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The danger of describing other people, of applying adjectives to human beings, is that words stick and flatten. The moment I say that my mother is X, I destroy every aspect of her that X fails to contain. As each word of a sentence unfurls and you home in on your point, you risk losing hold of a person’s layers, their texture and shape. An insect stuck to a board: the metaphor’s overused, but it holds. A novelist’s task is to get the insect pinned but keep it quivering. Most writers give up. Their books have moments that flutter and spurt, images or scenes brought to vivid life, but then readers want heroes and plot, characters they like—meaning characters who are softer, less fearful simulacra of themselves. There’s an appalling conception of fiction as an escape, when, in fact, its job is to make us more attuned to life’s truths rather than blunted, far away.

Gwendoline Riley, who’s published eight books in the U.K. and is now out with “The Palm House,” in the U.S., seems instinctually able to keep the insect quivering. Her novels linger hardly at all on exposition and plot, and open mid-conversation, or in what seems like mid-thought. They sometimes lose hold of time but bound forward with a vibrating force. Scenes are tightly contained, dialogue hurled back and forth. The effect is that of a metal detector held close to the ground, finding the spaces that complicate and contradict whatever assumptions we might feel compelled to make about others.

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Like many of Riley’s earlier books, “The Palm House” is narrated in the first person, by a woman—this time, her name is Laura—who grew up lower middle class, with a selfish, bumbling mom and a cruel, ignorant dad. The settings and details (sometimes there’s a sibling; the parents may be either alive or dead) aren’t always the same, but the same basic structure recurs across her fiction. Laura’s a writer. She has left the town where she was raised and made a life in London, but she’s still stuck, unable to stop circling the people and places she comes from. Up to this point, “The Palm House” resembles Riley’s two most recent novels, “First Love” and “My Phantoms.” From here, though, the novel diverges. The narrative focusses less tightly on the “I” than in her earlier books, and—these departures feel linked—the “I” has reached middle age.

Speaking of middle age: the book is wreckage from the start. It’s 2017. Laura and a friend, Putnam, sit and drink at a bar on the Thames. A hurricane offshore whips up ash and sand from wildfires in Spain. Putnam has just quit his job as an editor at a magazine called Sequence. He and Laura have been friends for years, allied by what each of them wanted most to become, and are now joined together less by shared hopes than by the disappointments and frustrations that having become entails. As with so many magazines, Sequence’s board has no sense of what the magazine is, and when its editor-in-chief dies he’s replaced by a cad—he insists on being called Shove—whom everyone, but especially Putnam, hates. Putnam is forty-nine, and has been at Sequence more than half his life. His father has just died. He is unfailingly committed to the fact of his pain. Laura, long-suffering friend, tries again and again to take him out, cheer him up; she helps clean out his father’s house and suggests other jobs. But Putnam is dogged, digging his heels in:

He didn’t want reassurance. He didn’t want sense. He didn’t want fellowship. He did not want a substantive conversation. I found it mind-bending, to be faced down by this willful ignorance from one of the cleverest people I knew. I felt a prey object. Putnam was forty-nine! And as well as living, had he not spent a good proportion of those years reading, thinking, watching films? Had none of that given him an inkling of how to face life? Some model for elegant survival? Maybe this was all one in the eye for that old myth. Or new myth, was it? Newspaper-pedalled? If I thought of it that way I was less lost. Why should he learn anything? Was that a way to look at it? Or had he absorbed something else? Was this a sort of bovarism I was dealing with?

Like Emma Bovary, who yearns to be “the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague ‘she’ of all the books,” Putnam keeps reaching for impossible things, not least a sense of freedom from the drudgery of real life. He’s too blustery and finally self-protective—he doesn’t kill himself—to be Emma, but, at the end of the novel’s first section, he tells Laura that when he broke up with Katherine, a member of the Sequence team and apparently the only serious girlfriend of his life, he took a train to the Sussex coast. “ ‘I kept walking and I kept shouting,’ he said. The word he shouted, over and over again, was, ‘Free.’ ”

Riley’s previous novel, “My Phantoms,” opens, as “The Palm House” does, in the middle of a conversation. The narrator’s grandmother is talking about her late husband, who served during the Second World War:

There was “nothing for him” in England.

“There were no ‘Homes for Heroes.’ Oh no. No ‘Homes for Heroes.’ ”

My grandmother said this indignantly. And if my mother was there, she used to shake her head and join in: “There was nothing, no. Nothing.”

