October 4, 2021 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. A special shout-out to Steve Futterman for alerting me to the Bill Charlap Trio’s upcoming album “Street of Dreams.” I love this trio’s work. I have all its albums. Futterman writes, 

The pianist Bill Charlap, united as a working unit with the bassist Peter Washington and the drummer Kenny Washington for nearly a quarter century, has pulled off a very neat hat trick. By blending two unrelated strains of popular piano-trio traditions—the spit-and-polish drive of Oscar Peterson and the probing lyricism of Bill Evans—the Charlap triumvirate has established its own distinct voice, smoothly morphing into the premier mainstream jazz-piano trifecta. [“Goings On About Town: Music: Bill Charlap Trio”]

2. I relish this line in James Wood’s excellent “Connect the Dots”:

Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as “the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,” or this taut description of an Idaho winter: “Icicles fang the eaves.”

3. Alexandra Schwartz’s absorbing “Tell Me What You Want” contains this wonderful quote from Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Right to Sex”: 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.

I know exactly what she means.