Sonic Youth, Stereolab Fall Short
Sick of wading through 70-minute compact discs with only 40 minutes worth of decent music on them? Old-guard vanguardists Stereolab and Sonic Youth feel your pain. Their new albums, The First of the Microbe Hunters (Elektra) and NYC Ghosts & Flowers (Geffen), each time out at less than 45 minutes, Read More
The title of Peruvian singer Susana Baca’s excellent new album, Eco de Sombras ( Echo of Shadows ), suggests that she’s singing about something that somehow doesn’t really exist. That would be the music and culture of black Peru. African slaves followed hard upon the heels of Peru’s Spanish conquerors in the 1500′s, but, contrary Read More
If there is such a thing as a soul that survives physical death, then Astor Piazzolla, Argentine composer, bandoneon (button accordion) player and single-handed inventor of the “new tango,” has got to be one happy fella. From childhood on, Piazzolla was a passionate fan of Western classical music. Indeed, it wasn’t until his early 30′s Read More
French electric guitarist Marc Ducret’s most recent release L’ombra di Verdi, is a hard-nosed calling card for his impending visit to the city. (Mr. Ducret plays with Tim Berne in both the trio Big Satan at the Knitting Factory’s Old Office, Feb. 17 to 20, and in the quintet Composure at Tonic, Feb. 17.)
Mr. Read More
The Great Gatsby is the great American modern novel-the book that expressed more vividly than any other what it has meant to be alive in the 20th century in a country where hope springs forever and disillusionment is just around the corner. As surely as T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” captured the causes and effects of Read More
If tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker were cast in a jazz version of The Wizard of Oz ( The Jizz , let’s call it), he’d be the Dorothy sidekick looking for a soul. Mr. Brecker was one of the pioneer 70′s funk-jazz fusioneers (along with trumpeter brother Randy, the other half of the Brecker Brothers group) Read More
Drummer Paul Motian has worked himself into some of the most important piano jazz of the past three decades, with Bill Evans in the 60′s, with Keith Jarrett in the 60′s and 70′s and with Paul Bley seemingly forever. Now with the support of the European boutique label Winter & Winter, Mr. Motian has the Read More
Three years ago, American guitarist and record producer Ry Cooder went to Havana at the behest of the London-based World Circuit record label to capture something of the flavor of traditional Cuban music. The musicians he corralled were an assortment of has-beens, guitarist Compay Segundo and pianist Rubén González, and never-weres, singer Ibrahim Ferrer, but Read More
The whole notion of world music is more than a little off.
Anglo-American music styles get specific names, and everybody else shares the
world as a consolation prize? Hardly fair, especially considering just how much
musical territory is covered by three excellent so-called world musicians who
are performing in town this coming month: the singer Read More
In the mid-40′s, when the young autodidacts of bebop swept away the Swing Era dance band leaders, a certain hauteur seemed to permanently attach itself to the music. (Dizzy Gillespie, a great entertainer-intellectual, was the exception.) In the 60′s, when Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane opened the door to a perfervid, squalling “New Thing,” jazz Read More
