A Brutal Place Playing at Paradise

The filmmaker James Benning invites us to look closely at American landscapes and peer into their history. 

August 31, 2022

Clear but Not Cold

An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou explores the contradictions of a Weimar-era cultural movement that strove for fidelity “to positive palpable reality.” 

August 25, 2022

‘The Italian Proust’

Italo Svevo’s late fiction has all the dark irony, self-flagellating introspection, manic obsessiveness, and unapologetic moral perversity of his best-known work. 

August 24, 2022

The Lost World of the Jazz Club

It was an era when this milieu of popular music seemed to herald a now-distant promise of what American life might be.

December 23, 2020

An Interview with Archie Shepp

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, was a revolutionary, both musically and politically.

September 29, 2020

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

July 23, 2020 issue

The World of Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor developed an exceptional finger dexterity, and a complete mastery of his attacks and releases. As the pianist Craig Taborn told me, “fingers don’t do that naturally.”

May 16, 2018

The Grandest Duke

Of many artists it can be said that deep cultural currents can be read through their work; much rarer are those who, like Ellington, transformed those currents by their work.

October 28, 2010 issue

Some Like It Hot

For jazz to go so far, it needed impresarios and entrepreneurs committed to a cause. And it required public relaxation of an apartheid far stronger than we can now imagine.

April 13, 1989 issue

Cuban Hit Parade

Buena Vista Social Club may come nearest to being the perfect popular music record since Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

January 14, 1999 issue

Dizzy in the Daylight

Jazz Festival is a thick book of black-and-white photographs by Jim Marshall, one of the best-known American rock photographers, who first became famous by taking pictures of jazz musicians.

December 4, 2016

The Painter in the Paint

“Basketball inspires my work, not only with its data and information, but the little details of the sport that tell us about what we’re looking at: colors, lines, paths, boxes, rules.”

September 3, 2022

Compulsion, Triumph, Regret, and Unease

“Video games have access to compulsion—that kind of deep-seated slot-machine feeling—and the mindless cleaning-up-the-kitchen zone-out in a way that other art forms don’t.”

August 20, 2022

“Live in Fragments No Longer”

“Surveillance makes worker coordination and solidarity harder, and big data makes capital coordination easier, so the need for both pro-labor and antitrust laws is greater than ever before.”

August 13, 2022