Abdullah Ibrahim In The 1960s: How The Famous Pianist Began To Shape An African Jazz Sound

BY STEPHANIE VOS

POST0DOCTORAL FELLOW

STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSTY

The 1960s is a significant era in Abdullah Ibrahim’s story. It’s a time when the South African master’s international career as a jazz pianist was gradually established and he laid the foundations for the signature sound that is recognised today as people reflect on his passing.

He is best remembered for evoking soundscapes that are recognisably South African: harmonisations of church hymns, Cape Town’s ghoema rhythms and Islamic calls to prayer. His delivery in performance was characterised by a sophisticated simplicity and spaciousness.

This musical turn is mimicked by a spiritual one that culminated in his conversion to Islam and name change from Dollar Brand to Abdullah Ibrahim in 1968.

The World of Dollar Brand was a series of articles that Ibrahim wrote and published in the Cape Herald newspaper in 1968 and 1969. They reveal some of his travails and musical developments after he had gone into exile in Europe in 1962.

As I outline in my study of South African jazz artists and exile, to call this time exile for Ibrahim is perhaps a misnomer. He and his wife, jazz artist and activist Sathima Bea Benjamin, returned to South Africa from July 1968 to May 1969, and again in 1970 and 1974.

As South Africa became remote as a physical presence, however, it gained presence in the poetics of Ibrahim’s sound and discourse. These early years of his absence from South Africa present the lesser known corners of his musical career.

Yet through his music, writing and interviews of this time we can trace how Ibrahim imagined and contructed Africa musically, negotiating an African-rooted sense of identity.

The ‘exile’ years

Born in Cape Town in 1934, Adolph Johannes (Dollar) Brand had been a prolific pianist in the nightclub circuit in South Africa since he was 17 years old.

By the time he and Benjamin left South Africa in 1962, he had a solid reputation. He had collaborated on South Africa’s first bebop record, the Jazz Epistles’ Verse 1, with South African jazz luminaries like Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa.

In her biography, Benjamin recalls the couple were “literally starving for lack of opportunities” in a time of white minority rule and apartheid. A state of emergency declared after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 stifled the South African jazz scene. With the help of a personal friend, Paul Meyer, Ibrahim and Benjamin left for Zurich.

They arrived in the bitter cold of a Swiss winter to a room infested with bedbugs, and struggled to find work. Ibrahim wrote in the Cape Herald that his initial point of contact in Zurich was Club Africana, but they found his music “too modern”. He finally “managed to strike the right note” with the club’s managers – implying some form of musical compromise on his part – and secured a residency for four and a half months a year with fellow South Africans Johnny Gertze on bass and Makaya Ntshoko on drums.

Despite these adversities, this was a time of great development in Ibrahim’s sound. He put in intensive hours of piano practice, even turning to physical exercise to “sustain a long period of two-handed attack”. He honed his skills as a solo performer, and changed his approach to composition:

A lot of the (mostly American-derived) forms I had been working with in South Africa had become restrictive. I moulded new pieces which allowed me unfettered freedom and improvisation … lots of rhythmic patterns using the pulse … as the foundation.

Ibrahim’s early compositions The Stride, Machopi or Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro are examples of this sound.

The focus on pulse (the steady, smallest beats of music) as opposed to beats organised into metre (typically blocks of two, three or four beats that form a steady, repeating pattern, for example ONE two three ONE two three) signals that Ibrahim’s ear was trained on African modes of organising sound.

Cyclical repetitions of short riffs in the bass provide the structure of the piece, with the right hand freely improvising over it. This short cycle is a hallmark of many African musical traditions.

An encounter with Duke Ellington

A key event of Ibrahim’s time in Zurich was his encounter with US jazz star Duke Ellington in 1963. The story is well-known. Ellington was performing in Zurich and Benjamin convinced him to come and listen to a set of the Dollar Brand Trio. Clearly impressed, Ellington invited Benjamin and Brand to record with him in Paris a few weeks later.

This resulted in two albums: Duke Ellington presents the Dollar Brand Trio (1964), and Benjamin’s A Morning in Paris (only released in 1997). Ellington’s endorsement undoubtedly opened doors for Ibrahim, though it would be several years before his career took off.

brahim’s travels between 1962 and 1965 reveal the difficulties of securing a living. He performed at European festivals and did residencies. Stints from 1963 to 1965 at Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen resulted in the live recording released as Anatomy of a South African Village (1965) and Round Midnight at the Montmartre (only released in 1988).

Here some of his “new forms” are audible. After a period in London, Ibrahim and Benjamin moved to New York in 1965. The city became their home for the next four decades.

A solo concert

Ibrahim played his first solo concert in the famed Carnegie Hall on 10 October 1965, launching him into the New York jazz scene in a symbolically significant way.

The concert was largely self-arranged, which struck the pianist as remarkably similar to his concert arrangement efforts when he was still in South Africa.

In this concert, his preference for solo piano performance is already noticeable. In the Cape Herald he observed:


The usual line-up of bass and drums was becoming too restricted and it was quite difficult to find a bass player who could play the fast figures I wanted.

These were difficult years for Ibrahim. Despite generous assistance from the Ellingtons, he could find no work. He poured himself into practice, studying scores, remarking:

The solo piano form was beginning to take shape.
Conversion to Islam

Ibrahim and Benjamin returned to South Africa for 10 months in 1968 and 1969. It was during this time that Dollar Brand converted to Islam. Ibrahim recounts a period of cleansing and spiritual exploration that led to his conversion.

It mirrored the technical development in his musical practices, which Ibrahim said in an interview on BBC radio was connected with internal development.

According to a review in the Cape Herald of the first concert he played in Kensington, Cape Town, however, he had left his audience behind in his musical developments. Although the figure that walked onto the stage “was the old scruffy, well-loved Dollar all right”, the reviewer reports that “Dollar began playing for Dollar, way-out stuff started soaring right above the heads of the audience”. The audience whispered, they fidgeted, and then “started shouting ‘Go back to America’.”

Ibrahim had lost his Cape Town audiences by 1968, his music reconnected with them when he returned in 1974. With producer Rashid Vally he recorded one of his best known albums, Mannenberg – is where it’s happening (1974).

In the track Mannenberg the musical short cycle features again, but this time in the familiar form of the marabi pattern, a mainstay of South African jazz since the 1920s, which forms the backbone of this piece.

Coupled with the distinct saxophone timbres of Cape Town musicians Robbie Jansen and Basil Coetzee, these are the sounds that became synonymous with a home that was only available to Ibrahim imaginatively, sonically, after he left the country in 1974 into what became definitive exile.

They will be the soundtrack to a free memorial concert in honour of his passing in Cape Town on 29 June.

Ibrahim’s writing in the Cape Herald is referenced in this article. The anti-apartheid newspaper closed in 1986 and while these articles are available in archives, there isn’t a link to them online.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Jazz Commentary: John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” Turns 60 — A Homage

COMPILED BY BILL MARX

“I believe that men are here to grow themselves into the best good that they can be.” – John Coltrane

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the release of John Coltrane’s magisterial album A Love Supreme, which has meant so much to so many. Some of the magazine’s jazz writers wanted to express what the music meant (and still means) to them. Their reactions are below.

ALLEN MICHIE

It was years after I discovered Coltrane’s A Love Supreme that I learned I was listening to part of it all wrong.

I confess I didn’t look too deeply into Coltrane’s “Dear Listeners” letter and the “A Love Supreme” poem included in the album’s gatefold. I knew the music had an intensely spiritual dimension, but I thought I didn’t need to study the fragmented religious catchphrases in the poetry to have a deeper appreciation of it. The words didn’t strike me as being particularly literary or original.

What my eyes skimmed over in Coltrane’s “Dear Listener” letter was the line: “the fourth and last part is a musical narration of the theme, ‘A Love Supreme,’ which is written in the context; it is entitled ‘PSALM.’” My mistake was that I didn’t take this literally.

