Episodios
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Arto Lindsay is a singer-songwriter who divides his time between Sao Paolo and New York City, and one of the most influential figures in the New York Downtown scene that emerged in the early 1980s. A member of the “No Wave” band DNA and of the avant-pop group Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay went on to become an almost romantic crooner of samba, on albums like Mundo Civilizado – even as he continues to make deliberately disruptive noises on his guitar, an instrument he’s deliberately never learned to play. This combination of pop intuition and brash experimentalism has made him a darling of the art world. In our conversation, Lindsay spoke to me about his youth in Brazil as the son of progressive American missionaries; about living under the military dictatorship and about his early years in New York City and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also explained why religion, like music, is all about sex, and why he still refuses to take music lessons.
Links and References:
Downtown 81 - Kino Lorber
Ambitious Lovers / Envy
Mundo Civilizado
Crossing Music’s Borders in Search of Identity - New York Times
Heiner Goebbels: The Man in the Elevator - ECM
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Arto Lindsay is a singer-songwriter who divides his time between Sao Paolo and New York City, and one of the most influential figures in the New York Downtown scene that emerged in the early 1980s. A member of the “No Wave” band DNA and of the avant-pop group Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay went on to become an almost romantic crooner of samba, on albums like Mundo Civilizado – even as he continues to make deliberately disruptive noises on his guitar, an instrument he’s deliberately never learned to play. This combination of pop intuition and brash experimentalism has made him a darling of the art world. In our conversation, Lindsay spoke to me about his youth in Brazil as the son of progressive American missionaries; about living under the military dictatorship and about his early years in New York City and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also explained why religion, like music, is all about sex, and why he still refuses to take music lessons.
Links and References:
Downtown 81 - Kino Lorber
Ambitious Lovers / Envy
Mundo Civilizado
Crossing Music’s Borders in Search of Identity - New York Times
Heiner Goebbels: The Man in the Elevator - ECM
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A novelist, memoirist, critic, poet and screenwriter, James Lasdun has created a memorable body of work exploring the themes of existential dread, reputational damage and surveillance. The son of a well-known British architect, Lasdun is perhaps best known for his 2013 memoir about being stalked by one of his writing students, Give Me Everything You Have. In our conversation, James spoke to me about his childhood in London, as the son of Jews who had converted to Anglicanism without ever quite managing to become Christians; about his love of mythology; and about the dark fears and obsessions that run through his fiction and his non-fiction.
This episode is a co-presented with the London Review of Books
Links and References:
Besieged
Afternoon of a Faun
Give Me Everything You Have
Crazy In Love - Book Forum
He Said, She Said - The New Republic
James Lasdun Website
András Schiff, Franz Schubert, ECM Records
András Schiff, Franz Schubert - Sonatas and Impromptus, ECM Records
András Schiff, Franz Schubert - Fantasien, ECM Records
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Alain Gresh, a French journalist, was the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and is now the director of Orient XXI, an online journal about Middle East affairs. Gresh’s writing on Israel-Palestine and on the battles over Islam and secularism have made him one of the most important voices on the left in France. Born in Cairo in 1948, Gresh learned in his late 20s that a man he knew in Paris as a family friend, the Egyptian-Jewish revolutionary exile Henri Curiel, was his biological father. In 1978, Curiel was assassinated in his apartment building – a crime that remains unresolved to this day. In our conversation, Gresh talked to me about his trajectory as a radical commentator on the Middle East, his upbringing in Egypt on the eve of decolonization, his relationship to Curiel, and his ongoing search for the truth about Curiel’s murder.
