Throughout her career thus far (it is hard to remember that she is just 33 years old), Esperanza Spalding has proven that hers is a unique voice in the music industry, easily crossing genre boundaries, yet continuously lauded by jazz musicians and audiences.
Netflix’s mega-popular Narcos series romanticizes Pablo Escobar’s Colombian cartel by effectively distancing the international drug trade in time and place. But like the narcotizing effect of the drug Escobar traded in, gripping television should not lure us from the drug problems of our here and now.
What happens to the body in technologically-mediated live performances, particularly those that continue to be defined as jazz by many audiences? The music of Herbie Hancock, in many ways, answers that question.
Hsu’s thoughtful and beautifully written account of H.T. Tsiang’s efforts to add to the China experts’ conversation about his native land is a brilliant study of “what ifs?”
Tsar Nicholas II At the beginning of 1917, the outlook for the Russian army on the Eastern Front was pretty bleak. A brief glimmer of hope had shined in the summer and early fall of 1916, when Russian general Aleksei Brusilov had led a highly successful advance on the German…
In Putin Country shows that—in the midst of change, instability, and loss of international standing—the average Russian is still looking for someone to restore Russia to its former greatness.
The strength of The Terror Years is its candid portrayal of societal and personal shortcomings and strivings from areas as diverse as the meeting rooms of Washington, D.C., the heat of southern Arabia, and the hinterlands of Afghanistan.
Charles Clover catalogs each of Putin’s references to Eurasianism and, in so doing, draws a picture of Putin’s policies that pose an existential threat to Russian democracy, the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, to Crimea, to European unity, NATO, and liberal and democratic institutions everywhere.
In some ways, the current wave of African-American football players kneeling during the national anthem replicates the Bebop revolution that changed the public persona of the black male jazz musician. Now it is black players demanding that audiences recognize that their attitude is not the same as their white peers.