Coltrane does something in the fourth movement that he had never done before and never did again. I can’t think of another example of it in jazz before that enchanted recording date of December 1964. Coltrane read his poem, syllable by syllable, through his tenor saxophone. You’re supposed to read the poem as you listen to the music. Unlike musicians playing the written melodies to standards, where you can “hear” the familiar lyrics you already know, Coltrane was freely improvising his melodies. He invented and then built his solo around recurring musical motifs structured by recurring phrases in the words, such as “Thank you God.”

It’s not a gimmick. The effect is powerful, and I encourage you to take the time to give it your full attention. For those who sometimes struggle to “get” Coltrane and understand the logic behind what appears to be his chaotic musical approach, this is an excellent place to start.

In order to follow the natural cadences of speech, Coltrane limits the range to the middle of the tenor saxophone to match that of an adult male’s voice. When the voice rises and breaks with emotion, as it does at 2:52 over the lines “Have no fear…believe…thank you God,” you can hear a new level of sincerity of expression, free of cliché or overdramatization. Simple lines like “God is. He always was. He always will be. No matter what…it is God” at 1:14 are expressed as a moment of quiet but uplifting discovery.

As the entire A Love Supreme suite builds to its conclusion, at 5:27, Coltrane’s stately incantation rises to something a human voice would strain to do. It is a disciplined cry, part sorrowful at losing some of our past self, and part ecstatic that a rebirth is underway. “He will remake us…He always has and He always will. It is true—blessed be His name—thank you God.” The music descends to the line “so gently we hardly feel it,” then ascends triumphantly, step by step, through the words “ELATION—ELEGANCE—EXALTATION.”

If you have journeyed with Coltrane this far, the reward is yours as well.

STEVE ELLMAN

John Coltrane had worked the territory before – modality and the blues – but never with such an explicit agenda. What if the music had appeared without its famous title, without the chant of “a love supreme” that surprised so many when they heard it for the first time? But that’s pointless: it is impossible to separate the music of A Love Supreme from its purpose. Coltrane said it was “a humble offering to Him,” and I have always heard it as a seeking, as well – hands and horn uplifted to a non-denominational divine.

“A Love Supreme” is the expression of the first giant step in that musical journey. Coltrane was in good company – the heart of A Love Supreme is like that of Moses on reaching the summit of Mount Horeb; like that of Jesus of Nazareth as John the Baptist was lifting him from the water of the Jordan; like that of Siddhartha Gautama in his final seconds of meditation under the bodhi tree before achieving enlightenment; like that of the prophet Muhammad in the moment the angel Gabriel said, “Recite.”

The search is in Coltrane’s liner notes: “I perceive . . . His OMNIPOTENCE, and of our need for, and dependence on Him. . . . In all ways seek God everyday. . . . No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God. . . . I have seen God. I have seen ungodly . . . He will remake us . . .”

Coltrane revisited A Love Supreme in live performance (notably with Carlos Ward and Pharoah Sanders added as solo voices, in Seattle in October 1965). The original themes and improvisations have been reexamined and reinterpreted by Branford Marsalis’s quartet, by Wynton Marsalis in a large-ensemble version for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, by violinist David Balakrishnan for the Turtle Island String Quartet, and by Jeff Scott in his Passion for Bach and Coltrane (Fuse review), along with others of much less renown, like the sacred steel group the Campbell Brothers, Catalan drummer Vicente Espí, Hungarian guitarist Juhász Gábor, and the big band led by French composer Christophe Dalsasso and saxophonist Lionel Belmondo.

Individual movements of the suite have inspired reimaginings by (among many others) saxophonists Kenny Garrett, Eric Alexander, and Lakecia Benjamin; Alice Coltrane, with Frank Lowe, Leroy Jenkins, Reggie Workman and Ben Riley; singer Kurt Elling, in a vocalise version setting philosophical words to Coltrane’s solo on “Resolution”; guitarists Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin; keyboardist-producer Robert Glasper; and Canadian pianist Andy Milne, in a symphony arrangement for Carlos Simon’s Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra (Fuse review).

Even though the reinterpretations vary widely in sound and quality, they all share an astonishing continuity of reverence for the original, as if A Love Supreme were a cathedral, striking its visitors into awe and contemplation.

In all his music, consciously and unconsciously, Coltrane sought to fill the emptiness of a hollow world. The yearning of A Love Supreme touched something universal, and the musical expression of that yearning touched the souls of millions. Its power will not be diminished by time.

STEPHEN PROVIZER

Other Arts Fuse writers will no doubt discuss the creation of A Love Supreme and place it in a broader jazz context. My contribution is a personal story, inspired by the only slight exaggeration that this album saved my life. Twice.

My sister Marlene gave me the album for my 15th birthday the year it was released, 1965. She had no idea at the time, but days before, the girl I loved had told me she no longer wanted anything to do with me. I was devastated and took to my bed, crawling out only for an occasional meal. When Marlene brought me the LP, I could only muster a pro forma thank you.

My family’s record player was a console that sat in the dining room—a Sylvania. At that point, I had heard Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard, so I knew he was going in new directions, but I was not prepared for what I heard. I put the record on and lay under the dining room table to listen. I was more than confused by what I heard. In fact, my breathing momentarily stopped. By the time the record was over, my spirits had lifted and I knew I would never hear or play music the same way again. Life seemed not so dire and perhaps, I thought, love might find me again.

My obsession with Coltrane was such that when I went to college, I finagled a grant to study his life. At nineteen years old, and wearing a fedora in an attempt to look older, I hit the road to North Carolina, Philadelphia, and New York City; I interviewed as many of the people who knew him as I could. Some of this material was published, but I didn’t write a biography because Alice Coltrane’s lawyers wouldn’t let her speak to me unless I had a publisher, and I couldn’t get a publisher until…

To frame the second life-saving incident, I will remind people that this was the era of the Vietnam War. In 1969, the Selective Service lottery was held and my number was 132. I was clearly going to be drafted — I was not interested in going to war. I was called for my physical. I didn’t quite manage to get under the minimum weight for my height, although carrying my trumpet and devising some interesting sexual inclinations did compel the shrink to write on my form that I had “overt character disorders.” I knew I needed to apply for conscientious objector (C.O.) status. And this is where A Love Supreme reappears.

You have to submit a written statement to your draft board that establishes your religious and/or ethical claim to be a conscientious objector. I am Jewish and was bar-mitzvah, but my claim was not based on that. Instead, I included a copy of the liner notes of A Love Supreme and explained that this was the basis of my spiritual beliefs. When I went to my draft board in Brookline’s Coolidge Corner, I brought a man with me—a well-known town guy who umpired softball games. He testified to my sincerity and helped to ground my esoteric claims. I explained the basis of my application to the board: I was granted C.O. status and then declared 4-F. Thank you, John Coltrane. Because of you and A Love Supreme, I never had to see the jungles of Southeast Asia.

STEVE FEENEY

I had an early introduction to the music of John Coltrane by way of a gift from a friend—a double vinyl album that included two Miles Davis releases: Workin’ and Steamin’ from the 1950s. Wow, that tenor sax player in the group had a powerful, distinctive sound. But it was my later introduction to Coltrane’s own A Love Supreme that really opened my ears, which at the time was otherwise accustomed to a diet of psychedelic jams.

As we listened to the disc, a member of my group of young friends nearly threw me off by insisting on singing along in a peculiar way to the spiritual chant at the start of the album. She insisted on changing “A Love Supreme, A Love Supreme” to “I Love Ice Cream, I Love Ice Cream.” The memory of that somewhat amusing, but nonetheless supremely annoying, irreverence still freezes my brain for a moment when I play the album.

In any event, I was, and remain, more focused on the instrumental music that followed the chanting. “Pursuance” is the section (or movement) in the four-part work that still blows me away. It contains the most intense jazz quartet music I have ever heard. I use the qualifier ‘jazz,’ but really, it holds up against any serious quartet music.

