The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival entered its third decade Friday night in West Palm Beach in the arms of a warm, supportive audience that gave all of its work lengthy applause, and laughed forcefully at the jokes its performers offered in oral program notes before each piece. A good time at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall was certainly had by all, but … [Read more...]
The 2011-12 season in pop: Classic rockers in short supply for energetic season ahead
The 2011-2012 concert season in South Florida could conceivably signal that classic rock is dead as we once knew it. Unlike the past two seasons, which collectively featured ’60s- and ’70s-launched brand names like the Allman Brothers Band, Bonnie Raitt, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Eagles, Roger Waters, Rush, and Earth, Wind & Fire, the next eight months look comparatively … [Read more...]
‘Memory Palace’ a haunting story of illness, loss and remembrance
Norma Kurap Herr was a talented musician when she started hearing voices at age 19. She struggled with schizophrenia for the rest of her life, and was in and out of psychiatric wards and often homeless before she died at age 80. In this new memoir Mira Bartok, one of Herr’s two daughters, describes in heartbreaking detail her mother’s descent into chaos and its effect on the … [Read more...]
Grief memoir moving, but oddly unhelpful
Kay Redfield Jamison has often written and spoken eloquently about her lifelong struggle with manic depression, otherwise known as bipolar illness. In her new book, Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, she writes with the same honesty and passion about coping with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, from cancer. Both were well-known psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins University … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 15-21
Art: The biggest news in the local art world this weekend is artpalmbeach, which opened Friday night. Featuring more than 70 dealers and special exhibition spaces, this show at the Palm Beach County Convention Center looks every bit as dynamic as the Art Basel Show last December. Not to be missed is the huge installation by Colombian-born artist Federico Uribe, represented … [Read more...]
Jazz educators keep the beat alive
"Jazz is not dead," Frank Zappa said in 1973, "it just smells funny." It's documented on the song Be-Bop Tango (Of the Old Jazzmen's Church), from the 1974 live album Roxy & Elsewhere. And the master satirist was playing with one of his jazziest ensembles, which included keyboard-and-vocal icon George Duke and future Weather Report drummer Chester Thompson. That was 36 … [Read more...]
New Vista’s ‘Enter Laughing’ worth a few giggles
Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008 In 1976, Carl Reiner’s affectionate memoir of his earliest efforts to break into show business, Enter Laughing, was turned into a Broadway musical, redubbed So Long, 174th Street. Perennially boyish Robert Morse, then in his mid-40s, was miscast as teenage David Kolowitz — the Reiner character — and he became the scapegoat when the show closed two weeks … [Read more...]