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World Music Album Review: Bassist Alune Wade’s Brilliant “Sultan” — A Global Patchwork Quilt

August 5, 2022
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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.

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August Short Fuses – Materia Critica

August 5, 2022
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

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Poetry Commentary: Native American Poet and Activist Joy Harjo at Tanglewood — A Disappointment

August 4, 2022
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Many have surrendered to Joy Harjo’s undeniable shamanistic charms and classify her as a national treasure.

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Visual Arts Review: “Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone” — A Problematic Reevaluation

August 4, 2022
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Are visitors supposed to feel some sort of guilty pleasure if they find Mary Ann Unger’s Across the Bering Strait powerfully mesmeric?

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Visual Arts Remembrance: Pop Art Icon Claes Oldenburg Dead at 93

August 3, 2022
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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s work can be found in the collections of major modern art museums throughout the United States and Europe.

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Book Review: “Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld” — A Tale of Mobsters and Musicians

August 3, 2022
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Guitarist Eddie Condon quotes a mobster on jazz: “…it’s got guts and it don’t make you slobber.”

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Classical Album Review: Short Can Be Good — Three Splendidly Varied One-Act Operas by Lennox Berkeley

August 3, 2022
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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.

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Festival Review: 2022 Newport Jazz Festival — A Relaxed Musical Vibe, Communal and Diverse

August 3, 2022
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To some degree, everything fit under the resilient umbrella that the late George Wein raised at the edge of Newport Harbor.

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Theater Review: “Grand Horizons” — Divorce Geriatric Style

August 2, 2022
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Grand Horizons at the Gloucester Stage Company is a wild, funny, and sometimes wonderfully touching ride.

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Film Review: “Nope” – Behold, the Great American Spectacle

August 2, 2022
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Nope, Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated third feature, is an awe-inspiring marvel about our own unrelenting obsession with spectacle.

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