Words and Music

From the Food Vault Dept. : It’s long gone, I’m afraid. Owner Victoria Gelaj sold Pasquale's and moved south, the better to deal with so...

 From the Classical Vault Dept .: One memorable weekend twelve years ago, the Albany Symphony gave a pair of concerts at a spiffy new hall i...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : The bane and glory of a performing artist is the incessant touring the job demands. But this has allowed me...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Let’s welcome back Barry Pain with the third chapter of his wonderfully droll book Eliza . Chapter one is here , two i...

EDWARD SOREL’S COVER ART for his book Profusely Illustrated pictures him at a drawing board, pen poised in his right hand. In all other res...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : It numbs me sometimes to think that a review such as the one below was crafted 34 years ago. Although my do...

NORWEGIANS DON’T WAIT for a holiday to put treats on the table. This I know, having grown up with a Norwegian grandmother. So did Isabel Bur...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Stripling that I was at the time, I remember that there was some excitement in the music press when Ursula ...

From the Food Vault Dept. : Albany’s expansive food co-op has been in business for 45 years. Since the time I wrote the piece below, it move...

WHAT DO BEETHOVEN, CHOPIN, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Haydn, Dvořák, and Grieg have in common? You’ll find their music in vintage jazz recording...

I'd like to share another of my video collaborations with Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, this time realizing a project she suggested to hono...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Mark Twain’s recently published autobiography runs three volumes, or two and a half if you discount the padding at the...

ONCE I DISCOVERED classical music, I was ineluctably set on a path that would keep me free of the ties of mainstream anything, particularly ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : This blog is getting verse – specifically, another poem by P.G. Wodehouse. The creator of Jeeves and Lord Emsworth was...

From the Soapbox Dept .: I suppose it was those first few years of concert-reviewing that inspired the piece below, as I was confronted with...

From the Tech Vault Dept.: The evanescence of technology is such that nothing in the article below has any currency. The company that made ...

From the Food Vault Dept. : After the demise of Albany’s Metroland Magazine, there was a short-lived pseudo-alt-weekly that was published fo...

MOSAIC RECORDS WAS FOUNDED, nearly forty years ago, with the mission of reissuing great jazz recordings in a way that best showcases a parti...

From the Food Vault Dept. : It took over fifteen years to discover why there was a job opening that enabled me to get hired for my first job...

Our second pandemic-era Thanksgiving! How exciting! I didn’t think “frustration” was a sound culinary theme; instead, I decided to smoke a t...