Words and Music

From the Jazz Vault Dept. : As noted elsewhere in these pages, I’ve been a Scott Hamilton fan since I discovered him at Eddie Condon’s on We...

Obsession with Heifetz Dept .: Here’s the Preface to Listening to Heifetz: A Biographical Survey of His Recorded Legacy , in which I very su...

SOME BRAVE SOULS at the New York State Library have been rummaging through its cookbook holdings to discover how our attitudes towards have ...

BETWEEN 1940 AND 1948, Preston Sturges had an unprecedented Hollywood run of (mostly) successes with ten films he wrote and directed. Only C...

From the Theater Vault Dept .: Talk about a fairy-tale world. For a few seasons over thirty years ago, the Cohoes Music Hall was home to Her...

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to the late James Brown, I believe that the hardest-working man in show business is Bridge Street Theatre’s Steven Patt...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We welcome back Booth Tarkington, whose 1916 novel Seventeen was, like most of the author’s books at the time, a best-...

 ADAM ALEXANDER, whose curiosity prompted travel all over the world collecting endangered vegetable seeds to grow and share, writes that “Cr...

From the Food Vault Dept .: It delights me to discover that a restaurant I enjoyed visiting decades ago continues to thrive. Here’s one of t...

From the Food Vault Dept. : We look back twenty years to a Schenectady neighborhood (and a bit beyond) where the city’s Italian heritage was...

From the Concert Vault Dept. : 81-year-old Jordi Savall is still going strong, still exploring corners of the musical world typically neglec...

NINE CONCERTS; 31 jazz legends; 86 different songs; twelve hours of music on ten CDs. The statistics are staggering. These are the long-negl...

From the Food Vault Dept. : Against all odds, this unique little restaurant endures. It’s a world unto itself, offering creative vegan and v...

From the Opera Vault Dept. : The Berkshire Opera, in its earliest years, aspired to a Glyndebourne feel. And there were some eight summers o...

From the Theatrical Vault Dept .: Here’s another orphan piece, orphaned insofar that I can’t find any indication that it ever ran in any of ...

From the CD Vault Dept. : Here’s a trio of CD reviews from 23006 that I found languishing in a single file (computer, that is, not physical)...

From the Musical Vault Dept.: Keith Jarrett was a little grumpy when I got him on the phone. This was in 1985, and I called to interview hi...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : The madcap excesses of the “Barber of Seville” we discussed last week reminded me of a very different, very f...

From the Vocal Vault Dept .: We’re traveling back to 1985, when I was still finding my feet as a music critic, and a brief review I wrote of...

AS A LIFE-LONG INSOMNIAC, I grew up dependent on overnight radio listening to ease the struggle to get to sleep. But you know me. I sought c...