Category: people

Adam Gopnik: “Second acts there may or may not be, but American epilogues go on forever. Scott and Zelda’s friends from the Jazz Age would doubtless have spit up into their morning coffee – or, more likely, into teacups filled with bathtub gin – to find the pair, almost a century after their meeting, not a poignant footnote to an ill-named time but an enduring legend of the West, a subject adaptable for movies and novels and probably paper dolls and ice shows.”

“The Jazz Crusaders, who played the muscular, bluesy variation on bebop known as hard bop, had their roots in Houston, where Mr. Sample, the tenor saxophonist Wilton Felder and the drummer Nesbert Hooper (better known by the self-explanatory first name Stix) began performing together as the Swingsters while in high school.”

“Her characters often serve to ‘hold up the wall’ of the narrative, she said, like the empathetic best friend in ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ or the kindly stranger in ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.’ Or the kindly mental-institution psychiatrist in ‘It’s Kind of a Funny Story,’ the kindly rape-treatment counselor in ‘Trust’ or the kindly medium in ‘Beautiful Creatures.'”

“Cosimo Matassa, whose used-record business in New Orleans led him to sell new records, which led him to open a tiny studio that helped jump-start rock ’n’ roll by recording early hits by the likes of Fats Domino and Little Richard, died on Thursday in New Orleans. He was 88.”

“One can’t go on writing in his mid-60s as though he is 19 years old,” says the author of Atonement and The Children Act.

“In the lawsuit, Paul Ellington says EMI should stop deducting 50 percent commissions to foreign subpublishers that its parent company now owns before splitting the rest with Ellington’s heirs.”

“This is not a situation that rewards arrogance. A certain humility, even a touch of subservience, is in order, a lesson that Mr. Nelsons has evidently taken to heart and that has served him well.”

“In a lifetime that spanned a substantial portion of the history of jazz, Wilson’s combination of articulate composition skills with a far-reaching creative vision carried him successfully through each of the music’s successive new evolutions.”

“In a new album titled Caged Bird Songs – you can guess which book inspired this – Shawn Rivera and Roccstar will sample Maya Angelou‘s voice. The producers initiated the project before Angelou knew about it, but she agreed to share recordings of her voice and even opened her home to the producers.”

“[He] surely has neither the time nor the need to do anything he doesn’t want to do. What he does want to do, even now [at age 77], is comedy: he performs about a hundred times a year, mainly on weekends, following an itinerary that often leads him into what promoters call tertiary markets, where fans are not just happy to be able to see him in person but surprised, too.”