Adam Shatz

A Blues Surrealist

Julius Hemphill’s music uses stark, lyrical abstraction and svelte dissonances to confront the vicissitudes of black American life.

Memories of a Mentor and Friend

The writer and critic on how he and Stanley Crouch bonded over a shared love of jazz.

The Stanley Crouch I Knew

What Stanley believed in, I think, was calling things as he saw them even if it meant speaking hard truths, which used to be the business of critics. He left a number of bruises.

In the Vanguard of Trio Jazz with Micah Thomas

The piano trio has always held a special place in my experience—and imagination—of jazz clubs. And the most exciting debut on record that I’ve heard in the last year is Micah Thomas’s trio, recorded live last spring at Kitano, a small club in New York.

An Invitation from Jeanne Lee

Driss Chraïbi & the Novel Morocco Had to Ban

When Driss Chraïbi’s The Simple Past (Le Passé simple) was published in 1954, it was as if an explosion had gone off in the small, old-fashioned mansion of North African literature.

Capturing the Ephemeral Beauty of Improvisation

As Crispell fires off cascades of notes, Sorey follows her every step of the way, sometimes echoing her, sometimes throwing down a gauntlet—but always with an eye to the music’s direction.

‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now

The Orientalism of today, both in its sensibility and in its manner of production, is not quite the same as the Orientalism Edward Said discussed forty years ago. 


The Apostle of Now-ness

Rapping with Fanon

Once, in a 1959 lecture, Frantz Fanon drew upon a musical example to illustrate his vision of a revolutionary culture. Par les damné.e.s de la terre presents an extraordinary archive of recordings that illuminates the radical hopes that Fanon inspired.

New Stars in Coltrane’s ‘Interstellar Space’

John Coltrane’s torrential improvisations on Interstellar Space, like Beethoven’s late quartets, are a reminder that, as Edward Said observed, “artistic lateness” sometimes manifests itself “not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.”

Images that Hold Us

We’re moved by artistic expressions of pain, strife, suffering—and other, more joyous emotions—because, in their rawness of simulated emotion, they take us back to the earliest experiences of entering this world. 

The Mythologies of R.B.

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.”

Bad Boy from Buffalo

Silence Bigger Than a Table

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

The Sorcerer of Jazz

What gave Miles Davis’s music its cohesion, even its identity, was his unforgettable sound

'Music of Morocco'

Music of Morocco is not so much an archive as the document of an artist’s encounter with foreign traditions.

The Fierce Courage of Nina Simone

She did not so much interpret songs as take possession of them