Albums

SOME FACTS UNEARTHED WHILE SOME REMAIN BURIED The ultimate reason for the poet/short-story writer Edgar Allen Poe’s demise at age 40 was not clear in 1849, when the press reported his death, nor is it totally clear today, although this documentary by Eric Stange attempts to make it so. Broadcast this year on PBS’s American…

NO DAGGERS FROM ME FOR THIS DREAM Hooray and hallelujah! With her newest CD, a live double-album, jazz vocalist and song interpreter extraordinaire Cécile McLorin Salvant has cemented herself as this generation’s most mesmerizing, fascinating, and supreme songstress. Yes, she has that remarkably distinctive voice, but it’s supported by a personality which is an amalgam…

RIABKO ROMANTICALLY RETHINKS RODGERS I had a chance to catch Kyle Riabko on stage at The Wallis in Beverly Hills last weekend, where he returned to offer the Los Angeles debut of his Richard Rodgers Reimagined concert (his successful cabaret of Burt Bacharach songs played last year). Aided by three back-up musicians/vocalists, it was surprising…

DOO-WOP NOT REINVENTED In the mid-80s, Boyz II Men original members Nathan Morris, Wanya Morris, Shawn Stockman, and  Michael McCary began like the classic doo-wop singers of the 1950s: practicing on street corners and areas with great acoustics (McCary left the popular R&B quartet in 2003). So it’s fitting that the trio’s latest CD is a…

I’VE LOOKED AT WAR FROM BOTH SIDES NOW As a producer/director, Ken Burns is an artist of such high value on so many levels that he cannot be over-praised. For the past thirty-six years he has produced extraordinary documentaries which have educated, enlightened and entertained. Beginning with Brooklyn Bridge  (1981) Burns’s amazing array of films includes  The…

DARK AND TOWERING, BUT TRUNCATED AND CLICHÉD At turns surreptitious, ethereal, creepy, bold, spidery, wistful and dystopian, Tom Holkenborg’s  soundtrack to The Dark Tower  mixes traditional filmic orchestrations with an electronica edge, always offering an astoundingly moody, evocative, dramatic soundscape. There are no keyboardists or percussionists listed among the 88 orchestra players, so credit the four orchestrators—Jonathan…

THE HEART OF THE APES Composer Michael Giacchino is back with another Planet of the Apes installment and his insistent, encroaching, otherworldly, tribal soundscape is awesome. But unlike his first, Dawn of the  Planet of the Apes, which certainly captured the darkness, mystery, and potency of the popular movie series, War for the Planet of the…

ELLA REDUX When a new Ella Fitzgerald CD arrived, I ripped it open and started listening to what I believed was a re-mastered version of an album that I didn’t know existed (I own almost 30 of her recordings). The first track of Someone to Watch over Me (on CD and streaming September 29, 2017)…

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE OK, let’s get the confusion out of the way. If you’re not at all familiar with the Paramount films Holiday Inn  and White Christmas, listening to the just-released Original Broadway Cast album Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn (which had a short stint on Broadway in 2016) could be a pleasant enough experience first time…

MOVE OVER BOND AND BOURNE; HAMILTON’S IN TOWN These two hard-hitting spy thrillers, filmed in 2012, are based on well-known novels by the French-Swedish journalist, Jan Guillou (b. 1944), who wrote ten novels in all. There are other adaptations since 1989, starring among others, Stellan Skarsgí¥rd and Stefan Sauk, but these are the only two…

A SERIES YOU CAN’T REFUSE The Italian TV series Detective Montalbano Â (Il commissario Montalbano) has lasted eighteen blessed years. Since 1999, Detective/Commissario Salvo Montalbano (Luca Zingaretti)’â€56, stocky, well-built, and handsome’â€has loved, of all things, solving local crimes, mostly murder, and not all committed by the Mafia. Beautifully shot, the show glamorizes Sicily, not generally a showcase…

NOT SO PRIME For the few who don’t know, Prime Suspect is the well-loved cop-show game-changer from MASTERPIECE on PBS. The series, which ran from 1991-2006 starring a glorious Helen Mirren, now has a prequel.  Series creator Lynda La Plante’s  2015 novel Tennison  is the basis for this newest six-part television mini-series, but she abandoned the adaptation, which…

A ROYAL PERFORMANCE When British actor Tim Pigott-Smith died this past spring a month shy of his 71st birthday, the Community of Actors lost a legend. He came to fame three decades ago in The Jewel in the Crown,  the dazzling series about the end of British rule in India.  A consistently working actor, his last role…

STAR POWER MEETS GIRL POWER The new Broadway musical  War Paint  centers on historical personages and rags-to-riches rivals Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, cosmetic moguls who are not incidentally female and, even less accidentally, played by Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole.  Their half-century squabble, fueled by polar temperaments, marketing competition, even the men they stole from each other,…