The mix of joy, humility, and African American roots in A Love Supreme makes for a triumphant recording, a testament to the chemistry of the leader, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. I think I’ll stick the disc in the CD player (I still have one) in my car and head for a visit to the outer reaches of this great music— maybe taking some time out for a quick stop somewhere for a cone.

MICHAEL ULLMAN

In January of 1965, Impulse Records issued John Coltrane’s quartet record, A Love Supreme. I bought my copy soon after. I was already an engaged, teenaged Coltrane fan. I had heard Trane with Miles Davis and also in the Coltrane records I had already acquired—among them, Coltrane Plays the Blues, My Favorite Things, and the more recent Crescent. But my response, and that of others, to A Love Supreme was nonetheless different from our reactions to previous Coltrane performances and perhaps from any previous jazz record. I remember, in the fall of 1967, walking across the green at the University of Chicago and crossing paths with a young man who was chanting, “a love supreme, a love supreme.” Abruptly, it seemed my semi-private obsession with middle and late Coltrane was now widely shared, at least among hip Ivy League types.

A Love Supreme changed the public’s perspective on Coltrane. From 1965 on, his image was surrounded by an air of piety, especially following his premature death in 1967. After Trane, some jazz was increasingly seen as an expression of a spiritual force. No one then was surprised when Pharoah Sanders issued records like Karma and Wisdom Through Music, or when he chanted, “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” Alice Coltrane continued in Trane’s path with records like Lord of Lords. On the other hand, people were startled when they saw a photo of Coltrane smiling: he was typically seen as sober as an old-fashioned judge. His music reflected his seriousness. With its long, almost placid lines and out-of-tempo feel, the introduction to the title cut of Crescent may have been a musical precursor to A Love Supreme. But the latter album came with a poem, and the piece was made up of four movements—“Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm.” This setup suggested the path of an effortful but ultimately successful spiritual awakening. Listeners believed that his music offered them a healing journey, an escape from a war-torn political scene and an increasingly agitated racial climate.

In his notes, Coltrane wrote about his own journey: “During the year 1957 I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, more productive life.” He backslid temporarily, he said, but had come back to his chosen path. A Love Supreme was his way of saying thank you and also suggesting a way for the rest of us to follow. The way wasn’t meant to be tedious: he ends his poem by telling us what God had vouchsafed him: “ELATION—ELEGANCE—EXALTATION.” “Acknowledgement” begins with a splash on Elvin Jones’s gong and a fanfare from Coltrane, who withdraws as McCoy Tyner fills in and then seems to dwindle away in anticipation. The introduction ends with Jimmy Garrison’s repetitions of the four-note theme that A Love Supreme will always be known for. Coltrane returns, interjecting the straightforward force of his playing as he moves from overblown high notes to the depth of his tenor. He plays short phrases that seem to move with their own harmonic logic. At his most intense, he travels higher in his horn, swirling around an imagined center. Eventually, of course, he chants “a love supreme.”

After one acknowledges the omnipresence of God, there is “Resolution,” which precedes the action suggested by the following movement, “Pursuance.” The theme of “Resolution” is just as attractive as its predecessor. Here, though, McCoy Tyner solos at length with his own pounding, two-handed force: he plays a whole chorus of thumping chords. Jones is given the opportunity to open “Pursuance.” Coltrane ensures that every quartet member gets his feature time—still, the saxophonist dominates with his sometimes shrieking intensity. The concluding movement, “Psalm,” is a proclamation, perhaps of well-earned serenity. A Love Supreme has been treated by critics as Coltrane’s signature album. I don’t think he thought of it that way, as if its significance was set in stone. The next day, he re-recorded several movements, and in his next session he recorded “Chim Chim Cheree” from Mary Poppins. His ears remained open and his musical spirit playful.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Sly Stone Turned Isolation Into Inspiration, Forging A Path For A Generation Of Music-Makers

The charismatic front man of Sly and the Family Stone died on June 9, 2025, at the age of 82. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

BY JOSE VALENTINO RUIZ

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MUSIC

BUSINESS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP,

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

In the fall of 1971, Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” landed like a quiet revolution. After two years of silence following the band’s mainstream success, fans expected more feel-good funk from the ensemble.

What they got instead was something murkier and more fractured, yet deeply intimate and experimental. This was not just an album; it was the sound of a restless mind rebuilding music from the inside out.

At the center of it all was front man Sly Stone.

Long before the home studio became an industry norm, Stone, who died on June 9, 2025, turned the studio into both a sanctuary and an instrument. And long before sampling defined the sound of hip-hop, he was using tape and machine rhythms to deconstruct existing songs to cobble together new ones.

As someone who spends much of their time working on remote recording and audio production – from building full arrangements solo to collaborating digitally across continents – I’m deeply indebted to Sly Stone’s approach to making music.

He was among the first major artists to fully embrace the recording environment as a space to compose rather than perform. Every reverb bounce, every drum machine tick, every overdubbed breath became part of the writing process.

From studio rat to bedroom producer

Sly and the Family Stone’s early albums – including “Dance to the Music” and “Stand!” – were recorded at top-tier facilities like CBS Studios in Los Angeles under the technical guidance of engineers such as Don Puluse and with oversight from producer David Rubinson.

These sessions yielded bright, radio-friendly tracks that emphasized tight horn sections, group vocals and a polished sound. Producers also prized the energy of live performance, so the full band would record together in real time.

But by the early 1970s, Stone was burnt out. The dual pressures of fame and industry demands were becoming too much. Struggling with cocaine and PCP addiction, he’d grown increasingly distrustful of bandmates, label executives and even his friends.

So he decided to retreat to his hillside mansion in Bel Air, California, transforming his home into a musical bunker. Inside, he could work on his own terms: isolated and erratic, but free.

Without a full band present, Stone became a one-man ensemble. He leaned heavily into overdubbing – recording one instrument at a time and building his songs from fragments. Using multiple tape machines, he’d layer each part onto previous takes.

The resulting album, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” was like nothing he’d previously recorded. It sounds murky, jagged and disjointed. But it’s also deeply intentional, as if every imperfection was part of the design.

In “The Poetics of Rock,” musicologist Albin Zak describes this “composerly” approach to production, where recording itself becomes a form of writing, not just documentation. Stone’s process for “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” reflects this mindset: Each overdub, rhythm loop and sonic imperfection functions more like a brushstroke than a performance.

Automating the groove

A key part of Stone’s tool kit was the Maestro Rhythm King, a preset drum machine he used extensively.

It wasn’t the first rhythm box on the market. But Stone’s use of it was arguably the first time such a machine shaped the entire aesthetic of a mainstream album. The drum parts on his track “Family Affair,” for example, don’t swing – they tick. What might have been viewed as soulless became its own kind of soul.

This early embrace of mechanical rhythm prefigured what would later become a foundation of hip-hop and electronic music. In his book “Dawn of the DAW,” music technology scholar Adam Patrick Bell calls this shift “a redefinition of groove,” noting how drum machines like the Rhythm King encouraged musicians to rethink their songwriting process, building tracks in shorter, repeatable sections while emphasizing steady, looped rhythms rather than free-flowing performances.

Though samplers wouldn’t emerge until years later, Stone’s work already contained that repetition, layering and loop-based construction that would become characteristic of the practice.

He recorded his own parts the way future DJs would splice records – isolated, reshuffled, rhythmically obsessed. His overdubbed bass lines, keyboard vamps and vocal murmurs often sounded like puzzle pieces from other songs.

Music scholar Will Fulton, in his study of Black studio innovation, notes how producers like Stone helped pioneer a fragment-based approach to music-making that would become central to hip-hop’s DNA. Stone’s process anticipated the mentality that a song isn’t necessarily something written top to bottom, but something assembled, brick by brick, from what’s available.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Stone’s tracks have been sampled relentlessly. In “Bring That Beat Back,” music critic Nate Patrin identifies Stone as one of the most sample-friendly artists of the 1970s – not because of his commercial hits, but because of how much sonic space he left in his tracks: the open-ended grooves, unusual textures and slippery emotional tone.

