Deceptively Simple

I quit pursuing a career as a trumpet-player in the summer of 2001. This was after a year in the trumpet Master’s program at Indiana University, and as I watched (or, rather, heard) people play circles around me and realized I had technical problems that should have been ironed out when I was 19, and [...]

“Bird had a knack for getting from one note to another like nobody else.” That’s how Dizzy Gillespie summarized what made Charlie Parker stand out from everyone around him. Parker had the technique to run circles around people, and the harmonic ingenuity to upend jazz harmony as we knew it, but what made his playing [...]

New files were made publicly available yesterday from the Nixon Presidential Materials by the Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. If there aren’t any smoking guns, or crass examples of Nixon behaving badly, there are documents that can help fill in some gaps, and connect some dots. For one, there are several memos [...]

In Louis Menand’s New Yorker article (in the January 11 issue, and not available online) about the life and reception of Andy Warhol, there’s this intriguing fact: “[Tony] Scherman and [David] Dalton report that a profile of Warhol, by David Bourdon, had been scheduled for the cover of Life, but that after [Robert] Kennedy’s death [...]

The Chicago Symphony is playing Mahler’s Fourth Symphony this week, a work I always manage to both anticipate and dread. Maybe not “dread,” especially, so much as back away from. It’s a smaller symphony than those it’s bracketed by, the Third with its women’s and children’s choirs and eight French horns, the Fifth with its [...]