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Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Critic Who Translated Jazz Into Plain English
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. 'Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,' the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis 'an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.' Davis wrote for The Atlantic for more than three decades, from 1984 to 2016, and was a contributing editor for much of that time. He also had a high-profile stint at The Village Voice, where he originated an annual jazz critics' poll that continues today elsewhere and now bears his name. (His influence can also be detected on NPR's Fresh Air, which is hosted by his widow, Terry Gross, and where he served as the program's first jazz critic.) Corby Kummer, a longtime Atlantic staffer who edited Davis, told me that one thing that set Davis apart was how catholic his taste was. 'There were no avant-garde novels or musicians or art-house movies he didn't know, and he knew absolutely everything mainstream,' Kummer said. 'He was high-low before 'high-low' was a concept. He took everything into account.' You can see Davis's breadth in, for example, his 1992 rave review of Seinfeld, which doubles as an erudite history of popular television. 'So much in Seinfeld is new to TV, beginning with its acknowledgment of the absurdity in the ordinary, that you tend to forget that it's based on a premise as old as the medium,' he wrote. Twelve years later, he wrote a moving eulogy for Johnny Cash, 'a Christian who didn't cast stones, a patriot who didn't play the flag card.' But Davis's jazz writing stands out the most, and means the most to me. He came to The Atlantic under the direction of the editor William Whitworth. As my colleagues Cullen Murphy and Scott Stossel wrote in an obituary last year, Whitworth was a serious jazz fan who had also been, in his youth, a serious trumpeter; he eventually chose a journalist's life over a musician's. Davis 'might have been Bill's favorite writer,' Kummer told me. The two men would trade album reviews and listen to music together, and Whitworth gave Davis wide latitude to follow his interests. That might help explain how, in the same calendar year, Davis published deep and definitive profiles of Benny Carter, an alto saxophonist who had been recording since the 1920s, and John Zorn, an impish and sometimes earsplitting avant-garde composer who shared little with Carter save the alto sax and the imprecise label of jazz. 'Zorn, in short, is exactly the sort of rude, overgrown adolescent you would go out of your way to avoid, if only he weren't so … well, interesting, important, and influential (at least potentially),' Davis wrote. (Davis's prediction has borne out: Zorn remains a central and only slightly calmer figure today.) Davis lamented that the music he loved was viewed as elitist, but he wrote about it in terms that could reach both serious fans and casual listeners. His confiding but lightly sardonic presence on the page brought you in, and his ability to translate jazz into plain English brought you along. In 1988, he captured how the members of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis's band 'sound as though they were playing in four different time signatures. But actually they are stretching a basic quadruple meter four different ways, accenting different beats in every measure, and trusting that the listener will feel the downbeat in his bones. The effect is mesmerizing.' Davis's fundamental interest, though, was less musicological than anthropological. 'What does music mean to people?' he wondered. 'What does it signify to them?' I've always loved his description of the deceptively relaxed guitarist Bill Frisell: 'Even at its most melodic and high-stepping, Frisell's music seems haunted and disquieted, more Edward Hopper than Grant Wood or Norman Rockwell, evocative not just of rivers and prairies and small-town parades but of lost highways, dead-end streets, and heartbreak hotels.' Although Davis could write an immaculate sentence, his goal was not flash or provocation. 'He wasn't interested in being a cultural authority,' Kummer told me. 'He was interested, as the best writers are, in understanding what he thought by writing it out.' This meant that when he did make a judgment, it carried a great deal of weight. His verdict on Marsalis's retrospective orientation feels as solid now as it did 37 years ago: 'Progress is frequently a myth in jazz, as in most other aspects of contemporary life. But it is a myth so central to the romance of jazz that the cost of relinquishing it might be giving up jazz altogether.' The sureness of Davis's judgments makes me hesitate to contradict him, but I must. What I believe was Davis's final published piece was an essay in January that accompanied his eponymous poll, in which he disclosed that he'd entered hospice. His outlook on jazz journalism was grim. 'Maybe I was the last to learn that criticism had outlived its usefulness as far as the arts and entertainment industry were concerned,' he wrote. 'Or maybe only I have outlived mine.' On the contrary, his criticism has and will outlive him, much to the benefit of the listeners and readers who do too. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Critic Who Translated Jazz Into Plain English
