Jon Pareles

Goldie appears in the video for “Glorious” from Sudan Archives’ superb debut album, “Athena,” which was released Nov. 1. Her pet snake is also “kind of like the theme of the album,” she said. “It’s like me — people are sometimes intimidated by me, just because of how I look. The album is about duality and also about being misinterpreted. People are afraid and they almost scream when they see him, but look how cute and shiny he is! He don’t want to hurt nobody.”

With a dozen songs on two EPs that she released in 2017 and 2018, “Sudan Archives” and “Sink,” Parks, 25, has already earned a place among boundary-defying R&amp;B; innovators like FKA twigs, Frank Ocean, Solange, SZA, Kelela, Sampha and H.E.R. They have been turning R&amp;B; into an elastic, futuristic realm where fantasy and self-revelation, otherworldly electronics and real-world musicianship are constantly recombining. With “Athena” she pushes even further, sonically and emotionally, allowing her songs to be more revealing. “I washed away my fears and trusted my own ears,” she sings in “Confessions,” the album’s first single.

“Before, I felt like, I’m not going to really talk about my pain, I’ll kind of metaphor it,” Parks said. “But on this album, I feel like I confronted things. I’m going to sing about how you’re wrong, and not turn it into this happy thing.”

The EPs brought Parks an international audience for a playful, sometimes vertiginous style that she forged on her own, working largely alone. Singing about self-invention, connections and independence, she emerged as a solo phenomenon online and onstage. She constructed her music from loops of her beats, her airy voice and her violin, plucked and bowed in phrases that often evoke the modes of African music. (Parks is African American, not African; she was born and raised in Cincinnati before moving to Los Angeles.)

For “Athena,” she kept the core of her music — the call-and-response of her voice and violin — but brought in producers and collaborators to enrich and vary her sound. On the cover of “Athena,” she is a bronze nude statue on a pedestal, a goddess holding her violin high.

“That’s her trying to create a distraction from how naked she is in the music,” said her co-producer, songwriting collaborator and boyfriend, James McCall IV, aka the rapper Nocando, known recently as All City Jimmy.

During an interview over chips and guacamole at her kitchen table, Parks was bright-eyed and in nearly constant motion, with her hands dancing through the air as she spoke. She kept her laptop nearby, clicking links to credit her references and influences.

It was a multitasking day. She was leaving that night for Rome and a quick European promotional trip that would include her first television taping, for the BBC series “Later ... With Jools Holland.” Autumn Randolph and Pierre Davis, from the Los Angeles fashion house No Sesso, arrived with stage outfits for fittings, including a black jacket assembled from square and rectangular panels to be connected by eyelets at the corners: geometric, modular, utterly flexible. It wouldn’t get in the way of her flamboyant violin playing.

Sudan Archives’ music was forged from instinct, happenstance, discipline and research. Parks grew up in a family that attended a small Church of God three times a week, for ecstatic services with harmony singing and speaking in tongues. The church’s clapping and stomping — survivals of gospel’s African heritage — echo in the music she grew up to make.

She was in elementary school when Barrage, a fiddle-centered Canadian band mixing Celtic and international influences, came to perform there and she decided she wanted to learn the violin. After-school programs got her started, but she learned the rest by ear. She improvised along with the singers in church, and she taught herself to hear musical architecture and to invent melodic lines.

“This discipline that I had at a young age to keep playing an instrument — that’s what separates me from a lot of artists,” she said. “The violin chose a path for me.”

Parks recently started working with a violin teacher to expand her technique. She is also planning her first non-solo tour, joined by a pianist, that she intends to present as a surreal variation on a classical violin-and-piano recital. Her microphone stand will be shaped like a silvery snake.

“I think she’s going to be a hero,” McCall said. “The fact that she’s an instrumentalist and producer, and she happens to be sexy but she’s not selling sex — no matter what happens in her career, she’s normalizing musicianship and making musicianship cool for little black girls. And taking it past the race thing, little American girls.”

Parks started writing and recording songs in her teens with her twin sister, Cat. Their stepfather, who had worked in the music business, thought they could be “the next big thing,” she recalled. He had them work with producers in Cincinnati, hoping they would come up with a hit, under the name N2. But even as a teenager, Parks had her own ideas, and N2 didn’t last.

“She always wanted to do what felt good to her, even if it wasn’t popular,” Cat Parks said by phone from Los Angeles. “She was very bold in her opinions. When it came to her music, it was always, like, this is how I want it done.”

At 17, she decided she didn’t like the name Brittney; Sudan was a suggestion from her mother. There was friction with her parents, in part over her staying out late to attend concerts on Cincinnati’s underground experimental-music circuit, which gave her ideas about effects, textures and looping. At 19, she moved to Los Angeles. There, curiosity led her to look into the music of Sudan, where she found a fiddle tradition — raw, kinetic, modal — that felt to her like the spirit she had heard in Irish jigs back in elementary school.

Propped up on a turntable in her living room was the LP cover of one of her pivotal discoveries, Francis Bebey’s “African Electronic Music 1975-1982.” Bebey, who died in 2001, was an ethnomusicologist from Cameroon who wrote extensively about African traditions and channeled them into his own music. His book “African Music: A People’s Art,” led her to African string music, and she dug deeper: down YouTube rabbit holes, into albums and books. Thinking about personal and ancestral memory, she began calling herself Sudan Archives as she performed around Los Angeles.

She was also “doing a lot of psychedelics,” she said. “I would just mess with gear all day. I swear to God, when I started to experiment with stuff like that, that’s when I became a little more creative.”

In 2015, her home-recorded songs drew the attention of Stones Throw, a label that’s fond of left-field funk, which released and promoted her two EPs; she made her first music video in Ghana.

As her songs gradually drew millions of plays online, Parks honed her one-woman shows for larger and larger audiences. She has spent the past two summers touring festivals in the United States and abroad.

Her musical ambitions were also expanding. “The EPs are just thoughts,” she said. “The album is a fleshed-out thought. I wanted it to sound like the EPs, but I also wanted it to sound like it got picked up and then taken to another world.”

Stones Throw encouraged her to try writing songs with producers including Rodaidh McDonald (who worked with the xx), Paul White (who has worked with Charli XCX) and Ernest Greene (who records as Washed Out). Working in her bedroom studio, she also built increasingly elaborate string arrangements, bringing a new orchestral richness to some songs and placing abstract instrumental transitions between album tracks.

“I wanted all of my influences growing up as a little girl to be part of the album,” she said. “So there’s jazz represented there, there’s R&amp;B; represented in there, classical references, Irish jigging references, pop references, trip-hop, even some industrial weird experimental references.”

She also opened up her lyrics. On her EPs, songs like “Nont for Sale” put a cheerful, empowered face on conflicted relationships. But on “Athena,” Parks also explores darker, angrier, more confused moments: succumbing to desire, pulling away from codependency, recognizing inner angels and demons.

Working with collaborators led her to be “wilder” in both music and lyrics, she said. “I had people around me, they knew what the song was about, so they were holding me accountable for my own feelings. I felt like I couldn’t hide.”

She reached a turning point with “Confessions,” which convinced her she didn’t have to work alone. It poured out in a single session with producer Will Archer (aka Wilma Archer). “We did that insanely fast. It came together, the whole thing, in an hour and a half,” Archer said. Sudan Archives sings about her move to Los Angeles, breaking free — while reckoning with what she’s left behind: “There is a place that I call home/But it’s not where I am welcome.”

