Two of music’s powerful visionaries died this week. The songs they meticulously constructed offered an escape their makers struggled to realize in their own lives.

Following Sly Stone's passing, we explore how one of the funk icon's most enduring grooves turns minimal harmony into maximum impact

Sly Stone, whose band Sly and the Family Stone electrified Woodstock audiences and introduced a genre-fusing brand of psychedelic funk with hits such as “Family Affair” and “Everyday People” but then mostly vanished from the music scene for decades in the grip of drug abuse,

Sometimes death, as life, brings strange symmetries. Two music revolutionaries, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, both died within two days of each other. Each was 82.

Sylvester Stewart — known to most of the world as Sly Stone, who passed away at 82 on Monday — was one of the most important musicians not only of the rock-soul era — because his music combined both,

Sly and the Family Stone became the poster children for a particularly San Francisco sensibility of the late Sixties: integrated, progressive, indomitably idealistic. Their music, a combustible ...