[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR months now, one of the most intriguing instrumentalists in Los Angeles has been unspooling his style for the price of a drink in a small bar in Highland Park. Jeff Parker, longtime guitarist for the Chicago "post-rock" band Tortoise, has lived in Los Angeles for a few years now, and alongside playing with members of Spain and in drummer Matt Mayhall's trio, Parker … [Read more...]
Schubert, Meet Beckett
[contextly_auto_sidebar] TONIGHT I am looking forward to going to Disney Hall to see an odd pairing: the songs of Franz Schubert interspersed with the short plays of Samuel Beckett. The recital, put on by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, features several singers and actors including Irish actor Barry McGovern and soprano Julia Bullock. The whole thing springs from the twisted genius Yuval Sharon, … [Read more...]
A Musicologist Muses on John Adams
[contextly_auto_sidebar] One of the most insightful and eclectic thinkers on music I know is UCLA musicologist Robert Fink, who has written a book on minimalism -- Repeating Ourselves -- and both teaches music history and run the school's music-business program. On the occasion of John Adams' 70th birthday, and a series of related events in Los Angeles, I corresponded with Fink about the … [Read more...]
Nixon in China in Los Angeles
[contextly_auto_sidebar] IF you live in LA long enough, you might come to think you've seen John Adams' iconic opera not once but several times. There are few more talked-about or written about works from the last four or five decades; maybe "Einstein on the Beach" or "Angels in America." Adams' music -- his violin concerto, "El Nino," "Naive and Sentimental Music" -- gets performed all the … [Read more...]
Music and Design: “Seeing Noise”
[contextly_auto_sidebar] WHY do we talk about "seeing" bands or orchestral groups? How did album jackets and photography of musicians -- whether Francis Wolff's shadowy shots of jazz musicians smoking in the shadows or Astrid Kirchherr's images of the Beatles in post-industrial cityscapes -- become important parts of music's aura? Is a rock video a betrayal of what music is really about? I … [Read more...]
Snapshots from the Culture Crash: 1
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LONGTIME music journalist Steve Mirkin has been, like a lot of us in the creative class, though a series ups and downs since the Internet remade journalism and the recession undercut the middle class. He appears briefly in my book Culture Crash. Here is an update, which begins around January 1. It was not going to be a happy new year for me. After more than two … [Read more...]
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of my favorite writers in any genre is the USC humanities professor Leo Braudy, justly celebrated for his Frenzy of Renown, a history of fame going back to Alexander the Great. Braudy writes widely on literature, film, ancient civilizations. the question of America, the overlap of culture and politics, and all kinds of subjects that interest me. He's insightful, … [Read more...]
On Stage with the Marx Bros
[contextly_auto_sidebar]ONE of the glories of American culture is the cinematic ensemble known as the Marx Brothers. But before Chico, Zeppo, Harpo, and Groucho became anarchic movie stars in film like "A Day at the Races" and "Duck Soup," they were an anarchic vaudeville troupe that traveled the nation. And they performed and socialized with my grandfather, a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, and his … [Read more...]
Octavia Butler’s Los Angeles
[contextly_auto_sidebar] THE posthumous rise of the science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, who died in 2006 and spent most of her life in and around Pasadena, CA, has been fascinating to watch. I've been interested in Butler since I moved out here and began to hear of her work, in the late '90s, and love one of her story collections. But I don't know her life of output in great detail. So … [Read more...]
“Akhnaten” at Los Angeles Opera
[contextly_auto_sidebar] THE Philip Glass opera Akhnaten, the very abstracted story of the Egyptian pharaoh who lived 35 centuries ago, is now at Los Angeles Opera. Glass considers it a trilogy, alongside his epochal Einstein on the Beach and his Gandhi opera, Satyagraha. Akhnaten the man was a curious guy. Imagine being a fairly important figure -- he is credited with basically inventing … [Read more...]