Jazz is often held to be the most direct form of personal expression: the taciturn cool of Miles (or do I mean cruelty?); the flighty…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
While the rich still have not figured out how to evade death, they have always been adept at escaping taxes even from beyond the grave.…
Nothing is more ephemeral than a concert. Once played it is gone. A recording cannot reproduce or even fully recall it. Such documents are at…
The photo — this one in the New York Times, above the fold — had an uncanny vintage look to it: there on the front…
Perhaps God is exacting his revenge on the Ratzingers and on Regensburg, whose cathedral boasted a famed musical establishment claimed by Franz Liszt to be…
Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque 19th-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our…
One of my college friends was a Deadhead. He had crates of cassette tapes with labels like “Bucknell, 1971”, Stanford 1973”; “Fillmore East 1970.” Of…
Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” was released 50 years ago this coming Monday: August 17, 1959. That was ten years after, and ten degrees cooler,…
"I hate traveling and explorers." —Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955) * * * We curse the journey in order to praise the destination more fully.…