The events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses take place in Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904. Joyceans the world over celebrate Bloomsday with marathon readings and a pint of Guinness or two. Say yes yes to James Joyce with the Performing Arts Encyclopedia, where you can find manuscripts of Samuel Barber’s “Three Songs,” musical settings […]
June 4th was the birthday of Cuban-born composer and reed player Paquito D’Rivera. His clarinet and saxophone work has graced a diverse range of ensembles, from the incendiary Cuban-jazz group Irakere to the National Symphony Orchestra. A performance of “Merengue” by cellist Yo-Yo Ma won D’Rivera a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental in 2004. Other […]
Last December I began this blog with the announcement that Sir Paul McCartney would be the recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Music. I chatted with four Library of Congress staff members who experienced Beatlemania in person. From the stands at the Beatles’ rehearsal for the Ed Sullivan show, to the screams that could be […]
Tomorrow evening, the Montreal group Ensemble Caprice will bring Bach and the Bohemian Gypsies to the Coolidge Auditorium, in a featured concert at the 39th Annual Meeting of the American Musical Instrument Society. This program will illustrate the influence of anonymous gypsy virtuosi on the works of two great Baroque composers. The Caprice musicians and […]
Last week we celebrated birthdays of a diverse array of musical luminaries. Pianist Wladziu Valentino was briefly known as Walter Busterkeys before using the name by which we all know him: Liberace was born May 16, 1919. Read about him in the Nevada section of the Local Legacies project in The American Folklife Center. Alexander Warrack’s Scots Dictionary […]
The jazz world has lost one of its great pianists, Hank Jones, who died yesterday in New York. He was 91. During his long and storied career Jones appeared on countless sessions with legends from all walks of jazz: Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Jazz writer Howard Mandel […]
Pianist-composer Uri Caine has played with a veritable who’s-who of jazz, from hard bop legend Hank Mobley to soul-jazz leader Grover Washington to avant-garde icon John Zorn, from scat singer Annie Ross to the man who has been described as “James Brown trapped in Don Knotts’ body,” Arto Lindsay. He has performed Duke Ellington numbers […]
“People talk about song-writing techniques. I have a technique. I sit around scratching myself and waiting for something to crop up. That’s why they call it a gift! Sit there and open up your mind and let yourself be a conduit.” That’s song-writer and raconteur Bill Withers, who so memorably closed a great evening of […]
Above the desk where I sign in to work hangs a pin-up calendar whose pet of the month of May is a Shih Tzu in a shiny red wagon. Below the happy pup is the notation that May 2nd-8th, 2010 is Be Kind to Animals Week. According to the American Humane Association , this week […]
“It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’ ” — John Adams, composer of Nixon in China. [1] New Yorker music critic Alex Ross recently blogged about two different composers named John Adams, distinguished by their middle names of Luther and Coolidge. This common […]