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. 'Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,' the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis 'an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.' Davis wrote for The Atlantic for more than three decades, from 1984 to 2016, and was a contributing editor for much of that time. He also had a high-profile stint at The Village Voice, where he originated an annual jazz critics' poll that continues today elsewhere and now bears his name. (His influence can also be detected on NPR's Fresh Air, which is hosted by his widow, Terry Gross, and where he served as the program's first jazz critic.) Corby Kummer, a longtime Atlantic staffer who edited Davis, told me that one thing that set Davis apart was how catholic his taste was. 'There were no avant-garde novels or musicians or art-house movies he didn't know, and he knew absolutely everything mainstream,' Kummer said. 'He was high-low before 'high-low' was a concept. He took everything into account.' You can see Davis's breadth in, for example, his 1992 rave review of Seinfeld, which doubles as an erudite history of popular television. 'So much in Seinfeld is new to TV, beginning with its acknowledgment of the absurdity in the ordinary, that you tend to forget that it's based on a premise as old as the medium,' he wrote. Twelve years later, he wrote a moving eulogy for Johnny Cash, 'a Christian who didn't cast stones, a patriot who didn't play the flag card.' But Davis's jazz writing stands out the most, and means the most to me. He came to The Atlantic under the direction of the editor William Whitworth. As my colleagues Cullen Murphy and Scott Stossel wrote in an obituary last year, Whitworth was a serious jazz fan who had also been, in his youth, a serious trumpeter; he eventually chose a journalist's life over a musician's. Davis 'might have been Bill's favorite writer,' Kummer told me. The two men would trade album reviews and listen to music together, and Whitworth gave Davis wide latitude to follow his interests. That might help explain how, in the same calendar year, Davis published deep and definitive profiles of Benny Carter, an alto saxophonist who had been recording since the 1920s, and John Zorn, an impish and sometimes earsplitting avant-garde composer who shared little with Carter save the alto sax and the imprecise label of jazz. 'Zorn, in short, is exactly the sort of rude, overgrown adolescent you would go out of your way to avoid, if only he weren't so … well, interesting, important, and influential (at least potentially),' Davis wrote. (Davis's prediction has borne out: Zorn remains a central and only slightly calmer figure today.) Davis lamented that the music he loved was viewed as elitist, but he wrote about it in terms that could reach both serious fans and casual listeners. His confiding but lightly sardonic presence on the page brought you in, and his ability to translate jazz into plain English brought you along. In 1988, he captured how the members of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis's band 'sound as though they were playing in four different time signatures. But actually they are stretching a basic quadruple meter four different ways, accenting different beats in every measure, and trusting that the listener will feel the downbeat in his bones. The effect is mesmerizing.' Davis's fundamental interest, though, was less musicological than anthropological. 'What does music mean to people?' he wondered. 'What does it signify to them?' I've always loved his description of the deceptively relaxed guitarist Bill Frisell: 'Even at its most melodic and high-stepping, Frisell's music seems haunted and disquieted, more Edward Hopper than Grant Wood or Norman Rockwell, evocative not just of rivers and prairies and small-town parades but of lost highways, dead-end streets, and heartbreak hotels.' Although Davis could write an immaculate sentence, his goal was not flash or provocation. 'He wasn't interested in being a cultural authority,' Kummer told me. 'He was interested, as the best writers are, in understanding what he thought by writing it out.' This meant that when he did make a judgment, it carried a great deal of weight. His verdict on Marsalis's retrospective orientation feels as solid now as it did 37 years ago: 'Progress is frequently a myth in jazz, as in most other aspects of contemporary life. But it is a myth so central to the romance of jazz that the cost of relinquishing it might be giving up jazz altogether.' The sureness of Davis's judgments makes me hesitate to contradict him, but I must. What I believe was Davis's final published piece was an essay in January that accompanied his eponymous poll, in which he disclosed that he'd entered hospice. His outlook on jazz journalism was grim. 'Maybe I was the last to learn that criticism had outlived its usefulness as far as the arts and entertainment industry were concerned,' he wrote. 'Or maybe only I have outlived mine.' On the contrary, his criticism has and will outlive him, much to the benefit of the listeners and readers who do too.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Dean of American rock critics' Robert Christgau and his love for this band from Alabama
