Music

Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock aims to interpret Joni Mitchell's lyrics as well as her music on River: The Joni Letters, out September 25, and you can listen to Hancock's instrumental take on "Both Sides Now" here (Mac stream) or here (PC stream). Regarding his slow, sensuous take on the tune, Hancock said (in a press release), "There are places I decided would be resting places before I went to the next phrase, which Joni doesn't have on her recording of the song. Completely reharmonizing 'Both Sides Now' seemed appropriate to the lyrics." Beside its four instrumentals, Rivers also includes guest vocals by Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Luciana Souza, and Mitchell herself. Hancock's band includes Wayne Shorter (saxophone) and Dave Holland (bass). Hancock performed with Mitchell on her 1979 album Mingus. He told the Washington Post recently, "It occurred to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to learn something that eluded me for so many years, which is putting lyrics into real focus on one of my records."

Or at least download the free track "Radio Nowhere" from Springsteen's forthcoming album Magic, which will be released October 1. Springsteen and his E Street Band will begin a thirty-city tour of the United States October 2 in Hartford, Connecticut and wraps up November 18 in Boston. [via Guardian Unlimited]

Becoming a hula master involves more than simply learning how to sway like the waves, suggests Mimi Kirk's recent introduction to the world of hula in Smithsonian ("A Hip Tradition").

[T]he path to becoming a hula master is not universally agreed upon. Each hula school has its own particular steps and rituals. Several kumus seemed reluctant to describe these, instead uttering the Hawaiian proverb, "All knowledge does not come from one," when pressed about them. Dalire says students must study Hawaiian history, culture and language, as well as dance. Malama Chong, a protégé of Fonseca's, says lei-making and costuming are also important. In addition, students may be required to heed kapus (taboos), including abstinence and food restrictions. "It's a serious undertaking that requires years of training," Chong says.

Japan's entry in this year's Academy Awards, Hula Girls (trailer here) depicts rural Japanese girls learning the hula. And if traditional hula dancing is too culturally unfamiliar, you can always stick to hula hoops.

Flower Power: The Music of the Love Generation (Time Life); Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970 (Rhino)
Time Life's ten-CD box celebrates 175 late-sixties hits; Rhino's four-disk set focuses on the quirkier and lesser-known "misses" generated by the cultural earthquake's West Coast epicenter. The former packages tracks you've heard countless times into one convenient VW bus-decorated box; the latter features essays and track-by-track commentary on such lesser-known acts as the Vejtables, the Mourning Reign, the Harbinger Complex, and the Savage Resurrection. One box is pretty good; the other box is simply great.

Mekons, Natural (Quarterstick)
Thirty years after forming as a clamorous, politically volatile punk group in Leeds, England, and five years since their country-rock album OOOH!, the Mekons return with a despairing and mostly acoustic album recorded in the English countryside. While plenty of wit and wisdom remains in their maturing voices and creaky instruments, an undeniable pessimism colors the Mekons' ruminations on what mankind hath wrought. It's still pretty wonderful, though, and history teaches us that one should never write off a Mekon.

Bobby Osborne & the Rocky Top X-Press, Bluegrass Melodies (Rounder)
With the voice and mandolin licks of a man half his seventy-five years, bluegrass veteran Bobby Osborne continues the solo career he began in 2004 after parting musical ways with his banjo-playing brother, Sonny, with whom he performed as the Osborne Brothers. Bobby's new album sounds as straightforward as its title, with Osborne's high, lonesome voice soaring above a nimble quintet. Osborne mixes secular with sacred melodies, and I'm particularly digging his version of Vince Gill's "Go Rest High on That Mountain," a duet with Rhonda Vincent.

Toots & the Maytals, Light It Up (Fantasy)
Toots Hibbert is arguably reggae's most stylistically diverse eminence. On Light It Up he delivers a bluesy version of "Johnny Coolman" with Allman Brothers Band slide guitarist Derek Trucks, duets with blues singer Bonnie Raitt on "Premature," channels Ray Charles on "I Gotta Woman," toasts a legendary reggae producer in "Tribute to Coxson/Guns of Navarone," and returns to his rock-steady roots with "Celia."

