Music

Willie Mitchell: 1928-2010 Willie Mitchell slipped away this January 5 just past. Trumpet player, bandleader, songwriter, he was foremost a producer. Not a celebrity producer, he was better than that. Throughout the 60s, he made records under his own name. they were mostly instrumentals, in a Junior Walker-ish style. The title of one collection, That … Read more

When there’s madness in the air, only the mad survive, oh boy -“Up and Away,” St. Trinian’s 2 soundtrack If you’re a pop listener, you may have wondered: What accounts for the undeniable popularity (among both consumers and critics) of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”? Arguably the most hyped personality in the Western world, Lady Gaga … Read more

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original Robin D. G. Kelley Free Press For his entire professional life, Thelonious Sphere Monk was almost universally thought to be weird beyond comprehension, musically (up to the late ‘50s) and personally (all of his life.) He was thought to occupy a dimension of his own, … Read more

THE PARK PLAZA CHRONICLES OF VINCENT LIVELLI Introduction by Robert Farris Thompson Park Plaza essay by Vincent Livelli Postscript by Pablo E. Yglesias Edited by Robert Farris Thompson and Pablo E. Yglesias   Introduction Historians of mambo have established the cultural importance of the Park Plaza dancehall. The late and great New York Puerto Rican … Read more

At the conclusion of a dream that included my descending in an elevator with a hooker and leaping a barrier to catch a subway train, I found myself on a park bench taking out a notebook to describe my collection of .45 rpm records to which I have not listened in thirty-five years. When I … Read more

Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is good enough to deserve a better title. I wish he’d just called it Twisted: meaning strange or perverted, but also, in vernacular usage, confused or misunderstood (as in “don’t get it twisted”). Isolating this double meaning illuminates the double consciousness at work throughout the album, which dropped … Read more

Your editor got to Drive-By Truckers’ last album Go Go Boots late but first time through I fell hard for “Everybody Needs Love.” It took me South to a forever young place. And the journey’s just started because “Everybody Needs Love” is a cover of a song by the great lost soul singer/songwriter/guitar player Eddie … Read more