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 […]

Mike Fiorito’s latest book, “UFO Symphonic: Journeys into Sound”—his eighth, and a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards—isn’t only for people who “believe in aliens.” Blending memoir, testimonials and ideas from thinkers like psychologist Carl Jung and philosopher Aldous Huxley, the Brooklyn author taps into the idea of music as a universal language: one that connects us to each […]

When harpist and composer Kirsten Agresta Copely talks about Kuruvinda, her latest album, she does it with the same focus you hear in the music itself. The record, released August 1, is ten tracks of harp-led meditations that travel from dark corners to moments of calm. It is personal, shaped by reflection, and unafraid to sit with what is imperfect. […]

A Wolfe in Eno clothing. In 1996, Brian Eno published his 1995 diary under the title A Year With Swollen Appendieces. (A seond edition came out in 2021 with a new preface.) It was a revealing look at the producer/composer’s psyche and methodology, in more ways than he might have intended. It showed him, unsurprisingly, as an energetic and imaginative […]

The first half year of these columns has been about how jazz fits into and reflects contemporary American society, because the music is fundamentally and immediately about this country and expresses the ideas and means for how we could be. It is music that, collectively, expresses a set of value about America. And oh yeah, it’s just fantastic for the […]

Cinema is a lattice of miracles. Consider Northern Lights, a 1978 black-and-white film about a 1916 labor movement in North Dakota made for roughly $300,000 by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson. It’s a small miracle the directors raised the money for a pro-union period piece; that they found a group of (mostly) non-professional actors to commit themselves to a multi-year […]

Michael Jones has worked in many different industries — as a manager for Brooklyn synthpop duo Holy Ghost!, at Vice Media in the early days of online video, in the emerging New York City 2010s tech scene at places like Cameo and Dash, and then doing brand development for a company transforming small business lending by blending technology, data, and […]