Twenty-six-year-old future Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel's BBC Proms appearance leading the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is being celebrated as "the most outstanding orchestral concert in Britain this year," among other accolades. Dudamel and the orchestra performed Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony (available in its entirety here) before returning for a half-hour's worth of encores. And costume change: Dudamel & Co. switched from orchestral black to jackets fashioned after Venezuela's yellow, blue, and red flag. Among other works, they performed the most exciting version of the mambo dance from Bernstein's West Side Story you may ever see—complete with choregraphy. [via Sounds and Fury]

Compare and contrast Dolly Parton's demure original with the White Stripes' histrionic arena-rock cover.

Jamie Walton earns about $50,000 per year as a respected thirty-three-year-old concert cellist. His fine 300-year-old Guarneri instrument, however, cost $1.7 million. Portfolio magazine reports on the dozen or so major stakeholders in this rare and beautiful instrument, whom Walton enlisted when donations from friends and family turned out not to be enough. The co-owners range from an anonymous investor who read about Walton in a magazine to a writer enthralled by a live performance. [via Opera Chic]

Smooth Louis Balfour brings you "all that's best in the world of jazz," which turns out to be every jazz cliché under the sun, on the "Jazz Club" segments of the BBC's "Fast Show." Enjoy trumpet sucker Jackson Jeffrey Jackson ("Tune? This is jazz"), Doodles Bronson, the dinner jazz delights of "Crazy Nights and Lazy Days," John Cage's 4'33" of jazz, and lots more. Soo-perb.

On Tuesday, New York became the seventeenth state to pass a "Truth in Music" bill. The bill's intent is to prevent counterfeit bands from cashing in on the real deal, to the tune of up to $15,000 in fines. The bill's most ardent advocate has been Jon "Bowzer" Bauman from the group Sha Na Na (whose $300 check for performing at Woodstock famously bounced). Deception is especially prevalent among classic doo-wop groups such as the Platters, Coasters, and Drifters. So while founding Coasters lead singer Carl Gardner retains legal rights to the group's name, you can also hear Cornell Gunter's Coasters (who were trained by early member Billy Guy) and Coasters tribute acts such as Edwin Cook & Friends. As Jerry Adler wrote about the issue in Newsweek:

Early R&B groups were mostly faceless voices on the radio, in part because record companies weren't eager to remind audiences that their faces were usually black. And yet, in doo-wop as in painting, an undeniable aura clings to the authentic, the genuine, the original. Which is why if you go to a concert by the faux Drifters or a performance by the Platters manqué, you will always see, says Bauman, one guy in his 70s there so that you, the discerning doo-wop consumer, can nudge your seatmate and say, "That's the real one!"

[Newsday]

Louis Armstrong, Live at the 1958 Monterey Jazz Festival; Miles Davis Quintet, Live at the 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival; Dizzy Gillespie, Live at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival; Thelonious Monk, Live at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival; Sarah Vaughan, Live at the 1971 Monterey Jazz Festival (MJF)
The first batch of releases from the Monterey Jazz Festival's promising new label captures an era when jazz flourished as both art and as popular entertainment. "Pops" Armstrong was more a pop singer than revolutionary jazz trumpeter by 1958, and delivers a solid set of hits. Sarah Vaughan's and Dizzy Gillespie's respective shows, on the other hand, are brilliant examples of impeccable music that reaches for the stars while keeping audiences firmly in their pocket with involving banter and, well, love. Davis and Monk, meanwhile, performed shows as deep, cerebral, and uncompromising as you'd expect. A sweet West Coast vibe, suggesting something wonderful just over the horizon, imbues all these releases, and I imagine plenty of other treasures will be forthcoming.

