George Grella
George Grella is the Rail’s music editor. His latest book, Minimalist Music, will be published April 30, 2026, by Bloomsbury.
Music is repetition and change, within each piece and in the overall course of music. Having only time with which to work, music lays out sequences of organized sonic events through linear time.
Streaming means hunting in an endless cycle of killing, consuming, and excreting. While the concept has room for valuing music and reducing the amount of sheer stuff, the practice is inseparable from human nature and capitalist economies. And not all stuff is created equal, there’s lots of it worth collecting.
Gene Scheer is a songwriter, stage performer, and a lyricist for other composers. Expand that last in every way, and he’s also one of the major opera librettists in contemporary music. He’s tackled the adaptation of major literary works for the stage, now including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, premiering at the Metropolitan Opera on September 21.
The post-minimalist Bang on a Can organization’s 2025 Long Play Festival honored Terry Riley with it’s concluding concert, with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, guitarist Gyan Riley (his son) and guest musicians playing In C, preceded by an arrangement of A Rainbow in Curved Air.
Drawing on paper does have a corollary with Zorn’s composing. He has made himself into a notable composer in the classical tradition, and the meaningful details in his music—especially given not just speed (tempos) but his hairpin-turn structures—demand absolute clarity and precision in a symbolic language that’s just as much drawing as it is writing. The drawings seem a natural extension of his compositional skill.
Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass is one of the greatest works of music as both practice and philosophy in that it turns the former into the latter, and vice versa. It uses reason and logic to find a way into mystery and even unreason—the impossibility of rationality at the extreme edge of both technique and expression.
I know there’s beauty and chaos, but I try to find some kind of playful balance between all of this—where I find pleasure, and composition is where I find pleasure, improvisation as well. Sort of defining free improvisation as a genre away from, say, jamming.
There certainly was a valedictory edge to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra concerts at Rose Hall the first weekend after the election. The band, with trombonist Vincent Gardner as music director with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, featuring guest vocalist Ashley Pezzotti and percussionists Bobby Allende and Isaiah Bravo, played a concert titled “Bebop Revolution,” a celebration of both the music and the bebop inspired art of the great Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Freeman writes about music—this is his fourth nonfiction book after Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis and Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century—he previously published the Burning Ambulance magazine and now has a record label and newsletter under that imprint, and has recently started administering the back catalogue of the Leo Records label on Bandcamp. This biography came out of Freeman’s coverage of the Whitney Museum’s Open Plan: Cecil Taylor retrospective and performances in the spring of 2016, two years before Taylor’s death.
As the parable of the blind men and the elephant has noted, it’s best to go piece by piece, and even then there’s way too much Allen to fit into one article in one section of a journal. This one is ostensibly about Brendan Greaves’s invaluable biography of Terry Allen, which in five hundred-plus pages of text and extensive notes tells Allen’s story up to this point—he turned eighty-one in May—but demands a critical companion to the artist.
“New music” is one of those terms that has been used so often and for so many decades that it has the air around it of settled meaning. But take it apart, ask multiple people to explain it, and it's likely no one would agree.
At this premiere night for a new production of Ashley’s Foreign Experiences, the stage holds seven desks, each fronted by a piece of corrugated metal. Hanging at the back are some large sheets of metal, with a small window set high into one. The feeling is a bare room at night, a space for an isolated figure alone with their thoughts. There’s nothing left but the mind of madness.
Mikel Rouse is one of the most important and accomplished contemporary American opera composers. He’s an avant-gardist with pop and deep humanist appeal. His memoir, The World Got Away, will be published May 21 by the University of Illinois Press. He sat down for coffee with the Rail on a bright, chilly March afternoon in Hell’s Kitchen.
In December 1989, I went to Town Hall for the ten-year reunion concert of Cecil Taylor and Max Roach, revisiting and renewing their historic live performance at Columbia University. That first concert was released as Historic Concerts in 1984 on the Soul Note label. The concert is one of those musical experiences permanently embedded in my memory, the shape and feeling of literally ducking down behind the seat in front of me because the torrent of onrushing ideas was overwhelming and seemed a little dangerous still vivid in my body.
There’s a crucial difference though between being widely heard and widely known, and certainly the number of people who know such an artist is a smaller percentage than those who have ever been exposed to their work. Perhaps that’s why, despite the easy marketing of a one hundredth birthday of a famed (via the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey) artist, only the New York Philharmonic put any real effort into celebrating the life and work of György Ligeti.
