A thoughtful, artfully written exploration not just about how music works, but how it makes us feel.
A Montreal-based poet digs into our fascination with music and its relation to our search for meaning.
Outside of her poetic output, Waterman has collected a diverse collection of essays about creativity on her blog, The Mindful Bard. Many of these thought exercises and interviews concern music, but in this book, she writes, “they’re better and make more sense.” The most primal narrative thread is the idea of the “soundquest,” which Waterman defines as “a kind of hero’s journey” with more than a little bit of obsession involved. “A soundquest,” she writes, “begins when you hear something mysteriously thrilling, something that drives you to keep tunneling into the genre until you find the quintessence—the performance or the recording representing the culmination of listening pleasure for that genre.” Refreshingly, the author doesn’t limit her illuminating discussions to just Western music, though she does look at Bob Dylan’s influence and the cultural touchstone of Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie.” Physically, intellectually, and spiritually, Waterman travels much further. She analyzes the work of musicians from Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, among many other places, showing what drives these artists to create remarkable music. Waterman also shares the interesting, little-known fact that the mythology of the so-called “dark man at the crossroads” (in America, think Robert Johnson and the devil) reverberates across many cultures: “The crossroads being such a potent symbol of the intersection of the sacred with the profane, the soul standing at that intersection now complete can enter a state of mystical turning that, incorporating all, transcends all.” There’s a patina of New Age–y spirituality to the writing, but Waterman’s insights into the nature of jazz, blues, and other genres, as well as her personal discoveries, are well worth exploring.
A thoughtful, artfully written exploration not just about how music works, but how it makes us feel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77183-500-8
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Heady musical and philosophical stuff.
A welcome peek into the mind of the great jazz musician.
Reese, author of Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature and Loneliness, delves into the tenor saxophonist’s substantial archives in the New York Public Library, unearthing these fascinating notebooks. Divided into four chronological sections covering nearly 50 years, they capture how Rollins’ thinking about a wide range of subjects evolved. With entries starting in 1959, after two incarcerations, kicking his heroin addiction, and the beginning of his years-long practice sessions on the Williamsburg Bridge, these slight, diary-like bits and pieces reveal an incredibly curious and philosophical musician—“What I am is jazz phrasing”—with a strong work ethic. He’s very concerned with physical and breathing exercises, his health, practicing fingering and other technical aspects involved in playing the sax, his “proclivity for impatience,” his belief that “jazz is a free planet where everything is happiness and love,” and a passion for lists. “I must try to desist from lusting after women,” he adds. All of these ideas are in service of making him a better person and musician. Rollins sees himself in harmony with the music, and the sax “can achieve any color within the orchestra.” The entries seem well thought out, as if he hoped they would eventually be read by others, especially music students. He occasionally brings up social matters: “‘Race’ is synonymous to color! I am of the gold race.” On jazz’s “essence,” creative improvisation, he writes, “This then is man in his finest hour—portraying nature.” Rollins is devoted to yoga and avoids eating bitter candy, which affects his breathing. He consistently praises his instrument—“It is yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in one form—the almighty saxophone”—and he bemoans the “wasteful exploitation of energy resources.” The last entry, from 2010: “No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.”
Heady musical and philosophical stuff.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781681378268
Page Count: 172
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
An accessible, heartfelt introduction to van Gogh’s work and life.
A celebration of one of the world’s greatest artists and the works that inspired him.
As Naifeh notes in the introduction to this handsome, photo-heavy book, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) “never saw himself as a revolutionary artist.” His work “built on a strong foundation of the art that had come before him,” and he made “his own very personal versions of their paintings.” In this companion volume to Naifeh’s 2011 biography, Van Gogh, the author describes the ways in which van Gogh’s forebears and contemporaries had a profound impact on his work. Throughout the book, which is divided into chapters that highlight the schools and movements that influenced van Gogh and the subjects he painted, Naifeh places another artist’s work and van Gogh’s on facing pages to demonstrate the unique variations. Among the examples, the author shows that Jacob Hendricus Maris’ Two Girls at the Piano “made such an impression” that it led to van Gogh’s more vivid Marguerite Gachet at the Piano, a “boldly brushed painting, thick with impasto”; that Monet’s Fishing Boats at Étretat influenced Fishing Boats on the Beach at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer; and more. Naifeh amply quotes from van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo, a body of analysis so profound that Naifeh calls it “a literary masterpiece in its own right.” The book is occasionally repetitive. More than once, for example, the author notes that Dutch painter Anton Mauve encouraged van Gogh to master the art of drawing the figure by drawing still lifes and plaster casts, but van Gogh resisted. But as excuses for collecting paintings between the pages of a book go, this is a good one, with learned explanations, dozens of beautiful reproductions, and an especially moving essay about the author and his husband of 40 years, scholar Gregory White Smith, who died in 2014, and their love of art.
An accessible, heartfelt introduction to van Gogh’s work and life.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-35667-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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