By Robert Gottlieb 11/21/11 5:46pm

Dance

"Gossamer Gallants" by Paul Taylor.

A Weekend of Song and Dance: Unflagging Invention in an All-Taylor Evening, and Ellington on Exhilirating Fast-Forward

Saturday
City Center
2:00 p.m.

The Encores! series and Jazz at Lincoln Center blasted off their new collaboration with a spectacular show called Cotton Club Parade—all-singing, all-dancing, all-Ellington. (Even the non-Ellington numbers sound like his.) Of course a big theater like the City Center can’t replicate the feeling of an intimate place like the Cotton Club—for one thing, they didn’t have miking back in the day. (Lucky them.) And presumably a show at the club was relaxed: pauses between numbers; waiters passing through with drinks clinking; customers coming and going. Whereas the Parade is a semi-Broadway show, and one of its strongest virtues is that it’s driven at breakneck speed through its 23 numbers—its energy is never allowed to falter; even segues are ultraminimal. And there’s no intermission. But authenticity of venue isn’t the point. You leave the performance with a real sense of the variety, the ingenuity, the sheer fun of what things must have been like up on 125th Street in the ’20s and ’30s. Read More

By Staff 2/13/07 5:25pm

The Afternoon Wrap: Tuesday

  • Catastrophe in West Soho! Moondance Diner is being wiped away to make room for–here it comes–luxury condos. “There are not going to be any more diners,” says traitorous owner Sunil “Sunny” Sharma (one of the condo’s co-developers). [NY Sun, via Gothamist]
  • Is the newly-renovated $320,000 prewar co-op at 478 West 158th Street the Read More

    • By Elon R. Green 12/15/03 12:00am

    Power Punk: Karenna Gore Schiff and Drew Schiff

    Dr. and Mrs. Popularly Elected First Family; don’t bring up the Patakis; biotechnology can be fun!; Schiff likes Giff

    Karenna Gore Schiff’s ears peek out from between the strands of her flaxen hair; she, 30 years old, fixes the irregularity. Her husband, Andrew, 38, a former physician turned biotech venture capitalist, isn’t here. He is Read More

    By Joseph Hooper 12/23/02 12:00am

    Just Remember These: Most Desirable Discs of 2002

    The boy bands, the Britney clones and even the original navel-barer-all started their slow parade to the digital bone yard this year. And that wasn’t the only reason to celebrate. There was a lot of good music released this year, much of it from a bunch of old warhorses who were big when analog was Read More

    By Joseph Hooper 10/14/02 12:00am

    All Rise: Cocksure Marsalis Redeems Himself as Pasticheur

    Consider the odd case of Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Pulitzer Prize–winner and Ken Burns poster child, who over the past decade has consolidated his position as the official face of jazz at about the same rate that he’s been disappearing as an influential stylistic force within the inner sanctum of Read More

    By NYO Staff 5/07/01 12:00am

    The Shape of Jazz to Come

    Some time ago, when jazz music completely lost its relevance to the record-buying public, the recording industry decided that the best way to sell units to jazz music’s two remaining demographics (college juniors and party hostesses who need background music for dinner) was either by a) repackaging the seminal recordings of the jazz masters in Read More

    By William Berlind 1/15/01 12:00am

    Burns’ Jazz Doesn’t Swing

    As almost everyone in New York knows by now , Jazz , a 10-part, 19-hour documentary that began airing on PBS station WNET-TV on Jan. 8, is the latest opus by nonfiction filmmaker Ken Burns. As almost everyone here also knows, titles can be deceiving. And though Mr. Burns may have been the man behind Read More

    By Joseph Hooper 4/05/99 12:00am

    Requiem for a Heavyweight: Marsalis Bids Kirkland Farewell

    By anyone’s estimation, it’s been a bad year for pianists. In January, the French virtuoso Michel Petrucciani died of a lung infection, at the age of 36, after having battled a rare bone disease his entire life. (Weirdly, his lush Solo Live album on Dreyfus Jazz has just come out.) In February Jaki Byard, 76, Read More

    By Joseph Hooper 12/01/97 12:00am

    Pomo Clarinetist Don Byron Unleashes Existential Dred

    Clarinetist Don Byron is the bizarro-world version of Wynton Marsalis. So powerful is the force field around Mr. Marsalis, he generates not only worshipers but his own antimatter: jazz peers like Mr. Byron who can’t help but define themselves in opposition to him. Both in their late 30′s, Mr. Byron was still studying at the Read More