Jazz, Popular and Other
The Price of Jazz
Jazz Gallery’s Legacy and Ledger Latest music organization to enter the tight local real estate market: the Jazz Gallery, which lost the lease on its loft at Hudson and Spring streets after 17 years. Moving an ongoing venture at any time is painful, but seldom worse than right now in Manhattan, where the Gallery wants...
Classical Music / Galleries/Gallery Beat / Jazz, Popular and Other / Museums / Music / Theater / Visual Art
Tennessee’s Quiet Storm
Transforming the Classic ‘Streetcar’ Nicole Ari Parker has a triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire that our mainstream media and the cli-quish Tony Awards are ill-equipped to handle. Parker’s ravishing, statuesque presence and intelligent skill make the play what it always ought to have been: a genuine contest between America’s sexual and political hypocrisies; social...
Remembering Adam Yauch and Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot
Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot Directed by Adam Yauch Midway through 2008, something surprising has happened: two films with human dimension and artful expression–Adam Yauch’s Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness–have flushed the toilet of summer movies. Neither is a special effects extravaganza but they stir emotion by emphasizing the human scale...
Planet Waves
Why “Free Radio” Rocks “Once upon a time” began Bob Dylan in June, 1965 and his 10-20 page “rhythm thing” became the six minute rock phenomenon “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song hit the radio waves a month later and the “be bright, be brief” juke box format of radio programming changed forever. At CUE...
Soulful Realism and Romance
Womack Shows Steve Harvey How to Think Ben Kessler takes a critical look at Think Like A Man Act Like A Woman, the Steve Harvey-based bestseller and box-office phenomenon that stole the spotlight from The Hunger Games blockbuster and contrasts its musical recording version with the soul music legacy. As demonstrated in The Nutty Professor...
On the Record
Reviewing New Jazz Now The organizing principle behind this batch of records: They’re recent releases by NYC-based talents, recommended for originality and freshness. They’re all worth hearing more than once, and constitute discoveries. You don’t need to be told you’ll like Keith Jarrett’s solo Rio, right? Roots Before Branches, by drummer Henry Cole and the...
Imelda’s Dancing Shoes
David Byrne mythifies Marcos in ‘Here Lies Love’ The ambivalence provoked by women who wield power is reflected in the current photo-manipulation meme “Texts From Hillary,” in which a half-scowling secretary of state, peering dismissively down at her BlackBerry through sunglasses, fires scathing bits of digital wit at supplicants including Joe Biden, Mark Zuckerberg and...
Tarab! Allah! Sonia!
Sonia M’Barek’s All-Worlds Music For 500 years, Jews, Muslims and Christians created an immensely rich multicultural society in Andalusia, bursting with fresh ideas in math, science and the arts. This cultural fusion is epitomized in the music of the time, a unique form blending court music from Baghdad, medieval chant, synagogue hymns and local Iberian...
Drawlin’ from Nawlins
Dr. John goes BAM Dr. John’s nine-concert, three-week residency featuring three different programs at Brooklyn Academy of Music started last Thursday night with a classic example of New Orleans’ lackadasicality meeting institutional overkill. To have a good time in the Crescent City, you do your thing and rely on what’s always worked. To fill the...
Tarab! Allah!, Sonia!
M’Barek’s All-Worlds Music For five hundred years, Jews, Muslims, and Christians created an immensely rich, multicultural society in Andalusia, bursting with fresh ideas in math, science, and the arts. This cultural fusion is epitomized in the music of the time, a unique form blending court music from Baghdad, medieval chant, synagogue hymns, and local Iberian...
Expanding Yard
Miss Lilly Brings A Jamaican Cultural Hub to New York The clusters of tiny enterprises—let’s say a ramshackle recording studio nestled behind a patty shop and sided by an ice cream vendor—that dot Kingston, Jamaica’s downtown urbanscape are known as “yards,” one-stop destinations catering to the island’s basic needs for food and music and testifying...
Musiquarium
SFJAZZ Collective Plays Stevie Wonder Stevie Wonder might not seem an obvious composer for the SFJAZZ Collective’s focus, given its past performances have been inspired by the music of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk. But the brilliant R&B and soul artist more than fulfilled its criteria for a composer who produces...
Coalminer’s Canary
Springsteen Plays Politics For Armond White’s “Not-So Brilliant Disguise” article, click here. Bruce Springsteen recently told ABC News, “I genuinely believe an artist [is] supposed to be the canary in the coal mine, and you’re better off with a certain distance from the seat of power.” He has criticized several aspects of the president’s handling...
CITYARTS ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Not-So Brilliant Disguise
Following this week’s CityArts cover theme, Bruce Springsteen’s ballyhooed new album Wrecking Ball is considered by Editor Armond White and critic Ben Kessler who examine the contradictions when artists pursue the personal in the political. Read it here, only at CityArts. Springsteen’s New Album Wrecks Faith “Why does he sing like that, he’s from...
Something from Nowhere
The Ting Tings’ Pet ‘Sounds’ From the name on down, The Ting Tings’ second album, Sounds from Nowheresville, shows that remarkably little has changed for the pop duo since their platinum-selling debut, We Started Nothing (2008). It took four years for Katie White and Jules de Martino to shake off their success and return to...
A New Day Dawns
Why Doris Day matters By Dennis Delrogh Long before Beyoncé covered “At Last” in homage to Etta James, Doris Day in 1964 did the same and disclosed that she had always wished she could sing with James’ abandon. Day has become the surviving member of her big band generation of superstar singers, who include Frank...
Nonstop Herbie
Charting Hancock’s musical voyages Who is this particular Herbie Hancock appearing at Jazz at Lincoln Center March 9 and 10? Not the keyboardist who enlisted Dave Matthews, The Chieftains, India.Arie, Los Lobos et al. as guest stars on his latest album, The Imagine Project, or who won by surprise the Grammy for Record of the...
Listening to People: How the Swiss keep jazz Intakt
With no background of blues, gospel or swing, what does “jazz” sound like? A two-week festival March 1–15 at The Stone of the Zurich-based musicians who record for the Swiss record label Intakt offers intriguing examples. Pianist Irene Schweizer will perform powerful, blocky improvisations. Pierre Favre, her frequent accompanist and one of Europe’s busiest drummers,...
The Whitney Houston Dream: Broadway Lessons from a Pop Diva
Among Broadway’s young theater gypsies, Whitney Houston’s 1994 performance at the American Music Awards has been circulating as a unique theatrical tribute. Houston never appeared in a Broadway show, but her AMA medley of “I Loves You Porgy” and “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”—preserved in a 10-minute YouTube clip—connects to the current...
Through the Eye of the Camp: Parsing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Old Ideas’
Leonard Cohen bookends his new album Old Ideas with a song about mortality (“Going Home”) and a song about the divided culture (“Different Sides”). Throughout, Cohen refines the use of gospel-impulse female singers who added vitality to his own special, deep-toned gravity on the great 1992 The Future (remember the title track’s exhortations to “Repent!”)....
Rihanna’s True Confession: A Pop Star’s Music Video Rebellion
“Trust the tale, not the teller,” D.H. Lawrence’s essential dictum, applies to Rihanna’s recent music video “We Found Love.” Transparently autobiographical in its reference to the 2009 assault incident involving Rihanna and Chris Brown, “We Found Love” answers back to those tellers—in this case gossip-mongers and pundits—whose pontifications reduced Rihanna and Brown to domestic-abuse stereotypes....
