Words and Music

Remember Live Music? Dept.: I’ve long been in love with Pamela Frank, both as a violinist (she, not I) and on a fundamentally carnal level....

Remember Live Performance? Dept. : One of the most compelling shows presented at Albany’s Capital Rep nearly a decade ago was Leslie Uggams’...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Look, I’m as socially responsible as the next fellow. Trouble is, the next fellow isn’t typically very socially ...

KEEP IN MIND THAT BAYER AG (best-known as the aspirin company) remains in a legal hot-seat over its weed-killer Roundup, a product it inheri...

From the Cinema Vault Dept. : This way-too-brief review hardly suited its subject, a two-and-a-half-hour masterpiece of disturbing storytell...

From the Vault Dept. : Bob Bowyer found the humor in ballet and offered magnificently endearing shows with his troupe, American Ballet Comed...

From the Vault Dept.: Capitol Chamber Artists has been presenting music in the Albany, NY, area for over a half-century. They have been res...

From the Food Vault Dept. : Remember restaurants? How odd it would have been for me were I still actively reviewing them! Here’s a throwback...

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 ...