MediaFromDanteToTheLostAndFound

(March 21, 2012 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA) There is a reason why stages featuring the beautiful art of Indian classical music usually have their seats filled with a monotonously brown audience. Steeped in hundreds of years of local and regional traditions, the scientifically artistic sounds of Carnatic percussionists, sarangi musicians, dholak performers, doyra masters, and tabla phemons do not immediately translate well for American or Western audiences. Then again, when you have a legendary tablaist in Zakir Hussain and an equally apt team of jaw-dropping master percussionists performing in a Walt Disney Concert Hall filled with a crowd as diverse as it was on March 21st, struck is a perfect harmony of hyper-focused Indian culture and universally palatable ears. His brother, Fazal Qureshi, and six other artists here joined Mr. Hussain at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles on March 21st, with collectively more than 1,000 spirited souls at the ...

British Drummer Tony Marsh passed away from cancer on 9 April in London. Marsh was a familiar presence on the London improvised music scene, performing in a renowned trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and bassist John Edwards at venues such as the Vortex, and regularly participating in collaborations at Café Oto and elsewhere with improvising musicians of the highest calibre. Marsh played with Shabaka Hutchings and Guillaume Viltard in a trio at Café Oto in January, and in March at the same venue with Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Roscoe Mitchell and John Edwards. Marsh first emerged in the 1970s with the jazz-rock group Major Surgery, before moving on to record and perform in the 1980s and 1990s with musicians and acts such as Mike Westbrook Orchestra, Howard Riley and Harry Beckett. As a drummer, Marsh was well known for technical sophistication and for conveying a wellspring of emotional depth with his playing, whilst being respected amogst percussionists as a collaborative improvise...

Levon Helm, the longtime drummer of The Band who backed Bob Dylan and sang with Van Morrison, died Thursday after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 71. When The Band was backing Dylan in 1965, Time magazine described the combination as "in some ways the most decisive moment in rock history." The Band went on to record its own highly influential albums Music From Big Pink and The Band in 1968 and '69, before splitting up in the mid-'70s. After The Band, Helm began working on his own solo efforts and toured with a variety of musicians, including Ringo Starr. After taking time off to battle throat and vocal-cord cancer, Helm reemerged in the late 2000s. In 2007, he released the album Dirt Farmer, which received the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album, as well as many accolades from music critics. The Washington Post called Dirt Farmer "an exquisitely unvarnished monument to Americana from a man whose keening, lyrical vocals have become synonymous wit...

If pictorial reproduction can be traced to founding and stamping in Ancient Greece, textual reproduction to the printing presses of the Middle Ages, sound to the recording experiments of the late 19th century and the moving image to a few years later, then opera – that messy, mongrel art form – is finally having its moment. Walter Benjamin’s influential 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” debated the consequences of mass reproduction in the wake of a great flourishing of film and photography, and his ideas held their relevance throughout the 20th century. However, although sound and video recordings of opera performances are nothing new, it is only in the past few years that technology has brought us something close to a true reproduction: high quality sound and visuals and, crucially, the potential for live relay. High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the a...