The man often comes through in the notebooks, ideas for books to write, things to tell to other musicians like Davis and Mingus, a reminder of the right size suspenders to wear, admonishments on how he’s treating himself. His thinking about himself in the notebooks is self-critical, but there’s no direct line from this to the ideas that come out through his horn. But that’s the elusiveness of the great artists, they are great because they think of things others can’t, and it’s so inherent to their beings; there’s no way to explain it.
Death ain't what it used to be, at least on the opera stage. And that's a good thing.
Ewell’s core idea is a critical look at his own field, which he describes as founded on and controlled by the framing of white scholars who have not only been incapable (due to their racial and social backgrounds) of seeing the assumptions on which their scholarly values are built, but have made the field an expression of white supremacy, in part by crowding out other scholars and subjects.
The cassette tape is the audio equivalent of the AK-47: cheap and easy to mass manufacture; highly usable with the minimum of skills and experience; and a symbol and tool of revolutions. Marc Masters doesn’t use that metaphor in his excellent and truly exciting book on cassette tapes, but he doesn’t have to. He outlines the story of how the cassette came to be the dominant recording medium on a global scale during the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, and by doing so shows how essential cassettes were to so many musical movements that they would have been impossible without the tapes that, as he points out, are so easy and satisfying to hold in your hand.
In this world, however, jazz and improvised music do have that quality of being a constant undercurrent of thought, imagination, and practice, something that comes through prominently in public at certain times and on certain stages. More than anything else, that’s the fundamental value of the annual Vision Festival, which hit stage and screen at Roulette and The Clemente from June 10 through June 18 with panel discussions, documentaries, and of course a ton of vibrant music.
Has any band had a longer tail than Steely Dan? Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon has been a consistent seller for decades, but that’s more a murmur of rock in the steady state background of culture. Floyd were a global nova and their long commercial dissipation will continue.
June 2023Music
Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards’s Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music
It is absolutely a measure of his importance and achievement as a musician that a major publisher has brought out this book, Henry Threadgill’s autobiography (written with Brent Hayes Edwards in a fluid and engrossing style close to that of an oral history). Jazz in general is not a subject the big publishers are interested in, much less for someone like Threadgill who has been a leader in the avant-garde for decades.
This is a peculiar book. It is a collection of original source documents from the creation and development of minimalism in music, edited and introduced by musicologists O’Brien and Robin. It is expansive in both time and concept—the first excerpt is by Amiri Baraka, from his article “Miles Davis: One of the Great Mother Fuckers,” which dates from the mid-1980s, and the last is a translation of Éliane Radigue’s 2009 essay “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal.”
Theory is the thing here, this is a study of theories. It does gesture at practices, but in ways that show how thinking and writing about improvisation are so beholden to theory that the book is full of claims that sound like they are being made by an alien, sent to study the human race and report back on the marvelous, intriguing strangeness of all these creatures.
The weekend of the renewed Ragas Live Festival, Taylor Swift’s new album, Midnights, also dropped. The two are connected because in a fundamental way all music making is connected, but in a much more salient way because the album—and pop music as a whole—and ragas—and related traditions as a whole—are two opposing ways to solve the same problem; how to establish an expressive link to the listener so that they experience what the musician wants them to experience?
Underground music, the stuff at the margins, is vital to the health and longevity of future music. It almost exactly follows the rhythms of human life, with one generation giving birth to and raising the generation that follows and will replace its parents, again and again and again.
The reason there are critics—and that there need to be critics in perpetuity—despite the general and ancient American cultural allergy to “negativism,” is that there are a hell of a lot of bad ideas out there, and more than a few of them are dangerous to the overall prospects for society. If anything, there’s more of a need for critics now than ever before, because it’s easier now than ever before for malevolent buffoons like Elon Musk or Andrew Yang to influence the direction of government.
Long Play is a Bang on a Can initiative, so that means the festival had concerts dedicated to music by the founders, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars were one of the central ensembles—and yes, they played their arrangement of Eno’s Music for Airports.
In 1964, Dizzy Gillespie ran for president as a write-in candidate. The campaign wasn't serious, and I have no opinion on Gillespie's ability to administer the executive branch and America's laws—although I am intrigued by the idea of Miles Davis as the CIA director and Malcolm X as Attorney General—but the idea has been simmering in my head since I first found out about this, in my teenage years.
