There are different levels at which one can love Leonard Bernstein. There’s knowing all the lyrics to “Somewhere”; there’s devotion to his lesser-known works, like, say, the “Chichester Psalms”; then there’s throwing a two-year global festival in honor of the centennial of his birth. While that centennial doesn’t arrive until August 25, the festivities already…
At a concert hall in southeastern Ukraine, Svetlana Balabukha, 70, says she can remember when she first heard Vladimir Vysotsky. She was 18, a schoolgirl in Donetsk, a town in now-occupied eastern Ukraine. “First of all — what style, what a way of performing!” she says, then smiles and leans a bit closer. “And second…what…
There are certain things in this life that I pretty much take for granted: Snow will fall in December. A new baseball season will begin in April. And if he’s not already touring somewhere as we speak, Neil Diamond will be going on tour again soon. Which is why the announcement that the multi-platinum-selling singer-songwriter…
I first started digging for old records in thrift stores in the late 1980s, back when you could still score stacks of 45s from the glory days of AM radio at 5 or 10 cents a pop. In the course of each thrift store foray, I would almost inevitably come across a single or two…
Maybe you find yourself quietly humming along to Christmas songs, not wanting to attract attention to yourself out of a sense of embarrassment or guilt. Maybe you find yourself at this time of year overwhelmed or oppressed by the onslaught of overplayed Christmas ditties pretending to be “holiday songs.” Maybe you secretly love Christmas songs…
By now, the question is familiar: How should those who distribute and consume art deal with the artistic legacy of someone accused of sexual harassment and assault? And next: How should that calculation change if that person created their art through collaboration with others, who are presumably innocent of their colleague’s alleged crimes? That question…
The old rockabilly standard “You’re Sixteen,” first made famous by Johnny Burnette in 1960 and then revived by Ringo Starr in 1973, is back in the news again after right-wing commentator Joel Pollak, of Breitbart News, referred to the pop hit in defense of Alabama Republican Senatorial candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Arik Einstein was the single most important figure in the rise of Israeli rock-music, as important to Israelis as Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and the Beatles were to Americans. Although known exclusively for his songs in Hebrew, Einstein did record one song in Yiddish in 1971, a…
Had I been eating soup when I saw the cover of this week’s farewell issue of the Village Voice, I would have spit up. There, on the cover, is a full-page photograph of Bob Dylan, circa 1965, taken in Greenwich Village, saluting the camera in a manner which, one supposes, could be viewed as a…
The 2017 Polaris Gala, whose website says they aim to present awards to Canadian artists based on their “artistic integrity,” took place Monday, September 18. Among the evening’s delights was a new posthumous video for Leonard Cohen’s “Leaving The Table,” from his final album, “You Want It Darker.” The animated video opens and closes with…
I went to see Roger Waters, late of Pink Floyd, play a Brooklyn arena last night. It was September 11, a fact that seemed irrelevant when I bought the tickets. Once you get over the embarrassment of watching a 70-year-old man get worked up over lyrics he wrote when he was thirty (what if they…
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