Fly: Sky & Country (ECM, March 2009) My personal and admittedly partial lineage of the jazz saxophone trio starts with Sonny Rollins’s pair of 1957 recordings Way out West and A Night at the Vanguard. Way out West was a studio album, with bass icon Ray Brown anchoring and Shelley...
Throw Me the Statue, Purpleface (Secretly Canadian) Beirut, March of the Zapotec / Holland (Ba Da Bing!) The careers of Throw Me the Statue and Beirut are still young, and for the moment it seems both bands are doing exactly what they should. The stories of their success almost make this...
FOCUS! Festival at Lincoln Center. In trying to untie the many strands of classical music’s storied history, one of the most common techniques is to proceed country-by-country: the Austro-German school with its musical superheroes (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms) ostensibly...
George Crumb, The Sleeper, Vox Balaenae, and Voices from the Morning of the Earth at Carnegie Hall. Works by Charles Wuorinen at the Guggenheim. Many people feel intimidated by attending concerts, especially those focusing on new music. They don’t know the scene, they don’t know the...
John Adams, Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera The idea to do an opera about the atomic bomb was the brainchild of Pamela Rosenberg, who in 2002 was the politically-minded director of the San Francisco Opera. The genesis of the bomb’s music, however, came much earlier, in a...
John Zorn and Signal at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. at Thompson St., (212) 228-4854. Things other than school start in September. The new Greenwich Village club, (Le) Poisson Rouge, is a fine example. Described on its website as a “multimedia art cabaret,” (Le) Poisson Rouge...
