Archives for November 24, 2009

If you haven’t seen Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, go here to read it.
Not long after the Times review appeared on the paper’s Web site yesterday afternoon, Pops became the best-selling jazz book on Amazon. I don’t know how long it will stay that way, so if you haven’t gotten around to doing your bit, why wait? Christmas is just around the corner.
UPDATE: In addition to raving about “Pops” today, Kakutani has put it on her list of the ten best books of 2009.

• Jane Wilson, about whom I have written more than once in this space and elsewhere, has a show of new paintings and watercolors up at DC Moore Gallery through December 23. Busy as I am, I didn’t hesitate to carve out time to see it as soon as it opened, for Wilson is one of my favorite American artists. Imagine a cross between Mark Rothko and Fairfield Porter and you’ll get an inkling of what Wilson is up to in her near-abstract yet miraculously specific skyscapes, in which the fleeting manifestations of clouds and light are refracted through the transforming prism of an artist’s eye. I can’t praise Wilson more highly than to say that one of her small-format watercolors, Breaking Light, hangs in the Teachout Museum. I look at it every day.
DC Moore is at 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. For more information, go here.
• Maria Schneider, the most gifted of contemporary jazz composers, brings her big band to the Jazz Standard tonight for their annual Thanksgiving residency. They’ll be there through Sunday, playing a mixture of old and new tunes, and what I wrote about them in 2007 still goes:

Few instrumental composers of importance (and Maria is a very important composer) have drawn so directly on the remembered experiences that she transforms by an impenetrable act of mental alchemy into the pastel clouds of sound that are her compositions. I love to watch bits and pieces of her life find their way onto manuscript paper: hang gliding, childhood car rides, the dance music of Latin America, the sound of birds singing in Central Park.

No show on Thursday. Otherwise, two shows nightly, plus an additional late-night set on Friday and Saturday. Reservations are essential. For more information, go here.

“The people are a sovereign whose vocabulary is limited to two words, ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ This sovereign, moreover, can speak only when spoken to.”
E.E. Schattenschneider, Party Government: American Government in Action