You can hear his sounds in famous tracks such as 2Pac’s “If My Homie Calls,” which samples “Sing a Simple Song”; A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Jam,” which draws from “Family Affair”; and De La Soul’s “Plug Tunin’,” which flips “You Can Make It If You Try.”

The studio as instrument

While Sly’s approach was groundbreaking, he wasn’t entirely alone. Around the same time, artists such as Brian Wilson and The Rolling Stones were experimenting with home and nontraditional recording environments – Wilson famously retreating to his home studio during “Pet Sounds,” and the Stones tracking “Exile on Main St.” in a French villa.

Yet in the world of Black music, production remained largely centralized in institutionally controlled studio systems such as Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, where sound was tightly managed by in-house producers and engineers. In that context, Stone’s decision to isolate, self-produce and dismantle the standard workflow was more than a technical choice: It was a radical act of autonomy.

The rise of home recording didn’t just change who could make music. It changed what music felt like. It made music more internal, iterative and intimate.

Sly Stone helped invent that feeling.

It’s easy to hear “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” as murky or uneven. The mix is dense with tape hiss, drum machines drift in and out of sync, and vocals often feel buried or half-whispered.

But it’s also, in a way, prophetic.

It anticipated the aesthetics of bedroom pop, the cut-and-paste style of modern music software, the shuffle of playlists and the recycling of sounds that defines sample culture. It showed that a groove didn’t need to be spontaneous to be soulful, and that solitude could be a powerful creative tool, not a limitation.

In my own practice, I often record alone, passing files back and forth, building from templates and mapping rhythm to grid – as do millions of musical artists who compose tracks from their bedrooms, closets and garages.

Half a century ago, a funk pioneer led the way. I think it’s safe to say that Sly Stone quietly changed the process of making music forever – and in the funkiest way possible.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Beatlemania: A Penetrating New Book Celebrates Lennon And McCartney

BY T BONE BURNETTE

JOHN AND PAUL: A LOVE STORY IN SONGS

IAN LESLIE, CELADON

433PP

The Beatles at the press launch for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” held at the home of their manager Brian Epstein.Credit...John Downing/Getty Images

In our culture, music is most often written about in terms of sales, streams and chart positions. That is, of course, the least intelligent way to think about or talk about music.

Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” is unconcerned with all that, but rather it explores the way two extraordinarily gifted young men combined and exchanged their gifts while inspiring, challenging, teaching and learning from each other.

In the great teams of composers before John Lennon and Paul McCartney — Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, Leiber and Stoller, Bacharach and David — one of the members wrote the music and the other wrote the lyrics. John and Paul both wrote music and both wrote lyrics, and they made a decision at the beginning of their collaboration to share the credit on all of their compositions, thereby creating a third being called Lennon and McCartney. That selfless, generous merger, as their egos shape-shifted into and out of each other, unleashed a power that took music to a height that has not since been surpassed, or I think it safe to say, even reached.

I fell in love with rock ’n’ roll music when I was 9 years old in 1957 and first heard “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” by Jerry Lee Lewis. I clearly remember rolling around on the floor laughing at the explosion of freedom and joy in that recording, and in that moment I thought that that was how I wanted to spend my life. By 1960, however, the rock ’n’ roll explosion had faded away. Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash. Elvis Presley was in the Army. Chuck Berry was in jail. Eddie Cochran died in a car wreck. Little Richard was in the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been canceled. Rock ’n’ roll seemed at a dead end.

Three years later, however, these two young musicians and their friends George Harrison and Ringo Starr, all from a seaport in the north of England, reinvented a style of music that had come from the backwaters of the Mississippi Delta, the highlands of the Appalachian Mountains and the mean streets of our cities. In the next five years, while absorbing and combining the art and music of the rest of the 20th century, they made music that took us all on an exquisite trip into other worlds of sound and meaning in a feat of invention that seems and is, I think, superhuman.

Though there has probably never been music that has permeated and elevated mass culture to a higher degree, this book is not interested in music as a mass commodity. This book is about soul, about grief and most of all about love — the love that two boys who lost their mothers far too soon have for each other, the courageous way they merge and the unfathomable power of that merger.

Leslie, a British journalist and author, has a deep affection for, and a penetrating understanding of, these complex characters and their unprecedented friendship — from their boyhoods in Liverpool, through the debauchery of postwar-Hamburg night life, through their lightning rise to international fame, through the remarkable string of albums with the explosive innocence of “With the Beatles” in 1963, the jubilant rockabilly of “Beatles for Sale” in 1964, the cannabis-fueled “Rubber Soul” in 1965, the epic psychedelia of “Revolver” in 1966 and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967 — which, perhaps inevitably, ended in acrimony not long thereafter. Having lived through that period of time myself, it is stunning to follow Leslie’s insights into how far and fast John and Paul traveled, how profound their preternatural alliance was, and how epic their heroic journey.

I’m sorry John isn’t here to read this book. I hope if Paul does read it he feels the depth of appreciation and gratitude and intelligence it contains. There is a passage about them being high on LSD, after recording the song “Getting Better” during the “Sgt. Pepper’s” sessions, that seems to me central to Leslie’s understanding of his subjects:


That night, John and Paul did something that the two of them practiced quite a few times during this period: They gazed intensely into each other’s eyes. They liked to put their faces close together and stare, unblinking, until they felt themselves dissolving into each other, almost obliterating any sense of themselves as distinct individuals. “There’s something disturbing about it,” recalled McCartney, much later, in his understated way. “You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t.”

One plus one equals two unless you are counting, say, drops of water, in which case one plus one can equal one, or it can equal a fine mist. In “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” one plus one equals eternity.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Fleetwood Mac All The Songs: The Story Behind Every Track – Book Review

BY CLAIRE GLOVER

Fleetwood Mac – All The Songs – delves deeply into the exceptional recording history of the hugely-bestselling and immensely influential rock band. Packed with captivating information, photographs and fascinating behind-the-scenes details, it’s a must-have for any music fan.

This is an extremely comprehensive, beautiful book that covers Fleetwood Mac’s 15 lineups. It captures details of Peter Green, including his tragic death, the blues origins of Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, John and Christine McVie, and the crowning glory when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the line-up.

Detailing the band’s many iterations, from the self-titled debut album in 1968 when they were known as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, to the classic Rumours era. Covering the shocking passing of Christine McVeigh in November 2022, it’s crammed with hundreds of brilliant photographs, including rare black and white stills and images of instruments used by the band and engaging shots of the musicians in the recording studio. It is an essential prized possession for any true fan of classic rock. It’s a complete look at behind the scenes, which chronicles a five-decade-long recording history of this well-loved, bestselling and hugely influential rock band.

The content draws upon years of research to recount the circumstances that led to the composition of every song the band ever wrote, as well as the details behind their studio recording process. The layout comprehensively covers all the songs, documenting the musicians, where the song was recorded, production details, genesis and lyrics. Alongside incredible images capturing the band across the years.

From documenting Fleetwood Mac’s first concert at the Windsor National and Jazz and Blues Festival in 1967. From 1975 – 1987, which was then the Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks line up. It tells of Mick Fleetwood remembering hearing the song Frozen Love, performed by the Buckingham / Nicks duo, and he was particularly taken by the guitarist’s touch. He invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac, who insisted that his girlfriend Stevie Nicks be part of the adventure, and the rest is history, beautifully captured in these pages.

A couple of little snippets of mesmerising information: Lindsey Buckingham, who was born in October 1949, was pushed into swimming by his father, the owner of a prosperous coffee factory. Yet his only interest seemed to be music, and he didn’t fit in with his two older brothers, who were nicknamed the swimming Buckingham’s. At the age of five, Buckingham spent most of his time drawing guitars while his two brothers were swimming laps in the community pool. His obsession with the self-taught guitar took precedence over everything else.