That repeated “nothing” is surely a deliberate echo of the “ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” in “King Lear,” when Lear beseeches each of his three daughters to declare the strength of their love for him, and his youngest, Cordelia, replies that she is unable to speak what is not true. The central deadlock of the play—a daughter unwilling to pander to a parental figure’s pride, a father unwilling to suffer being wounded in that way—recurs throughout Riley’s books, which are haunted by stubborn, Lear-like male egos and hard-edged women whose honesty is bracing yet often ineffectual in the face of life. “The Palm House,” in focussing its attention on Putnam, seems to ask—like so many podcasts and op-eds over the past several years—what is owed, really, to men? Yes, there’s wreckage all around, but what’s new about that?

Once Putnam has been established, the book’s relationship to both character and time shifts. The narration runs through a klatch of men Laura’s known, all of whom waver between absurd and pathetic but who are still able to harm. The worst is Chris Patrick, a comedian popular “with a certain kind of girl,” to whom Laura sent adoring tape recordings when she was young. (“It seemed awful to me that he was lonely, as he often said. ‘So lonely’ was his phrase. What a world, I thought. What could it mean that someone like that could be lonely?”) She starts going to his comedy shows, where she makes a friend, Anna. He invites them back to his hotel. He’s twenty-nine; they’re both in their teens. “Giz a squeeze,” he says. Laura describes the fantasies she and Anna have about Chris Patrick, “about a future where he had been brought low somehow and we went and found him and rescued him. No one recognized or remembered him except for us. . . . We were in our thirties, elegant and fulfilled; he was fifty, and, frankly, a wreck.” They’re smarter than him, and it’s useless in the face of age, gender, money, power. But then, even as teens, the girls sense that time will alter how that power feels and looks.

We get only a few pages about Laura’s father, by way of her uncle, Owen, who calls to report her father’s death. As in Riley’s previous two books, the novel orbits around the mother—the barnacle or spur the narrator can’t shake. But we learn enough. Owen is a bad-dad-apologist. He and his wife helped to take care of Laura’s dad late in his life. And then this: “Owen had often been there during those long half-term holidays I’d had to spend with my father. He’d seen what went on. Owen, I remember, had dutifully come and sniffed my armpit while my father had held my arm up and said, ‘It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?’ ” Laura’s life, in other words, has always been part wreck.

The book’s movements through time don’t always declare themselves. We get a page break, a new section or chapter, and then we’re in a different period, sometimes marked and sometimes not. In the place of rising action or climax, what pressure exists in the book arises from a sort of roiling helplessness. Laura sees the world so clearly: her mother’s inanities, the failures of the men she knows, the chasm between what she wishes life were and what she knows it is. But what does seeing clearly get her? Her mom is still her mom. Her body still wants sex. The rumbling aliveness of the novel comes, in part, from the friction of these facts: what does it mean, really, to know better? No matter how many years we spend reading, thinking, watching films, somehow, insanely, we still have to live. As the story’s scenes accrue, this collision creates a sense, if not of agency or of power (which is perhaps the stuff of heroes), at least of stamina, the recognition that more and more life, more and more looking at it, can generate its own sort of strength.

Just once, Laura tries to explain her mother to Putnam. He immediately pins her down: “Northern . . . this annihilating flippancy . . . everything I’ve fought against for my whole life.” Laura’s annoyed enough never to try again, and also has to admit that most of what he says is true. Her mother is flip. She’ll do most anything for “a laff,” as Putnam says. And yet, in the scene immediately preceding this one, Laura has met up with her mother and her erstwhile boyfriend. Her mother’s been laid off and says—flippantly—that she might spend the time revisiting all the places she’s lived, “just as a project.” Laura suggests that it “could tell a story . . . a bit of social history. Where life has taken you.” The conversation drifts. The subject is dropped.

Only later do you realize that “The Palm House” moves past and into the houses and flats that Laura’s inhabited. Her mother’s idea was good. The vibrating center of all Riley’s books lies in moments like this. Laura’s mom is as silly as Putnam assumes. But no person is just an adjective. Putnam—with his glib dismissals, his unwillingness to consider what he might be besides the fallen hero of Sequence, to feel something beyond the agony of his father’s loss and his mother’s before that (“Putnam’s mother had died when he was twelve, but this fact was still in some way the key piece of information about him”)—fails to see this.

Riley is much too sharp a writer to pose and answer a single question in her fiction. Being inside her novels is a singular, spiky, often deeply funny experience. But, insofar as “The Palm House” casts its keen eye on men, it lingers on the ways that stories about heroes, about conquering and winning, about what men are owed and deserve, can be just as much of a trap as the stories told to women about what we are or aren’t.

