Words and Music

MUSIC GIVES A SOUL TO A PARTY. Not recorded music; that’s a cop-out which has become all too normalized because we’ve gotten so far away fro...

From the Vault of the High Cs Dept .: Thirty years ago I reviewed a pair of NYC Opera performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a...

THERE’S A RECEIVED NOTION that American food is exemplified by the blandest of processed inventions, those rubbery slabs of “American” chees...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Here’s the restaurant review I wrote 30 years ago, offered now just to make me feel all the older. I had moved t...

MY MOTHER WANTED ME to move back in with the family. It was 1974. I was eighteen and already had been living on my own for two years as I fi...

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 ...