Jon Garelick
A Boston jazz critic’s notebook — three shows at Regattabar and one at the Lilypad.
Music is one of the ways we experience time — Satoko Fujii and the musicians in “GEN” make it disappear.
Put Bill Charlap in that camp of brilliant jazz originals who have plied their trade by playing songs by other people and making them definitively their own.
“PoemJazz” is a project where music and poetry reinforce each other, where the declaimed poetry works like the sung line of a song — though Robert Pinsky never sings or pretends to.
This might not be everybody’s idea of who Maria Callas was, but the film is plausible, and honest. You can watch Angelina Jolie’s Maria and think, so that’s what it was like to be her.
Most in the Berklee audience seemed satisfied with the chance to be in South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s presence, subdued perhaps, but still casting a magisterial aura.
In Godwin Louis’s music, prayer seems best expressed in dance.
If Fernando Huergo’s band of A-list Boston players sounded especially inspired, it was certainly in no small part due to what he was giving them to play.
Pianist Ran Blake’s performance was like a long dreamscape of personal reflection and meditation.
Arts Remembrance: Francis Davis, 1946-2025
There are few critics as worth re-reading as the late Francis Davis, whose writings are filled with musical and cultural insight, erudition, literary grace, and, most valued now, humor.
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