Over a drum loop Archer provided, “She just responded with violin, and lyrically and melodically, instantly,” he said. “She didn’t even sing a guide vocal. She had the lyrics immediately — she didn’t hum a melody, she just went right in.”

Parks constructed “Athena” as an album to be heard end-to-end. It starts as biography, reaching back to remake “Did You Know” — the first song she recorded as a teenager — followed by “Confessions.”

Then it shifts to become a “mental journey,” she said. “It’s about duality and this battle within your inner thoughts, and you’re trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, and it leads to this sense of oneness where nothing’s really right and nothing’s really wrong. Your life is just crazy, girl! And it has this magical twist on it, and it’s supposed to be this soundtrack of the making of a goddess.”

Is that makeover now complete? Parks briefly considered the idea: “I don’t think she’ll ever be finished.”

This article originally appeared in

Sudan Archives Is Making R&B Deeper and Stranger

LOS ANGELES — “Are you afraid of snakes?” asked Brittney Parks, the songwriter and violinist who records as Sudan Archives. In an interview at her home, where her bedroom often doubles as her recording studio, she was introducing me to Goldie, her ball python, as he languorously wrapped his gold-patterned body around her tattooed forearm.

Over the five years she’s been releasing music as Vagabon, her project has already undergone a major transformation. Her songs embrace mixed, elusive emotions: longing and ambivalence, displacement and stability, seeking a home and leaving it behind, confronting fears and searching for hope. Her structures move by instinct and impulse, sometimes blurring verse and chorus as if they’re coalescing right in the moment, sometimes obsessing over a telling phrase. Her voice has a breathy fringe but a tenacious core.

Vagabon’s new self-titled album, out Friday, veers away from the style that brought her an international audience with her debut, “Infinite Worlds,” in 2017. That album was a response to and — with its success — an escape from trauma. Although Tamko sang about feeling small, trapped and weaker than she wanted to be, her underlying determination was clear.

“That’s the one that got me out of a really, really bad space,” she said. Making the songs and touring for two years gave her confidence. “I got to get in touch with who I am and feel like I have a purpose.”

Tamko’s music on “Infinite Worlds” was the kind of home-recorded, self-taught, guitar-centered indie rock — moving from acoustic and exposed to scrappy and vehement — that she started uploading to Bandcamp in 2014, then honed by performing steadily in small clubs. But for the new album Tamko relied instead on the computer software Logic along with her guitar, often layering her voice amid synthesizers and programmed drumbeats. She played and sang nearly every note on “Vagabon” herself, although she arranged the parts for a hired string section and a French horn. In the 21st century, do-it-yourself songwriting has countless variations.

“I have no idea if this music is what people want to listen to,” Tamko said with a laugh. “I have no clue. Some days I really, really love it and some days I’m like, ‘What have I done? I’m going to lose everybody.’”

She spoke over lunch in the outdoor garden behind Ladurée in SoHo, which she had chosen to remind her of Paris, where she had lived for six months with her family as a teenager. She was dressed for both attention and pragmatism in a fuzzy orange shawl and puffy white Naked Wolfe platform sneakers, her short hair dyed an orange-blond. After the interview and a photo shoot, she’d be taking the subway back home to Brooklyn.

“Infinite Worlds” arrived with a rich back story. Tamko was born in Cameroon, where she first made music at family gatherings. “My mom would host these things that she called reunions,” she said, smiling at the recollection. “Her friends would come over every Sunday and they would harmonize. And my grandmother’s a choir director, and so I was always going to church and always singing gospel music. But no one ever called it anything. No one called it music, no one called it art, no one called it singing or dancing. Everyone was just doing it.”

She emigrated to the United States with her family at 13. She wanted to go to music school, but got “a hard no” from her parents. Figuring there were jobs in the field, she studied and then worked at electrical and computer engineering. She also taught herself to play instruments, write songs, engineer and produce music.

During that time Tamko fled what she called, unwilling to be more specific, “a toxic physical space” where “there just was abuse all around me,” she said. “I couldn’t really understand how to get out of it, and also how to not feel guilty if I left. The first record, I’m talking about all of those things.”

The trauma also reinforced her inclination to go it alone. “Music was the only form of healing that I had available to me and I had to create it,” she said. “I think part of my stubbornness about autonomy is saying, like, ‘What if everyone decides they’re not going to help you any more? Can you do it again?’ I created my own world. I created my own safe place.”

She found an audience online and in Brooklyn, regularly playing do-it-yourself venues like Silent Barn and the whimsically named Shea Stadium. By the time she polished her first set of songs to release as “Infinite Worlds,” her fans included fellow musicians like Mitski as well as Tegan and Sara, who took her on tour as an opening act.

But even as she was performing songs from “Infinite Worlds,” Tamko was contemplating changes in her music. The initial buzz over the album, which was released on the independent Father/Daughter Records, got Vagabon courted by major labels. She chose to sign with Nonesuch, the proudly eclectic label with a catalog that includes classical music, jazz, Buena Vista Social Club and the Black Keys.

“Like a lot of people I was instantly a fan of her album,” said Kris Chen, senior vice president of Nonesuch, who signed Vagabon to the label. “Right before I met her, I saw her play at the Bowery Ballroom and I was struck by how warm she sounded, not just in terms of how she spoke to the crowd with this disarming sincerity and honesty, but also how her voice was so much more expressive live. It made me feel she has so much more in her than this first record.”

He added, “And what I loved when I met her was that one of the first things she said was, ‘I don’t want to be just that black girl with a guitar.’”

In summer of 2017, only a few months after the release of Vagabon’s debut, Tegan and Sara suggested that Tamko could rework their song “Floorplan” for “The Con X: Covers,” a 10-year anniversary celebration of their album “The Con.” The result, with only a hint of “Floorplan” in it, was “Flood,” which Tamko kept to become the first single from the “Vagabon” album: a stately, synthesizer-centered ballad about wanting to leave yet wanting to stay.

“I was shocked that I made that song,” Tamko said. “I was shocked that I programmed those drums. But when I thought of writing it for them, I wanted to grab synthesizers, I wanted to grab electronic drums. So in a way that song opened up my view of myself as an artist. ‘Oh, I guess I can write other types of songs — this is cool!’”

Another early breakthrough was “Water Me Down,” the catchiest song on “Vagabon,” with an understated four-on-the-floor beat behind gently exasperated lyrics. Tamko recalled tossing around ideas with a friend, Eric Littman, who offered a synthesizer line. “Immediately my world opened up,” Tamko said. The lyrics were a reaction to a recent “phone call with a really annoying person”; the layers of drums, strings and melody came to her quickly. “I listened to that song, and I was like, this feels like a Vagabon song still,” she said. “That’s crazy.”

A new possibility had opened up, reinforced by the fact that Vagabon was spending a lot of time on the road, and a computer running Logic was easier to set up than recording a guitar. But it wasn’t just a matter of convenience.

“After ‘Infinite Worlds,’ I felt like I didn’t have any fresh ideas on the guitar,” Tamko said. “Especially because I’m self-taught, I don’t know scales, I don’t know keys or anything, I’m just winging it. I didn’t want to make the same thing. And so it was, how can I keep a freshness about my ideas?”