Henri Curiel, citizen of the third world - Le Monde diplomatique
When Palestine captured a generation’s dreams - Le Monde diplomatique
French Law on Separation of Church and State - Orient XXI
PLO: The Struggle Within
Anouar Brahem - Blue Maqams
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The bassist, composer and poet William Parker is the soul of the Lower East Side free jazz scene. A veteran of ensembles led by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Billy Bang and David S. Ware, Parker is also remarkable leader in his own right. In 2021 he released a ten-disc boxed set, The Music of William Parker: Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World, Volumes 1-10, featuring compositions in a dizzying range of styles. With his wife and collaborator, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, Parker has turned the annual Vision Festival into one of the defining events in New York creative music. In our conversation, William spoke to me about his early years in the Bronx, how he rose up in the “Loft scene” of the 1970s, his experiences with Cecil Taylor, and his understanding of music as a force of revolutionary social transformation.
Links and References:
recordings in this episode
Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World
I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield
Piercing The Veil
Farmers by Nature: Love and Ghosts
Cecil Taylor Unit: The Eighth
Blue Lime Light: A Tribute to Cecil Taylor
David S. Ware Quartet - Surrendered
James Brandon Lewis: Jesup Wagon
links and additional music
Universal Tonality - Cisco Bradley
Arts for Art / Vision Festival
William Parker Tone World - New York Times
The Life and Music of William Parker - Brooklyn Rail
Lisa Sokolov
David S. Ware & Apogee
David S. Ware - Passage to Music
Amiri Baraka - Black Music (re: Jazz and the White Critic)
Art Taylor - Notes and Tones
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The bassist, composer and poet William Parker is the soul of the Lower East Side free jazz scene. A veteran of ensembles led by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Billy Bang and David S. Ware, Parker is also remarkable leader in his own right. In 2021 he released a ten-disc boxed set, The Music of William Parker: Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World, Volumes 1-10, featuring compositions in a dizzying range of styles. With his wife and collaborator, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, Parker has turned the annual Vision Festival into one of the defining events in New York creative music. In our conversation, William spoke to me about his early years in the Bronx, how he rose up in the “Loft scene” of the 1970s, his experiences with Cecil Taylor, and his understanding of music as a force of revolutionary social transformation.
Links and References:
recordings in this episode
Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World
I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield
Piercing The Veil
Farmers by Nature: Love and Ghosts
Cecil Taylor Unit: The Eighth
Blue Lime Light: A Tribute to Cecil Taylor
David S. Ware Quartet - Surrendered
James Brandon Lewis: Jesup Wagon
links and additional music
Universal Tonality - Cisco Bradley
Arts for Art / Vision Festival
William Parker Tone World - New York Times
The Life and Music of William Parker - Brooklyn Rail
Lisa Sokolov
David S. Ware & Apogee
David S. Ware - Passage to Music
Amiri Baraka - Black Music (re: Jazz and the White Critic)
Art Taylor - Notes and Tones
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Claudia Roden is the author of cookbooks that revolutionized eating in the United Kingdom, including The Book of Jewish Food and Arabesques. Raised in a Jewish family in Cairo, Roden began to collect Middle Eastern recipes after her family and families like her own fled Egypt in 1956. By chronicling the cuisines of the Middle East, Spain, the Mediterranean, and the Jewish diaspora, Roden has produced an extraordinary Book of Memory, as rich in history as it is in flavors and aromas. In our conversation, Roden talked to me about her Cairo childhood and her youth in Paris; about how collecting recipes became her obsession; about the sexist prejudices against cookbooks; about how politics informs her understanding of food; about the secret Jewish origins of fish and chips; and about how she discovered why the Spanish roast their pork with cumin seeds.
Links and References:
The Book of Jewish Food
Med
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The pianist Marilyn Crispell works in jazz and improvised music. Crispell started out in classical music, but when she heard Coltrane’s spiritual suite A Love Supreme, she experienced an epiphany that led her to jazz. A member of Anthony Braxton’s classic quartet in the 1980s, Crispell has established herself since then as one of the most lyrical and introspective voices in avant-garde jazz, especially in her work on ECM records. In our conversation, Marilyn spoke to me about her childhood in Baltimore, the revelation she had listening to A Love Supreme, her work with Braxton and the ECM producer Manfred Eicher, and the restorative effects of contemplation and silence on her art.
