Open Thread: Create Your Own Trey

Actually this is just a more prominent way of letting folks know I’m overwhelmed with a looming deadline on another story and won’t be able to make the Wolves game tonight–or even see it until tomorrow or Friday. So if anyone wants to fill in with their impressions–it can be a trey of your own … Read more

The Three Pointer: A Culture of Losing

Game #30, Road Game #17: Minnesota 82, LA Clippers 91 Season record: 4-26 1. 4th Quarter Follies For those of you with hangovers, either from an excess of alcohol or undue loyalty to a dysfunctional, mentally weak basketball franchise, we’ll start with a Joe Friday straight script on the lodging of the Wolves’ latest L. … Read more

The Three Pointer: Redemption Song

Game # 25, Home Game #13: Indiana 118, Minnesota 131 Season record: 4-21 I usually condense two weekend games into a single trey, but tonight’s victory over Indiana was sufficiently exciting and worthy of individual comment that I’ve decided to file this now and let you folks add comments to this and tomorrow night’s road … Read more

moe.

In terms of wank-out psychedelia, this Buffalo, New York-based jam band is more peyote than purple microdot: organic, smooth, and offering a slightly shorter trip than the Grateful Dead or Phish, or their friend Umphrey’s McGee. After using concert improvisations to flesh out the tunes that run like flowing ribbons through previous albums like Wormwood … Read more

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

Ever since Wynton Marsalis seized the reins of the JLCO in the early ’90s, both the orchestra and the organization have been hallmarks of supreme scholarship and top-notch quality control in the effort to enshrine jazz as America’s classical music. The only danger was that Marsalis would smother his project with love, favoring hermetically sealed … Read more

Abbado Conducts Schubert

Italian conductor Roberto Abbado knows the difference between flair and flash, or sophistication and ostentation. After a series of typically elegant performances with the Minnesota Orchestra earlier this decade, he became an artistic partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra two years ago and ascended the podium for five weeks of solid Beethoven last February … Read more

Bill Carrothers’ Armistice Band

Jazz pianist Bill Carrothers was born in Minneapolis in 1964 and, even as a tyro getting his artistic bearings, elevated the local jazz scene with his cerebral gravitas (No one, for example, untangled the Gordian knots of altoist Lee Konitz better than Carrothers in concert.) While his best-known disc is probably Duets with drummer Bill … Read more

The Three Pointer: Miami Vice

Game #23, Road Game #12: Minnesota 87, Miami 91 Season record: 3-20 1. Sabotaged At the Two Guard The Miami Heat look terrible. Shaq is shockingly old, his hands lacking grip, his knees unable to help him stop on a dime–he committed two or three fouls (and fouled out) tonight simply bowling people over with … Read more