Joshua Kosman's fine appreciation appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Robert P.Commanday's appears here. Allan Kozinn's NYT obituary is here.
I first heard Imbrie's music because of New World Records, that noble defender of American music in all its forms. Imbrie's clarity and contrapuntal majesty attracted me, particularly in his songs and his transcendent string quartets.
Yet, according to many, his greatest quality was his ability to teach…
"Underlying the hype is the silly notion that if a work introduces plenty of characters and traipses after them for enough years and pages, it is ipso facto ambitious. The true mark of an ambitious work is its style and depth. We would recognize Anna Karenina as such a novel even if only its first few pages had survived, because they depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives. In contrast, Tree of Smoke starts off with one Seaman Bill Houston shooting a tiny monkey he sees in…
At first, the album seemed odd, patchy. I wasn't sure where Sam Beam was trying to go, wasn't sure what he was trying to say, wondered if he was lacking…
The Bird and The Bee: The Bird and The Bee
The Little Ones: Sing Song
Beirut: The Flying Club Cup
New Pornographers: Challengers
Fiery Furnaces: Widow City
PJ Harvey: White Chalk
Neko Case & Her Boyfriends: Furnace…
It was only somewhat comforting to read that these discs represent "a new generation of instrumentalists, singers, and conductors"—it's not your grandpappy's classical. I'm not over the hill, yet.
Most important, however, is the fact that Number 9 on this impressive list is Cantus' new eponymous disc—engineered, edited, mixed, and mastered by our man, John Atkinson.
I have to say that this is my very favorite…
Jeffrey Owen Jones was a father, scholar, college dean, Emmy Award winner, and magazine editor—all of which managed to fit into one paragraph of his obituary. But let the poet laureate of his generation write one nasty song about your cluelessness and that they'll remember.
Jones seemed to take it well. "'I was thrilled—in the tainted way I suppose a felon is thrilled to see his name in the newspaper,' Jones wrote in a story for Rolling Stone magazine some years later. 'I was awed too that Dylan had so accurately…
How good was it? Shawn Moynihan offers an appreciation.
Over at CJR, Nicholas Lemann ponders the limits of clear language, going back to George Orwell's classic "Politics and the English Language." Lemann doesn't quite worship at the altar of "P&TEL," however: He applauds it, but points out it was a rush job—one of 100 articles Orwell published in 1946.
Well, that's the…
"Folks,
"I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom 'stroke.'
"We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on…