Music
-
I've been reading a collection of Nat Hentoff's music journalism, American Music Is, and came across this great anecdote: When Mr. [Robert] O'Meally was a student at Harvard, he approached [Ralph] Ellison, who was giving a talk, and asked: Don't you think the Harlem Renaissance failed because we failed to create institutions to preserve our gains?"…
-
In that recent discussion about Dylan, which led into a discussion of folk music, Daniel Nichols described his youthful discovery in a library of a recording of authentic Scottish folk music, and his immediate enthusiasm for it. That reminded me of an album I bought in the late '60s called The Lark In the Morning, a recording…
-
If you're a Richard Thompson fan, you really want to see this. Front and Center is a one-hour concert series on PBS (APT? what's the difference?). This one is the same trio that's on the Electric album, and is maybe better than the album, because the choice of material is broader. In my opinion RT's current songwriting…
-
In the guise of a review of the recent Basement Tapes re-issues, and in an unlikely place–The Weekly Standard–this is one of the better things I've ever read about Dylan. It's called "AWOL from the Summer of Love." And in case you don't read it, here's what seemed to me a very significant bit (in…
-
Lyle Lovett has made some fine music over the years, and I haven't heard all of it, but I'm doubtful that he's produced another album as consistently good as this one, his first second. I had forgotten how good it is until yesterday, when I listened to it on the way over and back to…
-
I've been watching the 35th Annual Blues Music Awards, recorded a while back from PBS, in segments of fifteen minutes or so every day while I eat my lunch. This is taken from that broadcast. I had never heard of Doug MacLeod before Tuesday. "Protest songs," as they used to be called in the '60s, generally…
-
Andrés Segovia I wanted to close out this series with a really important guitarist, and it would be hard to find a more suitable candidate than Segovia, who did so much to bring the guitar into the mainstream of classical music. In a career that spanned the greater part of the 20th century, he advanced the repertoire…
-
Mississippi Fred McDowell I wish I could say that when I was growing up in rural Alabama I heard this kind of music alive in its native culture. But I didn't; I heard it on records in the living room of an aunt and uncle who had a great interest, very unusual for white people…
-
John McLaughlin McLaughlin is very well known in jazz circles, but I've never really listened to him very much. I heard him back in 1970 or so when he appeared on Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, which I did not really get then and still don't, although it's considered a masterpiece by many. But as with…
-
Frank Zappa I want to say more or less the same thing about Frank Zappa now that I did in a 2007 review of Hot Rats, so I may as well not bother rephrasing it, and just quote: I must say right off that I had never taken very seriously Zappa’s ambition to be taken…
Light On Dark Water 