2008 February

Charles Baxter’s novels and short stories have often questioned the nature of their composition: Is this a story? And if so, where is the boundary between the story and the life it may or may not reflect? Where is the...

Jazz critics, like pollsters and pundits, are often wrong. When in 1958 a relatively unknown twenty-eight-year-old pianist named Ahmad Jamal had a hit tune named "Poinciana" that stayed on the top-ten charts for weeks...

Never one to go with the first metaphor that comes my way, I was dismayed, as I heard Anna Ash sing at a party on New Year's Eve, to find myself thinking, "Damn, this girl sings like a bird!" But she really does....

When was the last time you heard a recital of four-hand piano music? At one time it was all the rage. Long before there was an iPod in every ear, there was a piano in every living room. And people played them, sometimes alone...

Forty years ago David Holt visited the Appalachian Mountains for the first time and began immersing himself in the music and stories he heard there. Since then, he has studied with many people and taught many more. Today, all...

I first encountered Joe Henry's name when I heard Garth Brooks's "Belleau Wood," a fabulously detailed and evocative song about the Christmas truce of 1914. Henry started out in country and Americana music,...

During World War II, sixteen-year-old Polish Jew Sala Garncarz was sent to a Nazi slave labor camp. She brought along a leather satchel. In between inspections and camp work, she gave the satchel to fellow prisoners, buried it,...

Still contending with the loss of George Balanchine twenty-five years on — the legendary choreographer and New York City Ballet founder died in 1983 — the dance world tends to pin its hopes for fresh new ballets on a...