After the first installment of my planned two-part tribute to Harry Belafonte, who died a month ago at the age of 96, two weeks of nonsense intervened. First came the coronation of Charles III—the pomp…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
The Eurovision Song Contest has long burst the geographically borders seemingly staked out by its name. Yet the international spectacle hardly makes a blip on America’s collective consciousness or its screens. Other countries even farther…
Not only the living were listening in Westminster Abbey last Saturday. The dead heard the music too. Among the legion of once famous, wealthy, and powerful entombed there, none was bigger of girth and of…
Arrayed behind the twenty-one-year-old Harry Belafonte on the night of his unlikely debut as a singer in January of 1949 was a quartet of modern music greats: Al Haig on piano, Max Roach on drums,…
In an April 4th ceremony in the vast and bleak plaza in front of NATO’s $1 billion, 250 square meter Brussels headquarters conducted in the presence of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and U. S. Secretary…
In the movie business typecasting can be as much of a curse for composers as for actors. Marco Beltrami made his name in Hollywood with his score for Wes Craven’s satirical slasher movie Scream back…
For at least as long as people have talked about the weather, they have made music about it—from rain dances to pastoral symphonies, from the paleolithic powwows to Prince’s Purple Rain. Even if the climate’s…