I don’t believe revealing plot points spoils books, so I will say: Putnam returns to Sequence in the end, as incapable of facing any sense that his life is less than what he had hoped as he was at the beginning. But it’s Laura and the reader who have learned—the novel has shown us if we’ve not yet lived enough ourselves—the weight and import of a survival that is not always elegant, but all the more expansive and hard-won. ♦

Day One: Something is stirring in New York City. A chill spring wind is picking up, littering sidewalks with cherry-blossom petals. And a new pain is forming at the back of your head, disarmingly close to your parietal lobe (you discover after Googling “brain areas labelled”).

Day Two: This mysterious pain is progressing, and quickly. Your husband calls out to you from the kitchen that there’s a more colloquial term for an ache in your head, but you tune him out to focus on the A.I. summary search result for “What does the parietal lobe do?” You learn that it’s “crucial for processing sensory information,” which sounds like a vital skill for a brain to have.

Day Three: You wake up to a feeling of dread and decide on a brisk morning walk to take in the restorative Brooklyn air, much as a tubercular Romantic poet would have retreated to the seaside. You see, on your walk, that the trees lining the streets are fast turning green, which is cheering. The sight of new life doesn’t fix your sore head, however. Instead, you return home with a cough.

Day Four: The cough is worsening, particularly on your walks, forcing you to stay inside your cramped “study” (or, as the realtor for your fourth-floor walkup apartment pitched it, “think of this as a half room”). Your husband asks if your throat is still “tickling,” which makes you scoff—“tickling” being an inadequate word for the turmoil in your trachea. This triggers another coughing attack.

Day Five: You are now experiencing flashes of pain every time you blink, contemptuously, at your husband. Opening all the windows (necessary, given that the hottest boiler in all of Brooklyn is still turned on in your building) only aggravates your cough. Being relegated to your sickbed leaves you no other choice; you upgrade to Victorian accounts of suffering. You start passive-aggressively rereading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and aggressive-aggressively reminding your husband that it’s a crime against feminism that he hasn’t read it yet.

Day Six: In what you assume is a sign of your body’s imminent total collapse, your eyes are now itching and watering. What condition could so swiftly wear down your most basic abilities—thinking, breathing, seeing? You consider how, at last year’s vision checkup, you turned down the optometrist’s offer to use a hundred-thousand-dollar machine to take photos of the back of your eye, because it would have cost you an extra seventy dollars. Pointlessly, you wonder whether they would have caught the eye cancer/brain tumor/stroke that is causing your current demise.

Day Seven: You think back wistfully to the start of this week, when your condition was confined to a mere ache in the sensory-processing lobe of your brain, and curse yourself for underreacting to the onset of this sickness. You fumble, weakly, for the pulse oximeter in your nightstand, which you bought when you had pneumonia three years ago, and had to keep going back to urgent care for a daily chest X-ray, until you were told that there’s a limit to how many “medically unnecessary” scans your insurance will cover (the limit is zero). Your hand seizes on a pink oblong pill, fexofenadine—and what a relief to find it there, a reminder of your regular April allergy flareups! After all, you surely wouldn’t want your eyes to be red or your nose to be runny when your nearest and dearest see you in your open casket.

You go to set a calendar reminder for this time next year that says, “REMEMBER YOU HAVE ALLERGIES,” then stop yourself. You don’t want to make this any harder on your soon to be widowed husband than it already will be. You picture him, sitting alone in your former not-legally-a-room room, in the throes of mourning, most likely questioning why he never took his late wife to Rome for the rest cure she so frequently suggested. You delete the event from your phone and sigh, contemplating a life lesson learned too late. Nevertheless, you’re glad you took the fexofenadine while you still were able. You’re already feeling better for it. ♦

Told a certain way, the life of Kimberly Noel Kardashian maps neatly onto the entire history of media in the new millennium. In her teen-age years, Kim’s family was part of the biggest televised spectacle to date, as her father, Robert Kardashian, successfully defended O. J. Simpson in his murder trial. In her twenties, Kim worked as a personal stylist for Paris Hilton and showed up as a bit character in Hilton’s reality series “The Simple Life.” That show prompted grumblings that Hilton and her ilk were famous only for being famous, a mantle that Kim soon took up. In 2007, a sex tape starring her with the singer Ray J became an early case study in virality in the streaming era. (Ray J has since claimed that the tape was leaked by Kim and her mother, Kris Jenner, an allegation that they both deny.) The same year saw the début of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” which would, of course, become one of the most successful reality franchises ever and transform the Kardashian clan into both television celebrities and online protagonists of innumerable memes derived from choice snippets.

