Music & Musicians
75 posts found
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Peace, Love & Ringo
Peace, Love & Ringo View Original Article -
Leonard Cohen's Calling
“Hineni, hineni I’m ready, my Lord” With these words that Abraham, the biblical patriarch spoke when God called upon him, Cohen begins, “You want it darker,” the title tune of his final album, Released a few weeks before Cohen’s untimely death in Los Angeles on November 7, 2016 at age 82, Cohen’s nine new songs recorded in his home over the last year are a powerful farewell, elegant and poetic yet cleared-eyed in the face of imminent death. Very much… -
A Howl of Warren Zevon in the Night
A Howl of Warren Zevon in the Night View Original Article -
A Tribute to The Prince of Yiddish Barroom Song
A Tribute to The Prince of Yiddish Barroom Song View Original Article -
Tell the Damn Truth! A Conversation with Peter Guralnick
PETER GURALNICK is the author of Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home, about the great artists at the heart of American Roots Music; the two-part biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; as well as Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, and Searching for Robert Johnson. He has written the scripts for documentaries about Sam Phillips, Sam Cooke, and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. He was in Los… -
Mozart as Guilty Pleasure
"Mozart in the Jungle" which I binged watched on Amazon's streaming service recently is a great example of what I call a really good bad show. Which is another way of saying that although it is thin on plot, the characters are at times caricatures and there are moments of... View Original Article -
Les Blank is Always a Pleasure
One night a few months ago, I found myself surfing through the Criterion collection on Hulu and stumbled upon an early Les Blank documentary, "The Blues According to Lightnin" Hopkins." I pushed play and I was suddenly in a field in Mississippi, with great immediacy and no explanation â no... View Original Article -
Did Figaro turn Marie Antoinette's head? Can LA Opera engage yours?
Last Saturday, I spent the day at the Getty Center at a one day study program hosted by The Getty in cooperation with LA Opera, "Luxury and Liberation: Art and Revolution in 18th Century France," just one of the events in LA Opera's multi-faceted city-wide "Figaro Unbound"celebration. This is the... View Original Article -
The Book on Billy Joel with Fred Schruers
Fred Schruers is the author of "Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography" (Crown Books). Fred has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly among many others. I"ve been friends with Fred for a long time., Recently I did a Google Hangout with him to talk about... View Original Article -
Leonard Cohen's Triumphant "Problems"
The mere release of “Popular Problems,” two days after Leonard Cohen’s 80th birthday last month, is remarkable in and of itself. (How many 80-year-old sex symbols and style icons are there?) But it also caps a decade in which Cohen conquered troubling neuroses and fears to mount worldwide tours that were invocations, convocations and spiritual gatherings, not to mention money-makers, that returned Cohen, who’d been swindled out of his lifesavings, to financial security. His is one of the more amazing… -
We are all ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’
“Inside Llewyn Davis,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, is the fictional story of one week in the life of a folksinger in Greenwich Village in 1961. The title character, played with total conviction by Oscar Isaac and supplied with credible material by the maven of American music, T-Bone Burnett, is acknowledged to have been inspired, in part – at least as a jumping off point -- by the late folkie Dave Van Ronk. Ethan Coen describes Llwyn as “not… -
Danny Sanderson in L.A., celebrating 40 years of Israeli pop music
If you’ve been to Israel in the last 40 years or heard Israeli popular music, then you probably know Danny Sanderson, who will be performing with his band at the Gindi Auditorium at American Jewish University on Dec. 8. Sanderson was a founding member in 1973 of Kaveret (literally Beehive; also called Poogy), a band often referred to as “the Beatles of Israel.” Although Kaveret broke up in 1976, they have reunited successfully on several occasions. Last summer, for their…