Category: AJBlogs

For the last few months I’ve been meaning to revisit some of the abiding concerns of this blog and the book that inspired it. Mostly, I’m talking about what we used to call the press …

Mrs. T and I are putting our lives back together after her unexpected hospital stay. It’s taken some doing.

Even in times of budgetary constraint, cultural institutions must not be shortchanged when it comes to financial support for their most basic function—the protection of the irreplaceable objects of cultural and scientific importance that are in their care.

Thelonious Monk: The Complete Prestige Recordings
Any Monk collection without the Prestige dates is missing the pianist’s early partnership with Art Blakey, who is considered by many musicians and critics to have been Monk’s ideal drummer.

Pianist and composer Randy Weston, who championed the African origins of jazz, died at home in New York yesterday. He was 92. With his distinctive rhythmic patterns and powerful harmonic progressions, Weston…

Our tireless staff of thousands is often asked to review all sorts of books, and from time to time one or another seems worth noting. This one, for example, by Elina Gertsman

I wrote an appreciation of Paul Taylor for the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Paul Taylor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 88, was…

So the headline isn’t mine, it came as a demand from my longtime eating partner Shelley, who heard me complain yet again about one of her beloveds — this particular paragon presenting as fat, limp,

LAST week I took a wild guess and approached singer/songwriter Aimee Mann for my musicians-on-writing column, All the Poets. As a longtime fan I had a vague sense that she was literary.

The 40th annual Chicago Jazz Festival, four days free to all of unfettered, usually joyous music held in beautiful downtown Millennium Park, started last night, setting the tone for a weekend of exciting, civically-supported music here — and similar outpourings of jazz and blues, America’s vernacular musics, are offered throughout the U.S. this Labor Day weekend.