Tag: Vol. 31 No. 33

Finnish producer Vladislav Delay has emerged as one of the more interesting figures in electronic dance music. Early on the former jazz percussionist put hard but minimal beats through subtle workouts, transforming them by introducing digital errors and gentle dubby effects; on recordings from a couple years ago, like Sistol (Phthalo) and Entain (Mille Plateaux), […]

Broadway singers generally aren’t very credible jazz-pop vocalists; Jack Donahue is an exception. This handsome University of Virginia alumnus and teacher, whose extensive theatrical credits include the Goodman’s brilliant Floyd Collins and The Ballad of Little Jo at Steppenwolf, has a light, airy, plaintive tenor a la Gino Vannelli or Stevie Wonder. It’s an expressive […]

Unlike familiar mainstream documentaries in which titles and an omniscient narrator tell us what to think about the images, Jesse Lerner’s films create disparities between image and spoken text that encourage the viewer’s active participation. While he focuses on the history of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula–which attempted to secede in the 19th century, had a socialist […]

Paul Fejos’s exquisite, poetic 1928 masterpiece about love and estrangement in the big city deserves to be ranked with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and King Vidor’s The Crowd from the same period, though it’s not nearly as well-known. Equally neglected is Fejos himself, a peripatetic Hungarian who made striking films in Hungary, Hollywood, Austria, and France […]

More than any American composer since Leonard Bernstein, John Corigliano has an uncanny feel for the popular pulse. Proficient in a wide range of idioms, he responds to the nation’s shifts in mood rather than adhere to an orthodoxy. As if answering the prayers of concertgoers frustrated with atonal music, he’s written sonatas, quartets, and […]