Word: byronism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Calling Don Byron a jazz musician is like calling the Pacific wet--it just doesn't begin to describe it. Magazines may not be able to resist the impulse to categorize, but Byron has carpentered an extraordinary career precisely by obliterating the very idea of category. Though he made his bones as a jazz clarinetist, over the past decade he has developed a sort of musical Esperanto--impassioned, expansive, inclusive--distilled from the babel of styles, genres and species, both historical and contemporary, that make up our perception of music itself...
...child in the Bronx, Byron, now 42, was kept indoors much of the time by a near crippling asthma. But confinement married him to music, a music perceived not as a continent divided into separate principalities but as a unified cosmos. "A lot of the [music] that I've investigated in my life," Byron says, he first encountered "within the walls of my bedroom in my parents' house"--which is to say, within the infinite walls of imagination...
...Byron has devoted albums to the klezmer music of the eastern European Jews, to a variant Afro-Cuban sound he describes as "pan-Caribbean" and to a hybrid funk/hip-hop adventure with Biz Markie. His finest album may be 1996's Bug Music, a thrilling exploration of the jumpy, angular and surprisingly substantive music written for, among other things, 1940s cartoons. On his most recent disc, last year's A Fine Line, he brought together works by Stephen Sondheim, Ornette Coleman, Roy Orbison, Stevie Wonder and Giacomo Puccini. He was hoping to show, he wrote, "that a song untethered from...
Then this January, a devastating memo from Byron Boshell, captain of the police department's laboratory-services division, thudded onto Berry's desk. It filled four three-ring binders and noted reversals and reprimands the courts had handed Gilchrist, as well as the issues the professional journals had taken with her work. Under her supervision, it said, evidence was missing in cases in which new trials had been granted or were under review; and rape evidence had been destroyed after two years, long before the statute of limitations had expired. Gilchrist explained last week that she always followed established procedures...
That faith isn't shared by the loyal opposition. Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, an Energy Committee member, says, "I don't think the marketplace is working in a manner that gives consumers the assurance that they're not being manipulated. If you wait for the market to right itself, we'll be waiting for a long while before prices fall back into some reasonable line...