Celebrating Community
Let’s talk about some recent movies! I’ll start: Confess, Fletch. It’s pretty fun, a decades-in-the-making reboot of Chevy Chase’s 1980s comedy-mystery franchise based on Gregory McDonald’s series of novels, with Jon Hamm in the role as investigative reporter-turned-amateur-gumshoe I.M. Fletcher. It’s a solid effort from director and co-writer Greg Mottola, albeit a bit too shaggy and padded out to meet […]
Too much paranoias. When in need of squeaky thin organ-driven new wave of late, I often turn to the endearing L.A. four-piece the Paranoyds. The fashionista four-piece (they call themselves an “eyebrow band”) is generally just the right mix of quirky, sarcastic and sick of it. Their first album, 2019’s Carnage Bargain, got some attention with the singles “Girlfriend Degree” […]
Review of New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, by Craig Taylor Review by Michael Quinn I have lived in New York City for more than 25 years—my whole adult life. I sort of wound up here. I grew up on Long Island and went to school upstate. I had no idea what to do when I […]
No plan survives contact with reality. At the start of this summer, energized by recent listening, I started to dig into my library of books on free jazz, titles like Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your LIfe, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t by Scott Saul, Michael Heller’s Loft Jazz, and Ekkehard Jost’s im-portant study, Free Jazz. I was jazzed. But then […]
Lucifer on the dancefloor. A new of Montreal album is always a time of revelry—nobody does dark disco quite like Kevin Barnes. For a while, though, the albums have run thin fairly quickly for me. That’s not necessarily a problem; there’s far too much pop in the world for all of it to be permanent. But for a songwriter who […]
There is nothing new under the sun. Not to mention, you’ve heard that line before. How often? Well, Ecclesiastes was written about 3,000 years ago, so imagine the level of boredom it took to have someone mention it in the Old Testament. And they didn’t even have records back then. As surprising as it has been to admit this to […]
When was the last time you thought about Elvis Presley? When did you last think about breathing? Elvis is everywhere and nowhere — in music and marriage, camp and cliché, a singular entity who inspired countless imitators and reshaped nearly every facet of American life. Forty-five years after his death, his endurance is something of a paradox — more complicated […]
The Long Play festival, which ran in various venues around downtown Brooklyn from April 29 to May 1, was created to replace the previous Bang on a Can marathon, an annual single-stage daylong free presentation usually in Manhattan. Over three days at 10 venues, more than 60 acts represented a mix of contemporary composition, jazz-based improvisation and updatings of folk […]
Beauty runs deep. The surprise hit of the summer may turn out to be Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” which, after placement in an episode of the Netflix series Stranger Things, hit the top 10 in 14 countries and raced to the top of the Apple Music charts in the states. It’s not exactly a deep cut. […]
In the winter of 2020, trumpeter Wallace Roney appeared one evening on WKCR. A few weeks later, he was dead, killed, by the coronavirus. As Sharif Abdus-Salaam, who had hosted Roney, said with some shock when reporting this, “COVID does not play around.” No it does not. Nor, now with more than a million Americans needlessly dead, has it stopped […]