Stephanie Lynn Nicks was born on May 26, 1948, in Phoenix, Arizona. The name Stevie came from the fact she couldn’t pronounce the word Stephanie when she was little, and so the pronunciation came out as TD, which was eventually turned into Stevie. She was certainly one of the most emblematic figures in the band. Under the watchful eye of her grandfather, country singer Aaron Jess Nicks, Stevie first sang at the age of four. He introduced her to dozens of 45 records, which they listened to together religiously. He was tempted to take her on tour with him, but gave up when her parents categorically refused.

The 600 pages of the book’s contents include – The Roots of Fleetwood Mac, Jeremy Spencer, The Guitarist With Two Faces, The 2003 to 2013 Tours, Glossary, Photo Credits and final pages covering the band’s discography of every song.

This incredible book extensively captures in words and pictures one of the most enduring, charming yet drama-filled bands in rock history, whose success, challenges and amazing music continues to resonate with generations of listeners.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Film Review: “A Complete Unknown” — A Fable Well Worth Telling

BY TIM JACKSON

Focusing on the years between 1961 and 1965, director James Mangold turns Bob Dylan’s creative journey into a better-than-average cinematic biography in which the singer ends up riding off on his motorcycle and into history.

A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold. Screening on screens around New England beginning December 24.

In Bob Dylan’s imaginative memoir, Chronicle, he begins: “I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.” It is an apt summary of James Mangold’s film A Complete Unknown. With a script by Mangold and Jay Cocks based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric (Arts Fuse review), the film covers Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village in January 1961 and ends with his legendary performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The reinvention of Bobby Zimmerman into Bob Dylan was swift; he took the city and the folk world by storm. Mangold gleans Wald’s book for references and details, painting a clear if occasionally fanciful portrait. Dylan was already an obsessive songwriter at twenty. His songs and lyrics were highly personal, unlike the traditional songs performed by his peers. His performance at Newport with electric instruments was transformative, a radical departure from what was the standard for ‘folk music’, which was resolutely acoustic.

Playing Dylan, Timothée Chalamet might earn his first Oscar. There is a passing physical resemblance between the two of them; but more important, the actor plays the guitar and meets the challenge of duplicating Dylan’s nasal vocal style. (The rest of the cast also perform their musical numbers.) Chalamet suggests that Dylan’s mumbling speech might be the way the man used to emotionally distance himself from the world and close relationships. That reticence is understandable. As Dylan sings in “Maggie’s Farm”, ‘I got a head full of ideas that is drivin’ me insane’.

At age 20, Dylan is seen in the film moving into her apartment with a New York girlfriend, where he writes compulsively. Soon after that, Dylan shacks up with the already famous Joan Baez. (As Baez, Monica Barbaro has an unaffected singing voice that resonates with Baez’s, though the original is a tough act to duplicate.) Initially, Dylan had commented to manager Albert Grossman that Baez was “pretty,” adding “maybe too pretty”. Arrogant, unshakably confident of his own vision, Dylan later tells Baez to her face that: “Your songs are like oil paintings at the dentist’s office.” Baez’s understandable response: “And you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”

The narrative’s accuracy regarding times and places is shakey. It is true that Dylan met and played with the legendary Woody Guthrie during his first week in New York. A Complete Unknown places his initial visit at New Jersey’s Greystone Psychiatric Park where Guthrie, played by Scoot McNairy (also in this year’s Nightbitch), lies in bed, unable to speak, his career cut short after a long battle with Huntington’s disease. But it is film fiction that Pete Seeger was at Guthrie’s side at the time. Edward Norton’s fatherly demeanor and vocal inflections imitate Seeger perfectly — his performance is among the film’s highlights. After Dylan plays “Song to Woody” in the hospital room, the pair sit without comment. The silence of this moving scene makes a dramatic point: we’re left to infer that both of the older artists recognize that this young minstrel from Duluth might be the pioneer for a new generation of folk artists.

Grossman soon signed Dylan into his stable of artists, which included the biggest stars of the scene, such as Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. A Columbia Record contract followed. Grossman was a music industry powerhouse, but Dan Fogler’s interpretation of him is a bit clownish. Grossman soon recognized that his other artists could cover Dylan’s quickly expanding repertoire, earning all concerned a fortune in royalties.

In the film, Dylan falls into a relationship with activist and artist Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning. This character is a substitute for Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s actual muse, the woman who graces the cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. (It is one of the few name changes in the film.) In Chronicles, Dylan describes meeting Rotolo: “We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.” He later wrote the song “Ballad in Plain D” about their separation. In 1985 he said ”Oh yeah, that one! I look back and say, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’ Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.” After recording it, he was never known to have performed it again.

The fine supporting cast includes Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Norbert Leo Butz as Alan Lomax. Many key figures are skirted over in this telling, such as journalist Bob Shelton and folk singers Phil Ochs and Peter Yarrow. Others, like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, receive peripheral cameos. One notable scene comes when Dylan makes an unexpected appearance at a TV show hosted by Seeger, in which the guest is a mythical Delta Blues singer named Jesse Moffett. The blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield was brought in to play the role. Moffett and Dylan play a wonderful duet; it’s a made-up performance, but it adds some blues bona fides to the film.

Dylan’s wealth and status came fast. By 1964, he was a star. The civil rights and anti-war movements embraced the performer as their premier spokesman-troubadour. But soon a a radically altered Dylan would emerge, one that alienated many of his fans and admirers. That’s the subject of the second half of A Complete Unknown, which leads up to Dylan’s infamous appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

George Wein began the folk festival in 1959 with Grossman. It was to serve as a platform for live performances in the acoustic tradition, the lineup structured to include emerging folk artists (Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio), traditional bluegrass acts (Flatt and Scruggs), aging blues masters (Son House, Odetta, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee), and many more. Wein was creating a community made up of musicians who were dedicated to the progressive ideals of a generation, artists who had come of age amidst the battles against racial segregation and McCarthyism. There was also the assassinations of John Kennedy and Malcolm X, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. War was escalating in Vietnam. At the center of the movement and its ideals was the perpetually engaged Pete Seeger. But Dylan was a musician and poet first, not an activist. His sudden fame made him uncomfortable; he resented being labeled or pigeonholed. He had a working knowledge of a vast range of American music and loved rock and roll as much as folk. Given that his songs and lyrics were being interpreted by many as speaking for the conscience of anti-establishment culture, a conflict was inevitable.

In March of 1964, Dylan recorded an electric album, Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan, backed by members of Paul Butterfield’s Chicago Blues band, opened at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric version of “Maggie’s Farm”. Many in the crowd booed: it was seen by some as an affront to the acoustic roots of folk. They shouldn’t have been so surprised. The truth is, Dylan always wanted to be a rock star. Unacknowledged is the fact that the Butterfield Band had performed loudly that same afternoon with electric guitars. But Dylan’s performance ended up creating an angry division between Seeger, the traditionalist, and Dylan, who was upset and confounded by the hostile reaction. The folk world was forever changed.

The performance was not as much a revolution as an evolution, a change that is at the heart of A Complete Unknown. As befits a Hollywood biopic, it fabricates and simplifies details for the sake of creating drama out of Dylan’s break with the past. There’s added soap opera: an awkward episode about a romantic break-up. Nevertheless, by focusing on the years between 1961 and 1965, Mangold turns Dylan’s creative journey into a better-than-average cinematic biography in which the singer ends up riding off on his motorcycle and into history.

