. ZOLADZAlewya, ‘Spirit_X’Alewya, a songwriter with Ethiopian and Egyptian roots who’s based in England, has been releasing singles that rely on a breathless momentum. “Spirit_X” has a defiant, positive message — “I won’t let me down” — expressed in terse lines that hint at African modal melodies, paced by looping synthesizers and a double time breakbeat. She makes a virtue of sounding driven. JON PARELESKamo Mphela, ‘Thula Thula’Amapiano music is sparse and fluid, representing the hypnotic elasticity that is baked into South African dance music, simmering the textures and drums of jazz, R&B and local dance styles like kwaito and Bacardi house into a slow, liquid groove. “Thula Thula,” a new single from the genre’s queen Kamo Mphela, captures the hushed energy of the genre: a shaker trembles alongside a sinister bass line and a rush of drums claps under the surface. Mphela offers a summertime invitation to the dance floor, but the track’s restrained tempo is a reminder that the return to nightlife is a marathon, not a sprint. ISABELIA HERRERALorde, ‘Stoned at the Nail Salon’Lorde has always been an old soul; when she first arrived as a precocious 16-year-old in 2013, there was even a popular internet conspiracy theory that she was only pretending to be a teenager. Although she’s still just 24, Lorde sounds prematurely weary on her new single “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” from her forthcoming third album “Solar Power.” “My hot blood’s been burning for so many summers now, it’s time to cool it down,” she sings atop a muted chord progression that bears a striking resemblance to Lana Del Rey’s “Wild at Heart,” another recent Jack Antonoff production. The mellifluous “Stoned” flirts with profundity but then suddenly hedges its bets — “maybe I’m just stoned at the nail salon,” she shrugs in each chorus — which gives the song a hesitant, meandering quality. But perhaps the most puzzling declaration she makes is how “all of the music you loved at 16 you’ll grow out of.” Is this perhaps a self-deprecating wink at her own past, or a gentle hint that her new album might be a departure from what her fans have been expecting? ZOLADZIlluminati Hotties, ‘U V V P’As Illuminati Hotties, Sarah Tudzin has been rolling out deliriously catchy, high-octane summer jams for the past few months, like the incredibly titled “Mmmoooaaaaayaya” and the effervescent “Pool Hopping.” Her latest preview of her forthcoming album “Let Me Do One More,” though, slows things down considerably. “Every time I hear a song, I think about you dancing,” she swoons on “U V V P,” buoyed by a beachy beat. Late in the song, a spoken-word contribution from Big Thief’s Buck Meek transforms the vibe from a ’60s girl-group throwback to a lonesome country ditty, as if the versatile Tudzin is proving there’s no genre she can’t make her own. ZOLADZIndigo De Souza, ‘Hold U’Sometimes a song only needs to communicate the most honest and heartfelt emotions to work. That is the spirit of Indigo de Souza’s “Hold U.” There’s a splatter of programmed drums; a jangly, soulful bass line; and the melted caramel of de Souza’s voice, which gushes with simple lyrics (“You are the best thing, and I’ve got it, I’ve got you”) and blooms into a falsetto, her sky-high oohs curling into the air. It is a love song, but it’s not just about romance — “Hold U” is about living fully with your emotions, and embracing the love that emerges from being in community, too. HERRERABrandi Carlile, ‘Right on Time’Piano ballad turns to power ballad in “Right on Time,” an apology that rises to a near-operatic peak as Brandi Carlile acknowledges, “It wasn’t right.” It’s clearly a successor to “The Joke,” but this time, she’s not helping someone else; she’s facing the consequences of her own mistakes. PARELESThe War on Drugs, ‘Living Proof’The War on Drugs reaches back to the late-1960s era when folk-rock, drone and psychedelia overlapped, when the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead weren’t that far apart. But it’s self-conscious retrospection, aware of what’s changed in a half-century. “Living Proof” lays bare that awareness. “I know the path/I know it’s changing,” Adam Granduciel sings, as he returns to an old neighborhood and finds it’s not what he remembered. “Maybe I’ve been gone too long,” he reflects. The song has two parts: feathery acoustic guitar strumming and piano chords and then, at the end, a subdued march, as Granduciel declares, “I’m rising, and I’m damaged.” PARELESJordyn Simone, ‘Burn’An old-fashioned soul song is at the core of “Burn”: an invitation to “stay the night” that escalates toward despair — “There’s no hope for people like me” — and fury, as Jordyn Simone declares, “I didn’t ask for no goddamn savior.” Simone, 21, was a strong enough singer to be a teenage contestant on “The Voice,” and in “Burn” her vocal builds from a velvety tremulousness to flashes of a bitter rasp. Meanwhile, the production’s lugubrious strings and club-level bass open up new chasms beneath her. PARELESWilliam Parker, ‘Painters Winter’ and ‘Mayan Space Station’The bassist, organizer and free-jazz eminence William Parker released two albums with separate trios on Friday: “Painters Winter,” featuring the drummer Hamid Drake and the saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, and “Mayan Space Station,” a sizzling free-fusion workout, with the guitarist Ava Mendoza curling out surf-rock lines and conjuring spacey fuzz while the drummer Gerald Cleaver drives the group steadily on. Together the LPs give an inkling of how broad Parker’s creative footprint has been on New York jazz. For a fuller measure, look to the 25th annual Vision Festival, happening now through next week in Manhattan and Brooklyn; he helped found the festival a quarter-century ago with the dancer and organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker, his