By Jane Rosenberg Meditative, spare, hypnotic, fascinating, and tender – words that aptly express the experience of seeing Deborah Hay’s Figure a Sea. Her minimalist aesthetic combined with her insistence on the poetry of everyday movements forge a quiet yet compelling inner dialogue for each dancer and in turn offers the audience a window… Read More Dance: Deborah Hay’s “Figure a Sea” at Freud Playhouse, UCLA
By Devon Wendell Los Angeles. Buddy Guy kicked off the 2015-2016 Center For the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Thursday night with a truly mesmerizing performance. Buddy Guy is the last true prophet of the blues, especially since we recently lost B.B. King. Buddy and his Damn Right… Read More Live Music: Buddy Guy At UCLA’s Royce Hall
By Devon Wendell On Saturday, June 13th; Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and young players from The Monk Institute Of Jazz Performance Ensemble will be performing at the 37th Annual Playboy Jazz Festival taking place Saturday and Sunday at The Hollywood Bowl. I recently had the amazing opportunity to interview Wayne Shorter on his upcoming performance… Read More Q&A: Wayne Shorter and Daniel Rotem At The Playboy Jazz Festival
By Don Heckman Describing Herb Alpert as a philanthropist doesn’t accurately identify the full generosity of his activities over recent decades. Many of his awards have been institutional, to UCLA, USC, CalArts and beyond. And in each of those cases, his generosity has had a significant impact upon the effectiveness of their music education programs.… Read More Here, There & Everywhere: The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts
By Don Heckman Herb Alpert has had more successes – creative and financial – than most artists can dream of experiencing. And to his credit he’s handled them with remarkable finesse and generosity. Music programs at UCLA and CalArts have benefited from his multi-million dollar grants to each institution. Today, another impressive display of the… Read More Here, There & Everywhere: The 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts
By Mike Finkelstein There is an undeniably universal appeal in a guy singing love songs with a guitar. Ladies love the high level of simple romantic communication in it, and upon seeing this, most men certainly recognize the power of the medium to grab a woman’s attention by the heartstrings. Over the past 30 or… Read More Live Music: Bryan Adams Bare Bones Tour at UCLA’s Royce Hall
By Michael Katz Chick Corea and Gary Burton are two exquisite musicians, who in their duets have found a way to channel their talents into a performance both unified by their sensibilities and singular in their contributions. Saturday night, in a UCLA Live presentation before an appreciative audience at Royce Hall, they brought out some… Read More Live Jazz: Chick Corea and Gary Burton at Royce Hall
By Mike Finkelstein Legendary blues man Taj Mahal’s performance last week at a UCLA Live concert in Royce Hall drew a large and enthusiastic audience. It was a night in which we saw an integration of musical styles from many different points on the planet, ranging from the Mississippi Delta to Mali. In the capable… Read More Live Blues: Taj Mahal and Vieux Farka Toure at Royce Hall
By Don Heckman When three musicians have been playing together as long as Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette have, it’s not unreasonable to expect a certain amount of repetitiveness to surface in their performances. Even the Duke Ellington Orchestra, for all its vaunted longevity, spent a good deal of its onstage time playing… Read More Live Jazz: Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette at Royce Hall
By Don Heckman Los Angeles – Feb. 2. (Mon.) Emerson String Quartet. The veteran, eight Grammy Award-winning ensemble performs amid a major retrospective showing of the art of painter Roberta Eisenberg. The program includes Beethoven, Ravel, Webern and Schubert. Cal State Polytechnic. Pomona. (310) 216-5861. http://www.csupomona.edu/~kellogg_gallery/. – Feb. 4 – 7. (Wed. – Sat.) Jacky… Read More Picks of the Week: Feb 2 – 8
The International Review of Music 