One of the Band’s most enigmatic yet best-known songs is “The Weight.” It’s in the Top 50 of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; in the Top 15 of Pitchfork’s “Best Songs of the Sixties”; and one of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll,” according to the Rock and Roll Hall…
Writing the first biography of Leonard Cohen took me to a mountain top (Mt Baldy and his Zen hideout), as well as to the Greek island of Hydra, a New York sound stage and the Tower of Song — Leonard’s music room at his home. Spending time with him meant learning what generosity of spirit…
Rock-poet Leonard Cohen, the “master of erotic despair” and the writer of dozens of modern classics that have been performed and recorded by everyone from John Cale to Judy Collins, Willie Nelson, U2 and Rufus Wainwright, died on November 7, at age 82. The official announcement was made on November 10 after a private funeral….
With his long, curly hair, his amber medallion and a guitar strapped onto his shoulder, Dani Toledano looks like a troubadour just about to recite an elegy. In fact, he works for Ragonis Tours, an Israeli company that helps groups of visitors discover the Jewish past of Toledo, Spain. In a quiet square of the…
There’s a story in Carole Bayer Sager’s just-published memoir, “They’re Playing Our Song,” about the day she met Marvin Hamlisch. They were supposed to discuss writing the score for a TV pilot. The meeting was short; Hamlisch told her he had to leave for London to start scoring the new James Bond movie, “The Spy…
More than any other singular individual – including Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis – it was Chuck Berry, who turns 90 years old today, who put together the disparate musical elements, the teen-focused lyrics, and the showman’s persona that created the template for all rock ‘n’ roll music that followed. The Beatles,…
For at least a moment or two, Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature set the world of Twitter abuzz. The announcement inspired a bevy of reactions. Some welcomed the choice as an acknowledgment that Dylan redefined what literature means in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Putting aside world & will now listen to…
Let’s start right from the beginning by getting this out of the way: Allen Ginsberg was no Bob Dylan. But Bob Dylan is no Allen Ginsberg, either. However, the funny thing is that the two of them, each top in his chosen field, seem to have had aspirations to be the other. Dylan’s man crush…
‘I’m a mother of four children,” Ute Lemper was saying, fingers toying with the handle of her coffee cup, “and singing these songs, telling these terrible destinies and tales of death, is almost impossible.” Lemper sat across from me at Nice Matin, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The lunchtime conversations surrounding us hummed with an…
Jewish roots are emerging in contemporary music from remarkably diverse performers who are often not Jewish. Beyond the intriguing klezmer revival, there’s a steadily growing movement of typically classically trained musicians who are discovering mostly European Jewish music as a base for alchemical combinations of past and present. When classical guitarist Denis Azabagic, originally from…
“Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921,” the Broadway show starring Audra McDonald, opened on April 28. Its book by George C. Wolfe purports to explain how the African-American songwriter Eubie Blake encountered difficulties along the way to producing a show, “Shuffle Along,” nearly a century ago. One of the key…
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