Two weeks ago, through the din in the basement of the International Beauty Show at the Jacob Javits Center, a peaceful melody could be discerned. Camped in front of a booth selling Hungarian organic skin cream, the musician David Young was playing two recorders at the same time. Beside him, a boom box purred with Read More
A few days before the singer Chaka Khan would win two Grammys for Funk This, her first album in 10 years, she was sitting at Sardi’s in midtown: skin glowing, hair unending, taking a long draw on a Parliament. “I’m fine,” she said, when asked if smoking was O.K. for her voice. “There is a Read More
You’re watching a Seinfeld rerun, or the late-night news on the WB. Cut to commercial. “Woke up this morning/ Cable’s triple play in my head …” It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? There’s a pretty girl on your TV, dancing and singing in a huge, loft-like space, wind blowing through her dark hair, glossy lips shining, Read More
These days, it’s not often that you hear music people waxing poetic about the business. But the love was flowing on Thursday, June 7, at the Marriott Marquis, where the Songwriters Hall of Fame held its annual dinner and induction ceremony.
Maybe it was all the old-time music publishers working the room and calling Read More
At 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 23, at Union Hall, a bar in Park Slope, there will be a screening of Yacht Rock, a series of absurdist, documentary-style shorts in the style of This Is Spinal Tap and the classic SNL sketch about Blue Öyster Cult featuring Will Ferrell and a cowbell. Yacht Rock purports Read More
Musical style and technology have always been in conversation, each one pushing the other along. The development of well-tempered piano tuning with its fuller dynamic range, for example, made it possible for the great body of 18th- and 19th-century piano music to be written-or, more precisely, created the medium through which certain composers found their Read More
Marvin Hamlisch is not a “cookie filled with arsenic,” to quote one of the million quotable lines in Sweet Smell of Success , the noir musical he’s adapted from the 1957 movie. He’s more like a cookie filled with Oreo cream.
Double stuff me, Sidney.
When Marvin Hamlisch was 16, he wrote a Top Read More
On a recent afternoon, 25-year-old tennis pro Nabile Taslimant stood next to a clay court at Town Tennis, an unmarked club on East 56th Street, gloomily observing one of the tragic pantomimes of his profession. On the adjacent court, a weary-looking pro was intentionally losing to an old man who had demanded a match.
After Read More
Many people know Denise Rich as the glamorous Democratic fund-raiser at the center of a furious investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of her ex-husband, financier Marc Rich. Less is known about Ms. Rich’s unscandalous but prosperous career as a lyricist and co-writer of numerous, amorously themed pop songs, from Celine Dion’s hit “Love Read More
Sondheim won’t spark any debate but it will certainly please anyone looking to throw on a bit of sophisticated music before popping open a bottle of Chardonnay before dinner
Judging from the avalanche of Stephen Sondheim collections released in recent years, you might think that Mr. Sondheim was no longer with us. He is, of Read More