Greg Brown, Yellow Dog (Earthwork)
The cause—metal-sulfide mining's threat to the natural beauty of Michigan's upper peninsula—is dire, and singer-songwriter Greg Brown's music echoes with appropriate urgency on this benefit CD. Brown's set of new and rough-cut "notebook" songs paints a dark weather report of life in these United States through keenly observed lyrics and serious-business voice.

Red Meat, We Never Close (Ranchero)
California country meets Texas swing on the latest set of twangcore tunesmanship from this quintet of displaced Midwesterners who've become San Francisco honky-tonk heroes. Impeccable picking is the main appeal in their songs about thrift-store cowgirls, high-maintenance girlfriends, and hicks seeking kicks in the city.

Super Guitar Trio, Live at Montreux 1989 (Eagle Eye Media DVD)
The spirits of swinging Charlie Christian and "gypsy jazz" legend Django Reinhardt, among others, hover benignly over this sweet and dazzling display of fleet-fingered guitar artistry featuring guitarists Larry Coryell, Al Di Meola, and Biréli Lagrène. The camera dotes lovingly on the fretboards of the threesome, whose technical virtuosity makes this DVD a terrific bargain if only in terms of notes per dollar.

There are two adequate reasons to see El Cantante, the fidgety and generally unloved biopic about the life and death of salsa star Héctor Lavoe. The first and better reason is if you need an easily digestible synopsis of why salsa was such an important musical style in the seventies and eighties, and why Lavoe, played by the charismatic and mystically cheekboned Marc Anthony, was its most popular performer. The second and less adequate reason would be Jennifer Lopez (Anthony's spouse), who both produced El Cantante and co-stars as Lavoe's feisty wife, Puchi, through whom, for better or worse, his story is told. "The more he grew as an artist, the lower he got as a person," Puchi says, and thus El Cantante's concentration on Lavoe's addictions, infidelities, and general messed-upness.

Although far too much of El Cantante is shot in what resembles a vintage MTV pastiche, things pick up whenever Anthony channels Lavoe's impeccable phrasing amid longtime Lavoe musical partner Willie Colón's brassy electric arrangements. Lavoe's unhappy childhood (his mother died when he was four), emigration from Puerto Rico against his father's fervent wishes at seventeen, rocketlike artistic ascent, and subsequent decline (he attempted suicide before succumbing to AIDS in 1993 at age forty-six) all fail the storytelling mandate of show-don't-tell. This movie's real them is his tumultuous relationship with J-Lo/Puchi.

Check out some primo YouTube footage to really see what made Lavoe salsa's Elvis and Sinatra at once. This vintage 1970-ish performance with Colón's orchestra captures the young, pre-dissolute Lavoe at his best. Lavoe's outfit alone justifies this fine performance of "Mi Gente" with the Fania All-Stars. And he's the consummate rock star in this Venezuela television performance with Tito Puente.

The great jazz drummer Max Roach died in his sleep Wednesday night. Roach created a new kind of drumming as bebop's preeminent percussionist during the forties, and reinvented himself consistently throughout his career without ever losing the drive and lilt on display here. Roach performed with Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Cecil Taylor, but his best group was arguably the quintet he led in the early fifties with trumpeter Clifford Jordan, who died in a car crash in 1956. Pete Hamill wrote in The New Yorker that Roach once told him that he never got over it.

I always loved Roach's unorthodox approach to arranging, especially his all-percussion ensemble M'Boom, with whom he worked during the seventies, and his "double quartet" featuring four string players. His most important recording, however, may well be We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. Featuring singer Abbey Lincoln, Roach's musical interpretation of the civil rights movement and hundreds of years of African-American history was an uncompromising tour de force that sounds as powerful today as when he released it in 1960. You can see him perform the angry and powerful music that eventually led to his being blacklisted by the American music industry here and here.