Still, she didn’t rule out guitar. “In a Bind,” with one of the album’s most blunt lyrics — “I know that I was gone a lot last year/But I hoped you’d still be here” — hints at the syncopated, hypnotic vamps of Malian guitar master Ali Farka Touré. And mournful strumming sits behind “Every Woman,” the album’s closing statement.

“Every Woman” was inspired by a “micropoem” by author Nayyirah Waheed: “All the women. In me. Are tired.” The Vagabon album’s preliminary title was “All the Women in Me,” though to avoid directly quoting Waheed, Tamko dropped that and rewrote the song’s lyrics, which now include lines like, “All the women I meet are fired up.” The song is calm, not strident; Tamko strums her acoustic guitar, singing with quiet strength.

“The anger part of me comes out in ‘Every Woman,’” Tamko said. “I’m able to put onto paper what I am feeling about this country that we’re living in right now and these bodies that we’re living in right now.”

She added, “If every album for me is like archiving a moment in my life, that song had to be a part of it, because it’s a strong feeling that I have. I want to build community. I want the song to be like someone’s older sister that makes you feel seen and heard and understood.”

In conversation as in her songs, Tamko balances between righteous confidence and looming insecurity. But she’s willing to take chances. “I’m always going to do exactly what I want to do,” she said. “I can finally make my own rules and I’m really going for it. Now I don’t have anything to be afraid of.”

Vagabon Found Her Voice in Indie Rock. Then Found a New One.

NEW YORK — “I have no idea what Vagabon will evolve to be,” said Laetitia Tamko, the 26-year-old songwriter, producer and one-woman studio band.

It is unclear how old Ocasek (pronounced oh-CASS-ek) was; according to some public records and previous articles, he was 70, but according to other reporting, he may have been 75.

In a string of multimillion-selling albums from 1978 to 1988, Ocasek and the Cars merged a vision of dangerous and romantic night life and the concision of new wave with the sonic depth and ingenuity of radio-friendly rock. The Cars managed to please both punk-rock fans and a far broader pop audience, reaching into rock history while devising fresh, lush extensions of it.

The Cars grew out of a friendship forged in the late 1960s in Ohio between Ocasek — born Richard Theodore Otcasek — and Benjamin Orr, who died in 2000. They worked together in multiple bands before moving to Boston and forming the Cars in the late 1970s with Elliot Easton on guitar, Greg Hawkes on keyboards and David Robinson on drums. It was the beginning of the punk era, but the Cars made their first albums with Queen’s producer, Roy Thomas Baker, creating songs that were terse and moody but impeccably polished.

In the Cars, Ocasek’s lead vocals mixed a gawky, yelping deadpan with hints of suppressed emotion, while his songs drew hooks from basic three-chord rockabilly and punk, from surf-rock, from emerging synth-pop, from echoes of the Beatles and glam-rock and from hints of the 1970s art-rock avant-garde. The five albums the Cars released from 1978 to 1984 each sold more than 1 million copies in the United States alone, with ubiquitous radio singles like “Just What I Needed” in 1978, “Shake It Up” in 1981, “You Might Think” in 1984 and “Drive” in 1984; “Just What I Needed” and “Drive” had lead vocals by Orr.

When the Cars were inducted into the Rock &amp; Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, the group’s surviving members reunited, joined by Scott Shriner of Weezer on bass. In his induction speech, Brandon Flowers of the Killers described the band as “a slick machine with a 340 V8 under the hood that ran on synergy, experimentation and a redefined cool,” and said they had it all: “The looks, the hooks, Beat romance lyrics, killer choruses.”

Richard Theodore Otcasek was born in Baltimore. His father was a systems analyst for NASA. At the Cars’ Rock Hall induction, Ocasek credited his grandmother for getting him to sing as a child and buying him his first guitar at 14. The family moved to Cleveland when he was a teenager, and he briefly attendeded Antioch College and Bowling Green State University before dropping out and turning to music.

He met Orr in Ohio and, in various bands, they worked their way from the Midwest to the Boston area, where they started a folk-pop trio, Milkwood, that made one album in 1972 before dissolving. Ocasek and Orr continued to work together around Boston; the Cars’ lead guitarist, Easton, joined their mid-1970s band, Cap’n Swing, which got airplay on Boston’s rock radio station WBCN but went no further.

With Easton, Hawkes and Robinson — who had been the drummer for the Modern Lovers, local heroes in Boston — the Cars coalesced in 1976, working on songs in Ocasek’s basement in Newton, Massachusetts. Starting with Ocasek’s basic recordings of the songs, Easton told Rolling Stone in 1978, “We just built the songs up. When there was a space for a hook or a line — or a sinker — we put it in.”

WBCN gave the band’s demo recordings extensive airplay, and Elektra Records signed them. The first Cars album was made in 21 days — 12 for recording, nine for mixing. It would go on to sell 6 million copies in the United States. The band became a staple of FM radio in the late 1970s and of MTV in the 1980s, toying with textures and ironies but sticking to neat pop structures.

Ocasek’s songs were invariably terse and catchy, spiked with Easton’s twangy guitar lines and Hawkes’ pithy keyboard hooks. But they were also craftily filled out by multitracked instruments and vocals. Lyrics that might initially seem like pop love songs were, more often, calmly ambivalent. “Just What I Needed,” the Cars’ first single, revolves around negatives: “I don’t mind you coming here and wasting all my time/’Cause when you’re standing oh so near, I kind of lose my mind.” And the Cars’ biggest United States hit, “Drive,” poses a series of glum questions: “Who’s going to hold you down when you shake?/Who’s going to come around when you break?”

The Cars disbanded in 1988 as Ocasek and Orr grew apart. Ocasek had begun making music on his own while still in the Cars and would eventually release seven solo albums from 1982 through 2005, though without the popularity of his Cars catalog.

While he said he didn’t want people prying into his personal life, “I feel that my song lyrics are kind of an open book,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1986. “I feel that writing songs for my solo albums is kind of like spilling my guts, telling people how I really feel subconsciously. When I’m writing, it’s like I’m not really in control.”

In 2003, he took a job as senior vice president of artists and repertoire, charged with finding new hitmakers, for Elektra Records, but the label rejected his choices; he lasted less than a year. While in the Cars, he had produced albums for punk pioneers he admired: Bad Brains and Weezer. And after the Cars disbanded, he produced music for Weezer, Bad Religion and No Doubt.

After two previous marriages, Ocasek married model and actress Paulina Porizkova in 1989; they met in 1984 while the Cars were making the music video for “Drive.” She announced in 2018 that they had separated a year earlier. He is survived by their two children, Jonathan Raven Otcasek and Oliver Otcasek, and four sons from previous marriages: Christopher, Adam, Eron and Derek Otcasek.

Ocasek often said that he did not enjoy endless touring, and Easton and Hawkes toured without him — joined by Todd Rundgren as lead singer — as the New Cars from 2005 to 2007. But in 2011, Ocasek regrouped the surviving members of the Cars for a final album, “Move Like This,” and a tour, although his stage presence had always been diffident. “I don’t think I’m an entertainer,” he told The New York Times in 2011. “I never think, Wow, I can’t wait to get the crowd moving.”

