He’s the prolific one-name artist known as much for his homegrown musical experiments as his full-band funkadelic workouts. Despite well-publicized…
Books & CDs
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Saul Bellow at 84 has written a novel as graceful and funny as Ravelstein….
While the singer’s fans may wait in vain for CD reissues of many of her original albums, the market is…
The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings suggested reading: Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (1998), Laurence Bergreen Louis Armstrong,…
.. Brian Lane Green made his Broadway debut as Huck Finn in Big River, was Tony nominated for his performance…
The Glass Cocoon is a 500-page behemoth of a murder mystery written by two first-time novelists, Christopher J. Jarmick and…
These two albums bracket the summer of 1958—the first recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival in June, the second at…
An Uncertain Currency is a murder mystery with a memorable crime-solving protagonist named Mario Castigliani, an Italian-born stage performer and…
Big Fun is one of the forgotten items in Miles Davis’s discography. Recorded with four different bands (one for each…
These are not sacred texts. They are pieces of music. Yes, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker is probably the Colossus of…
Christopher Hitchens is, if not always agreeable, usually entertaining. The character he’s created: a fat, drunken, chain-smoking hack journalist, taking…
Joe McPhee is, by the evidence presented on this CD, one of the truly great musicians of the postwar era,…
Suggested reading: Silence (1973), John Cage Talking Music: Conversations With John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of…
The quickest test of whether or not Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Ex-Friends might appeal to you is by your level of…