Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for The New York Sun and other publications. The host of the radio show ‘Sing! Sing! Sing!’ on San Diego KSDS on Saturday mornings, he also is the author of 10 books. He has written more than 600 liner notes for compact discs, received 11 Grammy nominations, and appears frequently on television and in documentaries.
Marley’s story could have easily been the subject of an epic. Instead, ‘Bob Marley: One Love’ brings to mind a description of the recent Priscilla Presley biopic, ‘a minimalist biography.’
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
‘Sondheim in the City’ does double duty, as a songbook package to celebrate the great composer-lyricist and as a set of songs meditating on life in the city.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
This week at Birdland, the singer is serving two masters: It’s Mardi Gras at New Orleans and it’s Valentine’s Day everywhere. These two events necessitate two entirely different kinds of music.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
‘Rhapsody’ has weathered everything that one could possibly throw at it — including harmonicas and now Bèla Fleck’s banjos — and has earned its celebrations.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
This is a highly understated album, with most tempos on the slower end of metronome; it has a fuzzy, amorphous sound that reminds me of K.D. Lang singing ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed.’
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
Like Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton a century ago, Andy Farber makes consistently creative use of the blues form throughout his portion of the program.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
Ensembles that during the 1920s and ’30s worked outside the few main metropolitan hubs have been categorized by jazz scholars as ‘territory bands.’ Buck and a Quarter embodies that ideal both musically and literally.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
Her latest offering is not only songs by women, but songs and stories of a specifically self-affirmative, uplifting nature. As Mulder announces early in the set, ‘This music gives me space to laugh, to cry, to rage, to feel.’
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
A new documentary shows that no musician of the 20th century made better use of time — both in performance and long-term, as in a career — than Roach.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
‘Celebrating Bix’ seeks to take Beiderbecke’s diminutive gems and jewels and musical treasures and expand upon them, offering something that is new and that illuminates the mastery of the original historical recordings.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
Now launching its 24th year of playing at Birdland, the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band is the creation of the tuba player, bandleader, former attorney, and passionately devoted Armstrong scholar, David Ostwald.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
Recorded in Germany in 1984, ‘The Printmakers’ was the first album as a leader by Allen (1956-2017), who used it to reconsider nearly all of the ‘givens’ that we expect of a jazz pianist.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
||Arts+
