Music and Poetry
Music Review: The Melody At Night, With You by Keith Jarrett (ECM 1675)
Piano variations from the American songbook
By Philip Sprake, March 30, 2000
In contemporary jazz it is sometimes difficult, at least for novices, to recognise the difference between a technically proficient musician and a truly great one. The Melody At Night, With You, a coll...
Curtis Mayfield dies:
A modest man of great musical talent and sensitivity
By Richard Phillips, January 24, 2000
The death of 57-year-old Curtis Mayfield last December 26, after several years of failing health, marks the passing of one of the most talented gospel-influenced rhythm and blues singer/songwriters an...
Country music singer Hank Snow dead at 85
By Ian Bruce, December 31, 1999
The death of country singer Hank Snow marks the passing of a major figure in the history of popular music. Snow, who died December 20 in Nashville at age 85, played a key role in helping transform cou...
"The heart and soul of country music is the experiences of ordinary people"
An interview with Dale Watson
By Richard Phillips, December 16, 1999
One of the more interesting music documentaries screened on Australian television this year was Naked Nashville, a Channel Four production about American country music. While the program did not provi...
Book Review:
Auden's poetry and his last years
Later Auden by Edward Mendelson Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1999
By Margaret Rees, November 20, 1999
The publication last April of Later Auden, Edward Mendelson's detailed biography of Wystan Hugh (W.H.) Auden, has again focused attention on this key figure of 20th century English poetry. Mendelson, ...
Why we need Byron
By David Walsh, September 1, 1999
Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, by Benita Eisler, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999, 837 pages.
The atmospheric music of Underground Lovers
By Jason Nichols, August 25, 1999
One of the more thoughtful contemporary music bands to emerge in Australia in the last decade is Underground Lovers. Cold Feeling, the group's latest CD, combines guitar rhythms and taped music sequen...
A letter on the music of Joaquin Rodrigo
August 10, 1999
The WSWS received the following letter in response to our July 13 obituary of the Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo.
Book Review
A humane life
Jackson's Track Memoir of a Dreamtime Placeby Daryl Tonkin & Carolyn Landon, Viking Books ISBN 0-670-88332-8
By Stephen Griffith, July 31, 1999
Jackson's Track is a remarkable story of ordinary Australian people—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—living together under difficult circumstances. It is a story of rural life that is rarely ...
Obituary:
Joaquin Rodrigo, famed Spanish composer dies
By John Martinez, July 13, 1999
Joaquin Rodrigo, acclaimed Spanish composer and the man most responsible for popularising the guitar as a classical concert instrument, died on July 6 in Madrid at the age of 97.
Mel Torme, an appreciation
By John Andrews, June 10, 1999
The last few years have not been good ones for the giants of American song. First we lost the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald, then Frank Sinatra and Joe Williams. Now Mel Torme, who died Saturday from t...
Tracks, a Sony Music 4-CD boxed set by Bruce Springsteen
Anthology charts Springsteen's musical journey
By Peter Stavropoulos, May 4, 1999
The latest release from American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen is a collection of 66 tracks spanning a musical career that has endured for nearly three decades. The four-hour anthology, which in...