I’m at Carnegie Hall to review a recital by pianist Denis Matsuev. Not sure what to expect, haven’t heard him play in years and my only experience with him has been in Rachmaninoff piano concertos, Matsuev soloing in front of orchestras conducted by Valery Gergiev.
We are, as unimaginable as it used to be, entering an era where Black musicians in classical music are conspicuous only for their abilities. Marian Anderson opened that door.
For most of 2020 and at least half of 2021, musical artists were forced off of stages, out of venues, off the road, and into some form of isolation. Those circumstances brought forth a lot of streaming, remote performances, one-man-band-type recording experiments, and attempts—some astonishingly successful—to collaborate musically while working and playing in separated, remote locations.
With concerts back after a year and a half of pandemic closures, you'd think I'd be happy, if not ecstatic. Instead, I walk the streets and keep asking myself, "why do we even have classical music in America?"
This past August, TIME:SPANS combined last year’s postponed programming with a new 2021 schedule and presented 11 concerts. That number of evenings dedicated to music from the first or second Viennese Schools would be definitive, but near a quarter way into the 21st century, a listener is barely getting a partial survey of what’s happening on the contemporary scene.
Music-making is a social activity, bringing people together into a temporary society and culture that exists around the performance. Culture is how we share and pass on ideas and values, so it is important for venues and institutions to look beyond the pandemic and plan on once again creating these myriad enlivening evenings of small societies with shared pleasures and purpose.
July/August 2021Music
Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
To interpolate an old line about sports, fans hear with their hearts. Hopper is a critic who, like all of us, is originally a fan, and that delineating is often hazy and, in the space of this book, self-contradictory—not in the way that happens to us all, having an opinion about a thing and then later changing our minds, but in terms of values.
Adored by audiences and critics through the years, Brooks gets behind the pop fandom and the cultural image-making and puts plainly in front of the reader’s gaze how Black women musical artists are, by their very nature, revolutionary cultural figures.
The clarity, beauty, and fundamental simplicity—and also utter sincerity—of her ideas and work make her intuitively comprehensible.
And this is where A Year With Swollen Appendices is most insightful. The Appendices are informative, short essays through which Eno presents his thinking and values. The diary part of the book, for the most part, is informative in a different way.
There are those times when one encounters talent that goes beyond normal experience, talent that is a pleasure to witness but difficult to grasp—like grabbing smoke, the standard tools are inadequate. That's what it's like at one of Jen Shyu's performances.
The unofficial “Mayor of the East Village” is arguably the Mayor of Free Jazz; as a collaborator and bandleader, he is the literal connection between Cecil Taylor, Matthew Shipp, Cooper-Moore, Susie Ibarra, Leena Conquest, Amiri Baraka, and many, many others.
Everything has changed for performances, so performances have to change. For opera, this should be an important reckoning as to how the Verdian model is no longer relevant, no matter how fresh the music or timely the topics. The opportunity is here—there’s no stage for a while, just speakers and/or screens.
Ambient music has been the only thing that has truly responded to the current cultural moment. It seems like the only thing that could do so.
Ambrose Akinmusire is the top trumpeter in this year's DownBeat magazine Critics Poll—his mysterious and beautiful January set at the Winter Jazzfest, a penumbra of dark and compelling sensations that enveloped the Irving Plaza crowd, earned my vote.
Matthew Shipp is one of the most creatively restless musicians in contemporary music. He is most immediately identified with the free end of jazz, and his notable peers have included bassist William Parker, saxophonist Ivo Perelman, and the late saxophonist David S. Ware. His playing is rooted in the blues and features complex harmonies, a sound that is simultaneously rich and unstable—chameleonic.
The greatest political music is also protest music and is also great music. The elements go together—it takes mental discipline, craft, and artistry to take something that at least a plurality of people would agree with and turn it into a statement of fact and grievance that can wound a political-social system. It takes no courage to say torture is bad, fascism is bad, racism is bad, and leaving it at that has no effect on the body politic.
A republication of the jazz artist’s self-published 1974 DIY book, this edition maintains its DIY quality filled with typewritten text and photographs. It is a collection of poetry, both in prose-poem manner and free verse, that explores his personal history and the larger world of African-American culture surrounding him.