Given that America today is being ripped apart by another traumatic political divide, this is a story worth telling. Particularly for generations only vaguely familiar with the embattled evolution of one of America’s visionary artist poets,

Dylan aficionados will no doubt grumble. Chronologically, songs are performed before they were actually written; there are incidents that never happened, and various events have been consolidated for dramatic purposes. Rolling Stone magazine has published a list of 29 fictitious events and/or details in the film. Purists should turn to numerous books on Dylan’s life and music. Besides Dylan Goes Electric and Chronicles, it is worth looking at 2022’s Philosophy of Modern Song, in which Dylan analyzes and riffs on tunes over the course of over 60 essays. In film, there are Martin Scorsese’s documentaries, 2005’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and 2029’s The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. Also worth taking in: Todd Haynes’s terrific I’m Not There and D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, which covers Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England.

Dylan, who is on record as admiring Chalamet’s performance suggested on X, “After you’ve seen the movie read [Wald’s] book”. The book and film fit together well; they present a complete picture. In a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Chalamet explains: “This is interpretive. This is not definitive. This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable.”

Footnote:

I was at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I had just gotten my driver’s license and I drove to Newport from Connecticut with two friends. We slept in sleeping bags in the dirt and washed at the local YMCA. I owned the double side 45 RPM record of “Like a Rolling Stone”. That electric version, along with British adaptations of American standards, such as The Animal’s version of “House on the Rising Sun”, were blowing our young minds. All day, you could attend what were called ‘workshops’ with roots artists from America and around the world. The most vivid of those in my memory: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Doc Watson and his son Merle, Rev. Gary Davis, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. In those days you could gather informally around a folk singer like Taj Mahal singing under a tree in the afternoons. I’ll never forget an impromptu performance featuring Peter Schumann, co-founder of the Bread & Puppet Theatre, who did some improvised storytelling while Eric Von Schmidt unrolled a long sheet of paper attached to a fence and drew illustrations as he went along.

That evening, we expected Dylan to “go electric.” We had been soaked by the rain and couldn’t afford the ticket price, so we listened from outside the gates. We were pleased to hear the electric guitars cranking out “Like a Rolling Stone”. A decade later, working with folk singer Tom Rush, I wrote a piece for Black Sheep Magazine called “The Folkie’s Fear of Drums”. A positive letter of response was later published from none other than – Pete Seeger!

Tim Jackson was an assistant professor of Digital Film and Video for 20 years. His music career in Boston began in the 1970s and includes some 20 groups, recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate, and has also worked helter-skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980s. He has directed three feature documentaries: Chaos and Order: Making American Theater about the American Repertory Theater; Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups; When Things Go Wrong: The Robin Lane Story. And two short films: Joan Walsh Anglund: Life in Story and Poem and The American Gurner. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. You can read more of his work on his blog.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Music Review: Paul McCartney And Wings’ Release Bare Bones ‘Band On The Run’ On 50th Anniversary

This image released by UMe shows the 50th Anniversary edition of “Band on the Run (Underdubbed).” (UMe via AP)

BY SCOTT BAUER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sometimes less is more.

At least that’s the thought behind Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run (Underdubbed).”

Fifty years after its debut, the beloved album gets yet another rerelease, this time with a version that doesn’t include bonus tracks but instead pulls back some of the layers that were added after the original rough mixes. Hence, “underdubbed” in the title.

This isn’t the first time McCartney has revisited an album to strip off some of the bells and whistles to get closer to the original recording. He did it with the unfortunately titled “Let It Be Naked” back in 2003.

The “underdubbed” version of “Band on the Run” is notable for a slightly different song order from the U.S. release that will be jarring for those with the original sequencing committed to memory after decades of listening. The new order mirrors how the original tapes were discovered in McCartney’s archives and omits “Helen Wheels,” which McCartney didn’t intend to include on the album but did after it was a hit single.

Some of the changes with the songs themselves are subtle: a missing guitar riff or echo here, no backing vocals there. Others are more noticeable, like no orchestral overdubs, what sounds like a vocal flub on the title track and no vocals at all on “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.”

So, which version is better? They are different. The original still sounds fresh and exciting today, a half century later. There’s a reason why it’s McCartney’s best-selling, post-Beatles release.

The better question is whether it’s worth paying to hear the “underdubbed” version. The answer to that depends on your level of McCartney fandom.

If “Band on the Run” is part of your musical DNA, then “Underdubbed” is a fun alternate take that gives a window into what might have been. If that doesn’t interest you, or you’ve somehow never listened to the original, stick with enjoying it the way McCartney first put it out.

AP music reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/music-reviews

“Backstage & Beyond Volume I” — A Valuable Addition To Any Rock ‘N’ Roll Library

BY KAREN SCHLOSBERG

Veteran rock journalist Jim Sullivan, who has been a mainstay of the Boston-area music scene for four decades, has just released a collection of essays based on the many interviews he’s done during that span. This collection, Backstage & Beyond Volume I, covers those “who began or thrived in the classic rock area,” he explains in the preface (Volume II will cover punk/post-punk/New Wave and will be released in October).

Sullivan’s writing style has always been conversational rather than confrontational; his aim is to make a connection with a musician based on knowledge and a level of respect, and that is on display here — each chapter is an essay usually built from several interviews Sullivan has done with an artist over the years, sometimes including excerpts from reviews.

The pieces are pleasantly informative and chatty. The artists range from Roy Orbison and Darlene Love to both Davies brothers of the Kinks and Warren Zevon, from Pete Townshend and George Clinton to Lou Reed and Joan Baez. Sullivan is not out to write mini-bios of the musicians; he wants to present these artists as people, not stars. So while there is nothing earth-shatteringly new here, he serves up some good stories and evinces a sense of the person behind the microphone.

Of course, sometimes that person is not particularly pleasant and Sullivan, to his credit, didn’t sugarcoat these incidents. Jerry Lee Lewis, for example, appears to be a first-class arrogant misogynist and thoroughly unlikeable — not a surprise; Iggy Pop comes across as disagreeably full of himself, which was kind of a surprise. The sexism that is the dark side of rock ‘n’ roll is an undercurrent in many of these musicians’ anecdotes. I wonder how different some of these interviews would have been if the questions had been asked by a woman. (The skeptic in me thinks Sullivan probably got more truth from some of these guys because he is a man). And then there was Ginger Baker, who never met an interviewer he liked. Sullivan included his encounter as a humorous way of deflating his own goals for the book, and the encounter turned out much worse for Baker.

Overall, the artists in the book come across as thoughtful, hard-working, and refreshingly down-to-earth. The most moving chapter deals with Warren Zevon, whom Sullivan knew for many years; the writer examines the musician’s frustratingly commercially underrated work with compassion and insight. The chapters on Alice Cooper, Joe Perry & Aerosmith, and Peter Wolf & J. Geils Band also benefit from Sullivan’s long association with the artists. Richard Thompson, Darlene Love, and Brian Eno also contribute thoughtful musings on the creative process and the music industry.

Backstage & Beyond is a solid addition to any rock ‘n’ roll library, and I look forward to Volume II.

(Note: Sullivan and I have been writing colleagues in the Boston music scene for many years.)

Karen Schlosberg is a veteran journalist and editor. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Boston Herald, The Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone, Musician, Creem, and Trouser Press. She can be reached here or on Twitter @karen1055.

READ ORIGINAL ESSAY HERE

Sinéad O'Connor, 1966-2023 — Icon And Iconoclast

Sinead O'Connor performs live for fans at Sydney Opera House on March 19, 2015 in Sydney, Australia. Image: Don Arnold/Wire Image via Getty Images

'May her spirit find the peace she sought in so many different ways' — President Michael D Higgins

BY LIZ DUNPHY

People all over Ireland and further afield stopped what they were doing on Wednesday night in shock and sadness as the news broke that the icon and iconoclast, singer Sinéad O’Connor, had died aged 56.

The acclaimed musician and songwriter shot to worldwide fame in 1990 with her haunting reinterpretation of the Prince song ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.

Described as “the greatest love song in the history of music” by RTÉ DJ Dave Fanning, the video, pared back and powerful, shows O’Connor looking directly into the camera, tears rolling down her beautiful, grieving face.

She later said that she thought of her mother when she sang that song.

