Music and protest
Israeli musicians bullied, not bowed
Many an unkind word has been said about the late scholar and radical Palestinian activist Edward Said, but at least he firmly believed in the necessity of cultural contacts between Arabs and Israelis, so much so that he co-founded (with Daniel Barenboim) the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, one of the most notable peace-oriented artistic endeavors ever to have come out of
“Playing Changes for Change”
Read my column on jazz and politics, in the July/August issue of Jazz Times, here [pdf].
McWhorter on conscious rap
“Why The Roots make cool art, but lousy politics,” goes the headline of John McWhorter’s three-page discourse on “conscious hip-hop.” McWhorter’s a conservative fellow — I mean that literally, he’s a fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute — with a deep appreciation of rap but a contrarian take on the employment market, the prison-industrial complex and so forth. Lots of
NY Phil in Pyongyang PS
In this post I faulted Lorin Maazel’s relativistic statement on North Korea but credited him for clarifying and revising it. What I should have done was give the full quotation, which is far more offensive in its entirety: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country — the United States —
NY Phil in Pyongyang
I was going to post a comment about the NY Philharmonic’s impending appearance in Pyongyang but then just read that fellow blogger Steve Smith is going there… Wow, that’s intense. I’m conflicted on the propriety of the concert. I can certainly understand the argument for cultural engagement, as Lorin Maazel made it here. I also think there’s the danger of
Music after 9/11
The following book review appears in the Winter 2008 issue of Jazz Notes, the quarterly journal of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA), edited by yours truly. — Music in the Post-9/11 WorldJonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry, eds.Routledge, New York/London, 2007; 328 pp.; $24.95 paperback Review by David R. Adler In the liner notes to Up For It, written about
“The duality of man”
Violent hip-hop lyrics, we’re told, don’t really glorify violence — either they hold up a mirror to harsh reality or offer a fantasy escape from same. Brian McManus, my editor at Philadelphia Weekly, puts a knife in that argument, and twists it. It’s hilarious.
Stockhausen: a political postscript
I listened to a fair amount of Stockhausen while writing my recent Anthony Braxton feature [pdf]. Now that he has died, I want to vent on an obscure political detail likely to be left out of most of the obits. No, not the notorious 9/11 comment. I’m speaking of Cornelius Cardew’s 1974 essay Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, largely and very deservedly