Word: night
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Carter and Elling produced the most interesting sound of the night as they practically interchanged positions, Carter channeling Billie Holiday’s mournfulness with her violin, Elling mimicking the sound of a trumpet. This was obvious on “When I Grow Too Old To Dream,” a 1935 tune which Elling quickly belted out, as if to get the words over with, then carefully leaned into notes, producing a searing, rich sound like an alto saxophone. Carter, on the other hand, rollicked over her melody with a slight glissando. At the same time...
Barron himself led an ensemble within an ensemble, performing an original composition, “New York Attitude,” with Kitagawa and Blake. It was pure, muscular, sparkling, straight-ahead jazz—Blake shone throughout the night, but here he produced an especially lively, just ahead-of-the-beat, sound interspersed with snapping rolls and cymbal brushes that propelled the frenetic tune along. Kitagawa, with his calm demeanor and walrus mustache, evoked a Mingus-like sprightliness in his bass playing, switching between slow and fast in a messed-up blues solo. Barron himself remained a steadfast leader...
Elling, a lounge lizard with a pink pocket handkerchief and slicked-back hair, unquestionably played the role of entertainer and host throughout the night. He makes a point of arranging poems to transcribed musical improvisations, and he did not disappoint with a version of Robert Pinsky’s “The Broken City” set to Wayne Shorter’s haunting “They Speak No Evil.” His voice, a piercing jet of sound, flew over the jagged melodics, weaving them into a blindingly rapid melody, as Malone and Barron easily grounded...
Critics have aptly compared Mason to the experimental novelist Italo Calvino; the looping path of “The Lost Books of The Odyssey” calls to mind the continual beginnings of Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” and the distorted views of Venice in “Invisible Cities” find their match in Mason’s ever-refracted portrait of Odysseus. Both authors leave the reader with the task of sorting through their sketches. Like Calvino, Mason trades in shadows...
After one particularly long game with Harvard students on a late night, to which I came out on the losing end, I began to see some parallels between the results of the game and events in world history, specifically the Cold War. Was I reading far too much in between the properties? Perhaps. However, the lessons a group of freshmen took away from this elementary board game can be seen as good indicators of how much our society has internalized the Cold...