In 1987, Ocasek told The New York Times, “I’m happy that the pop songs have a bit of a twist. When I’m writing, I never know how it’s going to come out. I don’t think, well, I’ve done a catchy one, now I can do a weird one. I read a lot of poetry, and that gives me a wide range of permission to say anything in a song — they’re more twisted than I’ll ever be.”

Ric Ocasek, New Wave Rock Visionary and Cars Co-Founder, Is Dead

Ric Ocasek, the songwriter and lead singer for the Cars, was found dead Sunday afternoon at his town house in Manhattan, according to the New York Police Department. No cause of death was available on Sunday night.

Beyoncé flexes both her musicianship and her cultural leverage with “The Lion King: The Gift,” her companion album to the state-of-the-art remake of “The Lion King.” It’s her latest lesson in commandeering mass-market expectations, as she bends “The Lion King” to her own agenda of African-diaspora unity, self-worth, parental responsibility and righteous ambition.

Beyoncé was an obvious choice to be cast in an anointed blockbuster: the 25th-anniversary update of “The Lion King,” the 1994 animated Disney parable set in Africa. Its story of a young lion fleeing and then reclaiming his birthright had already generated a 1997 Broadway adaptation — still running — and movie sequels. Beyoncé has a voice role in the new version as the brave, conscientious lioness Nala; she also, of course, sings on the soundtrack.

On the official soundtrack album, Beyoncé joins in a remake of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” the Oscar-winning song that ended the original “Lion King,” and caps the existing soundtrack songs with her new one, “Spirit,” a dynamic secular-gospel exhortation to “Rise up!” Beyoncé wrote and produced “Spirit” with British producer Labrinth and with Ilya Salmanzadeh, a member of Max Martin’s Swedish songwriting stable; it’s also on “The Gift.”

But “The Gift” (Parkwood/Columbia) goes much further. With Beyoncé as executive producer and a songwriter and performer on most of its tracks, it’s essentially an alternative soundtrack album, tied to the plot of “The Lion King” (and interspersed with dialogue snippets) but decidedly more Afrocentric and more attuned to women’s strengths and experiences.

On “The Gift,” the movie’s plot points are springboards for songs like “Keys to the Kingdom,” “Scar” and “Already.” The album’s first full song, “Bigger,” is at once maternally protective and acutely aware of generational cycles and, as the video clip emphasizes, ecological interdependence: “You’re part of something way bigger,” Beyoncé sings, adding, “I’ll be the roots/You be the tree,” as a somber beat gathers under churchy keyboard chords. She follows “Bigger” with a paternal counterpart: “Find Your Way Back (Circle of Life),” with Beyoncé recalling a father’s lessons on a track that samples the Nigerian singer Niniola.

Like many other Disney projects set outside the United States, in 1994 “The Lion King” fudged the specifics of a distant (from Hollywood) place with a well-intentioned but hazy first-world perspective; Africa is just Africa, without particular cultures, countries or regions. (It’s also unquestioningly celebrated as a patrilineal monarchy.) The wildlife and landscape of “The Lion King” suggest the Serengeti plains of Tanzania and Kenya, and its African names and words are in the Swahili language — all East African.

Meanwhile, the movie’s music is largely non-African, steeped in Hollywood and Broadway idioms, with an orchestral score by the German composer Hans Zimmer (reworked for the 2019 version) and wordplay-loving, musical-theater-style songs by two Englishmen, Elton John and the lyricist Tim Rice. At key moments in the 1994 soundtrack, the South African musician Lebo M. (Lebohang Morake) provided South African-style choir arrangements and his own vocals, including the indelible opening incantation in “Circle of Life.” He gets far more prominent billing in the remake.

Untethered to previous productions, Beyoncé has rethought “The Lion King” as 21st-century global pop, frequently drawing on Africa. Her throngs of collaborators include musicians, singers and producers from the U.S., England, Sweden, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and Cameroon (though not East Africa). It’s a canny, forward-looking move, both musically and with an eye to an international market that’s increasingly receptive to African innovations and non-English lyrics. Beyoncé even sings in Swahili at the end of “Otherside,” a ballad invoking life after death.

American and British songwriters — Paul Simon, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Carlos Santana — have all found renewal in African music, as jazz musicians did before them. With “The Lion King: The Gift,” Beyoncé joins their ranks soulfully and attentively, seeking full-fledged fusions. She mixes (apparently) personal thoughts and archetypal ones; she savors musical hybrids and rhythmic challenges; and she digs in to every line she sings.

Internationalism reigns. “My Power” — with Beyoncé alongside Tierra Whack from Philadelphia, Yemi Alade from Nigeria and Nija, Busiswa, Moonchild Sanelly and DJ Lag from South Africa — is built on the deep bass thuds and jittery double time percussion of the South African dance music called gqom. In “Water,” Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams are joined by Salatiel, a songwriter from Cameroon, in a bouncy, sinuous track with leaping vocal inflections that also includes a credit for a Ghanaian songwriter, Afriye. The track for “Mood 4 Eva,” Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s latest celebration of their luxurious life, transforms a sample from Malian singer and songwriter Oumou Sangaré.

Some of the album’s guest performers have racked up tens of millions of streams worldwide without extensive recognition — yet — in the U.S. Prominent among them is a Nigerian contingent that draws on the crisp, computerized rhythms that are known internationally as Afrobeats (and are clearly related to reggaeton’s ubiquitous dembow rhythm via West African-Caribbean roots and internet cross-pollination).

The album includes Nigerian stars Burna Boy (who gets a song of his own, “Ja Ara E,” that suavely warns, “Watch out for them hyenas”) and Mr Eazi (who shares “Don’t Jealous Me” with Tekno, Lord Afrixana and Yemi Alade and “Keys to the Kingdom” with Tiwa Savage, all fellow Nigerians). Wizkid, the Nigerian songwriter who collaborated with Drake on the worldwide hit “One Dance,” duets with Beyoncé to praise the beauty of a “Brown Skin Girl”; the track also has the voice of Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter.

Each song on “The Gift” is a coalition, almost always a trans-Atlantic one. And the African elements are at the core of the music; they’re not souvenirs or accessories. Unlike the movie that occasioned it, “The Lion King: The Gift” is no remake or reiteration, no faraway fable. It tells a story of its own.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/arts/music/beyonce-the-lion-king-the-gift-review.html" id="b6311f39-6225-3806-ade4-fb2adb25e85e">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

Beyoncé Reimagines 'The Lion King' as Global 21st Century Pop

Leading the Smiths in the 1980s, and then in a solo career that has extended to 11 albums, Morrissey has targeted himself — his shortcomings, his rationalizations, his yearnings, his peevishness — just as often as he has savaged others. He can be pointedly sarcastic in one song, startlingly vulnerable in another. All of the mood swings are centered by his voice: a long-breathed croon that breaks, at precise moments, into a cascading melisma. That voice is committed, physical and inarguable, and far less ambiguous than the words it carries.

For a rock star like Morrissey, who is 59, coming to Broadway is a paradoxical milestone, a downshift: playing a theater that’s smaller than his usual venues — the Lunt-Fontanne seats 1,509 people — with the promise of making a more intimate statement. Morrissey acknowledged his setting with his a cappella first notes, singing the line “There is a light that never goes out” (from a Smiths song) and continuing, “on Broadway.”

