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Jazz Album Review: Gustavo Cortiñas’s “Live in Chicago” — The Culmination of a Decade’s Worth of Music

March 6, 2024
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Throughout this superb live album, percussionist Gustavo Cortiñas allows his fellow band members an enormous amount of space, and that is welcome because of their high level of musicianship.

Book Review: Akshat Rathi’s “Climate Capitalism” — We Have Made Progress

March 6, 2024
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This encouraging book highlights the preponderance of positive developments regarding the efforts, worldwide, to deal with climate change.

Jazz Album Review: Abdullah Ibrahim’s “3” – Meditations on a Legacy

March 5, 2024
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A new release from Abdullah Ibrahim adds almost 100 minutes to a legacy of paramount importance to jazz, to world music, and to our understanding of a life lived in art.

Book Review: The Life and Times of Keith Haring, An Iconic Artist

March 5, 2024
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This biography of Keith Haring is a compendium of vivid, first-person narratives that provide an engaging insider’s perspective on the artist’s life.

Film Review: “Make Me Famous” – In Search of Edward Brezinski

March 5, 2024
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“Make Me Famous” is not the portrait of a superstar like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring; this protagonist is representative of the everyday angst, the struggle, the not-making-it, and the work that was produced regardless.

Book Review: “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson” — Generous and Eloquent

March 4, 2024
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This arch-New Englander, descendant of Puritans, is also “the American who resists branding, who will not be commodified.”

Book Reviews: Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan — Together Again

March 3, 2024
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Because they were masters of performance, metamorphosis, and movement — of “containing multitudes” — Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan are the closest peers to Whitman America has yet produced.

Classical Music Concert Preview: Cappella Clausura to Perform Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D

March 2, 2024
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Mass in D was Ethel Smyth’s first large-scale score and, according to Cappella Clausura conductor Amelia LeClair, the composition expressed her yearning for hope and redemption.

March Short Fuses — Materia Critica

March 2, 2024
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Book Review: “How to Build a Boat” — A Novel That Breaks and Lifts the Heart

March 1, 2024
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This splendid book should be read by every child and adult who is convinced he doesn’t “fit in.”

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