wife. At 69, he hasn’t slowed down: Parker is slated to perform in no fewer than five different ensembles over the course of this year’s festival. RUSSONELLOKippie Moeketsi and Hal Singer, ‘Blue Stompin’’The alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi was among the first to fit bebop’s musical language into South African jazz, but he didn’t import it whole cloth. He made the language sing rather than banter, and he played with a circular, spinning approach to rhythm — related to marabi and earlier South African styles — not the typical American sense of swing. On his unaccompanied intro to “Blue Stompin’,” Moeketsi leaps in with a sharp, bluesy cry, then nods toward a carnival-style rhythm before growling his way to the end of the cadenza. Then he locks into the main melody, playing in unison with the American tenor saxophonist Hal Singer, who wrote the tune. A former Duke Ellington Orchestra member who had scored some radio hits of his own as a jump-blues saxophonist, Singer was in South Africa in 1974 on a State Department tour when he recorded a few tracks with Moeketsi. Those became an album, originally released in South Africa in ’77; it has just been remastered and released digitally by the Canadian label We Are Busy Bodies. RUSSONELLO More

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      Leon Bridges Brings Southern Soul Into the 21st Century

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      The Texas songwriter finds his groove in vulnerability on his third album, “Gold-Diggers Sound.”Tenacity is baked into Southern soul. It’s there in the grain and determination of the singing, in the patiently rolling grooves, in how its down-to-earth stories unfold. It’s there in the way the music holds on to blues and gospel roots connected to deeper African ancestry. And it’s there in the way the sound persists and adapts through decades, finding new rhythms but still testifying from the heart.“Gold-Diggers Sound,” the third album by the Texas songwriter Leon Bridges, offers his personalized survival strategy for Southern soul. Bridges sings about its classic topics in songs that take their time and revel in natural, unvarnished singing. He pledges sensual romance in “Magnolias,” does some cheating (with duet vocals from Atia “Ink” Boggs) in “Don’t Worry About Me” and affirms his faith in “Born Again.” Around him, the music uses synthetic textures, programmed beats and surreal layering to carry a decades-old tradition into the 21st century.“Sweeter,” which Bridges released in June 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd, draws grace from mourning. The narrator is a dead man with his mother, sisters and brothers weeping over him. “I thought we moved on from the darker days,” Bridges sings, over a pattering trap beat and Terrace Martin’s measured electric-piano chords; he adds, “Someone should hand you a felony/Because you stole from me my chance to be.”“I cannot and will not be silent any longer,” Bridges said in a statement at the time. “Just as Abel’s blood was crying out to God, George Floyd is crying out to me.”Bridges, 32, has worked his way forward through soul-music history. His first album, “Coming Home” in 2015, introduced a singer who harked back to an era well before he was born. His voice recalled the suavity of Sam Cooke and the grit of Otis Redding, and his music was unabashedly revivalist 1960s soul. Bridges moved the timeline forward with “Good Thing” in 2018, invoking 1980s “quiet storm” R&B and 1990s neo-soul. Both albums reached the Billboard Top 10, but they left the impression that Bridges was still doing genre studies, trying on established styles.“Gold-Diggers Sound” — named after the Los Angeles studio where the album was made — is more confidently single-minded. All of its songs are midtempo or slower, often verging on languid. Gently coiling, reverb-laden electric-guitar vamps, from Nate Mercereau, turn many of the songs into meditations, and all of the tracks, no matter how much is going on under the surface, defer to Bridges’s voice. Although the writing credits are full of collaborations — including pop song doctors like Dan Wilson and Justin Tranter — the songs present Bridges as a lonely figure in a desolate space, pleading and promising.Bridges and his producers, Ricky Reed and Mercereau, have clearly heard the slow grooves of D’Angelo, Prince, R. Kelly, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. But there’s a different, melancholy side to Bridges’s songs and his voice: less assurance, more ache.He’s still a sweet talker, offering his lovers not only pleasure but also deeper empathy. In “Motorbike,” over a calmly plinking, African-tinged groove, he insists, “Don’t mean no pressure/I just wanna make you feel right.” A guitar vamps serenely in “Details” as he worries about a partner finding someone else; he reminds her how closely he’s paid attention to “How you look in the car when I’m driving a lil fast/How you pause when you talk when you’re trying not to laugh.”Throughout the album, Bridges dares to admit how needy he is. “Why Don’t You Touch Me” has the kind of ticking, undulating backdrop that another singer might use for an understated come-on. But Bridges’s song sees the passion ebbing out of his relationship, wonders what he might have done wrong and ends up begging: “Girl, make me feel wanted/Don’t leave me out here unfulfilled.” And Bridges ends the album not with romantic bliss, but with “Blue Mesas,” which confesses to a lingering depression that hasn’t been changed by success. It’s a contemporary choice — unexpectedly in line with the brooding sing-rap of songwriters like Polo G and Rod Wave. For Bridges, soul’s history is still unfolding.Leon Bridges“Gold-Diggers Sound”(Columbia) More

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      Laura Mvula Set Her Sound Free. It Ended Up in the ’80s.

