Twenty-five years ago the Jazz Journalists Association began to identify and celebrate activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz as members of an “A Team,” soon renamed “Jazz Heroes.” Today the JJA announced its 2025 slate of these Heroes, 29 people across North America who put extraordinary efforts into sustaining and expanding jazz in its various forms.
So who...
Yuval Sharon, Artistic Director of Detroit Opera, talks about their historic upcoming productions and the role of the arts within a rapidly changing society.
From Book III of The Republic, by Plato (circa 375 BCE, translation by F. M. Cornford). Socrates is speaking with Glaucon:
One thing, however, is easily settled, namely that grace and seemliness of form and movement go with good rhythm; ungracefulness and unseemliness with bad.
Naturally.
And again, good or bad rhythm and also tunefulness or discord in music go with the...
In deference to St. Patrick’s Day, I’m reposting an entry from ten years ago. Titled “Yeats and the Economics of Creativity,” it originally ran on the Arts Endowment website on May 7, 2025.
Last month, at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin, I took part in a conference titled “Creative Minds: The Importance of the Creative Economy in...
“There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.”
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night (1959).
