Celebrating Community
Music making is a social activity. Anyone with a laptop and a bedroom can make an album, but there’s limits to that, not the least how far one’s imagination can go without the stimulus of other personalities. When musicians get together to play it’s a social activity, they make something together whether or not they’re in front of an audience. […]
It was in September, sitting in the big auditorium at BAM, packed with people, watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi masterpiece Solaris. Near the beginning of the film is a shot of rain dropping into a pond, the water rippling out into green shards of wetland flora — nothing special, necessarily, but the kind of pastoral lyricism Tarkovsky routinely leaned on. […]
Cemeteries freak some people out. My mother, who grew up in Queens, is still traumatized from an experience she had as a little girl. Her family visited dead relatives every Sunday. Once, she peeked into a mausoleum window and saw a baby carriage. She never got over it. I grew up differently. Perhaps as a result of my mother’s unhappy […]
It’s hard to say just what a bassoon power trio should include, maybe hurdy-gurdy and viol de gamba. Brooklyn’s Bassoon’s got none of that, though. The heavy prog-metal Brooklyn band put out their debut in 2012 and somehow only now have decided to follow it up with Succumbent (Nov. 17, Nefarious Industries, CD and download). The band was formed in […]
’Tis the season of the list, and for your local man in jazz that means putting together what were, for me, the best new and archival recordings I heard this year. And I mean “heard” seriously; I listened all the way through something like 250 albums released in 2023, and at least partially through an additional 400-plus (those are records […]
Community Board 6 held a meeting on landmarks and land use on Nov. 30, which included an application for rezoning 41 Richards St. in Red Hook, between Sebring St. and Commerce St. “The Proposed Action would facilitate the development of a seven-story plus cellar, 113,557 gross square foot mixed-use building with 41 parking spaces,” said the Department of Environmental Conservation […]
The work of five American artists, mainly New Yorkers and five German artists, mainly Berliners, is the subject of the exhibition titled International Waters which opened recently as part of the Red Hook Open Studios program in The Wall Gallery. The Wall Gallery is an artist-run space which specializes in exchanges between Brooklyn New York and Berlin Germany. International Waters […]
Hearing someone tell you about a dream they had can make your eyes glaze over. It could be because dreams follow their own logic, unique to each of us. Dreams can feel specific, urgent and compelling after we’ve experienced them, but vague, meandering and uninteresting in the retelling. Cartoonist Roz Chast understands this completely—but she still wants to tell you […]
A step ahead at looking back. In April, I wrote about Joe Jackson’s 1981 album Jumpin’ Jive in a review of Taj Mahal’s recent album of early jazz songs. Since then, Rickie Lee Jones has issued a respectable collection of crooner tunes, and countless rockers-of-certain-ages have done so before, generally with far lesser results than Jackson, Jones and Mahal (special […]
In art music (meaning music not designed for mass commercial success), there used to be a general consensus about forms and styles. That’s obvious when you look at classical music, but also things like folk music (in the English speaking world) and the blues; things were generally done within certain guidelines and outliers were less revolutionaries than eccentrics and avant-gardists, […]