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      After five years between albums, the award-winning English songwriter changed everything, trading orchestras for synthesizers and cranking up the beat.The English songwriter Laura Mvula changed nearly everything as she made her third album. She changed her sound, her songwriting method, her collaborators and (involuntarily) her label. After two award-winning, brilliantly idiosyncratic albums of time-warped orchestral pop, Mvula’s latest, “Pink Noise,” swerves in an entirely different direction: toward the brash, glossy, synthesizer-driven R&B-pop of the 1980s.“I need to be able to go — wherever,” Mvula, 35, said in a video chat from her living room in London. “There’s the feeling of risk, of not quite knowing what I’m doing. This was always going to be an album of liberation and championing myself. It’s channeling everything I want to channel without holding back.”Behind her, with its strings and hammers exposed, was the battered upright piano she learned to play as a child. Every so often, her cat, Marley, wandered by.Mvula was born Laura Douglas; her parents are from St. Kitts and Jamaica. She grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham, England, feeling like an outsider: a Black girl in a “predominantly white middle-class neighborhood,” she recalled. “I was never quite sure of where to place myself.”Her family was devoutly Christian, and Mvula’s songs often invoke prayer. (One new song, “Church Girl,” juxtaposes her naïve youthful expectations with the disillusionments of adult life, wondering, “How can you dance with the devil on your back?”) She sang regularly in church and also studied classical music, playing violin.She earned a degree in composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire. She also sang in Black Voices, an a cappella group directed by her aunt; wrote songs for her neo-soul/fusion jazz group, Judyshouse; and led school choruses and gospel choirs before concentrating on her own performing career. By then she had married a fellow conservatory student, Themba Mvula, an opera singer who was born in Zambia.Mvula’s 2013 debut album, “Sing to the Moon,” willfully and elegantly ignored most 21st-century sounds. In songs about idealism and self-affirmation, Mvula drew on conservatory skills to bolster the raw soul passion in her voice. She reached back to the studio pop of the 1950s and 1960s, writing plush harmonies backed by orchestral arrangements, dramatic choirs and jazz-tinged rhythm sections. The album earned comparisons to vintage Nina Simone, and was nominated for the Brit Awards and the Mercury Prize; it won her two MOBO awards, which recognize British “Music of Black Origin.” Mvula sang at the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize concert.“I wanted to feel uncomfortable in my own listening mind,” Mvula said.Nicole Fara Silver for The New York TimesMvula’s 2016 album, “The Dreaming Room,” grappled with, among other things, the end of her marriage and her bouts of depression and panic attacks; she suffered from monophobia, fear of being alone. As she sang about despair and exaltation, her music deepened the orchestrations while occasionally adding some funk. Mvula also went public with her mental-health struggles, appearing on the BBC program “Generation Anxiety.” (She has improved lately with therapy, she said.)Although “Sing to the Moon” reached the Top 10 in Britain, and one of its singles, “Green Garden,” entered the British Top 40, accolades and awards didn’t equal more hits. Months before “The Dreaming Room” won the Ivor Novello award, a top British award chosen by songwriters, Sony Music informed Mvula in a brief email that she was being dropped from the roster. “I was not used to the reality of the commercial music industry,” she said. “It was just so curt. It was, like, ‘Here endeth your value to us.’”Mvula was already reassessing her songwriting. “There was this pressure put on me, and that I put on myself, to make something new,” she said. “I had all these tags in my head. You know, ‘Created her own genre of music, created her own lane.’ But then I found myself like, ‘So what does this mean? Where do I go next?’”Between recording contracts, Mvula toured as the opening act for David Byrne in Britain. Her stripped-down shows sparked new attention from Briony Turner of Atlantic Records U.K., who is now the company’s co-president. Turner had wanted to sign Mvula before her Sony deal. Now, Turner said from London, “She had moved into this unexpected new realm, and I was blown away. I signed her because I think she’s a genius. I love what she stands for culturally and musically.”Mvula told Turner she had been thinking about 1980s R&B and that she wanted to experiment with collaborators. Her ideas, she now admits, were nebulous. “I had been boasting about making a record that I wanted to dance to, but that was an outright lie,” Mvula said. “I had no real plans. I had no sketches, I had nothing. I was just trying to magic it into reality.”With Atlantic’s help, Mvula tried songwriting sessions that were “like speed dating,” she said. None panned out until Turner suggested Dann Hume, a producer from New Zealand who ended up co-writing and co-producing the entire album with Mvula. “Little did I know my life was going to change,” Hume said by phone from southern Wales.Mvula had set up a home studio in her clothes closet in London. One day, she said, “I told myself that when I went in that closet, the next thing needs to be the thing that releases me. And I stopped thinking. I decided I’m not going to say, ‘I want to create an orchestral palette with these textures.’ I’m not going to go to the keyboard and just play all the chords and the voice things that I enjoy. I’m not going to play the familiar shapes any more. I’m just going to play the first thing that comes.”That first thing was the bass line of “Safe Passage,” the album’s opener: a celebration of moving on and sharing pleasure. “I went so rudimentary,” Mvula said. “I took my index finger and ‘dum-dum-dum,’” she said, jabbing an imaginary keyboard and singing some syncopated low notes. “And then a snare, I really wanted that to be a fiery sound. It wasn’t until I finished it that I was like, that’s kind of ’80s. This is a path to explore, a sound world.”She brought the tracks to the studio, Hume was enthusiastic and the album took off. “I knew that she wanted to make something big and bold,” Hume said. “She made clear from the very beginning that she didn’t want to retrace any steps. I accepted that, and we never really looked back.”For her new songs, Mvula consciously sought sparser, more open structures. “I wanted to move away from the richness of harmony — from using as many notes as I wanted, as many chord changes,” she said. “I decided that this time I was going to work with two or three elements. The harmony would be implied, and sometimes it would be obscured, completely ambiguous.“I wanted to feel uncomfortable in my own listening mind,” she added. “I didn’t want to feel like, ‘Oh, I know what that chord will make them feel.’ I wanted to move away from that bag of tricks.”The production of “Pink Noise” — a technical term for the whooshing sound of white noise, which mixes every frequency, but with the lows boosted — revels in the whip-crack drums, gleaming keyboard tones and spatial immersion of 1980s pop. Mvula ruled out using the instrument she wrote songs on: the piano. She also sang even more freely and forcefully than before. “On the older records, I think I was still trying to please the teacher. I’m still scared to offend, to show certain blemishes or tones or parts of my voice. But all those things — in ‘Pink Noise,’ I let go of it.”“There was this pressure put on me, and that I put on myself, to make something new,” Mvula said.Rosie Matheson for The New York TimesThere’s ample nostalgia in Mvula’s new music. “You hear me as my 14-year-old self listening to late-80s and early ’90s soul and R&B,” Mvula said. “My first record was ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.’ I was obsessed with Sting. I was obsessed with Michael Jackson and Prince. Now, I just stopped trying to get in the way of it all.“And you might say a lot of the songs on this record, it’s Black music, whatever that means,” she added. “Before this, I had been disassociated with Black music because I wrote for strings and horns. So I think I was subconsciously wanting to just do away with that — like, why did I place myself in this box?”Still, “Pink Noise” is not entirely a throwback. Mvula’s own musical instincts persist, with jagged, leaping melodic lines cantilevered over the beat, not-quite-dissonant counterpoint and unexpected blooms of vocal harmony. “That’s just Laura’s mind,” Hume said. “She’s got such great musical knowledge, but she always wants to come at it from a different angle. If she knows how to do it, she doesn’t want to do it. She only wants to do it if it’s pushing it further.”The album is full of songs about love found (“Pink Noise,” “Safe Passage”) and lost (“Magical,” “Conditional”). But the “most important” song on the album, Mvula said, is “Remedy.” It was written during a 2020 lockdown in Britain, while Mvula watched Black Lives Matter protests and spoke with family members about generations of racism. She recalled thinking, “I’m not going to be marching on the streets, but I’m going to offer a song. I suddenly felt this overwhelming privilege to be a part of this reaching the threshold: No more.” Over a bluntly slamming beat and a mesh of assertive, interlocking synthesizer and horn-section lines, the chorus of “Remedy” sums up many people’s experience of 2020: “How many more must die before the remedy?/Can you hear all my people cry for the remedy?”But Mvula also, hesitantly, allows herself to have some fun on the album. “Got Me” goes skipping along on a triplet groove that harks back to Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” as Mvula invites a lover to “do what you wanna do.”She didn’t want to put it on the album, she said. “But Dann was so passionate! He was like, ‘It’s such a good jam!’ And the label were like, ‘This is the big single that’s going to radio.’ The whole art versus commerce thing really blew up in my face again,” she said with a smile.“And it’s cool. I have a jam,” she added. “And I eat my hat. I’m learning about the universality of music. It just goes wherever it wants to go. And I’m learning that my fears, my insecurities — they’re not going to be allowed to prevent me from walking the path I’m meant to walk.” More

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      Jam & Lewis Shaped Pop History. They’re Working on Its Future, Too.

