The Art Of Great Jazz

“Gone are the days when we could search in jazz dealers for those sumptuous cardboard squares that always seemed to promise so much, even if that promise was sometimes disappointed when you actually played the contents. The cult of labels has a lot to do with packaging: the yummy colour photographs in the case of Impulse and luxurious folding sleeves, the more austere Bauhaus look of Blue Note. It all comes down to shopping. And that’s something that, with the advent of iPods and downloading, is changing out of recognition.”

How Does Music Physically Affect Us?

Daniel Levitin, “who now runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, has immersed himself in music about as deeply as is humanly possible. He began asking scientific questions about the nature of his beloved obsession — Where does creativity come from? What goes into making a song memorable? — in the late 1980s. He began asking his peers and role models in the music business and publishing those conversations in magazines such as Billboard and Mix.”

Rumors Of A Long Lost Leonardo

“The Battle of Anghiari is the real Holy Grail of Leonardo studies: a wonderful lost object for which the search continues today. Its rediscovery would be an art-historical sensation. War was the stuff of everyday life in early 16th-century Italy, and Leonardo had plenty of opportunity to observe it: he described armed conflict as ‘the most beastly madness’.”