Words and Music

TRUTH TO TELL, there’s not much different going on here. Rural life has a built-in social-distancing factor, although that’s the thing that ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : The rising need for medical personnel is bein matched by a rising self-sufficiency among the quarantined masses. Accor...

My cabaret partner, Malcolm Kogut, and I spent yesterday recording the song embedded below. It's from a 1915 operetta by Franz Lehar, ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Thomas Nashe (or Nash; he signed it both ways) was a poet, playwright, and pamphleteer – and a devout Catholic, who li...

YOU’VE PROBABLY CONTEMPLATED doing more shopping at your local food co-op for many reasons, among them that you’ll probably find healthier f...

MOSAIC RECORDS HAS BEEN VERY GENEROUS with its Woody Herman reissues, and for an excellent reason: Herman’s jazz bands (and there were many)...

From the Editorial Trauma Dept. : Here’s a piece that could have been a favorite of mine, written in 1986, as I successfully traced a histor...

ALONGSIDE ITS INCREDIBLE RESOURCE of helpful information, the internet also has brought us the scourge of YouTube how-to- videos. This is no...

Crystal Ball Dept. : O, those prognotications of the year ahead! They fade so easily that by the time summer arrives we’ve usually forgotten...

From the Theatrical Vault Dept. : I reproduced in these e-pages an opinion piece I wrote in 1984 after the premiere of a Raggedy-Ann musical...

From the Food Vault Dept .: We’re still in early March, so don’t be fooled by the melting snow. It’s only clearing a space for what’s bound ...

From the Concert Vault Dept. : My stint as a classical-music reviewer began after I submitted samples to all the area newspapers, correctly ...

From the Food Vault Dept. : What, I occasionally ask myself, did I have for dinner thirty years ago? In many cases, it’s on record, and in t...

From the Vault Dept. : I wrote a series of liner notes for the mch-lamented Dorian Recordings label back when they were headquartered in Tro...

From the Vault Dept. : Early in 1984, B. A. Nilsson vanished from the pages of Albany’s Metroland Magazine, and a similarly erudite scribbl...

From the Vault Dept. : I mentioned in last Friday’s post the situation that emerged as I took on the post of classical-music reviewer for Al...

From the Literary Vault Dept. : Did this piece actually run in Metroland ? I can’t remember, and I’m not curious enough to go digging throug...

From the Vault Dept .: Some thirty years ago, Proctors in Schenectady tried a noble experiment by inaugurating a small, separate theater ser...

From Somebody Else’s Vault Dept .: Here’s an unsigned piece from the Chatham (NY) Courier’s “Rough Notes” section. That it comes from nearly...

From the Food Vault Dept. : I ran into Joseph Soliman while food shopping today (I buy in large-enough quantities to justify going where the...