Music
Despite its flaws, Dreaming Zenzile reflects, with power, on the difficult relationship between art and activism.
This is an album that’s at once musically significant but, more than that, thoroughly enjoyable. How tragic that, largely on account of her race and gender, Florence Price’s music was almost erased.
Pianist Billy Lester is an amusingly dry fellow who is also a deeply serious, idiosyncratic musician.
Others may hear a painfully flawed Latin jazz album, but what I heard was a brilliant postmodern ironic jam session in the mode of Ornette Coleman. I’m probably wrong, but I don’t care, because this album is a blast.
Oscar Peterson always seemed at his best live, which is how we find the pianist in this beautifully recorded, newly issued set.
Prodigy, post-Parker junkie, dead by homicide at a young age (1938-1972). Whatever. The myth shouldn’t crowd out the player. Musically, trumpeter Lee Morgan was a muthahfucka..
To this listener, the quartet generates a drama of gradual enlightenment, as if extroversion signified some sort of illumination.
This album offers a Baedeker of pianist Ran Blake’s cinematic effects, the mis-en-scene for a narrative musical imagination unlike any other.
David Bowie’s Toy is a solid, enjoyable, and buoyant effort from an artist who never failed to stay interesting and vital well into his later years.
Cultural Commentary: Death by Incorporation — Why Do Bean-Counters Run Arts Boards?