Words and Music

THE STORY OF ERNIE FIELDS BEGINS, as it must, with the visit from John Hammond. This was in the late 1930s, when Hammond was prowling the co...

WE’RE HEARING an increasing death-knell for big box sets, so I’m thrilled to welcome the reissue of all of the Guarneri Quartet’s RCA Red Se...

From the Food and Wine Vault Dept .: I wrote this piece in 2009, when the issue of wine in grocery stores was gaining momentum. I blog-poste...

AROUND THE TIME Louis Armstrong moved from a big band to a small-group setting in 1947, grumblings were being heard. At first, it came from ...

THREE MASSIVE BOX SETS have given us nearly 300 CDs of Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in recordings made between 1944 ...

ONE OF THE STANZAS of “Crooked Foot Lane,” the opening track of Amy Engelhardt’s new album “Finish What,” runs Downloaded directions / How t...

From the Food Vault Dept. : Speaking of Vermont, as was the case with the last two posts, here’s a journey back some 17 years to revisit the...

USUALLY WHEN A KID RUNS OFF with the family money, it’s for a nefarious purpose. We expect the kid to come to no good, to crawl back, if he’...

DATING, AS IT DOES, FROM 1938, Brattleboro’s Latchis Hotel is the kind of small-city gem that was built to welcome big-city escapees seeking...

FROM THE OPENING MOMENTS of the first CD in this collection, Bach’s “Easter Oratorio,” you’re whisked back to a time before historically inf...

THERE’S A REJOINDER common to gigging freelance musicians, when invited to play a job for no money but with guaranteed “exposure”: “People d...

“JUST RELAX AND PLAY,” (John) Hammond instructed them. “No engineers in sight, no flashing lights – nothing but music. Only, please keep cig...

From the Vault Dept .: Who doesn’t occasionally succumb to thoughts of “what was I doing ten years ago at this time?” Or twenty. Or, in the ...

ACCORDING TO Dmitri A. Borgmann’s 1967 book Beyond Language , the most likely explanation for the “the” in front of “The Congo,” was that it...

 MY GRASP OF FRENCH is tenuous, and that puts it generously. I’m good at classic French dishes and ingredients and the titles of Debussy son...

SO MUCH MUSICAL WEALTH bursts from the grooves of Mosaic’s 11-CD set of jazz V-Discs that you’ll be forgiven for forgetting that the 263 sid...

THE FINEST FOOD MOVIE probably of this or any other century sneaked into release last year, obscured, as is too often the case, by the blood...

From the Holly-Bedecked Vault Dept .: Here’s a Metroland piece from 1990, posted on this blog in 2011 (I’ve been at it that long ?) and enco...

THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the birth of Charles Ives was celebrated in and around Danbury, Connecticut, where he was born and raised and e...

A VISIT TO FRANCE is high on my agenda, and it has to include a stop in Marseilles. I’m prepared to be disappointed – I take it for granted ...