Category: AJBlogs

Your organization sucks at ‘community’ and let me tell you why
by Ronia Holmes, Assistant Director of Communications for Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-11-15

Mose Allison Is Gone
Mose Allison has died at the age of 89. A Mississippi pianist, singer, composer, songwriter and sometime trumpeter, Allison made his New York debut in the 1950s as a bebop pianist. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-15

Propwatch: the lace in Giselle
It’s only a moment. Giselle, a migrant seamstress made rootless by a changing world, confronts the dauntingly affluent Bathilde. Their encounter ripples with instinctive distrust (unwittingly, each loves the same guy; this is ballet). … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-11-15

Blindsided
It’s been a week since the election. … I will confess that one of my first impulses was to throw in the towel on my work attempting to better connect arts organizations with their communities. Even then, though, I knew that was a form of cowardice that I couldn’t, ultimately, abide. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-11-13

Lives in Layers
Jonah Bokaer and Daniel Arsham bring their latest work to BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-14

Chick Corea at 75
This is pianist, composer and bandleader Chick Corea’s 75th birthday, a milestone in the career that has brought him together with virtually every major figure in modern jazz. We congratulate him and wish him … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-13

Double Feature
Kate Weare Company and Liz Gerring Dance Company present New York seasons. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-13

Why it’s time to completely, totally, finally give up on economic impact studies in the arts
This is my last attempt at this topic, based on some recent (friendly!) twitter conversations and questions. One. Let me start with some data. Here, from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, are sector shares … read more
AJBlog: For What it’s WorthPublished 2016-11-12

The Revenge of the Mediocre . . .
. . . upon the great is a risk that every biographer takes. Mary Wisniewski has taken it, and it defeats her. Old friends of Nelson Algren whom he later spurned, to say nothing of … read more
AJBlog: Straight|UpPublished 2016-11-12

The May-Sinatra-Ellington “Indian Summer”
Vibraphonist, arranger, bandleader and master transcriber Charlie Shoemake lives on the California coast halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. As a performer who also teaches, he is known in the jazz community for the … read more
AJBlog: RiffTidesPublished 2016-11-11

75 Days to Decide: Is Your Organization Part of the Solution – or Part of the Problem
How will you use these 75 days? In her Jumper blog, Diane Ragsdale delivers a stirring message for the dawn of the Trump Presidential era that deserves to be shared and contemplated with the staff, … read more
AJBlog: Audience WantedPublished 2016-11-11

 

Racism and the ‘Bigger Force’
When I asked South African playwright Athol Fugard his opinion of race relations in the United States, he replied: Man! It’s not as easy to identify the enemy here, as it is back home, … read more
JBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-11-10

Happy Birthday, USMC
Today is the 241st birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Hard-core Marines (is there another kind?) might consider it heresy to create a jazz version of the Marine Corps Hymn. They would be wrong. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-10

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What is our “Great Work” in light of this election?
Several hours ago now, Donald J. Trump was elected the forty-fifth President of the United States. I haven’t slept in 36 hours. As the results of the election became clear, more than a few theater friends on my Facebook feed began to post the words: “The Great Work Begins” … read more
AJBlog: Jumper Published 2016-11-09

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Who Benefits?
Definitions are important to me. That’s probably a reflection of my former life as an academic. (Or, I suppose, it could be why I was an academic.) They’ve also become critical to my work as an advocate for community engagement. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-11-08

Comes the Revolution!
Don’t let that word “revolution” scare you this tense Election Day. I’m not talking about the USA. I’m referring to the wonderful exhibition now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-11-08

India in New York
Mark Morris curates “Sounds of India” for Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-08

“Tears of St. Peter” and the Master Chorale
Here is a piece I had not even heard of: … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-11-08

Where Black Lives Did Not Matter
In the many years I spent on Grub Street writing about the theater, Athol Fugard and the plays I saw of his stand out in memory for their searing eloquence and humanity. Master Harold … And the Boys was one of them. … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-11-08

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Remembering and Re-imagining an Era
Danspace Project’s Platform 16: Lost & Found revisits and examines the decades when  HIV/AIDS felled so many. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-07

An ideal concert
Anderson and Roe, the piano duo, at the National Gallery in DC, on October 30. And why was it ideal? Well, first, … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-11-07

Otis Redding at the Whisky — Revisited
You can never really have too much Otis Redding. The great R&B singer and songwriter died in a plane crash in 1967, at just 26 years old, and just about everything he recorded … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-11-07

Monday Recommendation: David Baker
Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, Basically Baker, Vol. 2 (Patois) … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-07

The unstructured room where it happens
In my last post I noted that, when I look at an orchestra’s structure, I don’t see anything that parallels a musician’s practice room. Scaled for an organization, what would a workshop like that look like? … read more
AJBlog: SongWorking Published 2016-11-07

Born in Vail
Vail Dance Festival: Re-Mix NYC performs at City Center, November 3 through 6. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-06

Home is the wanderer
Luciana Souza and I go back a long time. The first posting on this blog was about her. We’d met a year before that, in the summer of 2002. A friend told me that she’d … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-11-07

Bob Cranshaw, 1932-2016
Bassist Bob Cranshaw succumbed to bone cancer yesterday at his home in New York City. He was 83. He may be best remembered as Sonny Rollins’s bassist for more than half a century, but Cranshaw’s … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-05

Lit Crawl L.A./ North Hollywood
The other night I ventured out to Los Angeles’s North Hollywood neighborhood for the latest installment of Lit Crawl L.A. This annual night out has been going since 2013, but … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-11-04

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This Week In Understanding Audiences: Interactive Theatre, Arts Video And Artificial Intelligence This Week: Theatre used to be more interactive – can it be again?… There’s an awful lot of arts video out there – but what do audiences want?… Can you shame an arts organization into … read more
AJBlog: AJ Arts Audience  Published 2016-11-06

Born in Vail
Vail Dance Festival: Re-Mix NYC performs at City Center, November 3 through 6. Vail Re-Mix performers in 1-2-3-4-5-6 (L to R): Lil Buck, Michelle Dorrance, Robert Fairchild, and Melissa Toogood. Photo: Erin Baiano Damien Woetzel … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-06

Bob Cranshaw, 1932-2016
Bassist Bob Cranshaw succumbed to bone cancer yesterday at his home in New York City. He was 83. He may be best remembered as Sonny Rollins’s bassist for more than half a century, but Cranshaw’s … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-05

Lit Crawl L.A./ North Hollywood
THE other night I ventured out to Los Angeles’s North Hollywood neighborhood for the latest installment of Lit Crawl L.A. This annual night out has been going since 2013, but for various reasons I’ve … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrashPublished 2016-11-04

 

When is a novel like a piano? When it’s “treated”
Tom Phillips is the polymath’s polymath. When he gave the Slade Lectures at Oxford in 2006, we gleaned that he is not only a painter, print-maker and a Royal Academician, but also a film-maker, opera librettist and set designer, a fluent writer, translator, composer, and a musician with a fine singing voice. … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2016-11-03

So you want to see a show?
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-11-03

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Instead of publicity
There are new things you have to do now to publicize your work. This is something that most publicists, I fear, may not understand. But one of my former Juilliard students provides a good example of … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-11-02

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