The Brooklyn Rail

Despite being blinded as a young boy, this inhabitant of the Syrian city of Aleppo gains fame for composing some 400 pizmonim, songs sung on special occasions by Sephardic Jews. While able to effortlessly improvise verses to any melody even, it is said, to the sound of water dripping from buckets on a waterwheel, this sightless composer feels his greatest musical affinity for Arab music.

Featured in 27 movies and 1,200 musical recordings, this Egyptian singer-actress becomes one of her country’s greatest and highest-paid stars. In her late 20s, shortly after marrying an Egyptian Muslim, she converts to Islam from the Judaism of her birth. A few years later she is named the official singer of the Egyptian Revolution, but infighting among Revolutionary leaders leads to her marginalization.

Interviewed by a journalist from the Yiddish daily Morgen Journal-Tageblatt, a world-famous African-American singer shares the news that he is looking around for a Yiddish opera to perform in. When asked why he is seeking an opera written in Yiddish rather than a work from the European operatic cannon, the singer replies that he feels little or no affinity with operas from Italy, France or Germany.

A Jewish orchestra conductor and a Palestinian-Christian literary scholar, both preeminent in their fields, organize a workshop in the German city of Weimar for young classical musicians, both Jewish and Muslim, from across the Middle East. Meant to be a one-time event, the project evolves into a musical academy and a professional touring orchestra.

A 43-year-old music critic whose beat is hard rock and heavy metal attends a concert by one of his favorite bands whose latest album he has just reviewed for France’s most influential culture magazine. Raising two daughters with his partner, who is also a journalist and began her career covering the 9/11 attacks, he often has to do his writing late at night after the kids have gone to bed (“just like doing homework in high school,” he remarks).

“When I was a boy at school,” recalls an elderly musician who has written nearly a thousand songs and performed them on stages throughout the world, “on the first days of winter we went out to the playground, in the sunlight, and sang Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.”

Born during the Great Depression in a small North Carolina town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she shares a three-room clapboard house with her parents and seven siblings, a six-year-old girl impresses everyone when she accompanies a church choir (her mother is a Methodist preacher) on the piano. Friends convince her mother to have her daughter take piano lessons.

On weekends, a law student in Panama has fun and makes extra money by singing at private parties with a band called Los Salvajes del Ritmo. This arrangement comes to a stop when one of his professors witnesses one of his performances and reports him to the school’s dean, who insists that he must choose between music and law school.

It’s the late 1950s at an art school in the north of England and a teacher in the metalwork department has just dragged one of his first-year students out of the classroom to berate him for his shameless lack of effort. One of the student’s friends who happens to witness this encounter notices how his pal, who is only 17, has plunged his hands into his pants pockets, very likely in order to prevent himself from punching the fulminating teacher in the nose.

Two students at a Catholic university in Houston, Texas, start a band that eventually records one of the most experimental albums of the psychedelic era. After the band breaks up, one of the founders moves first to New York to work as the assistant of a famous artist, then to London, where he teams up with a highly politicized art collective with whom he makes audio and video recordings featuring the artists awkwardly chanting political tracts to a basic rock backing.

At a restaurant in a small town on the west bank of the Mississippi River about 70 miles south of Memphis on Highway 61, five men are enjoying a late lunch after having spent several hours playing the blues. One of them is an older Black man whose lives in the town, the other four are young white musicians temporarily in Helena between gigs.

A rockabilly singer and his backing band are hired to perform for a week at a club in Ft. Worth. When they arrive at the venue, which is called the Skyline Lounge, they are shocked to discover that the building has no roof.

Born in France to a classical pianist from China and a Russian composer (the family later immigrates to the United States), a musician who has studied with some of Europe’s most experimental composers is hired to teach at a Southern California art school.

Not long after the “events of May,” two old friends, who first met while studying avant-garde music in Darmstadt, rendezvous in Paris. One of them has been teaching in New York, the other, who is accompanied by his wife, plays keyboards in an experimental group currently setting up a studio in a large villa outside of Cologne.