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — It's not uncommon for music to be playing between 12 to 18 hours a day in Robert Christgau's apartment. Then, when he's ready, he starts to write about what all the sounds that had been swirling around in his head for the better part of a day make him feel. It's a process that has earned the esteemed writer the moniker of 'dean of American rock critics,' covering the thousands of albums and artists he has covered since the 1960s for places like The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Esquire, NPR to his own Substack, 'And It Don't Stop.' Over the years, he has covered and reviewed work as varied as The Allman Brothers Band and Kraftwerk to Nina Simone and Fela Kuti and countless others. In recent years, however, Christgau has taken a shine to one particular band from Alabama: Drive-By Truckers. 'They're a great f****** band,' Christgau told CBS 42 during a recent phone interview. 'It's as simple as that.' Christgau's association with the band goes back to their sophomore album, 'Pizza Deliverance,' in 1999. 'Rockers playing sorta-country with rough enthusiasm and nothing like a sound, they make their mark detailing the semivoluntary poverty DIY musicians share with the highly subsuburban constituency they imagine,' he wrote at the time. As the band put out new music and members came and went, Christgau continued to cover the band and with a couple of exceptions — he felt DBT's sophomore album 'Alabama Ass Whuppin'' had 'loads of stories, not much music' — remains a loyal fan. 'Without fussing over bridges and such, they treat their job like a calling–verses are packed with stories they need to tell and choruses ring out with why,' Christgau wrote of 'Decoration Day.' Christgau, 82, even dedicated an extended essay about the band for the Barnes & Noble Review in 2011, highlighting their work up to 'Go-Go Boots.' 'The Drive-By Truckers aren't bigger than Jesus,' he wrote. 'They aren't even bigger than Kings of Leon, or Jesus' Son. But body-of-work-wise, they deserve to be.' An avid reader as well, Christgau also favorably reviewed Stephen Deussner's biography of the band, 'Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers.' 'Everything Deusner has to tell us about the evolution of this remarkable band is of interest,' he wrote in 2023. 'They've led a long, complex, and idiosyncratic artistic life that's far from over.' Even Patterson Hood, the band's primary singer and songwriter, has gotten the Christgau treatment on his solo albums, including his latest one, 'Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams,' which was released earlier this month. 'I found the head Drive By Trucker's quasi-autobiographical songwriting here so varied and indeed interesting that I dipped back two decades to reaccess his 2004 solo debut 'Killers and Stars,' which I assayed in 120 B plus/A minus words for Blender but never gave it its own review in the Consumer Guide,' Christgau wrote in his latest Consumer Guide on 'And It Don't Stop.' 'Not bad, right, only the new one's even better.' When reached at his home in New York City, Christgau said one aspect of Hood's work on his latest solo album is the way he articulates his emotional life, especially on love. 'Ideologically, it's an important part of how I've organized my life,' said Christgau, who has been married to the writer Carola Dibbell for over 50 years. With DBT, who kick off their next tour in Texas on May 29, Christgau will continue to follow the band's work. 'I think they're an absolutely A-level band,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
South China Morning Post
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Who is Thor actress Kat Dennings' musician husband, Andrew W.K?
Musician Andrew W.K first launched his musical career in the early noughties with rock and metal songs about partying. He shot to fame with his 2001 anthem 'Party Hard', which remained a popular track for years after, appearing in adverts, movie trailers, video games and even at ice hockey games – it's the goal song for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Despite his hard rocker image, W.K – whose full name is Andrew Fetterly Wilkes-Krier – also became known for his motivational speaking and self-help work. He wrote an advice column for New York newspaper The Village Voice, hosted a children's game show on the Cartoon Network, and gave lectures on positive partying at universities including Oxford, Yale and NYU. And then he disappeared. Andrew W.K had disappeared from social media for two years until his wedding to Kat Dennings. Photo: @katdenningsss/Instagram Just a few weeks after releasing his sixth studio album God Is Partyin g in September 2021, W.K went off the grid. He deleted all his social media accounts and the tour he had announced was cancelled. Numerous conspiracy theories were floated by fans until about two years later, he began to be seen more frequently when his actress partner – Thor and 2 Broke Girls actress Kat Dennings – confirmed they were married. Here's what you need to know about the rocker. The fame train Andrew W.K and his wife Kat Dennings. Photo: @katdenningsss/Instagram Andrew W.K is a classically trained pianist, having begun lessons as a five-year-old with teachers from the University of Michigan Music School. He played in bands as a teen, then applied to and was accepted into the Art Institute of Chicago. Before the term even started, though, he had decided to move to New York and make music. In 2001, W.K's song 'Party Hard' became an instant rock anthem and by the time he released his debut album , I Get Wet – with its now famous cover of him drenched in sweat with a bloody nose – he had solidified a cult following.