‘Nothing Compares to U’ was named the number one world single in 1990 by the Billboard Music Awards.

That constant clash between her fragility and her raw, raging power was captured in that performance, and those qualities made O’Connor both magnetic and memorable.

But they could also make her vulnerable to public scrutiny and attack, of which she suffered plenty. She once said:

"They tried to bury me but they didn’t realise I was a seed."

She released 10 studio albums, the second of which was chosen for the Classic Album Award 2023 at the Choice Music Awards.

The award was for I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got which featured songs including ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and the anti-racism anti-Thatcherite song ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’ about black youths being harassed by police in London.

She received a standing ovation at those awards this year and used her platform there to dedicate the win to Ireland’s refugee community.

"I want to dedicate it to each and every member of Ireland’s refugee community," she said. "You’re very welcome in Ireland, Mashallah. And I love you very much and I wish you happiness."

Remembered as much for her activism as for her music, O’Connor never shied away from controversy or calling out injustices where she saw them.

She famously ripped up a photo of the Pope in protest at clerical abuse on Saturday Night Live in 1992.

Shunning the limits placed on women when she was growing up in 1970s and 1980s Ireland, she used her voice to denounce societal and clerical abuse and discrimination, later loudly championing issues such as abortion and women’s rights.

She also famously renounced restrictive contemporary conceptions of femininity by shaving her head.

That shaved head would become almost a trademark, and a reflection of her independence and rejection of narrow conformity — something so many people felt bound by in the Ireland of her youth.

Film and memoir

An award-winning documentary, Nothing Compares, about O’Connor and her life was screened in cinemas last year and is due for TV release in the coming weeks.

Director Kathryn Ferguson previously said that when Sinéad burst into her consciousness as a young teenager, it felt like a door had been kicked open.

“Here was a bold Irish woman who said things that others didn’t feel they could say, and she said them loudly,” she said.

O’Connor opened up about her traumatic childhood in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, in which she wrote that her mother would tie her down and beat her with a broom and lock her away for days without food or a toilet. She would knock on neighbours’ doors hoping someone would take her in and feed her.

She was sent to a reformatory boarding school attached to a Magdalene laundry before she escaped and enrolled in Newtown School in Waterford.

Her name was scrawled on the inside of a wardrobe in a dorm in that school to which excited students would flock in pilgrimage, tracing the outline of her famous name hidden behind coats and school uniforms.

One of the teachers there, Joe Falvey, had supported and encouraged her music career before she left school at 16 to join a band.

Her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, which she wrote and produced, was released in 1987, and was Grammy nominated.

‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, released in 1990, sold millions of copies worldwide and has been viewed almost 400m times on YouTube.

Born in Glenageary in south Co Dublin in 1966, O’Connor had four children. Her son Shane died by suicide last year, aged just 17.

In her last social media post on July 17, O’Connor shared a photo of Shane and wrote: “Been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul.”

She converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada Sadaqat.

In a statement, the singer’s family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad.

“Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”

President's tribute

On Wednesday night, President Michael D Higgins paid tribute to the giant of Irish music and icon of Irish feminism.

“What Ireland has lost at such a relatively young age is one of our greatest and most gifted composers, songwriters, and performers of recent decades, one who had a unique talent and extraordinary connection with her audience, all of whom held such love and warmth for her,” he said in a statement.

Her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, which she wrote and produced, was released in 1987, and was Grammy nominated.

‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, released in 1990, sold millions of copies worldwide and has been viewed almost 400m times on YouTube.

Born in Glenageary in south Co Dublin in 1966, O’Connor had four children. Her son Shane died by suicide last year, aged just 17.

In her last social media post on July 17, O’Connor shared a photo of Shane and wrote: “Been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul.”

She converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada Sadaqat.

In a statement, the singer’s family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad.

“Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”

President's tribute

On Wednesday night, President Michael D Higgins paid tribute to the giant of Irish music and icon of Irish feminism.

“What Ireland has lost at such a relatively young age is one of our greatest and most gifted composers, songwriters, and performers of recent decades, one who had a unique talent and extraordinary connection with her audience, all of whom held such love and warmth for her,” he said in a statement.

"My first reaction on hearing the news of Sinéad’s loss was to remember her extraordinarily beautiful, unique voice.

What was striking in all of the recordings she made and in all of her appearances was the authenticity of the performance, while her commitment to the delivery of the song and its meaning was total.

“To those of us who had the privilege of knowing her, one couldn’t but always be struck by the depth of her fearless commitment to the important issues which she brought to public attention, no matter how uncomfortable those truths may have been.

“Sinéad O’Connor’s voice and delivery was in so many different ways original, extraordinary, and left one with a deep impression that to have accomplished all she did while carrying the burden which she did was a powerful achievement in its own way.

President Higgins' tribute continued: “Her contribution joins those great achievements of Irish women who contributed to our lives, its culture, and its history in their own unique but unforgettable ways.

“May her spirit find the peace she sought in so many different ways.”

The President sent his “deepest condolences” to O’Connor’s father John, the members of her family, and to all those with whom she shared her life.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar also paid tribute to the singer and icon.

“Her music was loved around the world and her talent was unmatched and beyond compare,” he stated. “Condolences to her family, her friends and all who loved her music. Ar dheis Dé go Raibh a hAnam.”

Tánaiste Micheál Martin wrote on Twitter: “Devastated to hear of the passing of Sinéad O’Connor. One of our greatest musical icons, and someone deeply loved by the people of Ireland, and beyond.

“Our hearts go out to her children, her family, friends, and all who knew and loved her.”

Comedian Dara Ó Briain also lamented the singer’s passing.

“That’s very sad news. […] I hope she realised how much love there was for her.”

-----------IRISH EXAMINER

AI Helped Create ‘Last Beatles Record,’ Paul McCartney Says

FILE - Paul McCartney and Nancy Shevell pose for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film 'If These Walls Could Sing' in London, Monday, Dec. 12, 2022. Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon's voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” Paul McCartney said Tuesday, June 13, 2023. McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles' voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson's 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back." (Photo by Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP, File)

BY SYLVIA HUI

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’.”

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” he added. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”

McCartney didn’t identify the name of the demo, but the BBC and others said it was likely to be an unfinished 1978 love song by Lennon called “Now and Then.” The demo was included on a cassette labeled “For Paul” that McCartney had received from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, the BBC reported.

McCartney described AI technology as “kind of scary but exciting,” adding: “We will just have to see where that leads.”

The same technology enabled McCartney to “duet” virtually with Lennon, who was murdered in 1980, on “I’ve Got a Feeling” last year at Glastonbury Festival.

The singer-songwriter is set to open an exhibition later this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London featuring previously unseen photographs that he took during the early days of the Beatles at the start of “Beatlemania,” when the band rose to worldwide fame.

The exhibition, titled “Eyes of the Storm,” showcases more than 250 photos McCartney took on his camera between 1963 and 1964 — including portraits of Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Lennon, as well as Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

___

This story has been corrected to show that the title of McCartney’s photo exhibition is “Eyes of the Storm,” not “Eye of the Storm.”

ALL THINGS HISTORICAL: A Free Jazz Stylist: Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman

BY SCOT T SOSEBEE

It has been said that jazz is the only truly uniquely American music innovation. Jazz originated in the African American communities in and around New Orleans in the late nineteenth century, with its origins in blues and ragtime sounds. It then spread up the Mississippi into places such as Memphis and St. Louis and eventually made its way to centers such as Chicago and New York. It is a form in which improvisation plays a major role.

Jazz is rhythmic and has forward motion that musicians call “swing.” “Call-and-response” also is a chief component part (one instrument will play a part and another will then “answer”), but most of all jazz is a musical form that expresses emotion.

Jazz musicians find their own sound and style. Miles Davis, for example, sounded much different than Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker much different than anyone else ever. That is why one could listen to ten different jazz stylists play the same song and they would sound different each time.

