Calling Mina Agossi a jazz singer is like calling Michael Jordan a basketball player; it’s technically true but woefully understated. Like the best singers, Agossi makes it abundantly clear that her voice is an instrument, whether she’s working with her own compositions, Ella Fitzgerald standards, or Jimi Hendrix covers (which she renders complete with raucous … Read more
In an age of drum beats looped ad nauseam, of recycled and often misused samples, of really shameful overproduction, the modest melodies laid out by this Swedish trio feel almost revolutionary. Peter Bjorn and John have been together since 1999, but were little-known stateside until their 2005 release Falling Out, which won them substantial critical … Read more
The second program in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s 2007–2008 season features the highly anticipated performance of the Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths by the vibrant twenty-first century composer Thomas Adès, who has been revered and reviled for his often choppy and creatively versatile pieces, including the orchestral work Asyla and the operas Powder Her Face … Read more
Red House Records owner Bob Feldman was a fire hydrant of fun and positive energy before he died, a year ago January, at the age of fifty-six. With a folk-music show on tiny KFAI that was strictly a labor of love, Feldman cherished music enough to achieve a remarkably high batting average on the quality … Read more
Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin are rugged men investigating the murder of a veteran who had just returned home from Iraq. The new Coen brothers’ film? No, that’s the eagerly-anticipated No Country for Old Men, which also stars this pair. Elah, on the other hand, is the first vehicle from director/screenwriter Paul Haggis since … Read more
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht may never have had it so good. G. W. Pabst, who brought Louise Brooks to fame in his silent (and seductive) 1929 masterpiece Pandora’s Box, this time took to sound production and dirtied up the silver screen like never before. The Threepenny Opera tells the story of Mackie Messer (a.k.a. … Read more
Let’s call this a hybrid of the fictional Brazilian exposé City of God and Errol Morris’s police procedure doc The Thin Blue Line—both tremendous entertainment. Manda Bala (Send A Bullet)is a bizarre documentary detailing the rise of corruption in Brazilian culture as well as the country’s kidnapping epidemic. “Men will steal with a gun or … Read more
Megan Rye’s brother supervised the regional detention facility in Fallujah and transported Iraqi detainees within the Sunni Triangle. He took more than two thousand photographs during his tour of duty. As a painter, his sister is the real deal; she used these images to make huge paintings that are for keeps. These paintings are part … Read more
This somewhat mysterious exhibition, curated by Elizabeth Grady of the Whitney Museum, seeks to use the Soap Factory itself as subject and object. The grandeur and melancholy of the Factory, not to mention the deeply ingrained scent of soap and labor with which the place is imbued, have long been the best aspect of shows … Read more
This young (got his BFA from MCAD in 2005) and fast-rising (fellowships from Jerome, McKnight, Bush, and Skowhegan) Minneapolis artist works in the mode of the moment: a combinatoire of painting, assemblage, ragpicking, and video. These are fragmented times we live in, and it’s artists like Bryant who pull together the pieces of exploding cultures … Read more