The cast for this Boston Lyric Opera production was first-rate, and composer Terence Blanchard has worked in a wide variety of jazz styles and shifts gears to keep the score swinging throughout.
Con Chapman
Books Commentary: Chronicler of Boston Crime — The Case for George V. Higgins
George V. Higgins created a style that was at first revelatory, then degenerated into a tic at the end of his career.
Book Review: Writer Flannery O’Connor — The Most Un-Hip Woman Imaginable, and Proud of It.
If this collection has one failing, it is its attempt to make Flannery O’Connor into something she was not: “woke.”
Arts Remembrance: Emily Remler — The Short Life and Sad Death of a Jazz Guitarist
Emily Remler took a particularly clear-eyed view of her work. She didn’t want to be judged by a lesser standard because she was a woman in the overwhelmingly male world of jazz.
Book Review: “Rabbit’s Blues” — The Reserved Tenderness of Johnny Hodges
Johnny Hodges was originally a Cambridge/Boston guy, and one of the most interesting sections of Con Chapman biography is his knowledgeable description of the local jazz scene in the 1910’s and ’20s.