Tag Archives: music

Michael Davidson’s The Classical Piano Sonata from Haydn to Prokofiev; Vlado Perlemuter and Hèléne Jourdan-Morhange’s Ravel According to Ravel

Music, among the forms of art, is a rather strange beast. It is ephemeral, subjective, almost completely dependent on interpretation, and, looked at logically, has no intrinsic meaning unless paired with a text (which does not keep us from responding … Continue reading

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Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker

I was in the middle of writing a review of Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker when news came on Thursday, November 10, of his passing earlier in the week. It was obvious from the songs on this remarkable album … Continue reading

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Wolfgang Muthspiel’s Rising Grace

Austrian-born guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel has expanded the trio with which he cut his 2014 ECM debut as a leader, into a top-shelf quintet for Rising Grace, which has become one of my favorite jazz albums of 2016. To the rhythm … Continue reading

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Colin McPhee’s A House in Bali

Colin McPhee, a Canadian-American composer who had much more influence on American music than the body of his music might indicate (see Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds by Carol J. Oja), left behind two books that were as influential, … Continue reading

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Carol J. Oja’s Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds

The music of the East, particularly the gamelan of Indonesia, and even more particularly that of Bali, has a longer history of interaction with the music of the West than many might imagine. Claude Debussy first encountered the gamelan in … Continue reading

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The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc in concert

I usually don’t like it when a concert review is more about the reviewer than the musicians, so I’ll apologize up front. But this time, it’s kind of all I’ve got. The day started well enough (and – spoiler alert … Continue reading

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Waylon Jennings’ The Lost Nashville Sessions

They keep unearthing hidden treasures, in country music as much as in jazz. The latest, and apparently just the tip of the iceberg of this particular trove, is a parcel of recordings made by Waylon Jennings in 1970 as part … Continue reading

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Caleb Klauder & Reeb Willms’ Innocent Road

When you listen to an album and you can’t tell which are originals and which are classic country covers, that’s a good sign. I was pretty sure that the opening track of Innocent Road by Caleb Klauder & Reeb Willms … Continue reading

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Buckwheat Zydeco’s Lay Your Burden Down

I thought I had given up on zydeco. I first heard it in the late 1980s in the person of Clifton Chenier, the King of Zydeco. Also at about that time, I was fortunate to see in concert some superb … Continue reading

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Eljuri’s La Lucha

The New York-based guitarist, singer and songwriter Cecilia Villar Eljuri, who performs under the name Eljuri, compulsively fuses genres in a way that’s not entirely unusual for a Latino musician. She is, however, rather unusually a Latina rocker and electric … Continue reading

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