Oscar Peterson, 1925 - 2007

Oscar Peterson, whose dazzling piano playing made him one of the most popular jazz artists in history, died on Sunday night at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto. He was 82.

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE

To read another article from the Chicago Tribune's Art critic, Howard Reich, which includes a discography of notable Peterson recordings, click HERE

NPR Music site launched

The halls of National Public Radio are abuzz after the launch of the new NPR Music site. Today, NPR and twelve (12) public radio partners launched the free, multi-genre Web site which presents the best of public radio music.

NPR Music aims to be as diverse as its audience's interests and curiosity. That's why Jazz Profiles lives alongside World Café and Classics in Concert, and why the site features everyone from Aaron Copland and Aaron Neville, to Dan Zanes and Joe Zawinul.

The site includes new artist pages, music blogs, and archived concerts. There is also a new media player which allows you to set up playlists of favorite NPR stories.

To read more about this new site, click HERE

Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna

From The New Yorker's Alex Ross:

"In a handsome twist of fate, [Arnold Schoenberg] the most famously difficult composer of the twentieth century is now the most instantly accessible: possibly no modern artist has such a large Web presence. On the site, you can read immaculate digital reproductions of Schoenberg’s correspondence, listen to his complete works on streaming audio, examine his designs for various inventions and gadgets (including a typewriter for musical notation), and follow links to YouTube videos of him playing tennis..." [Oct. 22, 2007]

To see to the Schoenberg Center's website, click HERE

To read Mr. Ross's entire article on, "The Well-tempered Web: the internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music ", click HERE

Movies' Unforgettable Music

Danny Elfman has created the music for dozens of movies and TV shows, from Tim Burton's Batman to The Simpsons. But when NPR asked the film composer to name his favorite movies to watch, he couldn't quite decide.

To read and listen to the entire interview, click HERE

Eric Clapton Looks Back at His Blues Roots

Eric Clapton has been reinventing himself musically for more than 40 years. But the strong pulse of the Blues has powered his guitar playing since the beginning: from the Yardbirds when he was 18, through his stints with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Derek and the Dominoes, to today.

To read and listen to the interview from NPR's All Things Considered, click HERE

Backstage at Lyric

A new series called "Backstage at Lyric" from the Lyric Opera of Chicago features in-depth interviews with the singers, conductors, and creative minds behind the productions of the 2007/08 season.

The series launches with an engaging and informative interview with soprano Elizabeth Futral and tenor Joseph Calleja, who are currently rehearsing
La traviata.

Lyric Opera dramaturg Roger Pines hosts this first episode. Download and enjoy!

Two Musicians win MacArthur grants

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of the MacArthur fellowships. The fellowships, or "genius awards," as they are commonly called, recognize people in a variety of fields for their creativity and promise. Each new fellow receives an award of $500,000, which is meant to encourage future exploration and comes with no strings attached.

Among the 24 winners for 2007 are two musicians:

Corey Harris, a blues musician who is leading a revival of Mississippi
Delta blues by infusing traditional styles with influences from jazz,
reggae gospel, and African and Caribbean folk styles.

To read more about Corey Harris, click HERE

Dawn Upshaw, a master vocalist who stretches the boundaries of operatic
and concert singing and enriches the landscape of contemporary
performance through her advocacy of established and emerging composers.

To read an article about Upshaw from NPR's Tom Huizenga, click HERE

From The Silk Road Project

How goes the Silk Road Project? Since Alex Ross wrote about Yo-Yo Ma's innovative multicultural music series in The New Yorker back in 2002, Mr. Ross has kept an eye on the Project's progress across the country and around the world. On the occasion of the release of the latest Silk Road CD, New Impossibilities (Sony Classical), Mr. Ross spoke to Ma about how the project has evolved and how it has affected his musicianship.

To read the entire interview, click HERE

Jazz Legend Joe Zawinul, 1932-2007

Jazz legend Joe Zawinul, who soared to fame as one of the creators of jazz fusion and performed and recorded with Miles Davis, died early Tuesday, a hospital official said. He was 75.

To read the entire article at All About Jazz, click HERE

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935-2007

The world has lost one of the most famous opera singers of our time. Luciano Pavarotti died at his home in Italy after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 71 years old.

To hear excerpts of the famous tenor's singing and read a remembrance from NPR, click HERE

To read the BBC's news release, click HERE. And to watch a performance from a 1979 production of La Bohème with soprano Ileana Cotrubas at La Scala, click HERE

Chat with the Music Liaison

Are you in the midst of a project and need advice on finding more resources? I have set up a chat box on this site for Columbia College Music students and faculty. When I am at my desk, you can use the box on the right titled “Ask Lauren” to send me an instant message. I’ll do my best to assist you. Or if you prefer, you can click on "Contact" under my profile for traditional email.