But he didn’t offer a radically scaled-down, quasi-confessional performance like “Springsteen on Broadway” (even though, like Springsteen, he has written an autobiography, titled “Autobiography”). It was, instead, the kind of concert he has been playing on tour through the decades: loud, tuneful, impeccably sung and aimed toward the rafters. He brought his band (including his frequent songwriting collaborator, guitarist Boz Boorer), a video screen, strobe lights and smoke. He let the songs speak (and mope and sneer) for themselves — a relief, given his cranky, troll-like public pronouncements.

The Smiths were categorized as post-punk, but their music and Morrissey’s solo albums largely hark back to pre-punk: to full-bodied 1960s folk-rock and studio pop. The songs use pealing, Byrds-like guitars, gleaming keyboard chords and well-turned melody lines, a world away from the abrasiveness and austerity associated with post-punk. Morrissey’s innovation was to bring punk’s bluntness to his lyrics, to strip away pop reassurance and admit to emotions that could be bleak, abject, petty, angry, contentious or self-destructive. The happiest song in his set was “The Bullfighter Dies”; with the video screen showing bloody bullfight scenes, Morrissey, a longtime animal-rights advocate, sang, “Nobody cries/Because we all want the bull to survive.”

Before Morrissey stepped onstage, a half-hour of video clips were shown, a compendium of influences and kindred spirits, some obvious — David Bowie, Patti Smith, Edith Piaf, the Ramones — and some more obscure, including Love Affair, Giuda and Jobriath, a rock singer who was openly gay in the 1970s. During his set, Morrissey performed Jobriath’s “Morning Starship”; it will appear on “California Son,” an album of other people’s songs due May 24.

Morrissey worked the Broadway stage as he works larger ones. He concentrated on singing, strolling around and occasionally whipping his microphone cord — no wireless for Morrissey. Fans rushed the stage to bring him gifts, and in some songs he reached across the footlights to give handshakes while he sang about feeling lonely and alienated.

Yet throughout the show, Morrissey gauged his effects. Video images illustrated most songs. The title of “World Peace Is None of Your Business,” an ironic song about entrenched power, was shown on a sign held aloft at a mass protest. For “Jack the Ripper,” the theater filled with smoke and Morrissey performed in a cloud of blood-red light. And in “Seasick, Yet Still Docked,” which laments, “Wish I had the charm to attract the one I love,” simply hunching his jacket tightly around himself made Morrissey seem as frozen and friendless as the song’s narrator.

At typical rock concerts, an encore is a self-congratulatory send-off. Morrissey’s was the opposite: “Let Me Kiss You,” which presents the singer as “someone you physically despise.” He made an abrupt exit leaving, on the video screen, a gun-to-the-head suicide scene from Jean Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet.” On Broadway, Morrissey had been as intimate as his songs themselves, but he stayed true to his persona.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/music/morrissey-broadway-review.html" id="902ea98e-40c0-3f7d-af56-d7ba3196db64">The New York Times</a>.

Morrissey Brings His Misery, and Melisma, to Broadway

NEW YORK — Self-pity, self-mockery, self-righteousness, self-loathing, self-defense — long before the era of the selfie, Morrissey was writing songs that turned constant self-absorption into a blood sport. “This is my life to destroy my own way,” he proclaimed in “Alma Matters” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on Thursday night, beginning a Broadway run that continues through May 11.

NEW ORLEANS — If any popular-music festival was built to last an unbroken 50 years, it’s the New Orleans Jazz &amp; Heritage Festival. It was already looking back when it started in 1970, assembling a Louisiana Heritage Fair of music and food traditions to glorify connection and continuity. Many of the musical styles it brought together were already generations old. So what’s another half-century?

This year’s Jazz Fest, as everyone calls it, finished its first four-day weekend on Sunday (it continues May 2-5). It’s an institution dedicated to its home city’s particular local and regional culture: not a trademark revived for anniversaries, like Woodstock, or a reboot tied to a cherished name, like the Newport Folk Festival. Jazz Fest’s booking policy leans toward musicians who share something — funk, fiddles, accordions, carnivals, French and Afro-Caribbean connections — with Louisiana lore.

And the festival’s physical layout is designed to encourage discoveries. The path from the two main stages to the blues, gospel and jazz tents leads past a Cultural Exchange Pavilion featuring world music and the Jazz &amp; Heritage stage with performances by brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, New Orleans’ miracles.

Jazz Fest has built its attendance in recent years by adding more pop hitmakers at the top of its bills. But where many pop festivals are simply run-throughs of touring road shows, Jazz Fest visitors tend to incorporate something of New Orleans, having local musicians sit in and savoring the city’s charms. For her appearance on Saturday, Katy Perry performed her hits, but she had her stage set emblazoned with exhortations from the New Orleans-born poet Cleo Wade, and she used the Soul Rebels brass band as a horn section. More than 300 groups performed in the festival’s first four days. I heard a fraction of them, but here are 13 of the standouts.

Santana

Jazz Fest presents New Orleans music as both a polyglot cultural mix and as a fountainhead of ideas. Santana’s multifaceted, proudly bilingual blues-Latin-rock-jazz-pop catalog invokes its own migrations and fusions, now linked to messages of positive thinking and global healing. An extended set touched down periodically on hits, with Carlos Santana re-creating his familiar guitar solos only to take off from there. There was ample room for excursions into jazz, boogaloo, cumbia and even a hard-rock version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” sung by Cindy Blackman Santana, Carlos’ wife and the band’s indefatigable drummer. Trombone Shorty, from New Orleans, joined the band for an encore that free-associated through Jimi Hendrix, Swamp Dogg, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, “Fever” and the New Orleans piano standard “Big Chief.”

Ellis Marsalis Family Tribute

The pianist Ellis Marsalis was part of the first Jazz Fest. This year, his four musician sons — Wynton on trumpet, Branford on saxophones, Delfeayo on trombone and Jason on drums — joined him to perform his own compositions. The pieces traversed New Orleans jazz from slightly skewed traditionalism to knotty modernism; solos navigated every twist with brawn and panache. After featuring students from a music school established after Hurricane Katrina and named after Ellis Marsalis, the set concluded with the four sons raucously parading all around the jazz tent.

Irma Thomas

The soul hits Irma Thomas had from 1959 into the 1960s seesaw between womanly sass (“Don’t Mess With My Man”) and lovesick loneliness (“Ruler of My Heart”). They didn’t quite establish her as a nationwide star, but she became a New Orleans mainstay, and she still sings them with bluesy passion and a trumpetlike clarity. She wished Mick Jagger — whose heart surgery made the Rolling Stones drop out of Jazz Fest — a speedy recovery, but also reminded the crowd that she sang “Time Is on My Side” before he did. And when she moved into a medley of second-line songs and called for people to wave something in the air — handkerchiefs, hats — thousands of listeners happily obeyed.

Piano Professors

Flashy, two-fisted piano players are central to the sound of New Orleans. “Piano Professors” was one of the many tribute sets that are increasingly part of Jazz Fest, as — during the last 50 years — mortality has claimed indispensable musicians like Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint and James Booker. Five of their students and inheritors showed what they’ve learned in a brisk set of impossible-sounding piano solos that demanded propulsion, depth and sparkle. Tom McDermott mastered fearsome Jelly Roll Morton compositions like the aptly-titled “Finger Breaker”; Davell Crawford, even brawnier and wilder, flung tremolos and glissandos all over the place in a Booker tribute. They’re local luminaries who are too little known outside New Orleans.

