When 14th Street was Cooler. Back in the deep, dark ’90s, before the Meatpacking District was home to the Highline and the Whitney Museum and the Apple Store, West 14th Street housed one of the city’s great venues for music outside the norm, one that history seems to have left behind. The Cooler was a big, old, retrofitted, basement meat […]

One of the best cinema publications out there is Cashiers du Cinema. No, no – not the magazine that gave us Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and the French New Wave. That’s Cahiers du Cinema. But the confusion is understandable, at least at a passing glance. Both Cashiers and ‘60s-era Cahiers are similar formats and designs, square-shaped with yellow-bordered covers framing […]

Jason Moran was the subject of my first column, some five and half years ago. The pianist (and artist, teacher, etc.) had a fascinating and frustrating exhibit/installation at the Whitney, a great honor for anyone, let alone a musician, but an ungainly fit between the fleeting nature of music and the collection of static objects that define a museum. As […]

For months, my neighbors and I did exactly what the City asked of us. We showed up. We logged on. We filled out surveys. We sat through the webinars and “visioning sessions.” We took time off to attend meetings about the future of our waterfront. We wrote thoughtful comments and asked basic questions about traffic, flooding, jobs, and affordability. We […]

There’s some historically important and fabulous jazz available again this month on vinyl and CD, and it might be a surprise that my feelings about that are mixed. On January 30, Sony will be re-releasing the Miles Davis – The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965, a 10LP/8CD box set that has every note from every recorded set the […]

Nostalgia slop, from AI-generated trash to IP-leveraging franchise flicks, is belched out so regularly our culture practically runs on the stuff. From the outside, Obex, Albert Birney’s lo-fi, black-and-white ‘80s-set 90-minute valentine to pre-Internet culture, might be mistaken for more of the same, albeit in an indie vein, especially with a press pitch that insists the film is “inspired by Mario, […]

There’s some historically important and fabulous jazz available again this month on vinyl and CD, and it might be a surprise that my feelings about that are mixed. On January 30, Sony will be re-releasing the Miles Davis – The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965, a 10LP/8CD box set that has every note from every recorded set the […]

The world’s a mess; it’s in my kiss. “How to speak mother tongue when mother is gone?” German-Turkish singer/composer Alev Lenz repeats on the opening track of her 4 in a Cycle of Thirds (digital self-release out Jan.16) against a simple backing track of saz and upright bass. It’s an urgent question plaintively delivered in a beautifully sad song reminiscent […]

There’s something I’ve said frequently while writing about classical music for the last couple decades, which is that there’s no such thing as difficult music. Sure, there’s some music that may have less general appeal than others, but that doesn’t make it difficult. What “difficult” means in music is that it is unfamiliar in some way, from an unusual style—like […]

The Salvator Mundi Museum of Art is combining art with a great cause with its new exhibition, The Art of Rescue. The exhibition has a unique premise; it highlights the stories of art pieces that were restored and rediscovered to be worth millions of dollars and pairs those pieces up with dogs up for adoption at Badass Animal Rescue. Badass […]

Forty-something years of making it up, on the spot, in front of an audience. That’s Keith Jarrett’s legacy of improvised solo piano concerts on ECM. It’s an enormous and important body of musical work, a break—within the mainstream—with be-bop and hard bop conventions and the creation of an entire new idea of modern piano jazz. The first step was the […]