Word: instrumentality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...people who might actually call Al's selection of me an act of chutzpah," he said in Nashville, using the familiar Yiddish word for audacity. Lieberman has chutzpah too. At first glance you figure he will bore you silly, but he grows on you--his voice is a decent instrument, and he obviously enjoys playing it. His basic tune, about an immigrant's grandson who was the first in his family to attend college and now might be Vice President, is an American classic. He makes no effort to conceal how tickled he is to be on the ticket...
...hokum," and a few seconds into Dinah, the listener surrenders to the melange. The plucky violinist takes a solo, then a guy going infectiously nuts on tissue paper and comb. Finally it's steel guitarist King Bennie Nawahi's turn. He attacks the melody while caressing his instrument; his solo, like the best improvs, seems both wild and thoughtful. The full band convenes for a last mad-dash chorus, racing to Bennie's steel pulse. Who can hear this music, this musician, without feeling...
Visualize this: Timothy Draper, the gonzo venture capitalist from Silicon Valley, swoops into a South Central Los Angeles church to preach the gospel of school vouchers to a group of black ministers. He is introduced--by his own advance man--as "an instrument of God's hand, like Rosa Parks." Never mind that this is a 42-year-old multimillionaire preppie known to ski in boxer shorts and throw Frisbees at conferences, who even dressed as Batman to inaugurate a Manhattan office. Today, Draper tells the assembled pastors, he is ready to spend at least $20 million of his fortune...
Tribute albums are often content with summoning up old ghosts. Saxophonist , 31, takes a more rewarding approach on his excellent new CD: he offers up fresh takes on the music of French Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, but he does so by substituting his own instrument in the lead role. Carter, whether he's playing tenor or soprano sax, shows off a sweet, sinuous tone; when he reinterprets Reinhardt's classic Nuages with a bass sax, the muscular sound is distancing at first, but then it wraps itself around the listener like an anaconda. This CD does more than invoke Reinhardt...
Jovon, though smart, clever and exceedingly charming when explaining how he was framed for the wet-toilet-paper fight in the bathroom, didn't seem so psyched on Stanford despite our admittedly exaggerated description of seminars on video games. And the instrument thing, partly owing to some oboe trash talking on my part, wasn't going anywhere. There were nights when I dreamed of switching him with Elian, but that may have been more about my freakish need for media attention...