Word: artless
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Running nearly an hour, the music could not be more artless: an endlessly repeated tape loop of a now deceased London derelict intoning a hymn tune. "Jesus' blood never failed me yet," he sings. "There's one thing I know, for He loves me so." The old man's voice is untrained and shaky. And yet the tape, recorded in 1971 for a documentary film, has an undeniable dignity that Bryars found irresistible. Starting with a simple piano accompaniment, the composer gradually expanded the orchestration in a series of live performances, which culminated in 1975 in a half-hour recording...
...years Walcott has divided his calendar equally between Boston, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Boston University, and a residence in Trinidad, a base for his frequent travels elsewhere in the Caribbean. This regular shuttling between two worlds has kept his poetry balanced between heartless skill and artless passion. The speakers of Walcott's poems are half strangers wherever they find themselves, not because they want to be but because they have no choice. In The Lighthouse, an island vendor approaches the poet and smiles: "Fifty? Then/ you love home harder than youth...
...famous book, was based on Tom Blankenship, a poor white boy in Hannibal, Mo. But Fishkin argues that Huck's voice was in part inspired by Jimmy, a 10-year-old black servant. Twain described this boy in an 1874 article in the New York Times as "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across." Added Twain: "He did not tell me a single remarkable thing, or one that was worth remembering. And yet he was himself so interested in his small marvels, and they flowed so naturally and comfortably from his lips that . . . I listened...
...travels to the roof of the world with a handful of intrepid companions and finds both adventure and, in the end, herself. An offbeat but sophisticated hybrid of simple chord changes, birdlike ululations, soaring vocalises and stylized dances, Atlas is the apotheosis of Monk's decades-long quest for artless simplicity...
...There's something about the KRONOS QUARTET that has long made musical purists uneasy. If it's not the musicians' a la mode fashion statements, it's their extravagantly eclectic repertoire: from George Crumb's nightmarish Black Angels to the artless tangos of Astor Piazzolla and Jimi Hendrix's protopsychedelic Purple Haze, their trademark encore. The group's latest Elektra Nonesuch CD, PIECES OF AFRICA, finds the Kronos wandering even farther afield. A potent new brew of folk influences, Minimalism and European forms by eight black, brown and white African composers, the music ranges from the irrepressible Mai Nozipo (Mother...