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.

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

June 19, 2023 Issue

I was reading Steve Futterman’s “Goings On About Town” note on Vision Festival (“heartily committed to free jazz”), in this week’s issue, when the name Dave Burrell leaped out at me. Futterman identifies Burrell as one of the "luminaries" of the free jazz genre. I didn’t know that. I know Burrell for his wonderful, passionate, lyrical, melodic rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” on his 1978 album of the same name. It’s my favorite version of that superb song. It’s at the opposite end of the spectrum from free jazz. I’m not arguing that Burrell isn’t a free jazz master. But I am submitting that he’s also an exquisite interpreter of at least one great jazz standard – Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”  

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