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      Has this ever happened to you? You’re at a party or dinner or the gym, when out of nowhere, the person you’re talking to stops speaking. They look around as if they’re being called, which is funny because you don’t hear an emergency. Just Cheryl Lynn’s 1983 R&B hit “Encore.” They run to the dance floor. They make their own dance floor — right there in that restaurant, that bodega, that Target.If this has ever happened to you, the dancer was probably me. But it’s not my fault. It’s Jimmy and Terry’s. They wrote “Encore.” And for the three-and-a-half minutes it’s on, with its rocket-ship keyboards, juicy funk groove and Lynn’s mighty, muscled introductory ooh yeah, the only conversation I want to have is with this song.It’s not just me. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have been doing this to people for almost 40 years — using live instruments and state-of-the art studio wizardry to produce music strong enough to snatch a body and render it a Gyratron.“Just Be Good to Me” by the S.O.S Band.“Saturday Love” by Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal.“Human” by the Human League.“Monkey” by George Michael.“If It Isn’t Love” by New Edition.“Romantic” by Karyn White.“U Remind Me” by Usher.Toni Braxton told me her gateway Jimmy and Terry was Janet Jackson’s cashmere chastity anthem, “Let’s Wait Awhile.” (Braxton sang it to me, actually.) Last year, Mariah Carey released a rarities collection that included a faithfully robust live version of “Just Be Good to Me.” And, in an email, Jackson mentioned the S.O.S band, “Human” and the duo’s collaboration with O’Neal as being part “of this really incredible body of work.”Jam and Lewis have made music for and seemingly with everybody, but Jackson is the artist with whom they’re most automatically associated. Over about half a dozen albums, beginning with “Control” in 1986, the three merged into a trinity of megaselling, genre-melting popular musicianship, releasing work that defined and redefined then defined again who Jackson is and how she can sound. Jam and Lewis have been up for 11 producer of the year Grammys, and the bulk of the accolades has included their work with Jackson.But after decades of below-the-title collaboration (often in matching suits, ties, fedoras and shades) Jam and Lewis have decided to put themselves first. Sort of. July 9 brings “Jam & Lewis Volume One,” the first album released under their own names. They co-wrote, play on and produced its 10 luscious songs. The singing, however, has been left to professionals: Carey and Braxton; Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men, Heather Headley, Sounds of Blackness and Charlie Wilson.They’ve been working on this album for at least three years. I heard some of its songs in July 2019 on a visit to Flyte Tyme, their sprawling studio in an industrial warehouse complex in Agoura Hills, a town on Los Angeles’s western outskirts.The pandemic allowed the duo to finish the album in a time of relative calm. And they got to ruminate about their intentions.Flyte Tyme is practically a museum of Jam & Lewis’s success.Tawni Bannister for The New York TimesLewis learned bass in the real world, playing with the R&B barnburners Sam & Dave as a teen.Tawni Bannister for The New York Times“There was an elegance and an effortlessness to the way that the album sounds,” Jam told me a few weeks ago, on a Zoom call with Lewis. “When I listen back, it doesn’t sound like we’re chasing anything, it just feels like it’s just it is what it is, and the songs are timeless in a way.”“Volume One” isn’t out to burnish Jam and Lewis’s standing or defend their legacy. It’s more fascinating than that. Each song renders its singer just as Jam implies: as their most quintessential self.Do you miss the melodrama of mid-2000s Carey? Well, here she is cooing in anguish then roaring to life on “Somewhat Loved (There You Go Breakin’ My Heart).” Have you longed to hear Usher at both his most melodic and his most Prince? Then “Do It Yourself” hits the spot. And if you’ve wondered how the flirtaholic Morris Day, of Jam and Lewis’s old group the Time, might fare in the age of active consent, there’s “Babylove,” a bounced-up party number with the Roots, in which Day and his sidekick, Jerome Benton, all but ask the ladies in attendance for two forms of I.D.On “He Don’t Know Nothin’ Bout It,” Babyface sounds as smooth and certain as he did decades ago. Jam remembered that when the producer and singer heard the finished track, he couldn’t believe how classically himself he sounded. “We said, ‘Hey, man, you’re [expletive] Babyface. What do you think it’s supposed to sound like, man? Don’t you know who you are?’”Jam calls this conflation of old-school and contemporary sounds “newstalgia.” “It’s that feeling that you get when you hear something that’s new,” he said, “that’s exciting, but it takes you back to a place that’s very comfortable and very reassuring. And we wanted all the songs on the record to have that feeling.”Of the artists who appear on “Volume One,” no one sounds more newstalgic than Toni Braxton. Her song’s a honey-dripping ballad called “Happily Unhappy” that reaches the pit of your stomach and grips the bottom of your heart. It could have been both a big hit 20 years ago and, Jam said, “would fit in just the way it fits in now.”