Headquarters
To mark the 5oth anniversary of Preservation Hall. We are all in profoundly debted to Allan and Sandra Jaffe. Allan JaffeJazzmusicnew orleanspreservation hallPreservation Hall Jazz BandSandra Jaffe
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Branford Marsalis Interview
As usual from any Marsalis, an articulate, provocative and amusing view. It’s essentially inauthentic when I listen to it. It doesn’t sound like jazz, and I can find few situations with the exception of popular music where the music is so far removed from its roots that it’s so unrecognizable from the original form. So…
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?
86-year-old returns to New Orleans, fulfilling wish of a lifetime Her eyes still light up when she talks about New Orleans. When asked the top three reasons she loves New Orleans, she quickly answers with, “the food, the music, but especially the people,” referring to her close friends and the 400,000 friendly locals who make…
Parsifal: the greatest meditation on death?
I’ve been watching James Levine‘s version of Parsifal. Though quite the production, it doesn’t come near the experience of the starker Simon Rattle production I saw at the Royal Opera House some years back in which I thoroughly appreciated Vera Dobroschke’s lighting design (see photo below). Here is the NYT review, far more receptive than the reviews of…
Yom huledet “Pops”
Today is Louis Armstrong’s birthday, in my view a musical titan to match the likes of Wagner. No artist has given me such pleasure as Pops as well as being a perennial symbol or a paragon of dignity in trying circumstances. Below are two of my favourite photos of Pops. I also highly recommend you…
A new direction
This post marks the winding down of this website as primarily interested in matters philosophical and matters CogsSci – the new emphasis will be toward music. Of course one can never escape philosophical contemplation, but perhaps the impulse can be kept at bay. Three quotes from Thoreau seem to capture this turn: When I hear music, I…
The homogenization of music
This analysis probably comes as no surprise to those steeped in the history of popular music. Artificial intelligenceArtsCognitive scienceMusicologyPop musicPopular musicTimbre
Review of “Pops”
Here’s a review from the very excellent Journal of Jazz Studies. Along with Teachout’s “Pops” I can also highly recommend Ricky Riccardi’s What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years since together one gets a fuller and more rounded picture of America’s greatest art form and greatest artist. Both Teachout and Riccardi are masterful…
Plato to Domino
It’s been exactly five years since this “blog” began. So I thought I’d mark the occasion with an unlikely pairing – Plato and “Fats” Domino, the latter arguably the earliest pioneer of what we have come to recognize as rock ‘n roll. Eldridge Cleaver or somebody said that, with rock, the blacks gave the middle…
Blues, Trauma, Existential Vulnerability
Here’s an interesting article by psychologist Robert Stolorow and his son, Ben Stolorow, a jazz musician (thanks for the alert RS). Feel that existential angst . . . I can’t stand living, but I’m scared of dying, but Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along. —Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II African-American musicCognitive scienceHuman conditionphilosophical…
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