Word: jazz
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...Umbrian capital of Perugia is never more glorious than on a long summer evening when its medieval streets are filled with the sound of jazz. After a day devoted to touring, swimming or an extremely long lunch, there's nothing like settling into Perugia's Arena Santa Giuliana to hear the endlessly inventive saxophonist Sonny Rollins deconstruct the melody of, say, Thelonious Monk's Crepuscule with Nellie - in just the kind of magical twilight that might have inspired it. Monk's angular ballad could tumble out of Rollins' horn on July 17, when the star headlines the Umbria Jazz Festival...
...energy aren't always easy to reconcile. Hadid has managed a building that's both pumping and poised, heated but also very cool. You can't help thinking of Le Corbusier, one of the founders of 20th century architecture, who once said even modern architecture is too staid. "Jazz is more advanced," he wrote in 1931. "If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle." It's too bad he didn't live to see Hadid's performance in Cincinnati. You know what he would have said? "This joint is jumpin...
...becoming a marketing phenom was to hole up in a recording studio for two years to make a hermetically sealed album. Kid A in 2000 opened with the lyric "Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon," and then it got dark. Melodies were buried under horns bleating free jazz and drum machines vomiting arrhythmia. The lyrics were difficult to hear, and those that did make it through were not about sunshine and lollipops. The process of making Kid A, by Yorke's admission, was as disturbing as the material. Three hundred hours were spent on the construction...
...band's misanthropy seemed a bit of a pose. But on Everything Must Go, its second album in three years (2000's Two Against Nature won four Grammys, including Album of the Year), Steely Dan fully inhabits the role of rock's would-be Humberts, swinging through lite jazz riffs and dropping amber-encased phrases like "the big adios" while the girls ignore the come-ons. On tracks like the heartsick Things I Miss the Most--with Fagen yearning for the days of "Frying up my sad cuisine/Getting in bed and curling up with a girlie magazine...
...would rockers (or anyone) subject themselves to these sleazy depressives? To start with, there are lots of dirty old men out there, and the men of Steely Dan are better comrades than SpectraVision. They also happen to be spectacular musicians. Those groovy jazz chords and glossy harmonies sound easy, but they're not, especially when you consider that all the initial tracking on the terrifically produced Everything Must Go was done live. The music is also where the irony is. It's so airy and chipper that when mixed with the lead weight of the lyrics, it induces a pleasant...