Music making is a social activity, and that fundamental feature of touch at a distance is not just a physical realization of socializing, but likely something that motivated early humans to make this thing we now call music, a social desire for connection that brought about an enormous evolutionary step.
The playing was agile, sensitive, transparent. The musicians were completely open to the experience, sincere, eschewing all gesture and affect. There was an ongoing feeling that every line and phrase was part of a seminar, relaxed but with focused energy, every word not only spoken with meaning but placed in the most perfect grammatical and syntactical structure.
Live performances around the city this month.
Andrew Ousley is not an artist or a musician: he’s, in truth, a businessman. His firm, Unison Media, represents classical musicians for marketing and promotion. But he has another organization, Death of Classical, through which he has become an impresario, presenting concerts in two of the most beguiling locations in New York City; the crypt under the Church of the Intercession (The Crypt Sessions), and the catacombs in Green-Wood Cemetery (The Angel’s Share).
There’s always been dance music, Haydn and Mozart made it before Chic did, there’s no reason the pop musicians should have all the fun.
Rock and roll is Black music. White musicians play it, and play it well—like every other music it belongs as a practice (not an object) to those who make it with sincerity—but it began as Black music. And as this double-bill in the cozy kitsch-chic of The Sultan Room shows, it's at its best in the hands of Black musicians. That's because rock, at its best, is about shit.
Live performances around the city this month.
With Angel Deradoorian prominent, and Okkyung Lee slicing through with her cello, the music is a vehicle for reaching a state of being separate from the reality outside Pioneer Works. That is Riley’s point, and it’s what makes him special.
Live performances around the city in January
In the tidy, fun Punk Lust exhibit at the Museum of Sex, there was a famous photograph of Stiv Bators on stage at CBGB, in front of the Dead Boys, getting head from either one of two people: the club’s waitresses, who had been encouraged by the Dead Boys’ manager Genya Ryan, or else, according to Bebe Buell in her autobiography Rebel Heart: An American Rock ’n’ Roll Journey (2002), “America’s number-one punk groupie, Damita X.”
Live performances around the city this month
Songs about fucking and killing—that would have also been an appropriate subtitle for this scintillating new book from Ted Gioia. He’s already written three valuable books about the place of music in society and human experience, Healing Songs (2006), Works Songs (2006), and Love Songs: The Hidden history (2015). Music: A Subversive History builds on those by digging down into the fundamental nature of music, how it is made and how it affects us.
Two things about The Shed are unsurprising: the banality of its programming and its shoddy construction—making money is the most banal pursuit, and so The Shed reflects both Hudson Yards' purpose and values as well as the cost-cutting and trimming that's all part of being a real estate developer.
October 2019In Memoriam
A Tribute to Steve Dalachinsky
Steve was a force of Nature, driven by compassion & curiosity. He was opened to everything & everyone. He was naked inside & outside with no boundary between.
When Milton Babbitt wrote his article, “Who Cares if You Listen?” he unleashed a virus that has proven itself as robust and contagious as the flu. Published in High Fidelity magazine in 1958, the article quickly turned into a totem representing both every piece of new composing that audiences didn't even want to try to listen to and also how irrelevant those audiences were supposed to be to modern composers—and vice versa.
Don't miss this month's selection of live performances in New York.
September’s Listings
It is no criticism of Berry's fine book and clear, illuminating thinking that at its close I did not find Schoenberg any more pleasing. Rather, to his credit, Berry explained to me why I like so little of Schoenberg's music.
This summer’s highly selective listings
Ask the question, where does jazz happen, and the likely answer will be New York (or New Orleans, for the historically minded). No one is going to mention Detroit, not even dedicated jazz fans.
Our June Listings
Roscoe Mitchell needs no more accolades, he's been lauded many times over for what he has created through decades. Yet he does need to be rewarded, meaning he needs to get paid.
The irony, of course, was that after so many years trying to kill himself with booze and drugs, it was fucked up when Warren Zevon, sober and otherwise healthy, contracted mesothelioma, the terrible cancer of the lungs that delivered the coup de grace.
The Rail’s Highly Selective March Music Listings
Artists and critics on the vanguard these days are suppose to be past the idea of genres, other than to set them up like bowling pins to be scattered by the force and momentum of insight and truth.
The Rail’s February Music Listings
We are all going in different directions. The simplicity of that statement from John Cage disguises how deep it is, how it runs counter to the trends of human experience. We are individuals insofar as we act as such.