TV made the Kardashian clan, but the internet clinched and multiplied their fame—they are “new media” celebrities, perhaps the biggest examples thereof, as the writer and psychotherapist M. J. Corey documents in her book “Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto.” Kim and her siblings, particularly her half sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, built up millions of followers in the early days of social media, becoming ur-stars of Twitter and Instagram. (One of Kim’s memorably random tweets from 2010: “Nicole Richie reminds me of my jeep.”) Kim’s climb from there to the glam heights of Hollywood inspired a mobile game in 2014, the goal of which was to rise from the E-list to the A-list of celebrity. Her buxom re-creation of a Grace Jones photograph for the cover of Paper was designed to “break the internet,” as the magazine itself trumpeted. In 2015, her voluminous selfies were collected in a glossy book published by Rizzoli, titled “Selfish,” which helped to legitimatize a genre once derided for its narcissism as a modern mode of self-expression. Her marriage to Kanye West cemented a new kind of multi-platform fame, as the couple became omnipresent cultural forces in music, fashion, television, beauty, and even religion, when they launched a “Sunday Service” series of spiritual events, complete with streetwear. Propelled by our algorithmic feeds onto every small screen, in every conceivable format, Kim Kardashian became less an individual mega-celebrity than a scalable digital spectacle, attaining the kind of iconicity that the entire family seems to crave; they have even been known to turn Robert, their late patriarch, into a hologram to dispense fatherly wisdom.

Corey has long operated as a kind of meta-Kardashian influencer online, building up hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube by sharing conversational videos (“why fans feel betrayed”) and Kardashian memes remixed with quotes from critical theory (Kris Jenner x Chris Kraus) under the name Kardashian Kolloquium. (Corey is a pseudonym; she studied creative nonfiction and counselling psychology at Columbia and has contributed pieces of Kimlinology to The New Yorker.) The book, an extension of this œuvre, deploys a litany of canonical media theorists and philosophers—Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Bourdieu, Thorstein Veblen—to argue that the Kardashians are “an intentional amalgamation,” “a composite of historical touch points, media tropes, and shifting identities.” They are ciphers that consciously assume whatever shapes are most likely to gain them the most exposure—in other words, they are flesh-and-blood memes.

Corey charts the many different pop-cultural archetypes that the Kardashians, and Kim in particular, have played with through the years, often by playing dress-up: the all-American romantic doom of Marilyn Monroe, the ethnically ambiguous curvaceousness of Disney’s Princess Jasmine, the wifely devotion of Jacqueline Kennedy, the girl-group antics of the Spice Girls (when Kim dressed up as Posh in high school). Kim excels at metabolizing the idols of past eras—“performing the particular thrill of borrowed glamour,” Corey writes—but she is also a bellwether of the present. Extravagantly mutable and well maintained, the Kardashians’ very bodies have morphed to take on trends. Their self-transformations include Kylie’s filler-stuffed lips, Kim’s rumored Brazilian butt lift, and Kris’s recently publicized facelift, all of which helped inject such cosmetic procedures into the mainstream. “Kim’s ass . . . seemed to expand in tandem with all the growing interest in her body,” Corey writes. The more ass, the more attention—at least until that particular semiotic bubble popped, and the Kardashians appeared to deflate their rear ends, around 2022. Swapping paramours, hobbies, and physical features, the Kardashians shape—and epitomize—the Zeitgeist.

Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their vast audience. They are aspirational American consumers, flaunting their luxury-brand logos, in addition to being models of the American dream, as billionaire entrepreneurs. (The Kar-Jenner sisters have benefitted from collabs between their respective companies, such as a KKW x Kylie “lip set,” and from posing for Kim’s Kardashian-silhouette-inspired shapewear brand, Skims.) They are relatable mothers, daughters, sisters, and stepsiblings, as a blended family whose tumultuous relationships are documented on reality TV. The book is studded with amusing pieces of Kardashian lore that might be familiar only to devotees. Do you remember Kimoji, a $1.99 mobile app that provided two hundred and fifty Kim-themed emoji? The family once used prosthetic costumes to blend into the normie crowd on a Hollywood bus tour, only to make a run for it to escape photo-takers. Kimye’s 2022 divorce saga was effectively styled by Balenciaga, incepting the label into the public consciousness, one paparazzi photo at a time. Corey pithily sums up Kim’s pattern “of accommodating the public’s appetite for private affairs, and of making reality out of make-believe.”