Bonnie Raitt

Bonnie Raitt first played Jazz Fest in 1977 and has returned often. She praised it from the stage as a refuge for the “endangered species” of “roots music,” the blues, country, soul and funk that infuse her songs about love and honest acceptance. She augmented her band with two New Orleans-based keyboardists whom she has collaborated with through the years, Jon Cleary and Ivan Neville. And with Jazz Fest serendipity, she brought out Boz Scaggs — who had performed the night before — to join her and Cleary singing a Toussaint song all three have recorded, “What Do You Want the Girl to Do”; they turned it into a hymn.

Foundation of Funk

George Porter Jr. on bass and Joseph (Zigaboo) Modeliste on drums were the rhythm section of the Meters, the band that defined New Orleans funk in the 1960s and 1970s as a marvel of staggered syncopation. With guitarist Ian Neville — the son of Art Neville of the original Meters — and Ivan Neville (Art’s nephew), along with the guitarist Tony Hall, they offered their own tunes as lessons in funk construction before finding new rhythmic nooks and crannies in Meters favorites.

Moonlight Benjamin

The singer Moonlight Benjamin, from Haiti, built up a dark, incantatory power. Wearing a ceremonial-looking black dress and singing with a voice that could reach all the way up to an unbridled cry, she led a band that merged cranked-up blues-rock guitars and modal patterns with rhythms informed by voodoo drumming, a mesmerizing synergy.

Maggie Koerner

Troubled thoughts smolder and then sear in Maggie Koerner’s music. She sang for a year with the New Orleans band Galactic, but her own songs aren’t party funk. They’re roots-rock kin to Adele or Stevie Nicks: soul-infused rockers that move in dramatic crescendos through pain, anger and resolve.

Dobet Gnahore

A songwriter, singer, dancer and drummer from Ivory Coast in West Africa, Dobet Gnahore brought crisply modernized African pop to Jazz Fest. Her voice moved from airy delicacy to forthright declamation; the traditional sounds in her performance were loops from a computer meshed with electric guitar lines, and the rhythms exulted in ways to subdivide six-beat grooves. And with her beaded top and her hair swept up in a scarf and cowrie shells, she was dressed like a West African cousin of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians.

Cedric Burnside

Cedric Burnside’s grandfather was the Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside; his father was the blues drummer Calvin Jackson. He has held onto his inheritance of raw, hypnotic electric blues. In a duo with a drummer, he twanged stark guitar riffs and sang with dire intensity; eventually they switched instruments, and Burnside’s voice grew even more uncanny as he slammed the drums.

Preservation Hall Brass

Preservation Hall Brass — the brass-band annex of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band — brought pure euphoria to its Saturday-afternoon set, mixing ensemble precision and rowdy improvisational outbursts in the magnificent New Orleans jazz tradition. It went time-traveling through styles, from vintage second-line to funk, while the audience turned into a parasol-pumping parade.

Corey Henry &amp; the Treme Funktet

Electric funk bands that plug in onstage and brass bands whose instruments are ready to pick up and parade are both New Orleans assets. Corey Henry, who has been a member of the redoubtable Rebirth Brass Band and Galactic, combined them in his Treme Funktet set at Jazz Fest. The brass — including on trumpet his daughter, Jazz, a member of the all-female Original Pinettes Brass Band — could work like a taut horn section or a freewheeling squall; the band’s riffs were all muscle.

Taj Mahal

Like Jazz Fest itself, Taj Mahal has made it his business to trace the blues back to its sources and out to its latter-day family, from Delta fingerpicking to boogaloo, reggae and rock. He sang with gruff gusto and knowing humor, as if he was bringing the world into his backyard.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/arts/music/new-orleans-jazz-fest-best.html" id="eba98d7b-84ef-39b8-ac05-34e37c7336af">The New York Times</a>.

(Live Review)

13 Standout Sets at a Milestone New Orleans Jazz Fest

The first New Orleans Jazz &amp; Heritage Festival was held in 1970 in Beauregard Square, previously and afterward known as Congo Square, where African drumming and dancing had persisted through the era of slavery. It was modeled on the traditional-music showcases at the Newport Folk Festival, but filled entirely with Louisiana’s own styles — jazz, blues, gospel, brass bands, zydeco, Mardi Gras Indians and much more. Duke Ellington, the only performer without Louisiana roots, was commissioned to write and perform a “New Orleans Suite.” Nearly two dozen food vendors offered jambalaya, étouffée and other specialties.

Tickets were $3. But only about 300 people showed up, and the overstocked vendors ended up feeding children from a nearby orphanage.

Yet the New Orleans Jazz &amp; Heritage Festival has proved ambitious and resilient: It has survived deficits, rainouts and the aftermath of hurricanes. As it enters its 50th official run on Thursday, Jazz Fest, as everyone calls it, has grown inseparable from the cultural ecosystem of its hometown, embracing the sounds of the city and welcoming outsiders to enjoy them.

“Jazz Fest is everything that you love about New Orleans to begin with,” said Ivan Neville, the keyboardist who made his first appearance there in 1977; he is performing this year with his band Dumpstaphunk and in the Foundation of Funk with the rhythm section of the Meters, the band co-founded in 1965 by his father, Art Neville. “It’s the most variety of music that you’ll ever see in one given place, so that’s first, and then the best food that you will ever eat in your entire life.”

In recent years, Jazz Fest has drawn between 400,000 and 500,000 attendees across its two extended weekends; its peak, in 2001, was 618,000. Festival organizers estimate that it brings $300 million into the New Orleans economy. This year’s event includes nationally known headliners and hitmakers, among them Katy Perry, J Balvin, Chris Stapleton, Diana Ross and Pitbull, as well as habitual Jazz Fest performers including Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett, Al Green, Herbie Hancock and the Dave Matthews Band.

Yet while visiting attractions have boosted attendance, they have never defined the festival. Quint Davis, who has booked music for Jazz Fest since it began and is now the CEO of Festival Productions-New Orleans, noted that this year’s lineup includes 688 groups, “and 600 of them are from New Orleans and South Louisiana.”

That dedicated focus on the local is the core of the festival, which has bolstered the sublime stubbornness of New Orleans culture — where continuity is cherished and singular local customs are continued across generations — and brought worldwide appreciation to what were once just neighborhood festivities. “There’s no question that Jazz Fest has been the event that put New Orleans music on the map,” said Jan Ramsey, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the New Orleans music magazine OffBeat.

Jazz Fest has maintained its mandate because it operates far differently from other American festivals its size. Its music encompasses vintage jazz to chart-topping reggaeton; its audience is genuinely all-ages. It takes place in daylight, ending at 7 p.m. — which not only encourages visitors to seek out night life, but also rules out stage spectacles dependent on lights and video, emphasizing old-school musicianship instead.

More significantly, Jazz Fest is nonprofit, channeling revenues back into Louisiana music. “The mission of the festival all along has been to make a full circle,” Davis said. “To go back and support the culture that you’re promoting.”

