2003 November

If you've never heard the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama, by all means take the opportunity when they come to the Ark on Monday, November 17. Formed as the Five Blind Boys of Alabama in the 1940s, they cultivated a sound...

Charles Lloyd is one of the great originals in jazz. He grew up in Memphis, where he learned jazz from players such as George Coleman and Phineas Newborn but also apprenticed with bluesmen like B.B. King. He moved to Los...

A couple of decades before anyone ever talked about performance poetry, long before the spread of poetry slams and their imitators, Jayne Cortez was creating a reputation for herself as a performer of her own poetry. Associated...

The violin has never been considered a typical jazz instrument, but in recent years, in the eclectic atmosphere of improvised music, nontraditional instruments have been more welcome. A number of violinists have risen to...

Let’s not debate the merits of movie music. That argument was settled long ago by the only people whose opinion matters: the composers. Stravinsky wrote music for Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre (although Twentieth Century...

Last April, on the first Friday night when spring seemed truly possible, Odessa Harris sang blues, jazz, and R&B chestnuts and made them appropriately frisky and lustful. The buzz-cut, fluffed crowd at Goodnite Gracie...

In a career that has spanned more than three decades, Chava Alberstein has captured the heart of a nation with her dynamic vocal range and broad repertoire. Israel's leading vocalist has recorded in Hebrew, Yiddish, and...

Remember Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly? The Swedish director’s meditation on madness presents life as unendurable, death as unbearable, and God as a malevolent spider just beyond the wall. Remember the...