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist whose satirical skewerings ran in The Sunday Telegraph
Jules Feiffer, who has died aged 95, was one of America's most celebrated political cartoonists, turning a satirical eye on some of his country's most turbulent moments for nearly half a century. Feiffer started drawing weekly strip cartoons, initially called 'Sick, Sick, Sick', later simply 'Feiffer', for The Village Voice in New York, articulating the concerns of perplexed, neurotic liberal New Yorkers and exposing the hypocrisies and pomposities of US politicians. Feiffer explained that his work explored 'how people use language not to communicate, and the use of power in relationships'. In one cartoon, satirising the politically correct obsession with nomenclature, an old man says to himself: 'I used to think I was poor… Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was Needy… Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was Deprived… Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was Underprivileged… Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was Disadvantaged… I still don't have a dime… But I have a great vocabulary.' Although generally liberal in his outlook, Feiffer was an equal-opportunities satirist, skewering the antics of politicians from LBJ (seen in one cartoon telling a lollipop-sucking child: 'In the interest of freedom and in the pursuit of peace, we have today bombed…'), Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, and he became a vehement critic of the sort of liberal intellectualism that is oblivious to the violent forces that threaten social order. Feiffer's cartoons were syndicated to more than 100 US newspapers and ran in The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph. In 1986 he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. He combined his newspaper work with writing screenplays and stage plays in a similar satirical vein. He wrote the script for the Oscar-winning animated short Munro (1961), though his best-known screenplay was for Carnal Knowledge (1971), a comedy of sexual manners directed by Mike Nichols that followed the exploits of two old college friends (Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) as they try and generally fail to negotiate the sexual revolution. The film, which co-starred Candice Bergen and (a mostly nude) Ann-Margret – who received an Oscar nomination for her role as a model 'with splendid features', as the Telegraph critic put it – was banned as obscene in Georgia, though the ruling was overturned by the US Supreme Court. According to Feiffer, its blunt honesty about male misogyny got him blacklisted in Hollywood for 10 years, though in 1980 he agreed to come up with the script for Robert Altman's Popeye, starring Robin Williams as the one-eyed, spinach-chomping sailor, whom Feiffer characterised as 'the flawed Everyman as Walt Whitman might have imagined him, Frank Capra directed him, and Samuel Beckett mixed with Eugene Ionesco hired to write his dialogue'. Not surprisingly, the end result did not go down well with critics, while the production was dogged by rows caused in part, one reviewer noted, by 'Altman's erratic behaviour [and] the arrival of his notorious consigliere Scotty Bushnell, who revelled in creating inter-departmental tension. Altman stopped speaking to his cinematographer... Everyone, meanwhile, stopped speaking to Feiffer.' As a writer for the stage Feiffer often had better luck in London than in New York. His first full-length play, Little Murders (1967), a response to the assassination of John F Kennedy, later turned into a film starring Elliot Gould, was a black comedy set against a backdrop of mounting urban violence. A photographer becomes so disillusioned with life that he begins to specialise in pictures of excrement. As a result he becomes a celebrity and eventually joins in the mayhem by shooting passers-by. Hostile notices sank the New York production, but in London, staged by the RSC at the Aldwych, it was voted best foreign play of the year by London critics, the Telegraph's WA Darlington observing that it showed great 'vitality and comic power'. The only dissenting voice was that of the Lord Chamberlain, who objected to the use of the word 's--t', but found 'c--p' to be an acceptable substitute. Encouraged by the reception, Feiffer (who claimed to be an aficionado of London parks) chose London for the public premiere of his next major play, God Bless (1978), though with less happy results. The production, again by the RSC at the Aldwych, starred Roy Dotrice as William Brackman, a wheelchair-bound 110-year-old elder statesman and presidential adviser, a one-time liberal with his eye on the main chance. His reveries are interrupted when two radical ex-students of his at Harvard blow up the Washington Monument and invade the White House. The revolutionaries turn out to be agents provocateurs hired by a Right-wing president in an attempt to discredit Left-wing protest and foment a backlash. But as the 'revolutionaries' taste power, matters get out of hand and Brackman brokers an unlikely coalition, with disastrous results. 