Yet “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” is also a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative. It can read like social-media commentary, with disjointed riffing on one subject after another, and familiar critical ideas trotted out repeatedly. Corey references McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message” in the book’s preface, then repeats it three times in the first chapter, then once more, for good measure, in the sixth. In a final “Archives” section, she writes, “Now is a good time to bring in good old Marshall McLuhan.” (The McLuhan is the message.) The book seems designed for an online follower of Corey’s, who already knows the details of the Kardashian story and craves exegesis. The lay reader would benefit from a more sustained, linear biography of Kardashianism, but even in the latter half of the book, which proceeds roughly chronologically, the text darts among subjects and eras, often in the span of the same paragraph. A passage about varieties of self-concealment skips from ninjas to Odysseus to Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper.” Ironically, the Kardashians themselves, usually so expert at capturing attention, get lost in the mix.

Corey is generous in quoting the works of other writers (myself among them) and includes many Kardashian-fandom social posts as a kind of vox populi, but an overabundance of references disrupts the flow of larger ideas. The book is more dekonstruction and less manifesto; its credo may be contained in the line “To me, the Kardashians are no different from other enduring national institutions such as Las Vegas, Disney, and the WWE,” which is not a particularly controversial statement about a family that has long been accepted as American royalty. One of the book’s more sustained, intriguing scenes comes, several hundred pages in, when Corey describes how she came to start posting videos about the Kardashians. She was staying at her mother’s home in Arizona during the pandemic and began filming herself in the carport, after getting advice from a Gen Z friend that “pop culture-tok” could be a good home for cultural commentary that she had begun to do on Instagram. She went from having fifteen thousand followers on Instagram to more than a hundred and eighty thousand on TikTok. “If I’d learned anything from the Kardashians, it was that diversifying mediums is a wise move,” Corey writes. The Kardashian scholar had become a Kardashian-style content creator.

If you hitch your fortunes to the Kardashians for long enough, you’re bound to get ensnared in one drama or another. Late in the book, Corey describes the harassment she faced when she declined to weigh in on a Balenciaga controversy that some observers felt implicated Kim and Kanye by association. “It was my job, as a volunteer cultural critic, to deconstruct and then moralize about such a revelation, as everyone else on the platform was doing,” Corey writes in an apt summary of a writer’s current role on the internet. Other accounts then tried to rage-bait their followers into attacking Corey’s “silence.” Attention online—which is to say, the modern entertainment industry at large—can look a bit like a pyramid scheme, with each lower layer trying to siphon a segment of audience away from the more famous one above. It is that ruthless practice of eliciting engagement at any cost that may be the Kardashians’ true innovation, and the life style is not for everyone. As Corey writes, “I just wanted to post my wannabe Barthes takes in peace.” ♦

As far as commercial holidays go, Record Store Day is a virtuous occasion, because recorded music is among the wonders of the world, and the survival of physical media is crucial to the future of art. In the realm of jazz, the holiday’s hero is the producer Zev Feldman, who is responsible for a long and transformative run of releases from previously unavailable archival sources. To mark the latest Record Store Day (April 18th), working with a variety of labels, he has brought forth treasures that both deepen the history of jazz and expand the art form’s imaginative range. Three of the new sets (also available on CD and via digital download on April 24th) offer revelatory experiences of musicians whom I’ve been listening to for half a century—Cecil Taylor, Ahmad Jamal, and Joe Henderson. Delightful old recordings are rediscovered year in and year out, but it is rare for new entries in extensive discographies to feel instantly canonical.

The albums by Jamal and Henderson are from the nineteen-seventies, a time when jazz was in crisis—and their performances, both recorded in concert at the same venue (Chicago’s Jazz Showcase), present personal responses to the artists’ own situations and to the state of the music at large. As for Taylor’s recording, from the late sixties, it defines a bold advance in jazz that nevertheless reconnects with the music’s traditions.

Ahmad Jamal, “At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago”
Resonance Records

Jamal started his recording career in 1951 with a style of piano playing so unusual that it was often grossly misunderstood and underestimated (including, in 1958, in the pages of The New Yorker). Eschewing the profusion and complexity of the era’s bebop pianists (foremost, Bud Powell), Jamal played sparely, creating arrangements for trios that served as backdrops for his improvisations of stark strokes and elegant gestures, sharp punctuations and witty melodic distillations. He neither accompanied other soloists nor had wind-instrument sidemen in his band. But, by the mid-sixties, Jamal’s style changed. Working with a new, looser generation of drummers, he went from restrained to overflowing, playing denser and more emphatically expressive solos, albeit without sacrificing wit or melody. That transformation came at a cost: in the late fifties, Jamal had enjoyed great commercial success, but in the next decade his popularity waned. The trouble wasn’t his alone. Rock was supplanting the show-tune-based Great American Songbook—Jamal’s prime source—as the musical mainstream, and by the seventies popular jazz was heavily tinged with “fusion” elements (electric instruments, borrowings from rock and R. & B.) that often came at the expense of improvised solos. Jamal acceded to the trend and made several electric-based albums in pop modes that ranged from funk to easy listening. But the new album, “At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago,” features live performances from March of 1976 that sound like a revolt against commercial concessions.

