Category: AJBlogs

Toward the end of last year someone asked what was the most important reason for arts organizations to embrace community engagement: economic viability or cultural justice. But those issues are not separate ones. — Doug Borwick

There aren’t many props in dance. Some may intrude on classical ballet; otherwise, anything that gets in the way of bodies is considered clutter. That’s not the case with Bourne’s Swan Lake, in which the prince’s suicide note turns out to be the key to the story’s emotional power. — David Jays

I don’t know exactly how many chapbooks, folios, broadsides, and poetry cards Cold Turkey Press has published, but it must be in the hundreds. All of them — produced in handmade, illustrated, and limited editions — are unique manifestations of their publisher’s mind. — Jan Herman

Visitors who had scored timed entry passes for a Martin Luther King Day pilgrimage to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in DC were out of luck: Its doors remained locked today, due to the federal government shutdown. However, last February, I tweeted about (but never got around to posting on) the NMAAHC … — Lee Rosenbaum

Not a happy post, but a useful one: here are the hundreds of musicians and music industry activists who died in 2018, as compiled by photographer-writer Ken Franckling for the Jazz Journalists Association. — Howard Mandel

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums. – Doug Ramsey

The deaths of multi-instrumentalist Joseph Jarman, best known as the face-painted shaman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Alvin Fielder, Alvin Fielder, drums re-conceptualizing drummer, remind us. – Howard Mandel

“Get updates about our exciting new future,” proclaims the homepage of the long-dormant NAD, which closed its doors to the public on June 1, 2016, at the age of 190, with the stated intention of reopening in a “new home.” Two and a half years later, the nature of that “exciting future” has not yet been revealed and a “new home” has not yet materialized. — Lee Rosenbaum

That headline may not sound like news, but it is, in one sense. Many occurrences in the world of indigenous art that may not, on their own, make international headlines are adding up to real progress, intensifying a trend that began a few years ago. — Judith H. Dobrzynski