“If you just said, ‘Hey, Siri, play a Toni Braxton song,’ that would be a song that would come on,” he added. When L.A. Reid, who produced some of Braxton’s biggest hits, heard “Happily Unhappy,” he told Jam, “I just feel like a void, a cavity has been filled in my soul where I didn’t even know I had a cavity.”Braxton said, by phone, that she was nervous working with Jam and Lewis for the first time. “I had L.A. and Babyface,” she said, “and I always see Jimmy and Terry as Janet’s boys.” But they put her at ease, first by talking about music the three of them admired, like the score for “The Bridges of Madison County,” then reinforcing her musical confidence — on the piano, an instrument neither Jam and Lewis nor most people know Braxton proficiently plays.At the beginning of her career, a top producer told Braxton that she couldn’t be seen with an instrument because the great singers stood behind a microphone. (This was the early 1990s.) She complied. Nonetheless, the piano has remained essential to her approach. “When I play a song, the keyboard is the highway for me,” Braxton said. It’s “how I find my way, and I can put up the stop signs, and the red lights, and lights and pavement. But it helps me navigate my way, in music.”If you give a song “to a hundred people,” Lewis said on that Zoom call, “99 people would do it differently than Aretha Franklin. Toni has that same gift.” Jam said that Braxton “bends those notes, and even though she’s doing runs it’s not like in a gymnastic way where you’re going, like oh, oh, oh, and it’s like a run? It’s like every note in every placement is just — it’s just so good.” What Lewis and Braxton did is make room for Braxton to be both vulnerable and very much herself.“They’re therapists,” she said.Jam and Lewis in 1982, four years before their first album collaboration with Janet Jackson, “Control,” arrived.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesJAMES HARRIS III met Terry Lewis as a middle-schooler in the summer of 1973 on the campus of the University of Minnesota as part of a six-week Upward Bound program. Jam was an only child and recalled catching Lewis seated on a bed, playing Kool & the Gang on a bass guitar and thinking, “That dude needs to be in my life.” Lewis remembered Jam playing piano that summer for a group of girls. He wasn’t impressed by the attention Jam was getting; he saw an opportunity to fill a hole in his band.Jam grew up loving Chicago before it was a Top 40 powerhouse in the 1980s. The band’s ballad “Something in This City Changes People,” a jazzy sparkler from 1973, was particularly formative for him. “I’m self-taught,” Jam said. Chicago, and its keyboardist Robert Lamm, are the reasons “I learned the black keys on a keyboard.”Lewis was shaped by other means. As a teenager, he was out playing bass with the R&B barnburners Sam & Dave, learning “how to maintain the pocket,” he said. “They told me what not to do which was don’t go over the A string. You could play the E and the A string — but no plucking and no picking.”It was Lewis who helped ensorcell Jam with stronger grooves. “I was saying to him, man, the new Chicago record’s getting ready to come out and he looked at me and he was like, ‘Chicago record’?,” Jam recalled. “What about Earth, Wind & Fire, man?” His soul-music diet swelled to include, for starters, New Birth and Tower of Power. “That was so memorable, just our meeting that summer,” Jam said.Jam is 62 (Lewis is 64), but when he talks about their bond — when he talks about anything having to do with music, for that matter — he sounds like an enchanted adolescent. The duo is now approaching their 50th year as friends. Some of what appears to make the relationship work is their outward opposite nature, the complementary difference between a piano and a bass, between soft rock and funk, between the long, silky ponytail Jam wore in the 1980s and Lewis’s shorter haircut.Jam is tall, voluble and, until recently, meaty. Lewis has sharp facial features (high cheekbones, perfectly triangular nose), seems compact and slyer and, when Jam is around, more inclined to ride shotgun in a conversation. Jackson might know these two better than anyone apart from their families. In an email, she wrote that she’s “always called Jimmy and Terry my two dads,” even though they seem like one person. She went on to explain how they bonded in Minneapolis, telling each other stories, going out to clubs and building on a foundation of trust that came from first encountering the duo when she was in her teens.“They get along better than a married couple,” Janet Jackson, center, said of the men she said are like “my two dads.”Raymond Boyd/Getty Images“They get along better than a married couple,” she added. “You are talking about two guys who have known each other since junior high school, and they’ve never ever got into one argument to this day. Jimmy is very much like a diplomat; Terry is wise way beyond his years and loves a good debate.” Whenever they started a project, they asked her “What are you into?” Jam said that the collaborative philosophy between him and Lewis comes down to: “The best way wins.”When I visited Flyte Tyme two years ago, Jam hadn’t arrived yet, so Lewis guided me around the studio and the tracks they’d chosen to play for me. But when Jam arrived, Lewis rarely spoke unless addressed. This appears to have always been the case. Once, in the 1980s, the radio personality and host of BET’s “Video Soul” Donnie Simpson caught up with Jam and Lewis for an interview; Jam spoke in erudite blocks and Lewis interjected for comedy and clarification.Sitting with him for our listening session, I was worried that Lewis would disappear amid Jam’s ebullience. But Lewis likes the arrangement: “You know, sometimes if you talk too much nobody listens, so if you talk