more timely
“The Gates of Justice,” Brubeck’s 1969 masterwork, gets revived with his sons in tow, and reopens a conversation Americans need to have.
Larry Blumenfeld writes regularly about music and culture for The Wall Street Journal and Daily Beast. His work has appeared in publications and websites including The Village Voice, The New York Times and Salon. His reporting and essays often focus on connections between arts and issues of politics and social justice, especially in times of crisis; as a critic, he specializes in jazz and Afro-Latin music. He was the 2019 Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University and has received the Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Writing from the Jazz Journalists Association, a Katrina Media Fellowship with the Open Society Institute, and a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University. He programs and hosts the “Jazz and Social Justice” series for the National Jazz Museum in Harlem; is editor-at-large of Jazziz Magazine; Jazz Adviser for the Wells Fargo Jazz Series of Spoleto Festival USA; and the co-founder and curator of the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, travels to New Orleans whenever he can, and occasionally still plays basketball. He blogs (sometimes) at http://larryblumenfeld.com.
POPS
With “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” filmmaker Sacha Jenkins recasts a legacy he never really knew.
THE HOME OF HAPPY FEET
Shanta Thake wants to throw open the storied cultural center’s gates to new audiences. She intends to make a post-pandemic case for live performance. And she needs you to dance.
THE STRUT OF THE STREET
Replacing Robert E. Lee Boulevard with Allen Toussaint Boulevard is so disarmingly logical that the only question is, what took New Orleans so long?
REAL MAGIC, NO GIMMICKS
Jazz’s greatest living composer Wayne Shorter always wanted to write an opera. Now, with collaborator Esperanza Spalding, and in the face of health problems and a pandemic, he has.
LONG TIME COMING
The Grammy-winning trumpet player and composer’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” is the first opera by a Black composer performed at the Metropolitan Opera in its 138-year history.
YES WE CAN CAN
An expanded edition of a 2005 post-Katrina benefit album speaks to our present moment of estrangement.
'THE EVER FONKY LOWDOWN'
Amid enduring the pandemic and the loss of his father, the celebrated musician talks about cultural hustles, keeping jazz alive during quarantine, and those statues in New Orleans.
DRIVING WHILE JEWISH
Arrested in Starke, Florida, the author was humiliated by a bigoted cop 25 years ago. Can that experience enlighten him about far deeper issues today?
A PATRIARCH PASSES
Remembering Ellis Marsalis, father of the Crescent City’s most famous jazz family, which includes musical sons Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason—on his own terms.