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I saw Maria Schneider’s Jazz Orchestra at the Jazz Standard last night, for at least the 12th time in as many years, and they—both she and the band—get more and more dazzling with each visit. As I noted a couple months back, with the release of her latest CD, Sky Blue (available only from ArtistShare.com or MariaSchneider.com), Schneider’s compositions have grown both denser and airier—rich harmonies stacked on brisk, flowing melodies, swaying to rhythms at once buoyant, complex, and danceable. Her ballads are sweet and lovely without oozing into sentimentality. Her upbeat numbers are snappy…
Have astronomers astronomers accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy?
It doesn't seem fair, somehow. As John Atkinson observed, "I didn't observe it, my part of the universe should still be unaffected."
In August, astronomers discovered an one billion light-year hole in the Universe. Now, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton's team of theoretical physicists and cosmologists posits that it is "unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."
Wait, the absence of anything is evidence of the presence of something? Modern physics seems to exist mainly to make my head hurt.
It's funny, but hard-boiled pulp fiction seems to appeal to the literary mouth-breathers and the most extremely intellectual literati (and I make no claim as to which group I fall into). Even so, I did a double take when I saw that the review of Otto Penzler's new The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps was by John freaking Banville, author of The Sea, Doctor Copernicus, The Newton Letter, and Kepler, a novel."
If the book's half the read Banville's review is, it's a corker.
It was terribly difficult to get out of bed this morning. Wasn't it? For me, the soft sound of car tires over wet city street was a warm whisper: Stay in bed, don't go.
It's a grey day in New York City, but we're back in action. The "Products of the Year" plaques arrived—the shredded newspaper packing material that's covering my office floor proves it. None of the hefty glass plaques shattered in transit, but one was accidentally duplicated by the trophy company. So one of our lucky winners will be getting two awards this year.
Our new supply of Test CD 3 discs…
Ricky Rosas is teaching the USC Trojans how to be something better than football heroes—he's teaching them to be adults.
Peter Williams ponders a recent spate of books on Johannes Brahms' "late" ouvre. What does "late" mean? What does music mean, for that matter?
Wired's Seth Mnookin interviewed UMG's CEO Doug Morris, who proves that record labels were even more clueless than anyone could have even imagined when it came to the changing landscape of the Internet.
"Morris insists there wasn't a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. 'There's no one in the record company that's a technologist,' Morris explains. 'That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would…