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 20 2025
Long before synthesizers made futuristic sounds routine, Juan García Esquivel was already making orchestras behave as though they had escaped Earth’s gravity. Trumpets exploded from one speaker while voices answered from the other. Piano notes ricocheted across the stereo field. Steel guitar, percussion, whistles, wordless choruses, bells, and unexpected instrumental combinations appeared and disappeared with …
Jan 18 2025
Danny Kaye could turn language into percussion. A list of Russian composers became a showstopper. A nonsensical string of syllables could accelerate until words seemed to lose their meaning entirely. A medieval drinking cup could become the center of one of Hollywood’s most elaborate verbal routines. Then, without changing performers, the same man could sing …
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 08 2025
Some singers become recognizable through the first note they sing. Nora Dean could accomplish it with a cry, a laugh, a stretched syllable, or one of the strange wordless exclamations she scattered through her records. Her voice could sound sweet and playful one moment, mischievous the next, and then suddenly turn raw enough to cut …
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 22 2024
Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” may be one of the most instantly recognizable pieces of Christmas music ever written, but in 1960 Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn took its delicate, otherworldly melody somewhere entirely different. They slowed it down, darkened the atmosphere, added a relaxed jazz pulse, and transformed the Sugar Plum Fairy …
Dec 12 2024
Born Yewubdar Gebru on December 12, 1923, Ethiopian pianist, composer, and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is known for her free-spirited piano playing of compositions where notes flit with ease up and down pentatonic (five-note) scales. Her playing is heartfelt and instinctive, skillfully moving around the keyboard without a hitch. The scales heard in much of her music are representative …
Oct 30 2024
Night on Bald Mountain is a film set to the music of the same name by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, and arranged by his fellow Russian composer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The film was created by the inventors of pinscreen animation, Alexandre Alexeieff and his collaborator Claire Parker. Alexeieff was born in Kazan, Russia in 1901 and died in …
