Following a little break after my immersive experience with Madison Smartt Bell’s incredible trilogy of the Haitian Revolution, I’ve returned to his work with a road novel of a touring beach bar band, Anything Goes. He gets it right, not only in the telling, but he’s written a whole album of songs to go with …
Just tore through Royal Young‘s memoir, Fame Shark, recounting his growing up in the Lower East Side, born Hazak Brozgold to artist/social worker/psychologist parents. His father‘s work festoons several of the NYC subway stations (I’ve got some of his papier-mache masks shown below) gorgeous murals; Royal himself is a wonderful painter, whose work is now …
Ever since I somehow happened upon Stephen Graham Jones‘ debut novel, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, I’ve been reading ravenously everything he’s published. As he’s quite prolific, that takes some keeping up with: 10 novels, 3 collections and countless short stories just since the turn of the century. His early work (All the Beautiful …
Stona Fitch, superstar author, former member of Scruffy the Cat and Robin Hood-style publisher @ Concord Free Press, who I’m honored to call a friend, has introduced me to some authors who’ve changed my life: Lucius Shepard, Bohumil Hrabal and Danilo Kis among them. Last year, Concord came out with ZigZag Wanderer by Madison Smartt …
Just listening through, now, to first edits of my set with Matt Haimovitz of the Complete Beethoven Works for Cello and Piano, provisionally titled, Beethoven, Period, coming out on Pentatone in February of 2015. We had the great good fortune to be privileged to record at Skywalker Ranch on Matt’s gut-strung Gofriller and an 1823 …
Back a few months, while From the Top was doing a show with the Starling Chamber Orchestra and stellar alums Jonathan Miron, Charles Yang and Tessa Lark, I had the chance to sit down with Renaissance Man, David Neal Lewis for an extended chat about my upcoming recital at Xavier University on Sunday, the 28th …