It is hard now to think back beyond Tuesday night. But I do remember that when I heard “Yes She Can” on Monday afternoon, released that day by the ardent Democrat, will.i.am, I felt that…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Twice a year, every spring and fall, Ithaca, New York hosts one of the biggest used book sales in the United States. Staffed by a legion of volunteers who work for months accepting and organizing…
The iconoclastic American composer become cultural monument Charles Ives was born 150 years ago last Sunday. Ulysses S. Grant was then in the midst of his second term as president. Ives’s father George, the formative…
“To faint was a fault past hope of pardon,” wrote the Duke of Saint-Simon in his Memoirs of Louis XIV, an insider’s account of battlefield debacles, antechamber intrigues and bedroom assignations during the reign of…
The season has changed, if reluctantly. Time to put the storm windows on the old clapbord house, tune the grand piano and take out a volume of 18th-century duets off the nearby music shelf. And…
Join me in a tankard-raising toast to today’s release of my colorful new album, Handel’s Organ Banquet! Hailed along with his contemporary J. S. Bach as the greatest organist of his age, Handel left behind…
Two years ago, the newly formed independent label False Azure Records (FAR) issued its first album, the labor of forgetting. That title is itself a paradox. A recording preserves musical performances in the polycarbonate plastic…
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue turned sixty-five last month, the same age at which the trumpeter would die thirty-two years after recording the album. The record shows no signs of infirmity. It has no plans…
If Billboard is to believed, the sound of the summer is Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” now in its seventh week atop the pop charts. Before it climbed to No. 1 there, the song had…