Elvis Week peaks tonight at Memphis's FedEx Forum with "The Thirtieth Anniversary Concert" at 8 p.m. and "Midnight in Vegas" at midnight. Each event blends film and video footage of you-know-who with an orchestra, singers, and lots of musicians—most notably guitarist James Burton, bassist Jeffy Scheff, drummer Ronnie Tutt, and the Sweet Inspirations vocal group—who worked with Presley prior to his premature death while at home in Graceland on this day thirty years ago.

I'm not the world's biggest Presley fan. I've always found it too much of a struggle to hear beyond the big vulgar icon far enough to really enjoy his music in and of itself. But I try to appreciate his legacy, especially when it's conveyed as elegantly as Peter Guralnick did in his August 11 New York Times Opinion piece, "How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?"

When a reporter referred to him as the "king of rock 'n' roll" at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, "one of my influences from way back." The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.

We'd love to have seen the four Orpheus operas being presented by Cooperstown, New York's Glimmerglass Opera, but it's not going to happen, alas. However, there are still about four more occasions to catch all four productions—Philip Glass' s Orphée, Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, and Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld—before the end of their summer run, so feel free.

The series' jewel turned out to be Glass's 1993 Orphée, the first of three operas the seventy-year-old minimalist composer based on the films of Jean Cocteau. Anthony Tommasini's New York Times review of the series was mixed overall, but he loved Orphée:

Mr. Glass may follow the film slavishly, but his hypnotically repetitive music has the effect of ritualizing the story, making it mythic. I often find his music formulaic, but not this score. It is run through with honky-tonk, jazzy bits and ancient modal lyricism, percolating with rhythmic riffs that often break into asymmetrical patterns and keep you off guard. The vocal writing is sometimes like pitched speech. But that only enhances the austere ritualism of the music.

The strengths and appeal of the production lie in its unsentimental, organic, unforgiving, and edgy direction. The synthesis of Glass's music/libretto and Cocteau's inspired screenplay create a perfect atmosphere of delicious tension, questioning life and death and the afterlife. The characters are haunted by their own doppelgangers, hovering to remind them of their own bad decisions. There was nothing fussy or overworked, and the singing was allowed to weave over Glass's ambient score.

Christopher Denny, Age Old Hunger (00:02:59)
Arkansas singer-songwriter Christopher Denny sounds like a cross between Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Little Jimmy Scott on this unadorned slice of evergreen Americana. Kris Kristofferson's "Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again)" and Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone" sound like templates for Denny originals such as "Westbound Train" and "Gypsy Carpenter" when sung by this remarkable romantic loner.

Lori McKenna, Unglamorous (Warner Bros.)
One of commercial country's best lyricists, Lori McKenna spins Raymond Carver-esque tales of small-town life on her fifth album. "D. H. Lawrence would be your favorite poet, if you thought poetry was cool," she sings around haunting pedal-steel guitar lyrics in the autobiographical "I Know You." And the fed-up wife in "Sick of That Lie" can only smirk, "Baby, we're gonna take that vacation/ Once you get that new job." Yikes.

Les Paul: Chasing Sound! (Koch DVD)
Solid-body guitar inventor Les Paul remains a charmer at ninety-two. And this jaunty video is a testament to the solid work ethic, impish charm, and inventive spirit that marked his transition from road-hungry country artist to best-selling pop jazzbo. Along the way he created multi-track recording, overdubbing, and the Gibson Les Paul, guitar of the gods. Bonus footage includes Paul playing with Tony Bennett, Keith Richards, and Merle Haggard at his ninetieth birthday bash as well as fifties footage with longtime partner Mary Ford.

Linda Thompson, Versatile Heart (Rounder)
Linda Thompson was sidelined after her seventies heyday alongside former husband Richard Thompson by a rare vocal disorder (spasmodic dysphonia) right out of an Oliver Sacks case study. Her second solo album since then consists of low-key country, folk, and rockabilly tunes sung with beautiful gravity. The live highlight, "Day After Tomorrow," is a timeless tale of a young man's regretful trek off to a war he doesn't believe in.

