Prolific jazz/R&B trumpeter Donald Byrd has passed away at age 80. After a career-launching stint with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Byrd went on to record more than 40 solo albums, in addition to sideman gigs with the likes of Monk, Coltrane, and Hancock.

Cynthia Hopkins, whose Walker-co-comissioned This Clement World opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York Tuesday, offers a song from the music-theater piece—a climate-crisis reworking of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

Immigrant women are having fewer children, Barbara Crossette, author of two UN population reports, tells Laurie Anderson. “It shows that if you just let women from the developing world have the same rights—or, rather, access—that we have, they make smart decisions.”

Sax player Colin Stetson (Sound Horizon 2012) drops a new LP, New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light, Apr. 30. Mixed by Ben Frost (who plays a Walker-copresented gig in St. Paul next week), it features four tracks with vocals by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver).

New music pioneer Butch Morris has passed away at 65 after a battle with cancer. The inventor of “conduction”—“an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor”—he has worked with an array of artists, from Christian Marclay and John Zorn to Burnt Sugar.

Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier’s favorite album, the Stones’ Tattoo You, poses questions and codes he wants to crack: “Why are these guitars so rough? Why is everything so ragged?” And, of the “sassy” Mick Jagger, “Why is he so excited to be yelling in this part?”

A team of USC researchers is analyzing the science of beatboxing: Using MRI technology, they aim to document the array of sounds produced by a bilingual LA rapper and, ultimately, compare noises with those produced in different global languages.

Steve Kramer, accordionist and frontman for the ‘80s punk-polka group the Wallets, has died at age 59. Prior to the Wallets, he played with James Chance and the Contortions, including a gig at the legendary Walker-copresented M-80 Festival in 1979.

With music widely banned in Islamist-controlled areas of Mali, the Glastonbury Festival announced it’ll be highlighting Malian musicians this year, with Rokia Traoré—who played the Walker in 2004—kicking off the event.