a little people tune in.” He’s not wrong. His presence is one you can feel.Later in the afternoon, briefly alone with Jam, I told him that “You Ain’t Right,” the violent, sonically dense banger that kicks off Jackson’s album “All for You” is an ingeniously disorienting way to open a pop record. Jam said, “Quick story,” and went on to tell a long one that involved the ingenuity of the producer Rockwilder. “I always tell people, the reason Terry is such a good lyric writer,” Jam said, “is because what it takes me a paragraph to say he can say in a sentence.” With Lewis, the waters might be still but they run deep. He’s the bass of the partnership.The roots of that “&” in their arrangement are strong. “We shook hands back in ’82, I guess it was,” Jam told me as Lewis nodded. “And we said 50/50. So, it doesn’t matter whose idea it is, there’s no ego to it, it’s just the best idea wins, and so it eliminates 99 percent of anything that you would ever disagree with.”Lewis remembered an early period with Jackson “where Jam was the sensei and she was growing and she needed space, so I had to bow out.” Lewis said that Jam told Jackson, “You got a lot to say and nothing to prove.” If Jackson needed Lewis, she only had to call. “I’ll be right across the hall,” he remembered telling her. “You have to allow space for people to grow.”Jam calls the duo’s conflation of old-school and contemporary sounds “newstalgia.” “It’s that feeling that you get when you hear something that’s new,” he said, “that’s exciting, but it takes you back to a place that’s very comfortable and very reassuring.”Tawni Bannister for The New York TimesBOTH LEWIS AND Jam are proud of the fruits of their friendship. The Agoura Hills space is practically a museum of both their success (framed platinum discs on nearly every wall) and their inability to purge (if I saw one keytar maybe I saw a dozen).Some of the premium instruments were once in a storage space across the street — the Linn drum machine they used on the album “Control”; the SP1200 drum machine they employed on Jackson’s “Miss You Much,” “Escapade” and “Love Will Never Do Without You”; the OB-8 synthesizer that gives “Encore” its bass notes along with Lewis’s live playing (yes, that song has two bass parts). One 808 was so special — used on jams for the S.O.S. Band and New Edition, as well as “Volume One” — it was being kept in a Plexiglas case.A young hip-hop producer once asked Jam if he had 808 sounds stored on a computer, and Jam just showed him the actual hardware. “He started calling all his boys,” Jam recalled. “‘Man, Jam, got an 808, man. No, not the sounds, man. The real machine!’ It was hilarious to me.”Jam says they considered paring down. But a few things happened to change their minds. For one, they were working with the singer and songwriter Robyn, who also wanted to see a fabled 808 with her own eyes. “She was the one that actually sparked that idea” to move, Jam said. So now a visitor can walk around and “see the piano that ‘Tender Love’ was done on, or you see the drum machine that ‘Saturday Love’ was done on.”They also found a note Michael Jackson left asking if they wouldn’t mind importing some sounds he liked on Janet’s “Nasty” to a project they were working on with him. “I wasn’t there so he had taped it to the keyboard,” Jam said. “So, literally, it was the note with a piece of tape still on it from Michael Jackson. And Terry and I kind of looked at each other and said, Well, we got to move all these boxes, we can’t just toss” them.Two years ago, help was on the way. Jam mentioned that someone from the Smithsonian had recently come out to look into displaying some items for posterity. He reported that their equipment and accouterments have also drawn the interest of the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, and the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, where one of Jam’s fedoras already lives.The tour that started with Lewis and ended with Jam concluded only because three hours had passed, and some of us were hungry. For food. But also for news. Robyn, Lewis said, would be on “Volume Two.” So might Jackson.I asked when that might be.Lewis’s eyebrows arched over his shades, then he grinned.“After ‘Volume One.’” More

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      H.E.R. Still Finds Inspiration in Prince and ‘Martin’

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      The Grammy- and Oscar-winning performer talks about her new album, the moment she knew she wanted to be a rock star and why R&B isn’t dead.H.E.R. doesn’t want her music to be boxed in.“When I was creating it, I wasn’t really aiming for anything,” the singer-songwriter-instrumentalist said of “Back of My Mind,” her new 21-track album. “But when I started sequencing it and putting it together, I realized that a lot of the songs that I created were different moods of R&B.”The album was her playground, with references to early projects as well as those she hadn’t yet put out; featured vocals by Ty Dolla Sign, Cordae, Lil Baby and Chris Brown; reverb-y Dave Grohl-esque drums and trap beats; and “a bunch of really dope women working with me behind the scenes,” she said. “And all of those sounds turned into a celebration of all the things that R&B could be.”It has been a heady few months, even for H.E.R. (Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson), who as a child prodigy practiced acceptance speeches. In February, she performed “America the Beautiful” at the Super Bowl kickoff show before winning, in March, a song of the year Grammy for “I Can’t Breathe” and, in April, a best original song Oscar for “Fight for You.” She was only 23. Now comes the three-part “Prime Day Show” on Amazon, set in a reimagined Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles, which was a hub of Black culture in the 1930s and ’40s. And in August, she’ll take the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, while squeezing in work on a reggae EP that she hopes to release later this year.As H.E.R.’s star rises, so has her awareness as a role model.