Classic American pop songs figure in the album, which also starts with an original composition by Jamal, “Ahmad’s Song.” Like many of the numbers here, it opens with a florid, rhapsodic piano introduction, before the drummer Frank Gant (with whom he’d been playing for a decade) and the bassist John Heard join in and kick things into high gear. What follows is an electrifying outburst of energy, as Jamal pushes the tempo, pulls it back to cascading cadenzas, tosses in quotes from other jazz and pop tunes, unleashes carillons of thunder. The second track, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa-nova “Wave,” features a similarly dazzling virtuosic variety of phrases and riffs—a skipping and rocking eight-note motto that brings cheers from the audience, rapid two-handed chopping figures up the keyboard, crashing dissonances, swirl and bluster, lyrical whispers. Jamal’s exuberant solos give rise to a wondrous, paradoxical divergence: he flaunts a distinctive art of decomposition, breaking melodies down into small motifs that he both obsessively repeats and cleverly varies, yet he also keeps melody central, punctuating the improvisations with recognizable fragments of the basic tune, like signposts amid his free associations.

Fans of Jamal’s spare and firmly arranged recordings may struggle to recognize him in the teeming exuberance of this album. What unifies the two modes is the precision of Jamal’s discrete musical gestures, and his art of contrasts—how he moves in both periods, with jolting abruptness, from whispers to roars, from touches to torrents and back. If his early recordings isolate these gestures and surround them with musical space, separating the foreground of his piano from the background of his rhythm arrangements, the new recording brings background and foreground crashing together. To borrow an analogy from visual art, the finish of paint on the earlier recordings is thin, close to the canvas; here, it’s built up thickly. If there’s something Mondrian-like in his earlier, starker sense of musical geometry, at the Jazz Showcase he paints over the sharp lines with a van Gogh-esque impasto. In recent years, Feldman has put out three great albums of Jamal’s nineteen-sixties live recordings that chart the pianist’s transition to these more expansive styles. The new release marks the fullest flowering of them that I’ve heard.

Joe Henderson, “Consonance: Live at the Jazz Showcase”
Resonance Records

Henderson’s career launched later than Jamal’s but bore certain similarities. In the early sixties, Henderson, a tenor saxophonist, emerged as a modernist on the edges of mainstream jazz, where fervent but finger-snapping hard bop met the avant garde. He recorded with such illustrious musicians as Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver, Grant Green, and John Coltrane’s longtime bandmates McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones. In the early seventies, Henderson released such tough-minded albums as “At the Lighthouse” and “In Japan” but also made commercially tinged, fusion-based recordings (such as “Black Narcissus” and “Canyon Lady”). At the time of the Chicago gig, in February, 1978, he hadn’t been in the studio as a bandleader in nearly three years.

Like just about every major tenor saxophonist of his generation, Henderson was influenced by Coltrane, but Henderson absorbed that influence and transformed it into a mark of his own originality. He took on essential elements of Coltrane’s sound—the long low-note honks and growls and high-pitched screeches and wails—and he was inspired by Coltrane’s vehemence, how his energies from deep within seemed to burst out with reckless, self-revealing fervor. Yet where Coltrane is a natural complexifier, piling chords on chords and notes on notes and creating colossal intricacies even within jaunty phrases, Henderson is a simplifier, planing the harmonic field in order to dash ahead all the more ebulliently. Coltrane builds vertically, layering and intertwining the music into elaborately interlocking spirals; Henderson hurls out details and dashes through them, creating sonic landscapes for his relentless improvisational travels.

Notably, the first track on the new album, “Mr. P.C.,” is a Coltrane composition, an assertive romp that, a minute and a half in, already conjures a sense of having gone far fast. With buzzing and droning, wild high rasps and moans, fragmented and juddering phrases, roars and screams and split notes, beelike buzzing and hectic squalling, Henderson offers the sound-world of the avant-garde underpinned by songful riffs and a foot-stomping beat. At times, as in his solo on his own composition “Inner Urge,” these sound-shredding elements reach strident extremes untempered by thee rhythmic accompaniments of his bandmates—the pianist Joanne Brackeen, the bassist Steve Rodby, and the drummer Danny Spencer—who are keenly responsive partners in the high-spirited clamor.