Zap Mama, Supermoon (Heads Up)
Multiply tracked Marie Dauine is the big, versatile voice behind this long-running fusion of Western pop fusion, African rhythms, and pygmy songs. Dauine's group has evolved over fifteen years. The latest version of Zap Mama is full of bright, busy arrangements and optimistic songs often rooted in the traditional music of Gabon, the Congo, and other West Africa hot spots.

The New York Times takes Philip Glass's seventieth birthday year as an opportunity to sum up "the Minimalist achievement" with key recordings selected by its critics.

You'll try, but you won't be able to look away from the excerpts of Pattie Boyd's forthcoming autobiography, Wonderful Tonight, that appeared in Monday's Daily Mail. (For some strange reason perhaps involving copyright laws, Boyd's book is titled Wonderful Today in the UK.) In "My Hellish Love Triangle With George and Eric," the former Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. Clapton recounts the druggy but otherwise fairly banal circumstances that led to her leaving George for Eric. My favorite part describes a guitar duel Harrison sets up to shame Clapton, or something:

One evening the actor John Hurt was with us. Eric was due to come over too and George decided to have it out with him. John wanted to make himself scarce but George insisted he stay.

John remembers George coming downstairs with two guitars and two small amplifiers, laying them down in the hall, then pacing restlessly until Eric arrived - full of brandy, as usual.

As Eric walked through the door George handed him a guitar and amp - as an 18th Century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword - and for two hours, without a word, they duelled. The air was electric and the music exciting.

At the end, nothing was said but the general feeling was that Eric had won. He hadn't allowed himself to get riled or to go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar-playing was unbeatable.

Boyd inspired Harrison's most successful song, "Something," which Frank Sinatra deemed the greatest love song ever. But Clapton raised the stakes with "Layla," which he wrote while living with Boyd's sister. Boyd eventually succumbed to Clapton's "intoxicating, overpowering" passion after Harrison fell in love with Ringo's wife, Maureen. The whole sodden mess makes me almost sorry I missed "The Beatles' Women," which premiered Wednesday on A&E's "Biography." But I'm sure it will be back.

Ever wonder what became of groups like the Weads, the Vi Dels, Lonnie and the Legends, the Tasmanians, Cryan Shames, Chaos Incorporated, and the Beavers? Me neither. But I've been obsessing over the extremely under-the-radar careers of these and a few hundred other 1960s garage bands thanks to Garage Hangover, an amazing collection of data, images, and mp3s, I discovered via Portland, Oregon, nostalgia trove Stumptown Confidential.

Categorized conveniently by both state and country (don't miss the Confusion and the Dinosaurs, paired on a single released by an India cigarette company), Garage Hangover is a wiki-like cooperative affair. Today the site features the Vistells, the Cobras, and other bands from the late-sixties Santa Cruz scene, copiously illustrated with photos, business cards, posters, and the precious vinyl itself. The music, reflecting an era, is a naïve and often-charming blend of surf rock, English pop, and psychedelia.

At a time when releasing a 45 was somewhat more complicated than producing an mp3 track on your iMac with aptly named Garageband, many of these recordings involved the assistance of radio DJs, parents, and other sponsors for labels no one has heard of before or since. They weren't always purely commercial, either. A single released by Montreal's bilingual Les Harmonicos was given away as a souvenir at "Canada Family Day," with the same song sung in French on one side and in English on the other.

Garage Hangover's collection represents merely the tip of its stylistic iceberg, of course. But I imagine it becoming the center of a scene that has to date been documented mainly in the pages of equally obscure low-budget, long-out-of-print, barely circulated books and zines. This is posterity.

Dave Brubeck, Indian Summer (Telarc)
The eighty-six-year-old jazz pianist takes a solo journey through the past on this unadorned and dry-eyed remembrance of standards and originals past. It begins with "You'll Never Know," recalled from his army days, and concludes with the title tune he first recorded a half-century ago.

Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead/Santana, A Night at the Family Dog (Eagle Vision DVD)
Each band plays two songs prior to their guitarists blending together into a sludgy fifteen-minute "super jam" on this excellently produced slice of psychedelia recorded in February 1970. Jefferson Airplane is the astounding standout, with Grace Slick lurking saintlike among her gnarlier bandmates. The Grateful Dead never really get into it, although watching Pigpen belt out Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle" is a treat. Cute young women provide undulating ambience.

Bob Marley & the Wailers, Roots, Rock, Remixed (Quango Fontana)
It's always risky to mess with perfection. Yet the bubbling warmth and soul of Bob Marley and the Wailers originals like "Small Axe" and "Sun Is Shining" are never overshadowed by the trancey dancefloor effects added to them on Roots, Rock, Remixed, the first Marley remix album blessed and endorsed by the reggae icon's survivors.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, This Is Somewhere (Hollywood)
"She'll bake you cookies, then she'll burn your town," warns Grace Potter in "Ah, Mary," the ambivalent ode to America that kicks off This Is Somewhere. The twenty-four-year-old keyboardist's third album with the Nocturnals is a neoclassic-rock winner by a barn-burning band that lives on the road and sounds like it.

Soulive, No Place Like Soul (Stax)
Soulive used to be an instrumental trio in the venerable funk vein pioneered by Booker T. and the MGs. But new vocalist Toussaint has brings emotional depth and a reggae lilt to the group, which has found a perfect home on the rejuvenated Stax label.

Jackie Greene, who I caught at Joe's Pub (NYC) Sunday night, is a great-looking twenty-six-year-old Californian who could pass for a decade younger. Greene's claim to fame these days is his recent recruitment in Phil Lesh & Friends, a Grateful Dead repertory band led by its former bassist, and the club was a little loopy with assertive Dead fans eager to hear Greene's version of the canon. And while Greene, accompanied by guitarist Tim Bluhm, delivered perfectly adequate renditions of "Friend of the Devil" and "Sugaree," the problem was that his original material, which he performed on guitar, piano, and harmonica, was equally adequate except not, you know, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Songs like "About Cell Block #9," "Farewell, So Long, Goodbye," and "The Rusty Nail" sounded unlived-in even as Greene cranked up the passion for these old-fashioned verses featuring jealous rages and do-wrong mamas. His records are a little more convincing, and he'll definitely make a certain type of Deadhead happy.

Same venue, following night, completely different story. My admiration for violinist Jenny Scheinman grows with every Tuesday she performs at her usual hangout, Barbès. But tonight she was enjoying a bigger stage and better sound system with a quartet, performing an unusually personal form of jazz-rock definitely in the spirit, if far from the letter, of the early ultraexperimental Grateful Dead (or Pink Floyd, in the case of one spacious epic). Scheinman was accompanied by her own low-key rock star, guitar experimentalist Nels Cline of Wilco, along with the nervously urgent rhythm section of bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Jim Black. And verily these cats did smoke. Scheinman has performed country, jazz, pop, and samba with the likes of Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Bill Frisell, and the Hot Club of San Francisco. All these experiences appear to blend together in compositions both serenely pastoral and anxiously urban. Yet it always sounded intensely intimate, of the moment, and resolutely nostalgia-free. I can't wait to hear what she does next.

No music is more conversational than small-group jazz, so it isn't surprising that the many great jazz musicians Ben Sidran interviewed during the five years he hosted the public-radio program "Sidran on Jazz" (1985-89) turn out to be quite a conversational bunch. A well-regarded jazz pianist himself, Sidran asked the right questions of the music's best players and recently released the results. Talking Jazz: An Oral History is a boxed set of twenty-four-CD boxed set containing conversations with sixty musicians. Talking Jazz is available online for the time being, and here are some highlights:

Miles Davis: "[John Coltrane] could play under the chord, over the chord, a minor third up from the fifth of the chord....[A] dramatic player like Trane...could just turn you on to the sound of one note. The only people I heard who could you do that was Charlie Parker and Coltrane. That's the only two I heard in my entire life."

