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Some Time in New York City

The standard musician’s autobiography can run long on detail and short on writing style. It is doubtful, really, that anyone would pick up Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace—as interesting as his story is—for the prose.

Darker But Still Singing
Anna Gourari’s Canto Oscuro

ianist Anna Gourari belongs among the very best of a growing number of young classical musicians who view making records not as a display of technical and interpretative skill, but as a means of musical exploration. Her recordings are intimate offerings of haunting beauty.

A Night at the Opera

While we have many tangible examples of early visual and literary arts, our knowledge of vocal and instrumental music begins rather late. It seems that early cave-painting and female fetish-carving artists were pragmatic, creating representational art; authors were more creative, writing rhyming poetry—an inherently musical form—early on, alongside now-forgotten quotidian prose.

Outtakes

A now-retired New York Times music critic once described me as a free-jazz cultist, and a famous downtown saxophonist/composer once called me a JAZZ SNOB. Both are true to varying degrees, and I wear these banners proudly. But anyone who knows me well knows that besides being a chatty little Brooklynite, I love most forms of arts, but I have definite preferences.

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The Brooklyn Rail

APR 2013

All Issues