“Now I have this thing that I have to take care of and cherish, this ability to inspire and encourage women who are trying to figure out who they want to become, or who don’t want to fit into social norms,” she said.“I think anybody should want to think outside the box and be who they are, truly,” she added. “That’s what my album is about. And that’s the message that I carry with me in everything that I do.”In a call from Brooklyn, where she was rehearsing before heading to Los Angeles (“I live everywhere,” she said), H.E.R. spoke about a few of her own inspirations. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Fender Stratocaster Black and White GuitarThe first guitar my dad bought me was like a mini one for kids, and I learned to play the blues pentatonic scale. I want to say I was seven years old. I’ve been a Fender fan since then, and we had been having conversations about making my own guitar ever since I performed at the 2019 Grammys, and they created an acrylic Strat for me that was clear. I decided to make it chrome, and it also matches the holographic chrome design that I like to put on my nails sometimes. I designed it and picked all the effects and noiseless pickups. And I became the first Black woman to do a collaboration with Fender.2. Her Signature EyeglassesMost of the time people don’t recognize me [without my glasses on]. I’m like the female reverse Clark Kent. My favorite pair are these black frames that I actually designed in collaboration with DIFF eyewear, and they’re clear, and they’re blue-light glasses so they protect from you looking at screens.I’ve always loved glasses, but I started to be more intentional about wearing them when I started doing shows in 2017 after I dropped my first project, “Volume 1.” And I thought, let’s obscure the lights and I’ll wear glasses — because my music is the window to my soul, and not my eyes.3. “Rave Un2 the Year 2000”That’s a Prince concert DVD that I watched growing up. It was on every single weekend in my house, and it inspired me a lot. The moment with him and Lenny Kravitz performing — they did “American Woman” and “Fly Away” together — I was just so, like, “Man, I want to be a rock star.”4. Her Mom’s Filipino DishesLumpia is like a roll. There’s meat and vegetables in it, and it’s very delicious. It’s a long process to make but it’s what I grew up eating in my Filipino household. Halo-halo means “mix-mix” in Tagalog. I grew up eating it every day after school. There’s jellies and shaved ice and evaporated milk and ice cream and jackfruit and sweet beans and all kinds of stuff. My mom made it, and she taught me how to make it.5. And Her Dad’s Fried ChickenI don’t eat other people’s fried chicken. He grew up in Arkansas, and he brought Southern cooking into our house in the Bay Area in California.6. Prince’s “Purple Rain”I got to watch the movie when I was a kid, and my dad kind of skipped over the bad parts. It’s iconic — Prince absolutely killed that whole movie. I’ve played a lot of songs, but “Purple Rain” is one of those songs I definitely studied and covered. I wish, I wish [I would have met Prince]. I did get to see him live, though.7. Apollo TheaterI performed at the Apollo when I was 9 years old. I performed “Freeway of Love” by Aretha Franklin, and it was my first time in New York City, and my family came. They actually threw a little concert in our hometown so that we could afford to stay in New York for days. And then fast forward to early this year. I had the opportunity to go to D’Angelo’s Verzuz that he did on Instagram Live, and he sang “Best Part” with me.It’s just such a legendary place. Freshly coming from California, for me it just seemed like a world away. And so to be able to go there and perform — and then perform again with one of my favorite artists and a legend, D’Angelo — it just made the place even more special.8. Golden State WarriorsI used to love going to Warriors games when I was a kid. When I was 10 or 11, I sang the national anthem at a Warriors and Lakers game. And I got to see Baron Davis and Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes. They were all on the Warriors at that time of the “We Believe” era. I haven’t been to a Warriors game in a really long time. But I was at a Nets game the other day, and it was fun. Go-go Nets.9. “Martin,” starring Martin LawrenceIt’s one of those late-night shows for when you can’t sleep. If I’m having a bad day and that comes on, like that, I forget. [Martin plays a D.J. and talk-show host], and it’s about his relationship with his girlfriend’s best friend. And he also plays the Sheneneh character and then he plays a pimp, and it’s hilarious. I still watch it. It’s timeless.10. Lights On FestivalIt’s something that I started in 2019, and obviously I couldn’t do in 2020, but it was a huge success and I didn’t expect it — 14,000 people at the Concord Pavilion [in Concord, Calif.], and the whole lineup was R&B artists.That proved to me that R&B is still alive, and that people love it and they need it. So I’m bringing my festival back in September. We’re going to keep the music going. More