David Adler
Bravo, NY Times
It’s important to voice support for the NY Times (and other major papers) for publishing the “Swift” story on the tracking of terrorism-related financial activity. The denunciations from Bush and Cheney and their congressional lackeys are politically motivated and baseless. The topic of terrorist financing has been in the news since almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Would-be terrorists cannot
Sounds to cherish
Pierre Villette (1926-1998), Motets (Hyperion, 2006)A cappella sacred music of exquisite harmonic clarity and indescribable beauty. Gotta hand it to those Catholics. Villette’s influences include Fauré and Messiaen. Nightingale: Japanese Art Songs (BIS, 1997)Featuring counter-tenor Yoshikazu Mera and pianist Kikuko Ogura. Individual songs, as well as suites, by 20th-century Japanese composers. Mera, in voice and appearance, is an androgynous marvel.
Ralph Towner solo
On June 21, guitarist Ralph Towner played his first New York solo concert in 20 years. My review is online at JazzTimes.com.
A. Roy redux
Until now I haven’t had the time or the stomach for this, but here goes. Famed novelist/activist Arundhati Roy appeared on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now program in May; transcript here. I’ve written critically about Roy before, also here and here. (I’m grateful to a reader for pointing out a circulating misquotation that I once cited and then corrected.) The latest
Hilton Ruiz update
Via JazzTimes.com, a follow-up on the unresolved death of pianist Hilton Ruiz: [T]he Associated Press reports that Ruiz’s family believes the pianist was attacked by several people in Club Utopia, while bouncers “failed to intervene in any meaningful fashion” or call an ambulance, leaving the injured pianist “abandoned” on the street. The pianist’s daughter Aida Ruiz filed a negligence lawsuit
Gaza again
The June 20 statement from Human Rights Watch makes clear that the organization is not backpedaling. I stand corrected, and I’ve amended my original post. Meanwhile, Israel has botched a “targeted killing” elsewhere in Gaza; three children are dead. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade protests the killing of civilians by promising to kill more of them.
Feldman, Sibelius, Webern
Alex Ross has a great piece on the late composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) in the June 19 New Yorker: [Feldman] loved to challenge students’ assumptions about what ideas were au courant, about which composers were radical and which were conservative. He proclaimed, for example, a love for Sibelius, who had long been derided in progressive circles as a retrograde Romantic.
Vision Festival highlights
The Vision Festival, which ran this year from June 12-18, is exhausting and invigorating in equal measure. This is a left-of-center music marathon concentrated in one venue, the Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. It just happens to take place around the same time as the more mainstream, multi-venue JVC Jazz Festival. The theme for 2006, Vision’s 11th