Winter Listings
You can buy Beethoven in a box. Lots and lots of boxes, or on individual flat discs of various sizes. You can rent him, temporarily and in the moment, through your computer or other streaming device. That is, you can own him, but do you deserve him?
November Listings
For anyone who came to Tyshawn Sorey’s own records through his incredible drumming—what seemed a superhuman ability to take the complex sequenced rhythms of IDM, like those from Autechre, play them back and make them swing—in groups led by Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, and others, the quality of his composing was (and still is) stunning and disorienting.
October’s Highly Selective Listings
The music that Daniel Lopatin—likely better known as Oneohtrix Point Never—makes doesn’t truly have a name at the moment.
Nobody misses being mugged, but that danger was part of the every day reality of New York City in the ’70s and ’80s. Anyone could get mugged, pretty much any time or any place, including the old Times Square that, through the Vaseline lens of memory, has somehow been transformed into an object of sweet nostalgia.
“Like the fella says, in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” – Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man
One weekday afternoon some time in the spring of 1989, if I've not lost too much to the vagaries of memory, I was in my Fort Greene apartment, trying to occupy myself constructively during one of my frequent stretches of unemployment. I know it was a Monday, because I tuned in to Tony Coulter's Monday Afternoon New Music show on WKCR, and heard the most mesmerizing and unclassifiable music I had yet encountered.
Steely Dan played the Paramount Theatre in Seattle on the first of July, 1974—there's a live recording—and the MC introduced the band thus: "Ladies and gentlemen, here by popular demand and at great expense to the management, you may like them—personally I don’t—from Los Angeles, California, Steely Dan!"
Maybe music is the best means to tell stories.
Butch Morris was resolutely on the outside, though from a distance, and with the advantage of time, it seems clear that he wanted to be on the inside, like all artistic innovators who see their work as the most natural, understandable thing in the world.
The joke is right there: it’s ambient music, in a church!
America is a fake country. As a political state, its beginnings were multicultural, multi-lingual, and built on an economic foundation of feudal exploitation via slavery and indentured servitude. Perhaps that explains the virulence of the idea that Americans are, and have always been, white English speakers who worship a (Protestant) Christian God and have earned everything they have.
At the end of Diamanda Galás’s generous and delicious encore to her spell-binding Halloween show, she sang “Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill” and “Gloomy Sunday.” A man in the row behind me wept loudly.
I must confess; I'm an imposter.
I am sincere, and my intentions are good—I am a music maker, and the importance of the art and my values around it are my foundation for criticism. And I’m no dilettante; I have performed over the decades at classical venues, CBGB, and weddings. I compose music that others play.
My dedication is serious. Why else write hundreds of thousands of words for less than starvation wages?
But as a critic, I’m an imposter. Without comped access, there’s no way I could afford to see any of the musical events I attend. In a way, I’m in disguise as an audience member.
John Cage’s Europeras 1 and 2 were scheduled to premiere at the Frankfurt Opera House on November 15, 1987. Three days before opening night an unemployed, former East German resident broke into the building, looking for food, and ended up setting a fire that gutted the place.
For every culture there’s a counter, in every niche there are yet further discrete splinters, internal disputes that boil down to who has the purest values. Then there are the rare instances of individuals who are cultures solely of themselves, who are sympathetic to this group or that, but who ultimately never conform to anything except their own view of things.
Welcome to the new Brooklyn Rail music section. If you don’t notice anything new, if it seems fully congruous with what you’ve been reading for the past few years, then we’re doing our job right.
Beauty is underrated. Beauty used to be an important value in music, but one of the peculiar, and most significant, anomalies in the history of classical music is how beauty came to be distrusted and disregarded.
The first notes I heard in the Winter Jazzfest were the elegant, intelligent, muscular sounds of trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and his ensemble, Sicilian Defense.
Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni premiered in the fall of 1787. The complete original title was Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, or “the libertine punished, Don Giovanni to be precise.” The Don is a rapist and murderer with a particular taste for underage girls, and he’s eventually dragged to hell by the ghost of the Commendatore, the father of Donna Anna, the woman Giovanni is trying to rape as the opera begins.
2016 began January 10, the day David Bowie died, and concluded October 13, when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Record labels are dead, and good riddance—they controlled and exploited musicians for decades, stole their income, and stifled their musical creativity. So the story goes. It’s true, but it’s also not true. Things aren’t that simple.
