Unusual Venues: Chamber Music Seeks New Audiences in New Places
As any biologist will tell you, there is a link between environment and evolution, and in a world where classical musicians are often regarded as “play[ing] music composed by dead people to dwindling, graying audiences,” chamber organizations are able to adapt more quickly and to evolve in new and unexpected ways . . . 
Defixiones, La Serpenta Canta—Diamanda Galás
In many ways, Galás is less concerned with the victims carried away in any particular flood than in the closing of the waters of forgetfulness over them . . .
It’s Mostly Residual—Cuong Vu
The title track is stately, elegiac, yet not in the least mournful; one could only describe it as the sound of someone looking back on a glorious love affair that has ended without bitterness . . .
Southern Road Songs—Harley-Davidson
The blues songs on this CD aren’t exactly Southern Road Songs—they’re the songs that black people sang on the roads out of the South, which is an entirely different matter . . .
The Complete Columbia Recordings—Miles & Coltrane
These sessions from 1955 to 1961 show Davis leading the band from the rapid switchbacks of bop out into the open fields of the modal . . .
Ars Longa, Vita Longa: Theodorakis's Eightieth-Birthday Concert
Where Bartók and Stravinsky mined their countries’ folk music for material to enrich their classical compositions, Theodorakis plowed his rich musical education back into Greece’s popular music. He was responsible for an apotheosis of Greek song—not as classical music, but as itself on a higher plane . . .
Jackson Pollock: Jazz—Various Artists
Imagine discovering that Ornette Coleman’s favorite art was, say, seventeenth-century landscape painting, or finding out that Albert Ayler had actually harbored a secret love for clown portraits and sad-eyed children on velvet . . .
Rare Live Recordings 1934–1959—Billie Holiday
These discs trace the trajectory of her voice from the jaunty insouciance of her early performances through the peak of her career and back down the other side when smoking, drinking, drugs, and despair had left her sounding, as one critic put it, “like her voice had died and come back to haunt us from the grave” . . .
Live at Irving Plaza, NYC—The Plastic People of the Universe
“This is like ghost music, the best kind of ghost music,” shouts a stout, middle-aged Czech man into my ear as the Plastic People wrap up “Elegy.” “It’s from the other side of fear!” . . .
Ray of Light: A Tribute to Ray Charles at the Nashville Pops
Poets have been using the language of earthly love to speak of spiritual ecstasy since at least the Song of Solomon, but Charles turned the equation around . . .
“I Don't Have to Cross Over; I'm Already Over”: An Interview with David Krakauer
“I realized I had found the perfect place for all three of my musical personalities—interpreter, composer, and improviser. Klezmer music was my musical home . . .”
Black Cadillac—Rosanne Cash
“Modern country music,” Rosanne Cash has written, “is shiny and rich and rather shallow. . . . The dead have all but disappeared . . .”
The Politics of Unquiet
Interviews on the intersection of music and politics with Diamanda Galás, David Harrington, Archie Shepp, Bob Ostertag, and others . . .
and more to come . . .
Diamanda Galás—Live at the Open Ears Festival
Diamanda Galás—Malediction & Prayer
Pharoah Sanders—Save Our Children
Olu Dara—In the World
Various Artists—Pavarotti & Friends 2
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