'I was trying to show what our heritage of pragmatic liberalism has brought us in the last 20 years,' Feiffer explained. 'I wanted to do a political play... of the Cold War and Vietnam and how innocent people, nice people, can become murderers.' But the reviews were almost uniformly hostile, the Telegraph's critic regretting that 'the steely control of Feiffer's cartoons has not here restrained him from excesses of fancy which explode meaninglessly in the theatre.' By his own admission, one of Feiffer's biggest earners was his friend Norton Juster's 1961 children's fantasy classic The Phantom Tollbooth, for which he did the charming, scratchy illustrations. It has sold more than five million copies and has been adapted into a film, play and opera. As 'Feiffer' the comic strip retired in 2000 ('when I grew nostalgic over Bill Clinton, I knew it was time to go,' he joked), Feiffer reinvented himself as a children's book author and illustrator, and also wrote graphic novels. The second of three children, Jules Ralph Feiffer was born in the Bronx on January 26 1929 to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, David, was a salesman who struggled during the depression. His mother, Rhoda, described by her son as 'a control freak whose control did her no good at all', supported the family selling fashion drawings to department stores. He enjoyed drawing as a child and wanted to make it his career, but at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he attended art classes, drawing seemed more difficult than it first appeared. Finding a good caption helped, and he decided to become a cartoonist. Will Eisner, creator of 'The Spirit', a popular crime-fighting strip (and the main feature of a tabloid-sized comic), was his great hero and, aged 16, Feiffer talked his way into working under him. 'I thought I was a finished cartoonist,' Feiffer recalled. '[Eisner] looked through my samples. He disagreed. He thought I was finished as a cartoonist.' But Eisner allowed him to work as an unpaid 'groupie', and helped him to introduce 'Clifford', about the adventures of a little boy, a comic strip that showcased 'the sort of self-pity that made me famous'. Drafted in 1951 into the US Army Signals Corps, Feiffer concocted a plan to fake a nervous breakdown to escape possible combat duty in Korea and spent much of his time drawing anti-military cartoons and honing what he described as his 'contempt for abusive authority'. Discharged in 1953, he worked at various jobs, getting himself fired every so often so that he could draw the dole until he was given a slot in The Village Voice, where for the first eight years he worked unpaid. His pessimistic view of human nature owed much to McCarthyism. In 1953 he attended the memorial service of the actor J Edward Bromberg, who had died a couple of years earlier after prolonged McCarthyist persecution. There, he saw the playwright Clifford Odets denounce the state for having caused the death of his friend – but, a week later, he was appalled to hear that Odets had supplied names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and had fingered Bromberg as his recruiter. Hugh Hefner, who hired him to draw cartoons for Playboy, was the first person to pay Feiffer for his work, winning him a national audience before any of his work was syndicated: 'I was amazed at how I started getting college speaking dates within a year of appearing in Playboy.' Feiffer's other work included several more plays, among them The White House Murder Case, in which a nerve gas is released by mistake, killing 750 soldiers, and White House staff ponder how to spin the tragedy to the voting public ahead of a presidential election. In addition he published several children's books and what he called 'novels-in-cartoons', and a 2010 memoir, Backing into Forward. Feiffer's marriages, to Judy Sheftel and Jennifer Allen, were dissolved. In 2016, he married the writer JZ Holden, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage and two daughters from his second. Jules Feiffer, born January 26 1929, died January 17 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
