translation
and reviews |
 Django: the Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend Review by John Radanovich Although France may have only produced two jazz musicians of real genius, those two musicians alone give France pretty respectable bragging rights: Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt. Their quintet recordings for the Hot Club de France in the 1930s led the way for jazz becoming as popular in Europe as it was in the States. Music journalist Michael Dregni's completely engrossing book
offers an impressively researched, appreciative history of how
Reinhardt created his timeless sound, and gives a look into every
aspect of the guitarist's short but fully lived life. – Full
Review
Several years ago, a New York television producer listened to
a commentary by poet-“anarchist” Andrei Codrescu
on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" with
great interest. Codrescu, editor of Exquisite Corpse magazine,
might be called America's leading prophet of the offbeat and
kooky because he invariably manages to find the strangest aspects
of American society and renders his experiences with a mordant
wit and sarcasm—and in the accents of Count Dracula, another
native of Transylvania.
The Caribbean, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said, is a place whose unified culture extends from New Orleans south all the way to the Venezuelan coastline. He is always impressed when he gets on a plane in Barranquilla, Colombia, and a black woman in a blue dress stamps his passport, and then when he disembarks in Jamaica and another black woman in a blue dress stamps it again, in English. |
|---|
