Joe Lovano playing the classic Ornette Coleman tune. According to “derricksax,” “thats actually not a soprano saxophone, its called a tarogato, and I believe it is a Bulgarian instrument – cross between the fingerings and wood construction of a clarinet and the tone of a soprano saxophone.” With annoying voiceovers from bassist Esperanza Spalding and…
Garry Wills, also important
In his reminiscence of William F. Buckley, Garry Wills writes the following: Later, he sailed or skied with John Kenneth Galbraith and Walter Cronkite (I sailed with both), not because they were celebrities but because he liked them and admired their minds.
Very Clever, Those Armenians
Back in the day—way, way back in the day, in 1960—I first saw It Happened One Night, at age 15 on a 17-inch TV. When the walls of Jericho finally fell, I wondered to myself “Well, since they know how to make good movies, why aren’t they all like this?” Forty-nine years later, I’m still…
Musette Explosion—“Gitan Swing”
The Musette Explosion performing at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture on October 30th, 2008. “Gitan Swing” composed by Tony Murena. Will Holshouser, Accordion, Matt Munisteri, Guitar, and Marcus Rojas, Tuba. Django, one might say, lives. Afterwords Not enough tuba, eh? And what’s with the ragged cut-off, Brooklyn Public Library? Anyway, it’s…
Just think of it as the digital equivalent of spitting
William Saletan, who must have just a bit of a nicotine jones, gives an extended if not long-winded thumbs up to the latest thing in club gear, electronic cigarettes. I’m not interested enough to actually figure out how the damn things work, but Saletan, who earlier waxed eloquent on new smokeless tobacco products that “consist…
Early Monk—“Blue Monk”
The famous “Sound of Jazz” clips of Monk. The show aired December 8, 1957. This is the earliest footage I know of Monk, and he’s still wearing period “bebop” attire. Monk was mightily irritated that Count Basie decided to insert himself in the proceedings. I reviewed an early, cheap version of a “Sound of Jazz”…
The new, improved Doonesberry! Now with Anti-Semitism added!
Okay, I don’t think that Gary Trudeau thinks of himself as an anti-Semite, but the May 31 Doonesberry slides into some awfully unattractive territory. Boopsie’s daughter Samantha starts quizzing Rev. Sloan on the old Protestant riff that the God of the Old Testament is a God of Wrath, while the God of the New Testament…
Rock n’ Roll all night long. All night long.
The New York Times begins a seven-part series on master Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren. Yeah. That Han van Meegeren.
When Reagan Killed Bernstein
Michael O’Donnell, writing in the Washington Monthly, takes down Barry Seldes’s Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, which blames Lennie’s artistic collapse on the election of Ronald Reagan, rather than booze and boys. Well, it’s a theory. Via Arts and Letters (again).
Let them wear Nikes
Nice piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Mara Hvistendahl on “The Great Forgetting: 20 Years After Tiananmen Square”, via Arts & Letters. Seen largely through the eyes of Kang Zhengguo, author of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, who participated in the famous demonstrations, the article describes how the Chinese government dealt…