“One of the positives to come out of this whole [pandemic lockdown] experience is that everyone found out what is important in their lives. Those of us who love music realized just how special it is.”
Music
World Music Album Review: Bassist Alune Wade’s Brilliant “Sultan” — A Global Patchwork Quilt
Sultan has a solid lock on my year-end best of 2022 list. Let’s make the world a little smaller and make this album a hit.
Book Review: “Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld” — A Tale of Mobsters and Musicians
Guitarist Eddie Condon quotes a mobster on jazz: “…it’s got guts and it don’t make you slobber.”
Classical Album Review: Short Can Be Good — Three Splendidly Varied One-Act Operas by Lennox Berkeley
I was pleased to encounter all three compact operas. Lennox Berkeley seems to me more and more an admirable, indeed lovable composer, and a bit of a chameleon. I like him in all his various colors.
Festival Review: 2022 Newport Jazz Festival — A Relaxed Musical Vibe, Communal and Diverse
To some degree, everything fit under the resilient umbrella that the late George Wein raised at the edge of Newport Harbor.
Book Review: “The Stone Age: Sixty Years of the Rolling Stones” — A Tabloid Take
The Stone Age is only about the gossip, to the point where even when something (potentially) true comes along, it still reads like trash.
Listening During Covid, Part 13 — Music of Brazil and Other Latin American Countries, Religious Consolation from Post-WW II England, and an Operatic Novel
New recordings serve up fine performances of music from Latin America, Brazil, and post-1918 England. And a novel sends its main character back two centuries into Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
Classical Album Review: What Is American — PUBLIQuartet
American-ness in music is impossible to define and constantly in flux, yet the threads that connect it all together – at once beautiful, tragic, humorous, ironic, whimsical – are all somehow recognizable.
Classical Album Review: Weill & Shostakovich Symphonies
Taken together, this is a release that showcases both the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and its chief conductor – as well as their repertoire choices – in a brilliant light.
2022 Newport Folk Festival Review: An Occasion for Awe
The Newport Folk Festival’s biggest secrets were cleanly hidden and tightly executed with the day-capping revelations of Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell.