Category: AJBlogs

Here’s a Flash Mob video featuring a huge number of Muscovites having more fun than may be legal in Russia, dancing to the most joyous and metrically challenging song Irving Berlin ever composed. – Doug Ramsey

Solange LaFitte is mooching backstage at the dilapidated New York theatre. Everyone has arrived at the Weismann follies reunion party. And something sticks out of an old props basket – a shabby feather boa. Solange fishes it out, sizes it up. It’s grey – soft-toned down or just deeply-embedded grime? – David Jays

Could Harry Burleigh — Antonin Dvorak’s African-American assistant — be considered an Uncle Tom? These days, the question comes up whenever Burleigh comes up: it’s a symptom of the times. And it is addressed head-on over the course of the most recent PostClassical Ensemble WWFM podcast. – Joe Horowitz

Long ago, Billie Holiday dubbed Lester Young the President of The Tenor Saxophone. The title long since morphed into “Prez.” – Doug Ramsey

Much of the 16th-century music that New York Polyphony performed last Saturday night has a Rorschach quality: without typical polarities like major and minor keys, the music acquires an abstraction, prompting reactions that can be hugely different for each listener — and on every encounter — dictated by where the performers connect in these webs of notes and what the listener’s psyche zeros in on. – David Patrick Stearns

Having reviewed the Morgan Library & Museum’s extensive 2010 renovation, I didn’t expect to be writing about another major Morgan re-do any time soon. – Lee Rosenbaum

Recently I had the pleasure of reconnecting with a friend and colleague. The Community Engagement Network hosted a conversation with Lyz Crane addressing the topic of creative placemaking and community engagement. – Doug Borwick

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music)
Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. – Doug Ramsey

In Rockaby we hear the whispered thoughts of an old woman during the last twenty-five minutes of her life accompanied by the dirge of four distant trombones. “Those arms at last…”
Abbie Conant, actress, singer, all four trombones
– Jan Herman

Seemingly the go-to journalist for scholars seeking to debunk the painting’s attribution to Leonardo da Vinci, Darya Alberge wrote about “an apparent snub from the Louvre in Paris, which is understood to have cancelled plans to display Salvator Mundi in its major Leonardo exhibition.” But a passage, tacked on at the end of her article, seems to contradict that statement. – Lee Rosenbaum