One of those who pioneered his own style and sound — he began as a devotee of Parker’s “bebop” form — was Texan Ornette Coleman. Coleman, in the 1950s and 1960s, would expand the options in jazz and in the process change the course of the genre. His unique styling, which would come to be called “free jazz,” made the jazz variety less dependent on the rules of harmony and rhythm, which in turn allowed it to break away from the traditional repertoires it relied upon. His new “invention” made him one of the true jazz innovators, one whose sound was instantly recognizable and unquestionably unique.

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was born March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth. He grew up in hardscrabble conditions in the segregated city, made even more difficult when his father died when he was just seven. He showed musical aptitude from a young age, playing various instruments in his church and for local events. By the time he matriculated at I.M. Terrell High School, he was already an accomplished tenor saxophone player, even though he had no formal lessons and had begun to play by ear.

Because of his beginning, Coleman did not understand that, because of transposition between the instruments, a C in the piano’s “concert key” was actually an A on his saxophone. His music sounded fine to him, and when he learned the truth it led him to a lifelong suspicion that the “rules” of harmony and musical notation were more obstacles for musicians than they were beneficial.

After he graduated high school, Coleman began to play both the alto and tenor sax in a number of different rhythm-and-blues bands around the state. While he played in those bands, in his spare time he had become fascinated with jazz, particularly Parker’s “bebop” sound.

He eventually joined a traveling band out of New Orleans, fronted by Silas Green, and then part of the backup instrument group for blind blues singer Clarence Samuel. In all of those groups, Coleman could not help but to experiment with his own kind of style; once, while with Samuel, a group in Baton Rouge beat him after a show because he had been “playing funny.”

Coleman finally settled in Los Angeles in 1952, and it was there that he found the musical style in which he was searching. Coleman wanted to break out of the traditional chord patterns and progressions. He thought that such conventions restrained the musician and dulled creativity. So he developed a very unorthodox approach to harmony. His new “style” led him to be rejected by almost every music house in the city and also kept him from bookings in local clubs.

Undeterred, Coleman went to work as an elevator operator during the day, and every night he studied harmony and, because he had pawned all the other instruments he owned, bought a cheap plastic alto saxophone that he played for tips in clubs that would allow him to take the stage.

It was in those clubs that Coleman began to perfect his “harmolodic theory,” which would become the basis of “free jazz.” Jazz improvision, from its inception, was based on fixed harmonic patterns, but Coleman’s theory called for improvisers to abandon harmonic patterns — “chord changes” in the parlance — which would allow them to improvise more extensively and directly using personal expressive elements. That meant that the tonal centers of pieces played in this style changed at the improviser’s will. That became the genesis of it being called “free jazz.”

Rejected when he first began to spread his ideas, Coleman finally convinced someone to record him in 1958. He, trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins and bassist Charlie Haden recorded "Something Else!!!" It was only a modest commercial success but enough for the quartet to make second and third albums, "The Shape of Jazz to Come" in 1959 and "Change of the Century" in 1960.

Critics and fans raved over these recordings and proclaimed free jazz the wave of the future. In 1960, Coleman moved to New York City, where he continued to experiment with his stylings. He recorded two more albums in 1960 and ’61, the last the groundbreaking "Beauty Is a Rare Thing," in which he experimented with free meters and tempos, musical forms that proved controversial at the time but would eventually become influential among young jazz artists in the last 1960s and ’70s.

Coleman, in the 1970s, recorded albums incorporating strings and other symphonic sounds with his saxophone, including his most famous work, "Skies of America," which he recorded in 1972 joined by the London Symphony Orchestra. He then formed a band he named Prime Time in 1973, and he incorporated sounds he had heard while touring Northern Africa. The result was another innovation that blended these Rif musicians from Morocco with rock rhythms and his harmonically free improvisations. Prime Time would tour and record well into the 1990s.

Coleman cut back on his touring in the 2000s, but he continued to receive accolades. He received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize in 2001 and did a live recording in Italy in 2005 in which he used two acoustic double bass players.

Finally, as a cap to his career, he received the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007. He died at his home in New York City on June 11, 2015. His obituary in the New York Times called him “one of jazz’s most important — and controversial — innovators.” An apt epitaph.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Gordy, Robinson Honored At Reunion Of Motown Stars

Berry Gordy, left, and Smokey Robinson, right, accept their MusiCares Person of the Year awards at a celebration in their honor at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

BY BETH

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Temptations, the Isley Brothers and the Four Tops turned back time, singing and dancing as if in their prime at a reunion of Motown stars.

The occasion was to honor Motown Records founder Berry Gordy and singer-songwriter Smokey Robinson for their musical achievements and philanthropic efforts as MusiCares Persons of the Year on Friday night, the first time the charitable organization honored two individuals in the same year.

The Detroit natives have been friends for more than 65 years.

“When I first met this man it was the beginning of my dream come true,” Robinson told the crowd at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“I wanted to be a singer, I wanted to be in show business, I wanted to write songs and make music,” Robinson said. “I never thought it would be possible for me from where I grew up. But then I got there because I met Berry Gordy. He took me under his wing. He is my mentor.”

Gordy later took the stage with Robinson to accept their awards.

“I’m happy to be here with my best friend. Damn,” Gordy said.

Sheryl Crow, John Legend, Mumford & Sons, Dionne Warwick, Brandi Carlisle, Michael McDonald, Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder were among those honoring the 93-year-old Gordy and 82-year-old Robinson two days before the Grammy Awards ceremonies.

“I wouldn’t know music without Motown,” Legend told the crowd.


Gordy and Robinson alternately stood and applauded and clapped along, sometimes singing as well, while the artists sampled the vast Motown catalog.

The Temptations kicked off the 2 1/2-hour concert with a medley of “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “I Can’t Get Next to You” and “My Girl.” Resplendent in red suits and patent leather red shoes, the five-man group’s distinct harmonies were as tight as their choreography.

Gordy leaned over and put his arm around Robinson at their table as the group had the crowd singing along to “My Girl.”

Warwick, who is 82, later sang “My Guy,” the Mary Wells hit written and produced by Robinson on Motown. She and Robinson blew kisses to each other.

Ronald Isley, who is 81, and his 70-year-old guitarist-brother, Ernie, performed “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” a hit on Motown’s Tamla label in 1966.

The Four Tops recreated their run of 1960s hits with “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and “It’s the Same Old Song.” The crowd was up on its feet singing and dancing.

Wonder had the crowd clapping along to his reggae-tinged version of “The Tears of a Clown,” a hit he co-wrote as a teenager with Robinson.

“All of my appreciation, respect, love goes to you, Berry, who thought I couldn’t sing,” Wonder said, drawing laughter. “Smokey, I want to thank you. I can never repay you.”

Carlisle was backed by twin brothers Phil and Tim Hanseroth on “Tracks of My Tears,” drawing a standing ovation for the 1965 hit written by Robinson. The trio wore matching silver metallic jackets and black bowties.

Trombone Shorty tore it up on “Shotgun,” the Junior Walker and the All Stars song produced by Gordy in 1965. McDonald earned a standing ovation for his rendition of “Lonely Teardrops,” written by Gordy for Jackie Wilson.

In a pairing of young (28-year-old Sebastián Yatra) and old (66-year-old Rita Wilson), they sang “It Takes Two,” a 1965 hit for Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston on the Tamla label.

Valerie Simpson and Jimmie Allen teamed on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” while Lalah Hathaway was accompanied on piano and vocal by PJ Morton of Maroon 5 for “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”

In the oddest sighting of the night, Elton John and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi swayed next to each other in the crowd.

The evening closed with sisters Chloe and Halle Berry holding hands with Wonder while singing The Temptations’ hit “Get Ready” along with McDonald, Wilson and the Four Tops, among others.

Now in its 33rd year, the dinner and auction raised money for programs and services supporting musicians in need.

For more on this year’s Grammy Awards, visit: www.apnews.com/GrammyAwards