Author: The Rake

Pulitzer-winning pianist and composer William Bolcom has an enormous body of work, inspired by everything from Broadway to the classic American songbook. At a recent press event, he even dropped Grandmaster Flash when pressed to cite additional influences. His interpretation of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience won three Grammys last year, and we’ll…

The multilayered, polyrhythmic funk of Fela Kuti is the core inspiration for this Brooklyn-based Afrobeat collective. Like Kuti, they also pair rise-up political lyrics with a disobedient beat that refuses to lie down. As with so many other African bands, the dozen or so members of Antibalas make for an awesome stage presence; the merging…

With his new Son Volt record The Search, front man Jay Farrar diverges from a well-worn path of Neil Young-inspired folk-rock songs to explore more varied sonic influences, such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Beck, psychedelia, and swamp rock. The band has even enlisted a soulful horn section. Duly impressed by the album’s diverse sources…

In Boomsday, Buckley’s latest novel, the relentlessly topical humorist (and spawn of conservative doyen William F. Buckley) envisions a future in which bloggers are actually powerful enough to radically influence decisions at the highest level of American politics. Not so far-fetched, you might say, but Buckley’s penchant for taking aim at the broadest possible targets…

A rare opportunity to see one of America’s quietest—or at least lower-profile—literary lions. And judging from the man’s eclectic body of work, distinguished by its broad historical sweep and social criticism, it’s likely that Doctorow will have something of substance to say. Over a career that’s now spanned almost fifty years, Doctorow’s writing has consistently…

Here’s a pairing with a curious backstory. Galway Kinnell, whose 1980 Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was touring in Northern England when he found himself at a reading by Josephine Dickinson, a deaf Oxford-educated poet, musician, composer, and teacher. More than a decade earlier, she had fallen in…