Tag: Vol. 34 No. 38

For his most recent album, Purple Violets (Stunt), saxophonist SAM RIVERS is backed by players four and five decades his junior–and bassist Ben Street and Danish drummer Kresten Osgood work hard to keep up with the 81-year-old leader. Rivers doesn’t have anything left to prove; he preceded Wayne Shorter in the Miles Davis Quintet, recorded […]

On his new album, Migration (Loud House), singer-songwriter David Olney uses mythology, religion, and other broad metaphors to tackle everyday themes; “Lenora” imagines two lovers as a pair of birds, one of which gets shot down by a hunter’s rifle. The material often runs the risk of becoming insufferably precious, but Olney has a rough, […]

Eels front man Mark Oliver Everett, who goes by E, is a depressive’s depressive. On his 1998 masterpiece, Electro-Shock Blues, he dealt head-on with the deaths of his parents and his sister’s suicide and seemed a likely suspect to join the dour party of eloquent sorrow that Nick Drake, Ian Curtis, and Elliott Smith are […]

Like alchemists seeking the philosopher’s stone, improvisers have pursued the ideal of a fully improvised two-act play. Of course, the very notion may be chimerical: generating plots that are both complex and coherent seems almost beyond the pale of “yes, and” technique, and improv’s dreamy associative mechanisms tend to lock up when grounded in a […]

This fascinating oddity from Alain Corneau (Tous les matins du monde) adapts Amelie Nothomb’s autobiographical novel about the office life of a young Belgian (Sylvie Testud) working for a huge corporation in Tokyo. Though she’s spent her childhood in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese, a string of cultural blunders leads to one humiliating demotion after […]

This warmly intimate coming-of-age story is the latest from Pawel Pawlikowski, a native of Poland who got his start as a documentary director for the BBC (Tripping With Zhirinovsky) and graduated to dramatic features with Last Resort (2000). Based on a novel by Helen Cross, it follows the growing romance between a tony college student […]

Choreographer Boris Eifman cuts to the chase in his evening-length ballet Anna Karenina, focusing on the love triangle at the center of Tolstoy’s sprawling novel. A master at establishing character and psychological situations through movement, Eifman has created an excruciating scene between Anna and her husband, Karenin, after their marriage goes bad: while he orbits […]

Kirby Gann’s novel Our Napoleon in Rags (Ig Publishing) is set around the Don Quixote, a bohemian bar in a run-down district of fictional Montreux, Tennessee. Haycraft Keebler, the central figure of a mismatched bunch of regulars at the tavern, is a bipolar 42-year-old who devotes his highly regimented life to inspired but ultimately unsuccessful […]