Category: AJBlogs

Many composers go from maximal to minimal as they pare back and distill their musical language; Spears may be going the opposite direction. His Requiem and the neo-medieval dance opera Wolf-in-Skins are extremely spare; the music of his hit opera Fellow Travelers is understated dramatically but more harmonically rich; The Tower and the Garden, his new 30-minute piece for choir and string quartet, is positively lush.

I get questions on this topic frequently and always have to gird myself before responding. So here is what I try to bear in mind in answering the questions.

My first reaction when the press release hit my inbox today was: “This has got to be a hoax!” Reading the first sentence of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s announcement made me even more incredulous.

Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby – Swinging On A Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (Little, Brown)
Seventeen years following his initial installment, Gary Giddins continues the story of the man who absorbed and internalized early jazz values in the 1920s and became the most important popular singer in the world.

Royston was a drummer, but the album “makes clear that not only is he a master of his instrument but it also emphasizes that his complete musicianship allowed authorship of all of the album’s dozen tunes.”

I recently sat disconsolately through a screener of director Nathaniel Kahn’s new artworld documentary, The Price of Everything. Its dyspeptic take on the art world turned my stomach

Over the years I’ve attended several musical events put on by Rachael Worby, a human dynamo who has operated several series in and around Pasadena. Worby — who was once, I think, the First Lady of West Virginia — seems interested in something both populist and unorthodox.

Annie Chen Octet, Secret Treetop (Shanghai Audio&Video Ltd)
Woody Shaw, Tokyo 1981 (Elemental Music)
Dexter Gordon Quartet, Tokyo 1975 (Elemental Music)

A look at two works, now playing in New York, set in the much-mythologized Old West: Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West at the Met and a revisionist Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Over the past year the breathless articles that used to accompany new tech innovations have dried up, replaced with dystopian concerns about the Dark Web, privacy, hacking, fake news, and the deadening and manipulative effects of social media addiction.