33 Revolutions Per Minute

 Lynskey, Dorian. (2011). 33 revolutions per minute: a history of protest songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day. New York : Ecco.

The lively British rock critic Dorian Lynskey — he writes for The Guardian, among other publications — spends some time in his new book, “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” chewing over why most protest songs are heaped with scorn. They can be “didactic, crass or plain boring,” he writes. Those who warble them onstage can seem “shrill or annoying or egotistical.” Lester Bangs didn’t single out James Taylor’s politics in his hilarious 1971 essay “James Taylor Marked for Death.” (That essay is barely about Mr. Taylor.) But bad protest songs really do make you want to throttle someone.

Afro-Cuban Jazz

IF there is such a thing as a first family of Afro-Cuban jazz, the O’Farrill clan has a right to claim that distinction. Its members helped invent the hybrid genre back in the 1940s, when Chico O’Farrill came to New York from Havana, and in recent years they have worked to reinvigorate the music despite barriers in both Cuba and the United States. “We’re kind of people caught between two worlds,” said the pianist Arturo O’Farrill, Chico’s 50-year-old son. As such, he added, it’s his obligation to encourage “an evolving relationship between two countries that should never have been separated culturally” and to “pay a debt forward” in his father’s name.

I've long wondered about the name itself: Irish? 

The musical story of the family, which immigrated to Cuba from the British Caribbean colony of Montserrat in the 1700s, begins with Chico, who was studying at a military academy in Georgia in the mid-1930s when he fell in love with jazz. A decade later, after playing trumpet in Cuban orchestras, he moved to New York, where he quickly became an A-list composer and arranger, working with Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Count Basie and Machito, among others.

The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite is one of the greatest musical compositions I have ever heard, especially when it features Bird.

“Simply put, Chico O’Farrill is the greatest Afro-Cuban jazz figure of all time,” Leonardo Acosta, the author of “Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba,” said in a telephone interview from Havana. “His way of using the orchestra as an instrument, his ability as an arranger and composer and his skill in converting Cuban music into jazz and vice versa gives his work a kind of chemistry that no one else, neither Cuban nor American, has. He achieves another dimension.”

Arturo  on YouTube.

Who will remember Paul Simon?

At first I thought he might have died, with that headline, but it is an analysis of his person and music, musical criticism.

There may be legitimate reasons for the chasm between Mr. Simon and younger audiences. Some of his lyrics portray him as an upscale urban intellectual who shields his emotions behind a well-considered phrase; when he writes at street level, there can be a sense that he's revealing research rather than experience. For all his musical explorations—gospel, reggae, Mexican folk, South African mbaqanga, Afro-Brazilian batucada and electronic soundscapes, among them—Mr. Simon's recordings often polish away needed bite and edge.

His popularity does not equal that of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, is a criticism.

His métier, it turns out, is life's often-baffling twists and triumphs, joys and jolts, and though some Simon compositions may be cryptic, they are easily deciphered. Mr. Simon has been hiding in plain sight since Simon & Garfunkel's debut disc was released some 47 years ago.

In performance, Mr. Simon was, as he's been for most of his career, a man who spends little time with image, preferring to lead with his songs, voice and guitar to transmit a knotty, deeply felt worldview. His place in the pantheon of American song long ago secured, Mr. Simon said as he left the stage, "I had a good time." So did we all, as anyone would have who has an abiding interest in musical adventure and lyrical excellence.

317 East 32nd

Listening to WKCR on Sunday 20 March, a Jazz Profile of Lennie Tristano. One of the selections played was 317 East 32nd Street, which was Tristano address in NYC.

Deep in a dream

In the DVD Anita O'Day the life of a jazz singer, James Gavin was a commentator about Ms. O'Day's life and art. He was identified as author of two books: this one on Chet Baker, and Intimate nights: the golden age of New York cabaret.