Today in the world of glorious web discoveries, I saw on the OpenCulture twitter account a link to an interview between jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida. At first glance, it’s a seemingly random, bizarre, pairing, but something about it, on a gut level, just makes sense. And throughout their short conversation,…
Ornette Coleman, one of the greatest musical innovators of the 20th century and the man who coined the term “free jazz,” died this morning in Manhattan of cardiac arrest. He was 85. A saxophonist, composer and bandleader, Coleman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007 for his album, “Sound Grammar,” began playing jazz…
Although they’ve had a number of earlier releases, “Where we come from… Where we’re going,” a challenging CD that is almost equal parts avant-garde jazz and klezmer music, was my introduction to Klezmokum, an Amsterdam-based band (Mokum is the old Jewish name for Amsterdam) led by Burton Greene, a pianist with a long history and…
I was pleased to see a profile in the New York Times on July 20 of the unusual cantorial-music-aficionado-turned-audiophile-sound-engineer Mendel Werdyger. Werdyger is the proprietor of Mostly Music, one of the last bastions of old school Jewish culture in New York City. While you can certainly buy the standard schlock recordings of Hasidic boys choirs…
Art lovers have until January 24 to catch a compelling exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum, “Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace.” Originating at Massachusetts’s Danforth Museum of Art the show focuses on Bloom, one of the key Boston Expressionists examined in “Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism” by Judith Bookbinder (University of New Hampshire…
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