Music
In The Eternal Now
By George GrellaThe weekend of the renewed Ragas Live Festival, Taylor Swift’s new album, Midnights, also dropped. The two are connected because in a fundamental way all music making is connected, but in a much more salient way because the album—and pop music as a whole—and ragas—and related traditions as a whole—are two opposing ways to solve the same problem; how to establish an expressive link to the listener so that they experience what the musician wants them to experience?
38th Belgrade Jazz Festival
By Martin LongleyThe Belgrade Jazz Festival has a history of battling adversity. Despite a substantial run from its founding in 1971 until 1990, the festival was understandably dormant during the Yugoslavian Civil War.
Channeling Robert Ashley: Object Collection at The Brick
By Dan JosephAt its core, Automatic Writing is a kind of ritual magic rendered on magnetic tape. Imbued with a sense of occult-like mysticism, it transforms sound and language into a surrealist psychological space. Developed in the studio over a five year period, Ashley wrote that Automatic Writing “became a kind of opera in my imagination” that conjures a set of four shadowy characters. It is this hallucinatory auditory space, this imaginary opera, that Object Collection sought to animate on the stage.
Playing the Room
By Scott GuttermanMusicians are always playing off one another, and their own sounds are altered by these different contexts. Guitarist Grant Green sounds very different on two separate recordings of “My Favorite Things,” one with the low-slung, stepped-back style of pianist Sonny Clark, another with the ethereal modal reach of pianist McCoy Tyner. And these particularities are not limited to the musicians, but to the spaces in which the music is played.
