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Five Hundred Instruments and One White Lab Coat: How Lester Bowie’s Art Ensemble of Chicago Conquered Paris
Photo: Michael Hoefner / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Paris, in the summer of 1969, had never seen a band arrive like this. Four young musicians from the South Side of Chicago arrived with more luggage than a symphony orchestra. There were trumpets and saxophones, of course, but also gongs, bells, whistles, bicycle horns, and…
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Remembering Antal Doráti: The Conductor Who Made the Classics Sound Brand New
Antal Doráti, 1962. Credit: Joop van Bilsen for Anefo, 14 June 1962, Nationaal Archief. Licence: CC0 Opening: A Baton That Refused to Let the Past Grow Dusty Every record collection carries them — the albums pressed before most collectors were born, the orchestras whose tenors now seem to belong to another world. Antal Doráti’s music…
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The Sisters of Mercy – Floodland: The Story Behind the Song
The Sisters of Mercy at M’era Luna, 2005. Credit: de:User:Tsukasa / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 In November 1987 — thirty-nine years ago this month — the Sisters of Mercy released Floodland, their second studio album. It debuted at number nine on the UK Albums Chart. It was later certified gold for selling 100,000 copies. Its first…
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The Disco Record That Outran the Poster: How Leif Garrett Turned “I Was Made for Dancin’” Into a Worldwide Smash
Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain In September 1978, a sixteen-year-old boy stood under the television lights, waiting for his cue. The cameras belonged to Wonder Woman, then one of the most popular adventure shows on American television. The episode carried a title that sounded like a headline from his own life: “My…
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Three Minutes Short: How Lou Donaldson Improvised “Alligator Bogaloo” and Stumbled Into a Soul-Jazz Classic
Photo: Brian McMillen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 The tape machines at Van Gelder Studio had done good work by the evening of April 7, 1967. Outside the low building in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, an ordinary spring night was settling in. Inside, Lou Donaldson and his band had cut five solid tracks for…
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Steve Zahn – 59 Years of Stealing Every Scene
Steve Zahn during the She Dances premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, 5 June 2025. Photo: Bryan Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. There is a particular kind of actor Hollywood never quite knows what to do with, and Steve Zahn has spent more than thirty years being the best example of it. He…
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Terry Reid – 77 Years of the Voice That Said No
Terry Reid in 1969. Photo: Hit Parader magazine, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. He said no to Led Zeppelin. He said no to Deep Purple. And the music world has spent fifty years wondering what might have been. Terrance James Reid — Superlungs, the artists’ artist, the greatest voice you never heard — was born…
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Def Leppard – Bringin’ On the Heartbreak: The Story Behind the Song
Def Leppard. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons. In 1981, the loudest young band in Britain did something no one expected: they slowed down. Def Leppard had built their name on speed, sweat and noise, on guitars played like weapons and choruses shouted back by thousands. Then, for their third album, they recorded a power ballad…
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Joonas Kokkonen – 105 Years of the Composer Who Gave Finland Its National Opera
Joonas Kokkonen, 1963.Credit: Anonymous, 1963. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons. He was born in a small town in eastern Finland on 13 November 1921, and he died on 2 October 1996, aged 74. Today Joonas Kokkonen would have turned 105. In the seventy-four years between those dates he became, in the words of his Wikipedia…
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Booker T. Jones – 82 Years of the Memphis Sound
Booker T. Jones in a 1978 A&M Records publicity photo. Photo: Jim McCrary, A&M Records (public domain). The Sound That Never Left There is a riff that almost everyone on earth recognises within two notes. It is low, patient and unhurried, played on a Hammond organ with the kind of confidence that cannot be taught…