Like predecessors such as Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones, Foster doesn’t just “kick” the soloist, providing “fills” in the spaces between the horn players’ lines.
Rather, he sets up his own rhythmic patterns “underneath” the soloist. He is the Matisse of the drums, painting in bold shapes and colors, rather than the dense polyrhythms of Jones. Overall, the show was an example of beautiful, non-pretentious music with a focus on craft, openness, and freedom within tradition.
There’s a certain beautiful, irksome symmetry about writing assignments. Whatever carelessness, vagueness, or still-inchoate pedagogical goals creep into a teacher’s assignment tend to return to her in the form of careless, vague, and poorly executed student essays. Instructors are...
Autonomia: Post-Political Politics Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi
Before the book, a place and time: Berlin, summer, 1990. Or actually, the road to Berlin. I’d spent the last two days on the move, hitchhiking without sleep to get from Amsterdam to Berlin. I was delirious, having spent hours talking to a Dutch businessman who spewed a stream of racist bile about Muslims taking over his country and an even longer time with an Italian truck driver who insisted that he was carrying a large consignment of weapons for the Sicilian mafia.
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” —Abraham Lincoln The recent round of student protests and building take-overs at campuses across the University of California system this week have been both inspiring and heart-breaking. The devastating and...
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Nightwatching (2007), directed by Peter Greenaway Peter Greenaway has always been a visually-oriented director. Originally trained as a painter, Greenaway meticulously structures the images in his films, revealing a care and attention to the...
