Mandolin Orange, the duo of Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin, offers a gem with the release of their latest album. They have been touring regularly over the last few years, but this album whispers of the desire to be home. The last cut, “Of Which There Is No Like,” ends with: The fiddle, guitar, and mandolin blend with the voices surrounding you like a comfy blanket in the chill so you can settle back into your rocking chair or porch swing and enjoy life as the sun sets over the horizon. Hold me tight tonight my darling Out of the […]

Lost and Found: Buena Vista Social Club Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes Two recent musical releases dig into hidden gems and leftovers to create new albums. Lost and Found, from the Buena Vista Social Club, and Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes. On Lost and Found you will experience a wonderful mix, from Manuel Guajiro Mirabel’s trumpet solos of “Habenero,” taken from the vaults when it didn’t make it onto a planned solo album in 2004, to the infectious live tune that starts the album, featuring Ibrahim Ferrer and more than a dozen other musicians. […]

Lost and Found: Buena Vista Social Club Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes Two recent musical releases dig into hidden gems and leftovers to create new albums—Lost and Found, from the Buena Vista Social Club, and Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes. While these musicians are old by any standard and the music they play is thick with tradition, the sounds always make my body feel like moving. On Lost and Found you will experience a wonderful mix, from Manuel Guajiro Mirabel’s trumpet solos of “Habenero,” taken from the vaults when it didn’t make it onto […]

I have been experimenting with a new photography printing project in which I transfer layer after layer of photographic inks printed on plastic to the same piece of wood, building a transparent depth that I hope the viewer will gaze into and discover new things along the way. I describe this method to my students as doing Photoshop without a computer. That of course is not fully true. I still shoot with a digital camera, use Photoshop or Lightroom to process the image, use a computer to run the printer that puts thousands of droplets of inks onto plastic—but I no longer […]

This is the first all-banjo album to be added to my collection, and a marvelous addition it is.

While The Stray Birds fit into the folk tradition, most of the songs don’t seem to cut into deep political ideas like those of former generations’ folk singers.

Two recent releases, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, offer glimpses into the lives of two British geniuses, Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking. With the exposure of Turing’s homosexuality, I expected that narrative to have more emotional intensity and a more clearly articulated point of view. I was wrong. As Hawking says in one of the final scenes of the film when asked if he believes in God, which most of his research has seemed to open the possibility of, “To live is to have hope.” The Imitation Game, based on the story of Alan Turing, exposes the […]