booksbooksbooks

 The Jazz Loft Project by Sam Stephenson

 

The book is being called a coffee table book, but it is more of an art installation between covers, annotated by Stephenson. He not only rescues a time capsule of art and artists in an improbable setting, he curates a transporting photoessay.

 

W. Eugene Smith, WWII photographer for Life and Look abandoned another assignment when he installed himself in an abandoned tenement 821 6^th Ave in NYC in the 50s, in the middle of the wholesale flower district, that became the underground hub and ad hoc studio of jazz luminaries and writers, artists and photographers and junkies. It is the jazz version of Warhol’s factory.

 

Smith not only photographed everything and everybody, he wired the building for sound, so there are jam sessions from the jazz vanguard.

 

In the background, Smith taped radio shows of operas, plays, actors and authors reading poems and plays, political speeches, The World series, bulletins of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as they happened, they are his soundtrack to the legendary rehearsals of Thelonious Monk and Hall Overton’s seminal Town Hall Concerts.

 

 

 

Classical

Dutch composer Henk de Viliger’s condensation of Ricard Wagner’s The Ring | An orchestral adventure will not be to everybody’s taste, san voices and any version that would squash the 17 hour magnum opus in one. Conductor Neeme Jarvi brought it to the Philadelphia Orchestra over the weekend. 

De Viliger’ aerial approach of the Wagnerian panorama is a marvel of scaled architecture. In Jarvi’s hands a forward symphonic narrative and the attentiveness of the soloists, didn’t try to compete with operatic territory.

Fab on this arrangement, fortissimo and crescendo, foreshadows and sonic disappearances and that ever important triangle.

Jennifer Montone’s French Horn, those offstage heralds was the musical heart of the piece, except for that charging horn section, but for the flank of harps, led by the consistently inestimable power of lead harpist Elizabeth Hainen. The stalwart concertmaster David Kim led the unwavering precision and clarity of the left strings, but it is the cellos and bass guard that brought those Teutonic flybys back to sonorous ground.

politic tic tic

The obstructionist is there again. The wedger. The Ego. Yes, it’s say it ain’t so Senator Joe Lieberman again. He supported the idea of expanded Medicaid in the distant past and as recently as three months ago. 

I would love to hear him deny that he is beholden to his state’s insurance money and influence. Oh, that’s right, he’s already done that!

All the cameras are on him now that he can twist the collective Democratic balls if they don’t drop the Medicaid idea as an option to the public option. The man is a political whore in heat.  Joe, there are two things that I hate about you…Your FACE!