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Jazz Commentary: Louis Armstrong as Negotiator

October 2, 2020
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Throughout much of his career, Louis Armstrong negotiated a balance between being a “popular” artist and a jazz artist.

Book Review: “Jack” — The Romance of Revelation

October 1, 2020
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A taboo interracial romance may not be groundbreaking material for fiction, but Robinson’s spare conflicts are only the means to generate intimations of the profound in the everyday.

Opera Album Review: Offenbach in a Spanish Mood, in a Top-notch First Recording

October 1, 2020
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Bravo to the Bru Zane folks for this latest triumph! I encourage opera lovers to get to know this treasurable Spanish (or faux-Spanish) work by the pioneering master of nineteenth-century operetta.

Book Review: “Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong” — The King of All Kings

September 30, 2020
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He may be extreme as a polemicist, but Ricky Riccardi shines when he sticks to jazz’s history. 

Television Review: “Filthy Rich” — Crass Warfare

September 30, 2020
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For fans of novellas, Filthy Rich will be a trashy guilty pleasure.

Jazz Concert Review: The Lloyd-Hussain-Lage Trio — Live from Healdsburg

September 30, 2020
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Charles Lloyd and Julian Lage and Zakir Hussain served a loose, flowing 65-minute set with complementary facility that belied the novel circumstances.

Theater Review: Penny Arcade — Provincetown, Puritans, and the Pandemic

September 29, 2020
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I’ve hated enough people,” Penny Arcade confessed, “I can’t hate anyone new until 2022.”

Short Fuse Podcast #29 — A Birthday Show, Recorded Before 2020 Really Sucked

September 29, 2020
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No matter where our lives were at just nine months ago, most of us are now longing for those pre-pandemic days. Jump into this week’s jukebox of an episode for a trip back in time.

Poetry Remembrance: John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes” — Forever Young at 200

September 29, 2020
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Keats is comfortable in that ambiguous space between reality and the imagination, and you will find no finer example of Romantic poetry when he fuses them in the language of an erotic dream.

Concert Review: Farm Aid 2020 — The Promise of the Real

September 29, 2020
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When Willie dove into “On the Road Again” to close the set, singing of “making music with my friends,” one could envision the same hopes for Farm Aid to resume its annual trek to an amphitheater somewhere in America and stoke the communal cause.

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