Jazz Fest generates about $3 million each year for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, according to the foundation’s executive director, Don Marshall. The foundation owns the license of the New Orleans public radio station WWOZ-FM — which plays the kind of music heard at the festival year-round — and provides the bulk of its funding. The foundation also gives 8,500 Jazz Fest tickets to community groups; runs the free Heritage School of Music and supports other music-education programs; presents four free annual music festivals in New Orleans; subsidizes performances by Louisiana musicians across the state; underwrites a musicians’ clinic; documents the region’s musical history, and steps in with other efforts at maintaining New Orleans traditions.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the foundation arranged to buy beads and feathers for the Mardi Gras Indian tribes who, in a New Orleans tradition, sew new, eye-popping costumes each year and dance in the streets — and did so even after losing everything in the storm. And when the city raised the price of police permits for street parades, affecting jazz funerals and other community events, the foundation helped pay for them.

“In so many areas the heritage traditions are struggling to survive,” Marshall said. “But in New Orleans they’re growing. There are more Mardi Gras Indians now than there were before Katrina.”

The festival’s own legacy began with producer George Wein. He had presented the Newport Folk Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival, and in the early 1960s he was approached by New Orleans city officials and its hotel association. He told them he could not produce a jazz festival in a city that enforced segregation.

Eventually, years after the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, he seized the chance to create a New Orleans festival “combining the two festivals I had done in Newport, the folk and the jazz,” he said in an interview. He didn’t want to simply import well-known musicians for jazz concerts in auditoriums; for him, the “heritage” aspect of the festival, bringing all of New Orleans’ musical subcultures to the stage, was paramount from the start. “We had in mind to create a permanent relationship with the culture of New Orleans,” he said.

Davis, a New Orleans native, had coinciding ambitions. “My first idea was to have the world’s biggest backyard barbecue, like the old rent parties,” he said.

That first festival in 1970 lost $40,000, then a sizable downside. But it survived a few shaky years and soon outgrew Beauregard Square, moving to its current site, the Fair Grounds racetrack, where it could add more stages and more food vendors, all still homegrown. This year’s festival has 14 stages, large and small, and five dozen food vendors.

The festival became self-supporting by the mid-1970s, and Wein’s Festival Productions considered turning it into a for-profit corporation. But the New Orleans-based staff resisted that idea, and Wein conceded. In his memoir, “Myself Among Others,” he wrote, “It was probably the biggest financial mistake I ever made.”

Decades later, the many repeat visitors to Jazz Fest — often wearing past years’ souvenir New Orleans-themed Hawaiian shirts — bask in its routines. They welcome the annual reappearance of favorite performers, including New Orleans R&amp;B; stalwarts like Irma Thomas and Clarence (Frogman) Henry, long-running groups like the Rebirth Brass Band and members of Louisiana music dynasties like the Neville, Chenier and Marsalis families.

In 1970, pianist Ellis Marsalis advised the first festival on booking the city’s up-and-coming jazz bandleaders. “George didn’t know the musicians yet, and I knew all of the musicians that could play,” Marsalis recalled. “I said, yeah, no problem.” Now 84, Marsalis will be performing his compositions at Jazz Fest on April 28 with his four sons: Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason.

After years of growth, the first decade of the 2000s brought challenges for Jazz Fest. The 2003 festival was a financial and physical washout, rained out for five days and running a large loss. The foundation’s executive committee courted new producers, until Davis and Festival Productions-New Orleans arranged a partnership with AEG Entertainment, the second-largest promoter of music events worldwide (after Live Nation).

“Up till then,” Davis recalled, “We’re down here doing this, we’ve got no connections professionally to the outside world, we’ve got no clout, we’re not connected to the music industry. When we partnered with AEG, now, if we needed a big gun, we had the second-biggest company in music behind us.”

Instead of cutting his talent budget, Davis said, AEG raised it considerably; since then, Jazz Fest has had more nationally known acts alongside its Louisiana staples. “They’re not telling me who to get,” Davis said, “but they’ve rebuilt the financial structure.”

Then came Katrina in August 2005. New Orleans was emptied. The local groups that are the heart of Jazz Fest — gospel choirs, second-line marchers, Mardi Gras Indians — were dispersed. The Fair Grounds infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding.

Jazz Fest considered locations outside New Orleans, but decided to rebuild at home. It lined up a corporate sponsor, Shell. Musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Dave Matthews and Lionel Richie agreed to perform. Electricity and plumbing were reinstalled in time to erect the seemingly unchanged stages and food booths, like Vaucresson’s Sausage Co., which had been at every Jazz Fest. Its factory had been destroyed by the hurricane; a competitor lent his facilities to get it through the event.

Many musicians and festivalgoers were returning to their hometown for the first time since the storm. It was a deeply tearful celebration, a sign of how much Jazz Fest had become a symbol and ritual of New Orleans.

Jazz Fest has held steady in the years since, though booking troubles caused some headaches this year. Jazz Fest was to feature the Rolling Stones on May 2, but the band suddenly dropped out, postponing its tour so that Mick Jagger could undergo heart surgery. Fleetwood Mac was announced as a replacement, then canceled, citing health problems for Stevie Nicks. The jam band Widespread Panic finally took over the slot.

A continuing question for Jazz Fest, Ramsey said, is, “How does the festival change and adjust to keep its focus on the heritage music, and also still satisfy an audience and draw the numbers that it needs to survive financially?”

But in 2019, Jazz Fest will proudly serve up its familiar pleasures. Over five decades, it has become a tradition of its own. “The real bulwark of our success,” Davis said, “is not knowing any better.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/arts/music/new-orleans-jazz-festival-50th-anniversary.html" id="340d3050-5bec-34be-a3e6-adb8f8e01a76">The New York Times</a>.

It started small, half a century ago, but with a mission.

Where Heirloom Tunes Are Still the Main Point

But every so often, Burnett carves out time to record under his own name. This week he releases “The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space,” the first album of a planned trilogy he recorded with keyboardist Keefus Ciancia and drummer Jay Bellerose. On his own and in his collaborations, Burnett has become known for twangy, rootsy, naturalistic rock. But “The Invisible Light” veers into stranger territory.

Drumbeats lurch and sputter amid eerie, amorphous electronic sounds; instruments like guitars or pianos are relegated to the far distance. In that setting, Burnett speak-sings his way through free-associative songs that contain biblical allusions, echoes of the blues, tall tales, lovers’ plaints and warnings about disinformation, the cult of personality and the encroachments of technology. (The trilogy’s next installment, Burnett said, “is more rocking, more punk rock, and the third edition gets very, very jazz, pretty out there.”)

A conversation with Burnett, 71, easily wanders from musical particulars to philosophical speculations and back. He spoke from his home and studio in Los Angeles, where he makes most of his music; he had been awake, he said, since 4 a.m. The following are edited excerpts from the interview.

The songs on “The Invisible Light” revolve around technology and theology, with some very dark tidings.

I called it “The Invisible Light” for two reasons. It’s from T.S. Eliot’s “Choruses From ‘The Rock’ ” — he refers to divinity that way. But also, I’m actually optimistic about humanity’s chances, and in all this darkness some light is also contained. Except you have to really listen into it to hear the mirth and the optimism.

You also name-check songs like Delbert McClinton’s “Victim of Life’s Circumstances.”

The whole album is full of references, and that’s part of the notion of it. Because artists really do only one thing. Artists say, “I went to this place at this time and I saw this thing, and it was good.” And we mark it, we mark the things that we think are important and worthwhile.

