2004 June

Nature's ability to restore and transform is a long-standing theme in Western life and culture. In the eighteenth century, Queen Marie Antoinette often found it amusing to escape the perfumed protocol at Versailles by...

Something about Richard Buckner's music makes people want to drink and break things. After one Buckner show, friends of mine split a whiskey bottle with him and took him to the nearby public radio station to surprise the...

Rodney Crowell's Fate's Right Hand mines the tunnels of a dangerous cave; issues of life, death, faith, and fate can easily sink the songs of a lesser writer. But Crowell's a master. The eleven songs here dig and...

Few can match Mississippi-born songwriter Steve Forbert's way with a crowd. Although he always records with a band, he tours solo, with just a guitar. I saw Forbert play at a Vermont club a few winters back, with the outdoor...

Embracing diversity is a major theme running through Jeff Haas's music. You see it in the bilingual (Hebrew and English) titles of his recordings, L'Dor VaDor — Generation to Generation and HaGesher Chai —...

Back in 1980 we all knew about Judith Guest. Her first novel, Ordinary People, a story about a dysfunctional midwestern upper-middle-class family originally published in 1976, was turned into Robert Redford’s directorial...

I do not know who decided to pair two extraordinary jazz pianists at this year’s Summer Festival, but it is an inspired idea. Ellis Marsalis and Danilo Pérez are both regarded as modern jazz players, in the broadest sense...

When Porchsleeper guitarists Brian Raleigh and Derek Vertin were seniors in high school, they had a mutual friend who needed a place to stay. He spent the last part of the year moving between their two houses. Apparently, when...