Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, October 4, 2020

Bettye LaVette's Soulful "Blackbird"












Thanks to Jay Ruttenberg’s recent “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette (The New Yorker, September 7, 2020), I discovered a terrific rendition of one of my favorite songs – Lennon and McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Ruttenberg says of LaVette’s version, "She trades the song’s delicacy for gravity, flipping it into first person: 'All of my life, I have waited and waited and waited for this moment to be free.' " Beautifully put. LaVette’s “Blackbird” went straight into my personal anthology of great jazz songs.

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