YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: PERFORMING-ARTS: MUSIC

MUSIC: Jazz. As events in 1995 demonstrated, New York City's importance in jazz, while still primary, had diminished considerably. One sign of this was the attention attracted by jazz in the San Francisco Bay Area, where homegrown fusions of jazz and rock by young musicians became popular, while explorations by a variety of free musicians increased. Hip-bop and acid jazz are terms applied to San Francisco fusion music, which included jazz-rap groups and others that rearrange the jazz repertoire to fit the high volumes, metallic electric guitar sounds, and simpler, repeated rhythms of rock. Some of these fusion bands began to appear on recordings, the most noted of them probably being T.J. Kirk, named for Thelonious Monk, James Brown, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Meanwhile, bassist Lisle Ellis and guitarist Henry Kaiser; the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, especially Larry Ochs; the big band of tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman, which fused jazz and classical elements; Jon Jang's Pan-Asian Arkestra, which included traditional Chinese instruments and musical materials; and the Afro-Danish tenor saxophonist John Tchicai were catalysts in daring Bay Area explorations of free improvisation and composition. Like the established Berlin and Chicago festivals, the San Francisco Jazz Festival had become a forum for introducing native musicians to an international jazz audience. The 1995 festival featured a variety of young fusion bands as well as Spearman's 40-piece orchestra led by Cecil Taylor, one of the most influential jazz pianists, performing his complex compositions. There were a number of prominent anniversaries in 1995. The longest-running continuous jazz club, New York's Village Vanguard, was 60 years old. The famous jazz broadcaster Washington, D.C.-based Willis Conover celebrated his 40th year of spreading jazz throughout the world on the Voice of America. Two leading jazz record companies, both Europe-based, had their 20th anniversaries: Italy's Black Saint/Soul Note, which concentrated largely on American musicians, and the Swiss hatART (formerly hatHut), which documented Europeans such as flugelhornist Franz Koglmann and the Vienna Art Orchestra as well as Americans such as multi-instrumentalists Joe McPhee and Anthony Braxton, Taylor, and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy at valuable length and which reissued important small-label LPs on CD as well. London-based Leo Records, which had begun by releasing jazz albums by underground Soviet musicians, was 15 years old. Among festivals the largest, the 20-year-old North Sea Jazz Festival, drew 67,000 listeners to three days of concerts by 1,300 musicians on 15 stages in The Hague. The Vancouver (B.C.) Jazz Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary, as did the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival at the University of Idaho. The most prominent jazz musicians cooperative, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, presented a 30th-anniversary festival in Chicago, where it had been born. As support for jazz from U.S. state and federal arts endowments continued to dwindle in 1995, the most prominent private supporter, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, granted $5.1 million to underwrite its Jazz Network for another five years. The network represented six regional arts organizations throughout the U.S., among other projects, and the fund had donated nearly $19 million to jazz projects since 1991. The New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, which had a unique history of teaching and supporting jazz, joined with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz to establish a new curriculum, with teaching residencies by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, and pop-jazz saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr., along with long-established senior artists such as swing tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, pioneer bop drummer Max Roach, and pioneer free jazz bassist Charlie Haden. The major record companies' search for young lions yielded two prominent players, pianist Jacky Terrasson and a 21-year-old New Orleans, La., trumpeter with an unusually rich tone and a fabulous technique, Nicholas Payton, whose approach wavered between swing and bop. Payton released two albums and played at the Chicago Jazz Festival with pianist Ellis Marsalis. Marsalis' trio made up half of the album Joe Cool's Blues (Columbia), music from "Charlie Brown" television cartoon specials, and Marsalis' son Wynton led his septet on the other half. Another Marsalis, tenor saxophonist Branford, fired insults at host Jay Leno when he quit leading NBC's "Tonight Show" band, where the quantity of jazz had dwindled severely. He was replaced by jazz guitarist Kevin Eubanks. Composer-multiwoodwind player Anthony Braxton was the subject of a three-night festival at New York's Kitchen, at which he presented multimedia works for orchestra, medleys of big band compositions, and operatic compositions with singers and shifting ensembles; some of the pieces dated from the 1970s, and a number received their first public performances at the festival. His valuable Creative Orchestra (Kln) 1978 (hatART) was released, as was his Composition No. 174, for 10 percussionists, speakers, and controlled environment (Leo). The first release of alto saxophone giant Ornette Coleman's Harmolodic label was Tone Dialing, by his electric Prime Time band. While fellow saxophonist Henry Threadgill proved more successful in integrating Coleman's harmolodic principles with rock-influenced guitars and rhythms in his band Very Very Circus, his Carry The Day (Columbia) often sounded unfocused amid a welter of singers and instrumentalists. There were no misgivings about the joyous hard bop of tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin on Chicago, New York, Paris (Verve), with trumpeter Roy Hargrove, about the solo piano of Randy Weston on Marrakech in the Cool of the Evening (Verve), or about the trio of tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, pianist Marilyn Crispell, and drummer Hamid Drake on Destiny (Okkadisk). Among other releases, Drake appeared with Brtzmann on The Dried Rat-Dog (Okkadisk), alto saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell presented his lyrical side on Hey, Donald (Delmark), tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and composer-arranger Gunther Schuller collaborated on Rush Hour (Blue Note), and a pair of younger free musicians, Joe Morris (guitar) and Rob Brown (alto saxophone), offered Illuminate (Leo). Although the quantity of important reissues declined, Blue Note offered Bob Graettinger's 1951 massive, atonal City of Glass by the Stan Kenton Orchestra, and Mosaic's boxed sets included The Complete Capitol Recordings of Duke Ellington and The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions on both LP and CD. As Columbia issued Miles Davis' The Complete Plugged Nickel Sessions from 1965 on CD, Mosaic issued it on LP. While drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath replaced the late Connie Kay in the Modern Jazz Quartet, Atlantic released Dedicated to Connie, from an outstanding 1960 MJQ concert held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Yugos. The death of lyric trumpeter Don Cherry (see OBITUARIES), a pioneer of free jazz, was keenly felt. The year's other deaths included arranger-saxophonist Julius Hemphill, pianist Don Pullen, lyric guitarist Jimmy Raney, drummer Art Taylor, bandleader and saxophonist Junior Walker (see OBITUARIES), and critic Frederic Ramsey. (JOHN LITWEILER) This updates the article music, history of. MUSIC: Popular. British popular music had a great year in 1995. A whole batch of new guitar-based bands took attention away from American pop and generated such media interest and excitement that the new "Britpop" scene was being compared to the golden age of the British music industry of the mid-1960s. The best-known and most publicized of the newcomers were the Manchester band Oasis and the London-based Blur, whose rivalry was likened to the north-south clash between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones 30 years earlier (though in musical terms Blur sounded more like the Kinks or Small Faces, while Oasis sounded like the Stones attempting to imitate the Beatles). When both bands released a new single in the same week in August, the contest to see which would be the most popular became a national obsession. Blur won on this occasion with the song "Country House," but the commercial success of the second Oasis album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, which went straight to the top of the chart in the first week of its release, showed that they retained an enormous following. There were many other new bands snapping at their heels, from Pulp to Suede (known as London Suede in the U.S., they caused something of a stir when they were given top billing over Bob Dylan at a summer festival). The youngest of the bunch, Supergrass, led by 18-year-old Gaz Coombes, sold enough copies of their first album, I Should Coco, for it to be awarded platinum status just one month after its release, something their record label, Parlophone, had not experienced since the Beatles released their debut album, Please Please Me, in the 1960s. Like the early Beatles, Supergrass had a knack for writing catchy and hummable pop tunes, though the lyrics to hit singles such as "Caught by the Fuzz" and "Alright" tended to deal with getting into trouble with the police or with youthful lust. Female newcomers included members of bands such as Echobelly and Elastica, as well as PJ Harvey, a striking-looking performer who mixed her brooding, bluesy rock songs with a sense of menace and unease. The more experimental side of the new music was represented by Tricky and Portishead, who were classified as dance artists but who produced records that were languid yet gently unnerving and edgy. Portishead, fronted by singer Beth Gibbons, won the year's Mercury Music Prize for the album Dummy, which mixed samples taken from recordings by anyone from Weather Report to Isaac Hayes into their own pained and eerie soulful songs. Away from the new Britpop there were further experiments by more established artists. David Bowie was reunited with producer Brian Eno, with whom he had recorded such classic albums as Low in the 1970s, and the resulting Outside was a marked improvement on much of Bowie's recent work. Eno also collaborated with the Irish band U2, not just as producer but also as a comember of Passengers, a new group they had formed. Their album Original Soundtracks 1 was remarkable for the song "Miss Sarajevo," a drifting, atmospheric piece on which they were joined by opera star Luciano Pavarotti. With British music in such a vibrant state, it was appropriate that veteran heroes also should make a comeback. The Rolling Stones continued their Voodoo Lounge world tour and for the first time allowed one of their songs to be used on a commercial. Microsoft Corp. paid them a record 8 million for the use of the 1981 hit "Start Me Up" as part of the campaign to launch Windows 95. Even so, it seemed that the Rolling Stones would be upstaged by the three remaining members of the Beatles. Twenty-six years after their last recording session together, the three announced plans to release 150 Beatles tracks that had never been heard before, enough for three double CDs. These would include remixed alternative versions of well-known Beatles classics, studio outtakes, home recordings, and cover versions. Most intriguing of all was the promise of three new songs, including one by John Lennon. He had recorded "Free as a Bird" in the 1970s, accompanying himself on piano, and the track was now transformed as Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr added bass, guitar, and percussion backing. All this was timed to coincide with a major television history of the band, "The Beatles Anthology," and it was predicted that 15 years after Lennon's murder, the Fab Four would once again be the biggest act in the world. Outside Britain the best European album came from France, where Les Negresses Vertes proved that they had survived the death of their leader, Helno, by releasing Zig-Zague, a delightful mixture of French balladry, flamenco, and North African rai styles. From Africa there were strong albums from the Zairean veteran Papa Wemba, from the South African reggae star Lucky Dube, and from Salif Keita, "the golden voice of Mali," who moved away from Western jazz-funk and back toward African influences on Folon. (ROBIN DENSELOW)