Today is Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday–she would have turned 96–and there’s a lovely Google doodle up now to honor the occasion.
It seems to us, though, that the best way to pay tribute to the the great jazz singer is to listen to her music, which is what we’ve been doing, non-stop, for the past couple Read More
For the past two nights, guests arriving at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall have found two harps and five extra music stands occupying part of the second balcony next to the stage. They sat unoccupied for the first part of the program on Wednesday and Thursday evening, as the New York Philharmonic debuted composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse’s fearsome and taut 10-minute Prospero’s Rooms (2012) and as Joshua Bell maneuvered his violin nimbly, delicately through Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (1953–54), offering an almost jaunty feel in the piece’s jazzy closing moments. Read More
The first thing you notice about the Chicago soul singer Renaldo Domino is that he sounds like a woman, which is his best quality. His voice is smooth, sweet and high-pitched, like Smokey Robinson’s, but there’s a slight quaver in it that evokes Jimmy Scott’s jazzy contralto.
Mr. Domino is in his early 60s–though he Read More
That would be John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, recorded on this day in 1963. Before you furrow your brow, you should know that a lot of people feel this way, Daniel Okrent among them. In 1990 Okrent titled an essay in Esquire magazine much the same way I’ve titled this post.
Personally, I don’t think it’s Read More
The sound of 15,000 girls screaming at the top of their lungs was not what I thought it would be.
I had imagined it to be harsh and piercing, with the integrity of each individual scream maintained, like 15,000 stabbing stilettos. But it turns out there is no escaping fluid dynamics: 15,000 girls screaming turns out to be less a sound than a sensation, a molten force that surges forward in waves. Read More
Shortly after John Lennon was assassinated on December 8, 1980, the critic Robert Christgau printed his wife’s lament in the Village Voice: “Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon?” she asked. “Why isn’t it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?”
It was a distasteful remark, but it’s hard to dispute. Paul has long been a cheerful purveyor of pleasing pop songs, but John was by far the wittiest, most audacious and most intelligent Beatle. He was also troubled, arrogant and fragile. He was a man of many moods, and those moods were always uncontainable. Even before he became famous, Lennon’s teachers and schoolmates knew him to be clever with a pen and paper, and (people sometimes forget) in the mid-’60s he wrote two well-received books: In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. It is little wonder, then, that Lennon’s collected letters—285 of them, richly contextualized and handsomely presented by editor Hunter Davies in the new volume The John Lennon Letters (Little, Brown, 392 pp., $29.99)—make for fascinating reading. Read More
Sometimes a headline says it all, mais non? Like what more can we add to this, except that it’s super creepy when Rick Springfield stops playing for two seconds during the part where the lyrics go “Where can I find a woman like that?” so he can acknowledge, “I love it when girls sing that line.”
You are creepy! Creepy, Rick Springfield! Read More
In a letter sent to press, Foo Fighters frontman and onetime Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl announced that the band is to take a break. “I’m not sure when the Foo Fighters are going to play again. It feels strange to say that, but it’s a good thing for all of us to go away for Read More
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How often is it that you can call any decidedly Christian rock song a “chart-topper?” Probably not since the mid-’90s, when singers like Amy Grant or LeAnn Rimes could combine their theology with an insane vocal range.
But against all odds, it’s happened again: Read More
Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt—one of most popular crew members along with Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean (according to The New Yorker)—is getting ready to start laying down tracks on his next album. And the list of artists he plans on working with is very odd indeed. Read More
