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…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Not a Fat Tuesday, but a Fat Weekend. On Saturday morning the Metropolitan Opera simulcast of Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff. On Sunday night a home viewing of The Whale. Both are all about fatness. The…
I spent several summers on my grandfather’s berry farm in the Skagit Valley sixty miles north of Seattle. To irrigate his water-hungry crops, he had drilled a well in the 1950s. The water was conducted…
Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthday, March 21st, falls on the first full day of spring, if one calculates that date by mercilessly quartering the calendar. The chronological coincidence is a fitting one: though Vivaldi gets all…
What’s the difference between an American movie producer and an American secretary of state? The one dreams of winning an Oscar; the other makes sure the awards go to the right global players. American foreign…
This first musical nickname tagged him to the city of his birth: the Newark Flash. To a club called Lloyd’s Manor in Wayne Shorter’s hometown came Sonny Stitt in 1951. Stitt hailed from across the…
The lyricist and composer Sammy Cahn once quipped that Burt Bacharach “was the only songwriter who didn’t look like a dentist.” Many, indeed millions, were similarly bewitched by the looks of this greatest song-master of…