by Jamie Bernstein | Aug 19, 2020 | Song of the Day
From the opening upbeat, we know we’re in a warm bath. That beautiful saxophone, that long-limbed tempo, the sweet unabashed major chords – pure sunlight. When I first heard it, I was driving at night through the oil fields of western Oklahoma, picking up some faraway...
by Jamie Bernstein | Aug 18, 2020 | Song of the Day
I couldn’t resist including this truly odd song from Pretzel Logic. It’s very short. One of the reasons it’s so short is that each of the three verses is one line long. Why did Fagen do that?! It makes me laugh every time – as if he were really so very...
by Jamie Bernstein | Aug 17, 2020 | Song of the Day
Steely Dan. The sound track of my 20’s. What a band. It’s really all about guitarist Walter Becker and keyboard/vocalist Donald Fagen. But if you push me against the wall, not terribly hard, I’ll say it’s really all about Donald Fagen. What a composer, what a...
by Joe Nocera | Aug 7, 2020 | Song of the Day
When Native Dancer was first released in 1974, it was marketed as a Wayne Shorter album. That made a certain undeniable sense: an alumnus of one of Miles Davis’s greatest groups (it also included Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Ron Carter), Shorter was by...
by Joe Nocera | Aug 6, 2020 | Song of the Day
If you read my final New York Times op-ed column on Tuesday, you know that it drives me batty that American’s greatest opera company won’t perform America’s greatest opera. It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the Metropolitan Opera last put on a...
by Joe Nocera | Aug 5, 2020 | Song of the Day
It is not exactly news that Adam Guettel is a composer of immense talent. The grandson of Richard Rodgers (one is required to note that when writing about Guettel), he has a transcendent melodic gift, and has written more than his fair share of gorgeous theater...
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