Henderson also offers one of the most beautiful and unusual renditions of the classic modernist ballad “ ’Round Midnight” that I’ve ever heard. It starts with his unaccompanied solo saxophone; then, joined by the rest of the quartet, he bumps the tempo up to a bouncy stride and offers solos with thrilling velocity and intensity to match. He ends another ballad, “Good Morning Heartache,” with another free and unaccompanied cadenza that dives into the wild zone, buzzing and yodeling. I’ve listened to many of Henderson’s albums from early in his career through the seventies, and long beyond. The new one is what I’d play for a Martian who wanted to know the power and the freedom of Henderson’s art.

Cecil Taylor Unit, “Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts”
Elemental Music

Taylor, of course, is one of the prime creators of so-called free jazz, a genre largely defined by atonality, collective improvisation, ferocious intensity, and the absence of a foot-tapping beat. But the idiom’s paradoxes—and its deep roots in classic jazz—are reflected in the title of his composition “Fragments of a Dedication to Duke Ellington,” which fills the entirety of this two-disk album. The recording, from Paris on November 3, 1969, is by a quartet featuring two of Taylor’s longtime collaborators, the drummer Andrew Cyrille (who’s still active and recording) and the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, along with Sam Rivers—one of the prime free-jazz recording artists in his own right—on tenor and soprano saxes and flute. The group offers two separate performances of the same composition—one, from the afternoon set, and the other, from the evening. This is the first official release of the recordings, and hearing them is an ecstatic experience.

I’ve long thought of the great jazz musicians synesthetically, in terms of their implicit connections to other art forms. Taylor’s music has always struck me as bound with dance, for reasons that also help explain his deep connection to Ellington, beyond the similarities of their percussive piano styles and their efforts to create original group sounds. For much of Ellington’s career, his band was a dance band, playing in night clubs and at social gatherings which weren’t principally concerts, and his compositions and arrangements were designed to set people in motion. Taylor didn’t make his career playing for dancers (though he did, in 1990, accompany a choreographed dance performance), yet his music does much the same thing, in radically different ways that take a bit of teasing out. Taylor’s way of playing the piano evokes dance in its gestures, and he provokes the same effect from the entire group. At the keyboard, he doesn’t swing; he lurches and glides, leaps and thrusts and spins and jitters, unleashing torrents of notes at astounding speed, fragmenting his rhythms to their vanishing point. His free music manages to be intensely rhythmic nonethelesss, in a way that’s radically different from the familiar beats of foot-tapping jazz. His performances channel metabolic undulations, akin to breathing with the whole body, and they are liable to get even listeners in their seats, at home, moving along. By the end, a listener should feel not only exhilarated but also exhausted.

My only complaint about the new album is that the two versions of “Fragments”are presented in reverse chronological order—starting with the evening set, which runs forty-nine minutes, and followed by the afternoon one, which is nearly twice as long. The shorter version, heard first on the first disk, feels rushed; though the musicians are all inspired, the results feel somewhat unvaried. In the longer one, the quartet’s members have more solos and develop a wider range of moods, revealing the great variety that emerges from their relatively homogeneous and immensely complex style. It’s a grand, rich, and mighty experience—and the shorter rendition suggests that the quartet knew that they couldn’t top it or match it in such short order.

What the briefer version also lacks is the sense of stamina, of athleticism that’s at the heart of Taylor’s music. He was lean and in shape, as the album’s booklet and cover photos attest, and he remained so throughout his career. (I saw him, when he was nearing eighty, play with whirlwind thunder for an hour and a half, without interruption, amid the holy racket of his fifteen-to-twenty-piece big band.) Taylor’s music has a heroic, monumental sense of time; it occupies time the way that a staged spectacle occupies space, and, as a result, the forty-nine-minute evening set of “Fragments” seems slight, whereas the hour-and-a-half-plus version, for all its mind-wrenching and body-seizing intensity, fits properly in its dimensions. Taylor, who’d already made eleven studio albums, starting in 1956, hadn’t recorded any since October, 1966. As great as many of them are– notably, the last of that group, “Conquistador!”—this Paris concert is the earliest recording yet released to reveal the vast scope of his ambitions. ♦

