Main Theme for Kris Saknussemm’s The Humble Assessment
Last night From the Top taped a show before a live audience at SUNY/Purchase PAC’s Concert Hall with the astonishing National Youth Orchestra of the USA, under the direction of David Robertson. In the next couple of weeks, audiences in many of the major summer festivals will have reason to celebrate the superb musicianship and…
Madison Smartt Bell ~ Straight Cut
Making my way chronologically through the work of Madison Smartt Bell, I just finished reading an early work of his, Straight Cut, recently published as part of the great pulp/noir imprint, Hard Case Crime. A compulsive and compulsory read, this one’s an international crime procedural in the exacting and detailed style of the filmmaker, Jean-Pierre…
Cyril Scott ~ Bells @ Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA From the Top live taping 2014.06.29
From the Top just wrapped a live taping in Salem, MA in the bravely eclectic confines of the Peabody Essex Museum. Our program featured the usual array of greatly gifted young musicians in addition to PEM’s own composer-in-residence, the newly eminent conductor/composer/pianist Matt Aucoin. Each of our guests chose a work from PEM’s massive collection…
Megan Abbott ~ The Fever
I’m a huge Megan Abbott fan. I’ve read all her published work, starting with her L.A. Noir classics, including The Song Is You, my personal fave in the genre/pantheon, Chandler, Cain et alia be damned. I just finished reading her latest, The Fever, befitting her recent mise en scene: the complex and contorted psychology of…
Madison Smartt Bell ~ Zero db and Other Stories and The Year of Silence
in my present bingeread of the work of Madison Smartt Bell, i’ve just read his first set of short stories, read as autobiography (Princeton life, Hoboken skids), but of a more spiritual, intuitive voice than Henry Miller, especially noteworthy for the title story, told from the specifically informed consciousness of an expert soundman (one of…
Pablo Ziegler ~ Milonga del Adios
getting the band back together: I will be joining Pablo Ziegler, composer and pianist of many years for Astor Piazzolla’s New Tango Quintet, touring his fantastic two-piano arrangements of his own works and famous tunes by Piazzolla. We needed to find two pianos to rehearse, and so Irene Wlodarski of Steinway reserved a studio at…
Madison Smartt Bell ~ Waiting For The End of The World
Continuing my binge-reading of the works of Madison Smartt Bell with another of his early novels, Waiting For the End of the World, a deep gaze into the spiritual abyss that was New York City in the early 80’s: domestic terrorism lurking omnipotent, Satanism, even some Dickensian instances of Spontaneous Human Combustion. This book makes…
Madison Smartt Bell ~ The Washington Square Ensemble
Just finished reading Madison Smartt Bell‘s debut novel, The Washington Square Ensemble. it was thanks to Stona Fitch and Concord Free Press that I became aware of Smartt Bell’s work through his latest volume of short stories, Zig Zag Wanderer. I found his prose style addictive, his habitation of new voices compelling. I’ve collected all…
Haruki Murakami ~ Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
So now I’ve caught up with the compleat published works of Haruki Murakami (in preparation for the English publication of his latest novel, The Colorless Tsukuro Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage), having just finished reading his comprehensive short story collection (works from 1980-2005), Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Two dozen brilliant stories wholly worthy of…
New Two-Piano Concerto and Hexameron with pianist/composer Andre Mehmari and the Miami Symphony Orchestra, May 3, 2015
Thrilled to announce this project, brainchild of Maestro Eduardo Marturet‘s Season of the Piano at the Miami Symphony Orchestra, a collaboration with brilliant Brazilian jazz pianist and composer, Andre Mehmari. His music is beautiful, his energy, infectious. Thanks to school-chum and Percussionist of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, Dexter Dwight, for turning me onto this great…