Music
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Neko Case: Blacklisted The story goes that Schumann, on first hearing Chopin play, cried out "Hats off, gentlemen—a genius!" I'm slightly embarrassed to say that something of that sort went through my mind after I'd heard this album a few times. No, I don't really think Neko Case is a genius in the sense…
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Stained Glass and Organ Music I listen to a lot of recorded music. Too much, really. That overused word “addiction” could perhaps be legitimately applied to my habit, and I find it useful but very painful to give it up or at least cut it way back for a while, which I often do during…
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Robert Johnson and Me Over at The Corner, National Review’s blog, several people recently were playing a variant of the degrees-of-separation game, in which you count the number of persons linking you to some famous and important one. They were counting handshakes—John Derbyshire, for instance, had shaken hands with someone who had shaken hands with…
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Black Sabbath On A Friday Night Because my youngest daughter plays in the band, my wife and I have been going to high school football games for the past few years. The season is almost over, and as our daughter is a senior this year, the remaining few games will probably be our last. Although…
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Local Heroes I once heard a music lover who lived in Manhattan say that he no longer bothered to go to concerts very often. Regarding the New York Philharmonic he said that it was more trouble than it was worth to get to Lincoln Center to “listen to Mehta do another pedestrian run-through of standard…
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Imagine No Delusions NOTE: EXPLICIT CONSERVATIVE CONTENT I include this warning for the sake of certain friends and relatives unhappy with some of my conservative views. Pop music fans may have noticed a recent bit of fanfare about Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as determined by a poll of critics.…
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Sunday Night Journal — January 9, 2005 NOTE: EXPLICIT CONSERVATIVE CONTENT — I include this warning for the sake of certain friends and relatives unhappy with some of my conservative views. Pop music fans may have noticed a recent bit of fanfare about Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as determined…
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The Meditations of John Coltrane I first heard John Coltrane’s Meditations when I was a freshman in college, almost forty years ago. The hip graduate student who played it for me and a few other youngsters seemed much older and more sophisticated than the rest of us, and though we were determined to be cool…
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Some Kind of Artist A few weeks before the recent election the arts section of our local paper featured a discussion of the fact that so many artists are on the political left, sometimes the fairly radical left. The editor put the question to a number of local artists, and the unsurprising answer that many…
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Rediscovering Jimi Hendrix A few months ago, writing about the pleasures of driving, I described myself listening to a Jimi Hendrix album on my daily commute. As soon as I wrote that sentence I felt slightly embarrassed: what a stereotypical baby boomer pop fan, on the far side of middle age, tooling down the highway…
Light On Dark Water 