In April, the same month as the fall of Saigon, the Phyllis Cormack, a 66-foot-long fishing trawler, sets sail from Vancouver in search of the Russian whaling fleet. Its mission is twofold: prevent the Russian vessels from killing any more whales, and alert the public about the continuing slaughter of this endangered species.

A 20-year-old Ohio native whose accomplishments include dropping out of several universities, consuming as many drugs and as much alcohol as she can afford, and alarming her parents, is perusing a magazine stand at a shopping mall when, to her astonishment, she comes across a recent issue of the British music weekly New Musical Express.

Two British music journalists meet for lunch in a Holland Park bistro ...

A youth aged 17 (or, in some accounts, 15) is sent to jail for stealing $30,000 worth of automobile tires. Prior to this, he and his younger brother comprised a two-person gang that ruled their neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles.

Drafted into the US Army and sent to Germany, a 23-year-old is struck by a recent recording of the classic Neapolitan ballad “O Sole Mio.”

A Neapolitan singer-songwriter (whom we will call Composer #1) buys a collection of 23 melodies from another musician (Composer #2), who is also Neapolitan.

It’s the mid-1960s in Bedford-Stuyvesant where some 15 or 20 young men get into the habit of harmonizing together after pick-up basketball games. One of them, an aspiring musician who is supporting himself as an elevator operator, notices some talented voices in the crowd, so one night he invites everyone back to his apartment to rehearse, hoping for something interesting to emerge.

Thanks to her own talent, fearlessness and good looks, a 17-year-old working-class British girl secures a recording contract. Between takes at her first studio session she looks up at the control booth and sees her manager jumping up and down with excitement and the technicians around her laughing. “Your feet, your feet,” the manager explains over the microphone.

A teenager in Oklahoma City who is destined to become one of the most respected guitarists in the world but also fated to die at 43 from a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles laundromat covets more than anything else in the world a 1954 Fender Telecaster sitting in the window of a local music store.

Hoping to discover new acts and garner some publicity, two independent record labels organize a “battle of the bands” tour around England. At each venue, local groups are chosen to perform with the vague promise that the winners of the contest will be given a recording contract. One stop on the tour is a small basement club in a once vibrant industrial city that has fallen on hard times.

On the first Thursday of every month for nearly 40 years, a singer’s live performances, often lasting five hours or more, are broadcast throughout the Middle East. These programs become so popular that during them streets empty, stores and restaurants close, and politicians avoid scheduling any speeches or press conferences.

Upon being told by his manager that under no circumstances can he continue to go onstage wearing spandex pants without underwear, a young musician begins performing in nothing more than a trench coat, black high-heeled boots and black bikini underwear.

What happened in Łódź two months before her birth: the Germans forced 160,000 Jewish and Roma inhabitants into an area of the city—a new ghetto—far too small for that many people.

While waiting for his first book to appear, an impoverished 34-year-old poet succumbs to tuberculosis. When, a year and a half later, the volume is finally published it sells only 20 copies. To make matters worse the text is bristling with errors, most of which will not be corrected for nearly a century.

After studies in Paris with the leading French pianist of the time (who, alas, is soon to begin collaborating with the Vichy regime, a decision that will forever shadow him), a young Filipino pianist returns to his home country to begin a successful career as a soloist.

It’s the nation’s coldest winter in more than 200 years. Much of the country is covered in snow from December until March. Everything freezes, from water pipes to monumental fountains to streams and rivers. Travel is disrupted, food stocks begin to run low, a regional newspaper reports with dismay that two swans have been found frozen to death on a nearby river.

We’re in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s where two film student friends (one in graduate school, the other an undergraduate senior) enroll, in successive years, in the same course on film aesthetics taught by a legendary but now retired émigré Austrian director.

Living only one street apart in a London suburb, two 7-year-olds strike up a friendship that lasts until they are 11 and one of them moves away. In the years that follow, their school careers diverge (one begins attending university, the other enrolls in a local art school) but their musical tastes are oddly similar, as they discover when their paths finally cross again on a train platform in their hometown.