Music
Ornette Coleman turned to me and said, “You know, you can never really be out of tune. You are always in tune with something.”
The centenary of bassist/composer Charles Mingus’ birthday is days away and I am listening to the beautifully packaged and processed and richly annotated 3 lps of Mingus’s Lost Album, recorded live at Ronnie Scott’s London club in 1972.
The Boston Early Music Festival returns in person — and in a world-premiere recording of a German Baroque opera.
Big Thief is a largely somber folk-rock outfit fronted by introspective singer/songwriter Adrianne Lenker that doesn’t care much about showmanship.
It’s a work that shifts gears often, which is not in itself a bad idea for a book about a famed shape-shifter.
Charli packages existential angst and heartache in sly, self aware pop performances that manage to deftly fuse self-conscious artificiality with earnest passion.
Recently, some artists have come out of the closet and put their prog hearts on their sleeves with new recordings that celebrate the heyday of progressive rock.
When listeners outsource their listening to streaming organizations, as they commonly do, they are often directed to music that has been selected to fatten up someone’s bottom line, not to enrich and expand their musical lives.
These two superb new releases were both recorded at a former fire station in Connecticut.
Music Commentary: Jazz, Ed Sullivan, and Television
These performances on The Ed Sullivan Show occurred almost exclusively between 1957 and 1964 and that’s not happenstance. They coincide with the only slice of time when different styles of jazz ever got a significant airing on television.
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