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 13, 2019

Nate Chinen on Brad Mehldau























If you’re a fan of Brad Mehldau’s gorgeous album series The Art of the Trio, as I am, you’ll likely enjoy the chapter in Nate Chinen’s Playing Changes titled “From This Moment On.” Chinen praises Mehldau’s “virtuoso style – a confluence of silvery precision, ambidextrous ease, floating equilibrium, and courtly lyricism.” Note that last element. “Courtly lyricism” is exactly what I most treasure in Mehldau’s playing. It’s an ingredient glaringly absent from the music of most of the other jazz artists Chinen celebrates (e.g., John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer). He appears to favor the jagged, lurching, screeching, churning, dissonant deconstructions of postmillennial jazz. His chapter on Mehldau is a tonic exception. 
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