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Articles by Jonathan Leal
When Bebop Counter-Punched Racist Violence
Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop Duke University Press Among the CDs and long-playing records in my late grandfather’s personal music collection, eclectic and piecemeal as it was, there once lived a crisp reissue of Bird and Pres: Jazz at the Philharmonic, a Norman Granz production recorded in 1946, nearly two thousand miles from my grandfather’s home in the Rio Grande Valley, nearly three thousand from Harlem, there, in the late-night glamour of a storied auditorium that...
Duke University Press - Dreams in Double Time
Subjects Music > Jazz, American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies In Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities.
Chasing Transcendence With Pianist Tigran Hamasyan
There’s a tender sublimity in Tigran Hamasyan’s music. It’s a feeling that’s alive in the ornate rhythms and patterns he sets in motion, spinning wildly like clock gears; alive in the thick chords and smooth progressions he offers, which often range from wistful and filmic to twisted and angular; alive in the melodies he draws from seemingly disparate worlds — Armenian folk music, rock, jazz, Western classical — as they find proximity in and across his solos.
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Decorating Time With Tyshawn Sorey
I was, to say the least, moved when I first heard composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey‘s For George Lewis. As it happens, I was also quite literally moving, seated on a plane slicing through air thousands of feet above ground, listening intently while strapped firmly to a place between places, a time within time.
Bang on a Can; Julia Wolfe's Steel Hammer
BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS Robert Black, bass David Cossin, percussion Vicky Chow, piano Arlen Hlusko, cello Mark Stewart, electric guitar, mountain dulcimer, harmonica Ken Thomson, clarinets, harmonica Molly Netter, voice Rebecca L. Hargrove, voice Sonya Headlam, voice David Bloom, music director Cal Performances at Home premieres Steel Hammer, a new film featuring the acclaimed oratorio by Bang on a Can’s co-founder, Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Wolfe.
Julia Wolfe: Embracing Creative Risk
Near the end of Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer (2009), we enter a headbanger’s paradise: explosive percussion and strings flow into spectral choral overlays; angular rhythmic stabs align with a searing vocal trio, unfazed, belting “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” as if aflame onstage, backed up by Meshuggah in their prime. The phrase’s brake drums and polychords, scattered about like so much shattered glass, signal a world in which harmony is less mandate than memory, rhythm both match and fuse.
Anderson .Paak, Kendrick Lamar, and Colin Tilley “Get up in Our Rearview Mirror”: Collectively Analyzing the “Tints” Music Video
1 Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, 18. 2 Ibid., Chapter 7. 3 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. 4 https://www.criticalminded.com/2017/03/11/spotlight-on-earth-wind-fire/ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-earth-wind-fire-maurice-white-funk-to-the-masses-20160205-story.html 5 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia. 6 Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, Chapter 13.
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Maria Cichosz
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Maria Cichosz Maria Cichosz is a rare mind. At once a novelist and literary theorist, her work across forms and registers engages everything from sensory experience and allegorical interpretation to revelatory drug trips and countercultural living. And while already very accomplished—she defended her dissertation at Stanford University and released her debut novel in the same year—it’s clear she’s only just getting started.
A Thousand Interlinked Details: Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante
A Thousand Interlinked Details: Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante It’s morning here. I know it from the pale sunrise, and the cool air, and that young couple once again hotboxing what must be extraordinary weed, given the Nickelback rattling their Mazda. I also know it’s morning from my pre-caffeine headache, from my neural somersaults, and from the eye-watering clang of a thunderous garbage truck in militant salute.
Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain enlist 90 writers to tell 400 years of African-American history
Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain enlist 90 writers to tell 400 years of African-American history The co-editors of ‘Four Hundred Souls’ assembled a chorus of writers, each one taking on a five-year period ‘This is our story. We must not flinch.’’ So writes journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in her contribution to “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019,’’ a new collection of historical pieces co-edited by Ibram X.
Reach - Air/Light
Reach: A Correspondence [one-half-first][vertical-spacer]Dear Friend, I had the pleasure of meeting Michi back in late 2017, at a late-night music department get-together, while we were both grad students at Stanford. Like others who’ve had the privilege of speaking with her, I was blown away by her intellectual energy, by the range of her creative interests and capacities as a visual artist, violinist, writer, and scholar.
Nathalie Joachim Has a Long Reach on Fanm d’Ayiti
At the start of Nathalie Joachim’s “Madan Bellegarde” — a short, somber Haitian folksong describing a Haitian woman’s condemnation — the taut voice of an elder Ipheta Fortuma floats out of a hidden speaker. Joachim, standing center stage in a flood of purple light, surrounded by the masked, physically distanced members of the Spektral Quartet, hears Fortuma’s voice and nods, listening.
Concept Album ‘Futuro Conjunto’ Merges Music Genres And Unease Through A Futuristic RGV Lens
‘Futuro Conjunto‘ is the brain child of Rio Grande Valley natives Jonathan Leal and Charlie Vela. These music-minded storytellers managed to funnel the feeling of unease and worry about the future into a story of agency, curiosity and expression. It’s a story woven together through song, art and culture – Valley culture. This futuristic concept album is housed at Futuroconjunto.com.
Car Seat Headrest's 'Making a Door Less Open' Is an Indie Pop Triumph
Making a Door Less Open Car Seat Headrest Matador 1 May 2020 In the four years since the acclaimed Teens of Denial hit streams, Car Seat Headrest's Will Toledo, Andrew Katz, Ethan Ives, and Seth Dolby have been busy.
Rhiannon Giddens, Francesco Turrisi, and Jason Sypher Transform Bing With there is no Other
What can folk music help us hear? This was perhaps the central question animating Rhiannon Giddens, Francesco Turrisi, and Jason Sypher’s sold-out performance at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall on Friday, Feb. 7. Giddens: a singer, banjo player, fiddler, and MacArthur Fellow committed to recovering and reimagining long-buried historical truths via folk music.
The Living Earth Show Ponders Ruin and Renewal in Tremble Staves
Imagine, if you will, the sound of an electro-acoustic cello, reeled in from a saltwater pool and jolted to cranium-splitting life by two musicians in futurist regalia. See it: the bleak fogscape, the sublime coast — the air, mud, brine, and algae slowly swallowing an edifice of charred concrete. Here, by the cliffs and gulls: what are you feeling?
Emerging Critics Series: Jonathan Leal
by Jonathan Leal | Mar-27-2019 In this 2018–2019 Alan Cheuse Emerging Critics Q and A series, curated by Jonathan Leal, Emerging Critics offer short takes on big questions: What makes good criticism? How might one arrange one’s life to produce it? How do discrete critical interests relate? And if given the chance, what assignments would one pursue immediately? Applications are now open for the third class of NBCC Alan Cheuse Emerging Critics. Deadline April 3, 2019. Details here.
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