Please send me your name with your first post.

Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83

Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died Thursday, August 16th in Manhattan. He was 83.

As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.

To read an article about Roach from Drummerworld, click HERE

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE

Terence Blanchard: Rebuilding New Orleans in Song

New Orleans native son Terence Blanchard has created an impassioned song cycle, A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina), as his third album for Blue Note Records.

An important jumpstart for A Tale of God’s Will was director Spike Lee’s decision to document the aftermath of Katrina on film, in what turned out to be the four-hour award-winning HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke, which aired last year. Lee, who has enlisted Blanchard on numerous occasions to score his films, tapped him once again for his documentary.

Josh Jackson asked Blanchard to talk about his music for the Lee documentary. Jackson also asked him to play the piano.

To hear Blanchard's performance and an interview with Jackson on NPR from New Orleans click HERE

Bobby Sanabria's Latin Jazz Hybrid

Growing up in the South Bronx, Bobby Sanabria was exposed to a wide range of music: Latin, Afro-Cuban, blues, jazz, funk, rock. He became a fan of Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, James Brown and Mario Bauzá, among others.

Later, Sanabria performed alongside many of those legendary musicians. Now his name is included in the short list of renowned drummers and percussionists, and he's determined to make sure that the musical mélange of his past continues in the future.

To read the article and listen to the NPR interview, click HERE

Marian McPartland to be inducted into National Radio Hall of Fame

Jazz Icon, Marian McPartland, will be one of five inductees into the National Radio Hall of Fame in Chicago in a ceremony to be held November 3rd of this year.

Host of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz for more than 25 years, McPartland taught herself how to play piano at age three. Since 1978 the English born jazz musician has hosted one of the longest running weekly programs on NPR. McPartland is revered for her own talent and welcomes a wide range of guests to her program, including legendary jazz artists and fledgling jazz talents.

To read all about the National Radio Hall of Fame as well as to find out more about the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which is scheduled for opening in 2008 in downtown Chicago, click HERE

At the Concert Hall, a Symphony for Space Invaders

The average concertgoer might not expect to hear music from Super Mario Bros. at the local symphony hall — of if they did hear it, they might look around to see who smuggled in the Game Boy.

But that may be changing. A touring multimedia show that has already been seen by more than 100,000 people is playing at the world's finest concert halls — with the world's finest orchestras powering through some of the world's most popular video-game music.

To read the article and listen to NPR's segment by Benjamin Frisch, click HERE

Lee Hazlewood: Writer Gave Music Biz the 'Boots'

Lee Hazlewood, the reclusive songwriter and producer behind a slew of hits by Duane Eddy, Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in the 1950s and 1960s, including Ms. Sinatra's No. 1 smash "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," died on Saturday in Henderson, Nev. He was 78.

To listen to a remembrance of Hazlewood from NPR's Felix Contreras, click HERE

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE

Tanglewood Festival: Male Singers Need Not Apply

In case you missed this in the New York Times' ArtsBeat the other day...One new twist at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music is the involvement of a scholar in residence, to put the festival’s composers and music in perspective. This year's scholar in residence, Judith Tick, drew animated audience discussion, including comments from several composers, with a surprising statistic to the effect that some 70 percent of contemporary vocal music is written for the female voice.

To read the complete article, click HERE

“Alice in Wonderland” in Munich

"The labyrinthine fantasy of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” begins in deceptively lulling tones, with the idyllic phrase “All in the golden afternoon.” Unsuk Chin’s opera “Alice in Wonderland,” which recently had its première at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich, opens in distinctly more ominous fashion...
Chin, who was born in Seoul in 1961, and has been living in Berlin since 1988, has a knack for binding together seemingly irreconcilable extremes. A youthful enthusiast of the late-twentieth-century European avant-garde, she studied in the eighties with György Ligeti, a pioneer of alien soundscapes."

To read Alex Ross's complete article from The New Yorker, click HERE

Igor Stravinsky: The Recorded Legacy

The Library has just acquired a box set collection of Igor Stravinsky's recorded legacy. "...in terms of archival importance,[Stravinsky's] discography, especially the Columbia recordings now reissued on Sony Classical, is the greatest landmark in the history of recorded music from the classical tradition." The New York Times, June 1999
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