Betty Carter: "It's a shame, too, that I and Art Blakey are the only two people that will really take that shot with the young twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds when there are so many musicians, my contemporaries, who work, who have not yet made the sacrifice to educate young players. We need more people like me and Art Blakey who will give these young musicians a job."

Dr. John: "You got three inside [rhythms] goin'....What I think was unique within the New Orleans thing was that people danced all three ways: slow, fast, or 'half-fast,' as the joke went."

Keith Jarrett: "This category thing always comes up because I seem to skirt them. But the simple truth of it is, once a category exists, what's in it is impotent....The only thing I've been interested in all along are the potentials that are missed in any given scene. The things that are forgotten by a whole audience in any given hall."

Michael Brecker: "Well, this might sound strange, but I believe strongly in commitment. That has worked out well for me....[Steps Ahead] allowed me to be myself, with all the good and bad.... I was comfortable in the shadows, trying to be kind of a mysterious soloist, and not have to really expose myself more than I had to....It just seems in the past few years I've been finally ready to venture out on my own, which is scary for me but has been very rewarding."

Wynton Marsalis: "Before I started playing with Art Blakey, I didn't even see how it was possible to play jazz. How could you make a living doing that?...I can honestly say that when I was playing with Art Blakey, I didn't know what you were supposed to be trying to do when you played a solo."

Rough Guides have long been my go-to sources of no-nonsense travel wisdom—and they put out some decent international music compilations as well. So I'm a little surprised it took me so long to stumble across World Party: The Rough Guide to the World's Best Festivals, which came out in December. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Music and food are the best reasons to travel. And the world's most festive celebrations tend to focus on either one or the other, or, as in the case of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, both. (Add the Galway International Oyster Festival; Mendoza, Argentina's wine-centric Vendimia Festival; and Porto, Portugal's fishy Festa do São João to my list.)

As for music, you could construct a lifetime travel itinerary from festivals constructed to celebrate local and international sounds. You may not be up for England's often-muddy Glastonbury Festival ("quite simply the finest music festival in the world") or the all-night debauchery of Ibiza, Spain's closing parties ("These end-of-season events tend to attract an older clubbing crowd, who prefer to hop over to Ibiza for a long weekend [a 'cheeky one' in clubber speak] in the relative sanity of September"). But there's no reason to put off visiting either the Olinda or Recife carnivals ("the Brazilian carnivals that haven't sold out"); the reportedly life-changing Festival in the Desert near Essakane, Mali; Jamaica's vigorously laid-back Reggae Sumfest; or the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, which I recently attended.

And if you want to start making plans this minute, the book's website will start you on your festive way.

The original manuscript of Beethoven's piano arrangement, four hands, for Grosse Fugue was purchased in December 2005 for $1.95 million by an unnamed buyer. The purchaser turned out to be hedge-fund jillionaire Bruce Kovner, board chairman of the Juilliard School. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, who has been totally on top of these transactions and their worth, called the work "a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow in Beethoven's wake, it became a kind of political object."

Kovner subsequently donated the manuscript, along with 137 other more or less priceless works, to the Juilliard Library. They include the lost manuscript (from its 1725 premiere) of the transposed continuo part of Bach's cantata BWV 176; Beethoven's first sketches for the opening to his ninth symphony; the first manuscript page of Copland's Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra, inscribed to Benny Goodman; a heavily annotated early piano version of Stravinsky's Firebird; Leonard Bernstein's autographed manuscript of Copland's El Salón México, with marginal caricatures of Copland by the conductor; and Toscanini's marked-up copy of Wagner's imposing Die Walküre.

In addition to being on view at The Julliard School in Manhattan, this treasure trove is now available online. You can search each manuscript, sketch, proof, and edition with a zoom function at this elegant and easy-to-use site, providing intimate and unprecedented glimpses into the working methods of forty-two classic composers. [via The Rest Is Noise]