When I sat down this morning to write my column on my laptop, the day’s Google Doodle greeted me. There was a colorful tableau of jazz signs—piano keyboard, drumstick on cymbal, trumpet, clarinet— with Toots…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
On Wednesday South Carolina’s Supreme Court temporarily halted the execution by firing squad of Richard Moore, a 57-year-old Black man who has been on death row for two decades. The state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster,…
After clubs and concert halls shut down in March of 2020, the enterprising and exuberant pianist Emmet Cohen invited the cameras and microphones into his Harlem apartment for weekly Monday night jam sessions that brought—and…
“I hate traveling and explorers.”— Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955) It is an illusion to think that a need to complain about travel is unique to our age of mass tourism. In 1778 Thomas Boswell…
If ever there were steps of power that need storming by an angry mob, they are those of the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard on Oscars Night. Truth be told, I don’t know if the…
Handel was born with an umlaut on his name: Händel. He rubbed it out after he left his native Germany for a sojourn of several years in Italy before emigrating to non-diacritical England in 1711…
One of the longest seconds I ever lived through came just before the beginning the Dies irae from Mozart’s Requiem. The members of the Stanford Chorus crowded onto the risers at the back of the…