The material isn’t exactly songs or spoken words. How did it come together?

I started writing a play with Marshall Brickman, and the ambition for the play is to get it to Broadway one day. That led me to study Frank Loesser, and Lerner and Loewe, and Stephen Sondheim and all the great Broadway writers. Writing for theater is very different than just writing hillbilly songs or rock ’n’ roll songs. You only have a couple of hours to tell the story, and everything in the song has to be part of the narrative. It takes a great deal of discipline.

And so I started getting up at 4 every morning and writing for several hours when everything was quiet. I finished writing the music for the play in about a year.

But because I’d gotten in the habit of waking up at 4 in the morning and writing, I’ve continued doing that, for about the last three years. It’s this evolving poem that must be about 5,000 lines now, which I would guess someday I will publish as a poem. That became the sheet music in essence. I would pull a group of lyrics out of this stuff and give it to Keefus and give it to Jay, and we would just start jamming.

Melody is really codified inflection. In all of the lyrics there were melodies already hanging around in them, ghost melodies, and some were specific melodies. It’s maybe a form of Beat poetry. I certainly still think of myself as part of the Beat Generation.

One song, “A Man Without a Country,” ends with two full minutes of ambient landscape sound, almost silent. Why?

One could think of this album as a film that hasn’t been made that we’re scoring. Part of what we’re after is the fact that the electronic universe has been shrinking and fragmenting our attention spans for decades now. I want to create periods of time where people can just sit in pure sound without stimulation, where we can allow ourselves to relax into pure sound. It’s not really that nothing’s happening. It’s something’s happening but we don’t know what it is, so to speak.

Musicians praise the drum sound in your productions, and drums are way up front on this album. What’s the secret?

There was a time in the 1970s when everybody was dampening down drums and trying to take all the overtones out and focus purely on attack. But all of the most interesting sounds of the drums are the sounds of the overtones that react with one another and create other melodies and other rhythms within the piece. Which are the very things that get covered up by the guitars and the basses and the more normal instruments that are brought forward in a mix.

By taking all those away you’re able to hear what the drums actually are doing. We do it by playing very, very softly so that the attack is minimized. The trick, if it’s a trick, or the technique since it is technology, is to place the microphones so that they hear all of the tone and the overtones of the drums and then they also hear the tone and overtones of the adjacent drums. The room we’re recording all these pieces in is a very small bedroom, so you can only play so loud.

Yet the sound of the tracks suggests huge spaces.

That is the idea, to conjure these open, wild spaces. We wanted it to be an indefinable place, a dangerous place, a dark place, yet within it there’s all this life.

There are also a lot of warnings: about a “celebrity-in-chief,” about lies and willful self-deception.

There’s an extraordinary experiment in behavioral modification going on now. We live in a time now where leaders emerge from fiction and create the politics of eternity where there are no facts. That’s an extremely dangerous place to live. The “politics of eternity” is from Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom.” I think it’s the most important book of the 21st century so far. It’s a well of sanity.

Do you think about who your listeners are?

No, other than that the listeners are human beings and I have a love and a caring for humanity, and I hope that comes through. This is anti-anti-human music. There’s a lot going on in the world that is anti-human at the moment, and this is fighting that.

Art has to be irresistible. It can’t be pedantic or instruct or preach. I certainly have been accused of preaching in the past, and I hope I’ve overcome any tendencies I’ve had in that direction. More than preaching I’ve been raising the alarm. Hopefully I’ve gotten good enough at it so that I’m not preaching, but just ringing the bell.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/music/t-bone-burnett-invisible-light.html" id="9c0cc0b8-2b7e-30e6-a704-de6ca706685a">The New York Times</a>.

Joseph Henry Burnett, known as T Bone, has spent most of his long career in music behind the scenes. He has won 13 Grammy Awards as a producer, music supervisor and songwriter for albums including “Raising Sand” by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and soundtracks for “O Brother, Where Are Thou?,” “Walk the Line,” “The Hunger Games” and “Crazy Heart,” which also brought him an Oscar for collaborating on the best original song. Lately his projects have included producing Sara Bareilles’ new album...

Listening for the Light in the Darkness

“Absolute Zero” (Zappo Productions/Thirty Tigers) makes a 180-degree pendulum swing from Hornsby’s 2016 album, “Rehab Reunion.” On that record, Hornsby set aside the piano for songs built around the dulcimer, with basic folky harmonies and string-band-centered arrangements. “Absolute Zero,” in contrast, doubles down on piano virtuosity and musical intricacies: odd meters, polytonality, bustling counterpoint. In the new songs, Hornsby addresses a complex, distressing world with complex music, offering not an escape but a cleareyed recognition of 21st-century pressures and longings.

In 2019, “Absolute Zero” is decisively untrendy. Its songs are dense, literate, hand-played and largely acoustic (although a collaboration with Vernon, a forlorn lover’s plaint titled “Cast-Off,” does slip in some electronics). Rather than build productions with synthetic sounds, for half of the album Hornsby brought in yMusic, the contemporary chamber sextet that has also worked lately with Paul Simon, and its violinist and arranger Rob Moose; other songs use string orchestras. Hornsby then juxtaposed the disembodied classical ensembles with sinewy little studio bands that can kick and swing in any meter. One of the puzzles that Hornsby seems to have set for himself is seeing just how many pointillistic motifs he can set in motion without getting in the way of his voice.

Ambition and exuberance merge in songs like “The Blinding Light of Dreams,” with pensive lyrics flung into complicated motion. “The Blinding Light of Dreams” reflects on the history of racism in the South, racing along on an insistent 13-note piano pattern and dodging dissonant interjections from yMusic. And “Voyager One” is a kind of multidimensional hoedown, with piano and yMusic meshing in overlapping riffs while Hornsby sings about space exploration and wonders if humanity will destroy itself before Voyager makes contact with other life-forms. “Let’s break out of our orbits, fix the world we all neglect/We share this little planet, our neighbors need respect,” he sings.

Hornsby draws on science terms to get personal. In the title song of “Absolute Zero,” he imagines being cryogenically preserved for a century, awaiting “Another chance, maybe better next time”; sparse piano and sustained woodwinds suspend his voice as the drummer Jack DeJohnette pinpoints time still passing.

In “Fractals,” Hornsby maps the infinitely replicating, mathematically generated chaos of fractals onto a romance: “Our love is a fractal/Curves and shapes irregular,” he sings. But first comes a brittle, two-handed, stop-start piano part that doesn’t quite establish a key or a beat. While he sings, percussion pecks at offbeats before settling into 4/4, while piano and pizzicato strings continue to pelt him with syncopation. Amid all the musical antics, Hornsby doesn’t lose perspective. The grain of his voice and his folky sense of melody still hold together all of the songs’ odd machinations. And midway through the album, he touches down on the kind of cozy, empathetic song that established him in the 1980s and continue to dot his albums.

One way for a songwriter to invigorate a long career is to keep breaking routines, to change up methods and parameters and solve different puzzles with every album. It’s a modus operandi that has carried Bruce Hornsby from radio hits in the 1980s through bluegrass, jazz, a stint in the Grateful Dead and, lately, collaborations with a younger-generation fan, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. “Absolute Zero,” his 21st album, is one more daring, rewarding turn in his catalog: 10 knotty, thoughtful yet ...

Jon Pareles

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