Results for "John Lennon"

John Lennon

John Lennon was the Beatles' most committed rock & roller, their social conscience, and their slyest verbal wit. After the group's breakup, he and his second wife, Yoko Ono, carried on intertwined solo careers. Ono's early albums presaged the elastic, screechy vocal style of late- '70s new wavers like the B-52's and Lene Lovich. L7 and Babes in Toyland have also been influenced by and benefited from Ono's attitudinal, emotionally trailblazing work. Lennon strove to break taboos and to be ruthlessly, publicly honest. When he was murdered on December 8, 1980, he and Ono seemed on the verge of a new, more optimistic phase

Al Di Meola: Across the Universe

By DOUG COLLETTE

Al Di Meola's Across The Universe reaffirms how ideally the music of the Beatles translates into the eclectic style he forged early in his career. It's not as if the multi-instrumentalist/composer hadn't already made the point with All Your Life (inakustik, 2013), but this second, similarly conceived album is not only worth savoring repeatedly on its ...

Roberto Magris: Suite!

By KARL ACKERMANN

Italian pianist/composer Roberto Magris could not have anticipated the urgent need for a positive message when he recorded Suite! in 2018. The newly released double album reflects Magris' belief that a better world is coming and his certainty is conveyed in a sprawling program of poetry, original compositions, and some surprising covers. He has recorded as ...

The Archive of Contemporary Music

By KARL ACKERMANN

In Lower Manhattan, sits a musical gold mine. It's the motherlode of recorded music though the small, brightly colored sign above a grey steel door provides only a cryptic clue. The dusty window display of rare 78 RPM records, broken into erratic pie charts serves as a vestige of the past and a cautionary tale about ...

Tales of The Mystic Order of the Jazz Obsessed - Jazz Societies, Part II

By KARL ACKERMANN

Part 1 | Part 2 Jazz Societies, Part 1 briefly traced the preservation and interpretation of jazz from the oral history of its West African roots through academic and cultural institutions. The article included an overview of jazz societies and foundations that further the fostering of jazz education. The organizations vary in scope, size ...

Pete Brown: White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns, Part 2

By DUNCAN HEINING

Part 1 | Part 2 1966 was an important year in British popular music. Bob Dylan, performing with the Hawks, was booed for “going electric" at Manchester Free Trade Hall. The Rolling Stones topped the charts for the first time with “Paint It Black." The Beatles, fresh from the John Lennon “Bigger than Jesus" ...

Marco Sanguinetti: Inmoral

By MIKE JURKOVIC

Born, raised and still residing in Argentina, pianist-composer Marco Sanguinetti writes jewel-fine, poetic miniatures which bring back a time and place when individual voices of all talents were the wealth and treasure of any civilized society. Quite unlike, without getting too far afield, the mob-speak we're choked with today. The dozen tracks that tell ...

Adam Berenson: Every Beginning Is A Sequel

By KARL ACKERMANN

Pianist/keyboardist/composer Adam Berenson--across more than twenty recordings--offers incontrovertible evidence that talent surpasses an affinity for category. He is equally at home with jazz, electronica, blues, or a string quartet. On his previous , fully-acoustic album, Stringent and Sempiternal (Dream Works, 2019) Berenson went in an unusual direction (for him), covering works of Miles Davis, Bud Powell, ...

Jazz Societies, Part I: The Skipp Pearson Jazz Legacy Foundation

By KARL ACKERMANN

Part 1 | Part 2 The oral history traditions of West African griots led the preservation and interpretation of music that would become the fundamentals of jazz. In previous Under the Radar columns we looked at institutions that further the cause of safeguarding the genre; university-level academic programs and jazz museums whose hands-on experiences, ...

Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road And The End of The Beatles

By DOUG COLLETTE

Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road And The End of the Beatles Kenneth Womack 288 Pages ISBN: #978-1501746857 Cornell University Press 2019 Reverberating with all manner of interpretations, Solid State is a magnificently ironic title for a book purporting to tell The Story of Abbey Road and The ...