Links and Reference:
Storyteller
Amaryllis
For John Coltrane
A Jazz Supreme - Raphaël Imbert
Creative Music Studio - Archive Selections Vol 2
Creative Orchestra Music - Anthony Braxton
Nothing Ever Was, Anyway
Sibanye (We Are One)
MUSIC; A Chosen Calm After the Avant-Garde Storm - New York Times
Camilla Nebbia
Benedicte Maurseth
Lena Willemark
The Adornment of Time - Tyshawn Sorey
J.S. Bach: Six sonatas for Violin and Piano - Michelle Makarski & Keith Jarrett
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Joe Sacco is a Portland-based cartoonist and graphic novelist who has reported from Bosnia, Palestine, India, and Iraq. His powerful chronicles of modern-day political atrocities – in such books as Safe Area Gorazde, Footnotes in Gaza, and Paying the Land – have earned him comparison with Goya. In our conversation, Joe spoke to me about his childhood as the son of immigrants from Malta, about how he became politicized at the end of the Cold War, about his travels in the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia, about how he sees his art of witness -- and why he rejects the idea that he is “giving voice to the voiceless.”
Footnotes in Gaza
Paying the Land
Safe Area Goražde
Palestine
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
How To Read Donald Duck - Ariel Dorfman
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George Lewis is a composer of contemporary classical music, an avant-garde jazz trombonist, an electronic sound artist, an essayist, and the author of A Power Stronger than Itself, the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a black composers’ collective based in Chicago, where he grew up. A dazzling polymath, he moves between the worlds of new music, jazz, academia, computer science, philosophy and visual art with extraordinary ease and humility. In our conversation, George talked about his working-class Chicago roots, his experiences at Yale and in Europe, his views on “cultural appropriation,” his ambivalence about being seen as a trombonist, why he thinks about John Coltrane more than John Cage, and why he’s proud to be considered an Afro-futurist.
A Power Stronger Than Itself
The Recombinant Trilogy
Rainbow Family
The Will to Adorn
Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives
Jessica Ekomane
Seth Parker Woods
Dana Reason - The Myth of Absence
Savvy Contemporary - Anton Wilhelm Amo
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George Lewis is a composer of contemporary classical music, an avant-garde jazz trombonist, an electronic sound artist, an essayist, and the author of A Power Stronger than Itself, the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a black composers’ collective based in Chicago, where he grew up. A dazzling polymath, he moves between the worlds of new music, jazz, academia, computer science, philosophy and visual art with extraordinary ease and humility. In our conversation, George talked about his working-class Chicago roots, his experiences at Yale and in Europe, his views on “cultural appropriation,” his ambivalence about being seen as a trombonist, why he thinks about John Coltrane more than John Cage, and why he’s proud to be considered an Afro-futurist.
A Power Stronger Than Itself
The Recombinant Trilogy
Rainbow Family
The Will to Adorn
Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives
Jessica Ekomane
Seth Parker Woods
Dana Reason - The Myth of Absence
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Margo Jefferson won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1995, and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography for her memoir, Negroland, about growing up in an upper-middle class black family in Chicago. During her years at the New York Times, she wrote brilliantly about literature, music, dance, and the way racial politics seeps into culture: what the late Stanley Crouch called the “all-American skin game.” In our conversation, Margo spoke about her childhood in Chicago, her early experiences in radical theater at Brandeis University, her relationship to the feminist and Black Power movements, her emergence as a writer, and her battles with melancholia.
Negroland
On Michael Jackson
Ripping Off Black Music - Harper’s Magazine
Some American Feminists
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Vivian Gornick is a writer of essays, criticism, and literary nonfiction, a fierce feminist, and a proud New Yorker. Her 1987 book about her relationship with her mother, Fierce Attachments, was recently chosen by the book critics of the New York Times as the finest memoir of the last 50 years. In our conversation, Vivian reflected on growing up among working-class Jews in the Bronx, her struggles with her mother, her journey through the women’s liberation movement, and her relationship to desire, love, and work.
