Jan 27 2025
Some singers seem to belong to daylight. Maki Asakawa belonged to the hours after midnight. Dressed almost entirely in black, often hidden behind dark glasses and surrounded by cigarette smoke, she created a stage presence that seemed inseparable from the music itself. Her low, weathered voice could move through blues, jazz, spirituals, folk songs, chanson, …
Jan 25 2025
Few pieces of music can summon a place as quickly as an Antônio Carlos Jobim song. A quiet piano chord, a gently shifting harmony, the restrained pulse of samba, and suddenly Rio de Janeiro seems to appear: mountains descending toward the water, apartment windows open to the night, rain arriving at the end of summer, …
Jan 17 2025
Françoise Hardy seemed almost completely unsuited to becoming a pop star. She disliked crowds, suffered from stage fright, distrusted celebrity, and wrote songs about romantic uncertainty with a seriousness far removed from the exuberant image usually associated with teenage pop. Yet when she appeared on French television in 1962 singing “Tous les garçons et les …
Jan 15 2025
Lee Bontecou made sculptures that seem to stare back. From a wall of patched canvas and welded steel, a black opening pushes toward the viewer. It might be the mouth of a machine, the lens of a camera, the barrel of a weapon, an eye, a wound, a cave, or a hole leading somewhere beyond …
Jan 15 2025
Snowflakes swirl through the air as an old storyteller explains that each one is like a tiny white bee serving a queen who lives far to the north. Somewhere beyond the familiar city, past frozen rivers, forests, palaces, and vast stretches of snow, the Snow Queen travels through the winter sky in a glittering sleigh. …
Jan 07 2025
Magic hour is not the time to be in a restaurant. -Roloff Beny Roloff Beny photographed the world as though civilization itself were a work of art. A ruined column, a desert wall, a flight of birds, a temple reflected in water, a mountain range disappearing into mist, or a narrow opening between ancient stones …
Dec 25 2024
There are only a few hours left before midnight, the decorations are going up, musicians and dancers are rehearsing, and everyone at a Moscow House of Culture is preparing for a lively New Year’s Eve celebration. Then the new director arrives and decides the evening needs improvement. There should be fewer jokes, less dancing, more …
Dec 25 2024
There is something almost perfectly suited to Christmas about the sound of Oscar Peterson at the piano. His playing can be brilliant and technically dazzling, but it can also become warm, intimate, playful, reflective, and quietly elegant. On An Oscar Peterson Christmas, released in 1995, those qualities transform familiar holiday songs into jazz performances that …
Dec 24 2024
For a brief, glittering moment in the middle of the 20th century, the traditional evergreen Christmas tree faced competition from something that looked as though it had arrived from another planet. Aluminum Christmas trees shimmered beneath rotating color wheels, reflected the glow of living-room television sets, and fit perfectly into an era fascinated by rockets, …
Dec 18 2024
Few buildings capture the optimism of the Jet Age as perfectly as the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. With enormous white arches sweeping over a circular glass structure, it looks like a flying saucer has landed in the middle of LAX—or perhaps like a spaceport designed for a future that people in 1961 …
