Music

Mozart the Modernist

In his new biography, Patrick Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world.

November 2, 2023 issue

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

‘Give Me All the Power’

Did Latin rock meaningfully challenge authoritarian politics in Central and South America during the twentieth century, or was it music for rebels without a cause?

October 19, 2023 issue

Philip Clark

The Transgressor

RJ Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry examines his subject’s instinct for crossing the line musically, racially, and morally.

October 19, 2023 issue

George B. Stauffer

Where Are the Women Composers?

An engaging multiple biography draws the reader deep into the lives of four British women who attempted to forge careers in the male-dominated field of music composition.

October 5, 2023 issue

Karan Mahajan

A Brief Efflorescence

The early Aughts were a period when New York became the center of the world both politically and musically, the city itself the subject of songs and romance.

September 21, 2023 issue

Paige K. Bradley

Boogie on the Higher Levels

Judee Sill made two exquisite, defiantly spiritual albums in the early 1970s. A flawed documentary attempts to reckon with her too-brief career.

October 26, 2023

Adam Shatz

Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins

A newly reissued recording proves that the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders could get the grandest of effects from the humblest of riffs.

September 19, 2023

Ted Reichman

Wind in the Nave

Medna Roso documents a revelatory encounter between improvising musicians and Balkan vocalists in a Cologne church.

August 23, 2023

All That Jazz

Sean Wilentz

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

Accra Shepp

An Interview with Archie Shepp

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

September 29, 2020

Ming Smith: Sun Ra Space II, New York City, 1978

Namwali Serpell

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

Cecil Taylor playing at the Sweet Basil nightclub, New York, 1989

Adam Shatz

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

Geoffrey O’Brien

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

E.J. Hobsbawm

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

Alma Guillermoprieto

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

Charles Simic

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 Latest

Adam Shatz

Cries and Whispers

Throughout her long career, Meredith Monk has pushed beyond verbal language to explore the full potential of the human voice.

November 22, 2023

Zoe Hu

Child’s Play

Sofia Coppola’s film about Priscilla Presley feels like a document less of romance than of the comforts and dangers of fantasy.

November 18, 2023

Geoff Mann

Whose Country?

It is impossible to talk about the blues, country, or where the two might overlap without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past.

November 23, 2023 issue

J. Hoberman

Jammin’ in the Panoram

During World War II, proto–music videos called “soundies” blared pop patriotism from visual jukeboxes across American bars.

September 2, 2023

Incomparable

In recent years Sinéad O’Connor wrested her story back from a sneering media. But “if anyone truly wants to know me,” she wrote, “the best way is through my songs.”

August 5, 2023

Andrew Katzenstein

An Ensemble of One

The cellist Abdul Wadud had a virtuosic command of many musical languages, from bebop to free jazz, chamber music, and Delta blues.

July 23, 2023

Martin Filler

Poet of Shubert Alley

The late Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick, in Fiddler on the Roof and above all She Loves Me, gave the musical comedy a rare insight, poetic delicacy, and emotional intimacy.

June 30, 2023

Edward Ball

‘Tell Your Story, Omar’

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

May 25, 2023 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

Escaping from Notes to Sounds

Albert Ayler was not the first to exploit the saxophone’s capacity for nontraditional noises, but he was the first to create a coherent musical language from them alone.

May 11, 2023 issue