I’ve encountered Ted Drozdowski a couple of times in the last week. First in Blues and Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer, the welcome anthology of Palmer’s writing edited by Anthony DeCurtis. And then performing like a man on […]
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Look backward to the past and events seem to gain speed and inevitability. Observe Tim Buckley and the passing milestones become blurs. His short lifetime adds urgency and meaning to our impressions of his every evolution. Two recent releases illustrate […]
Jeff Bridges mounted the Hollywood stage on Oscar© night and gave the elegantly-groomed proceedings an ebullient kick in the butt. He had reason to celebrate: breathing life into ancient movie archetypes is no small feat. The lone drifter with a […]
The Fantastic Mr. Fox soundtrack demonstrates once again music supervisor Randall Poster and music coordinator Jim Dunbar‘s impeccable taste and unerring instinct for the perfect narrative note. Burl Ives, The Beach Boys, classic-film composer Georges Delerue, and The Rolling Stones […]
It’s now a commonplace that geography is destiny. If stolid mountains and excitable weather can mock mere politics and war, then surely they can imbue a man with an interior geography, a sense of his own purpose and place. E.C. […]
When 21-year-old Alan Lomax dragged 155 pounds of luggage and recording equipment into the heat and humanity of Port-au-Prince’s dockside, he entered a crucible. In the Christmas season of 1936, Haiti was re-forging a national identity after a 15-year U.S. […]
It turns out that, as a species, we have evolved to see and hear God. Biologists and anthropologists have concluded that the presence of a deity, whether on the hunter/gatherers’ dance floor or in the Good Book, provides a protective […]
I recently spent the evening at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory taking in a séance conducted by Jonathan Kane’s February. As their set built a four-guitar, blues-based throb and blast, the audience nodded with approval, or with closed-eye concentration, or with iPhones […]
After the youthful legend and tragic loss, the sexy funk/jazz experiments, a million versions of “Dolphins,” the echoing flash of brilliance and too-early loss of his son Jeff, a new release on Tompkins Square puts Tim Buckley’s voice and guitar […]
The journey of Clarence White and his brothers offers a useful corrective for those inclined to consider bluegrass, if they consider it at all, as the province of rustics on an Appalachian porch, fiddling next to a jar of flammable […]
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