By 1983, Tom Arndt was a few years into a project that consumed most of his life: creating a photographic portrait of American culture. He had lived through the hippie era, and at the dawn of the nineteen-eighties he thought he detected something new. Arndt had travelled to New York to photograph the 1981 ticker-tape parade that celebrated the release of American hostages held in Iran, which had coincided with the Inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. He told me that he remembers thinking, “This is a new kind of patriotism. This is not anti-Vietnam protests, or the generation that I was part of. This is balls-out ‘God Bless America.’ ”

Arndt decided to follow the national mood wherever it led, making portraits that found a home not in the world of journalism but in that of fine art, on the walls of galleries and museums. He returned to the Midwest, where he had grown up, and set about documenting the lives of farmers, homeless people, Holocaust survivors, politicians. He was living in Minneapolis when he heard about something interesting happening in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn, in the suburb of Bloomington, and decided to drive over with his cameras, a pair of Contax RTSIIs. A television-news crew captured the scene. “The lure of the movies drew them in droves,” the reporter said. “They were all hoping to land an extra role in a new movie called ‘Purple Rain,’ starring Prince, the Minneapolis rock star who has achieved national prominence.”

“Purple Rain,” the film and the associated album, arrived the next year; combined, they established Prince as something more than a mere rock star. He was suddenly a national obsession, a polarizing figure who was transformed, over the decades, into a consensus favorite. Especially since his death, a decade ago this week, he has come to be widely and rightly regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of popular music. But, on that day in Bloomington, Arndt encountered not a frenzied mob but a calm and quiet group, eager to be photographed by the people working for the film-production company, and willing, in some cases, to be photographed by him. (Arndt was careful to tell everyone that he had no connection to Prince.) He shot portraits for a few hours and then went home, feeling that they hadn’t turned out terribly well. “I did my best, and I didn’t think much of them,” he said. “If I had a delete button, I probably would have erased them—that’s why I’m grateful to be shooting film.”

He added the negatives to his voluminous collection and kept working, and didn’t even think to print contact sheets until last year, when he found himself curious about his afternoon among the “Purple Rain” hopefuls. He’d shot mostly closeups, emphasizing the faces and deëmphasizing the clothes, in hopes that the portraits would look timeless. But, when he looks at the images now, he is struck by how vividly they evoke 1983. “They are specifically anchored in that moment,” he said.

A number of Arndt’s subjects appear to be trying to dress like Prince, though this is not an easy assignment. On the record sleeve of his 1978 début album, “For You,” Prince poses shirtless in bed, with an acoustic guitar and his hair teased into an afro, like a seductive folk singer. But, in the years that followed, he borrowed from punk and New Wave, mixing jackets and trenchcoats with frills and lace and lingerie, slipping between styles and identities. The critic Nelson George, in an insightful and provocative book, “The Death of Rhythm & Blues,” published in 1988, wrote that not everyone enjoyed Prince’s slipperiness, and suggested that, by emphasizing racial ambiguity (for instance, through his “consistent use of mulatto and white leading ladies” in films and music videos), Prince “aided those who saw blackness as a hindrance in the commercial marketplace by running from it.” Nowadays, of course, no one questions Prince’s place in the pantheon of Black musicians, but in order to appreciate the magnitude of his imagination and his influence it’s important to remember how controversial he once seemed, and how confusing.

Arndt tried, above all, to be respectful of those young people gathered in the parking lot. “There were kids who were just in their underwear, and I didn’t photograph them,” he said. But his image of a young woman in hot pants, wielding a whip, captured the exuberant spirit of dress-up that predominated that day. The words “Prince” and “Purple Rain” evidently summoned forth a wide range of aspiring actors, and a wide range of styles; taken as a whole, they constitute a jumbled-up tribute to a performer who loved to keep people guessing. To one guy, dressing the part meant a sleek, light-colored sports coat. To another, it meant a fresh Jheri curl and a popped-collar jean jacket—state-of-the-art R. & B. mixed with old-fashioned rock and roll. One woman epitomizes punk chic in a beret and a spiked necklace. Two others are carefully layered and accessorized, perfecting the kind of theatrical eighties glamour that more or less disappeared with the end of the decade.

At one point in the afternoon, Arndt entered the hotel to find a bathroom, and bumped into Prince himself, accompanied by his bodyguard Charles (Big Chick) Huntsberry, who made Prince look even tinier than he was. But mainly he remembers the afternoon as a low-key get-together, despite the fashion. He has watched “Purple Rain” more than once, and never recognized anyone from the parking lot, which felt less like a would-be movie set and more like a local hangout. “I think that these portraits are very Minnesota,” he told me. “It’s not that they’re humble. They’re just quieter. If this was in Brooklyn, this casting call, it would be different.”