Max Roach: Last News

In February 1961, a remarkable outburst took place at the United Nations in New York – jazz artists Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, writer Maya Angelou and others crashed the Security Council to protest the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

Recordings of 9/11 news reports, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches and Henry Aaron’s 715th home run will be preserved alongside Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and other albums and singles — and one podcast — as the Library of Congress released its 2022 list of additions to the National Recording Registry today. See the full list below.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorAfter two years of pandemic-induced shutdown and Omicron-postponed reopenings in December and January, Iridium, the downstairs music club in New York’s Times Square known as the “home of Les Paul,” is finishing the second week of its grand reopening, which launched on March 1 with a performance by the Harlem Blues Project, followed by four shows with a fiery jazz-rock band led by guitarist Mike Stern (featuring the great Randy Brecker on cornet), blues guitarist King Solomon Hicks, veteran folksinger Tom Rush and tonight and Saturday, guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and jazz guitarist Larry Carlton, including sets focused on his extensively 1970s work with Steely Dan.The unusually intimate (for New York, anyway) 170-capacity downstairs club, which has updated its cleaning procedures and air-filtration system, returned with a full menu (including entrees like “The Les Paul” burger and the plant-based “Jerry Garcia”) a robust wine list and many (potent) specialty cocktails. The club is also launching Iridium Underground, a new series focused on emerging artists, next week with Brooklyn-based guitarist-producer Mario and the Mood.

“I believe that a big reason why this ambitious idea of throwing a music festival in Harlem in which somewhere between 70,000 to 90,000 people every weekend would see performances was so that there was something joyous and hopeful for people at that point were kind of at the end of their rope,” Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says about the importance the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival had to a Black America ravaged by violence and assassination.