Words and Music

Guest Blogger Dept. : Who better to celebrate Decoration Day with than Mark Twain? Here’s a selection from Albert Bigelow Paine’s massive fo...

BACK IN 1968, when I was a slip of a boy, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which affixed Memorial Day to the last Monday in M...

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT the most poised, the most elegant of jazz pianists. It’s no surprise that Teddy Wilson trained in classical music at fir...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Oh, my stars and garters! We haven’t heard from George Ade in a while. S.J. Perelman regarded Ade as the greatest Amer...

From the Vault Dept. : There was a time when major orchestras visited the Capital Region with alarming frequency. True, they didn’t draw muc...

From the Projection Booth Dept. : The Bobs have officially disbanded – they stopped by Caffe Lena, a longtime local performance venue for th...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : This was a show I missed during its development and eventual success in NYC, so I was glad to see it when the...

Twenty-five years ago, I drew the above to celebrate Susan's and my recent acquisition of a Montgomery County, NY, farm. Our friend L...

From the Food Vault : I wrote this review in 2011, but when you’re dealing with a place that has been successfully operating, with little ch...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : As the father of a theater major, I’m no longer easily persuaded to avail myself of child-centered entertainm...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We call once more upon the redoubtable Mark Twain to enlighten us, this time with reflections upon his vacation reside...

MY DAUGHTER MADE HER RADIO DEBUT IN MANCHESTER not long ago, and how this came about is worth the telling. We begin in 1972. I was a high-...

THERE ARE JAZZ BANDS AROUND THE WORLD TODAY dedicated to presenting the music of the Swing Era (and many another jazz era), but to tackle th...

AS NIGHTMARES GO, it wasn’t all that awful. But, having no recall of any other nightmares I may have encountered during the past couple of d...

From the Food Vault Dept .: I was delighted to discover this restaurant a decade ago, and am even more delighted that it endures, because I’...

ALL ROMANCES ARE POSSIBLE; any enduring outcome is unlikely. We work hard to stay united. We’re given little in the way of helpful precedent...

HIS LITERARY CAREER began with a parody and soon reinvented the genre he’d mocked. But Eric Ambler first wanted to be a playwright, and had ...

From the Classical Vault : It turns out that the my review below celebrated the first American visit from the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra wi...

From the Stage Vault Dept .: How best to put an epic like The Iliad on the stage? Why, with a solo actor and the assistance of a cellist, as...

From the Musical Vault: The Albany Symphony has a new recording out of music by Michael Daugherty, with whom the ensemble has long been ass...