Arto Lindsay is a singer-songwriter who divides his time between Sao Paolo and New York City, and one of the most influential figures in the New York Downtown scene that emerged in the early 1980s. A member of the “No Wave” band DNA and of the avant-pop group Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay went on to become an almost romantic crooner of samba, on albums like Mundo Civilizado – even as he continues to make deliberately disruptive noises on his guitar, an instrument he’s deliberately never learned to play. This combination of pop intuition and brash experimentalism has made him a darling of the art world. In our conversation, Lindsay spoke to me about his youth in Brazil as the son of progressive American missionaries; about living under the military dictatorship and about his early years in New York City and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also explained why religion, like music, is all about sex, and why he still refuses to take music lessons.

Links and References:

Downtown 81 - Kino Lorber

Ambitious Lovers / Envy

Mundo Civilizado

Crossing Music’s Borders in Search of Identity - New York Times

Heiner Goebbels: The Man in the Elevator - ECM

Arto Lindsay is a singer-songwriter who divides his time between Sao Paolo and New York City, and one of the most influential figures in the New York Downtown scene that emerged in the early 1980s. A member of the “No Wave” band DNA and of the avant-pop group Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay went on to become an almost romantic crooner of samba, on albums like Mundo Civilizado – even as he continues to make deliberately disruptive noises on his guitar, an instrument he’s deliberately never learned to play. This combination of pop intuition and brash experimentalism has made him a darling of the art world. In our conversation, Lindsay spoke to me about his youth in Brazil as the son of progressive American missionaries; about living under the military dictatorship and about his early years in New York City and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also explained why religion, like music, is all about sex, and why he still refuses to take music lessons.

Links and References:

Downtown 81 - Kino Lorber

Ambitious Lovers / Envy

Mundo Civilizado

Crossing Music’s Borders in Search of Identity - New York Times

Heiner Goebbels: The Man in the Elevator - ECM

A novelist, memoirist, critic, poet and screenwriter, James Lasdun has created a memorable body of work exploring the themes of existential dread, reputational damage and surveillance. The son of a well-known British architect, Lasdun is perhaps best known for his 2013 memoir about being stalked by one of his writing students, Give Me Everything You Have. In our conversation, James spoke to me about his childhood in London, as the son of Jews who had converted to Anglicanism without ever quite managing to become Christians; about his love of mythology; and about the dark fears and obsessions that run through his fiction and his non-fiction.

This episode is a co-presented with the London Review of Books

Links and References:

Besieged

Afternoon of a Faun

Give Me Everything You Have

Crazy In Love - Book Forum

He Said, She Said - The New Republic

James Lasdun Website

András Schiff, Franz Schubert, ECM Records

András Schiff, Franz Schubert - Sonatas and Impromptus, ECM Records

András Schiff, Franz Schubert - Fantasien, ECM Records

Alain Gresh, a French journalist, was the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and is now the director of Orient XXI, an online journal about Middle East affairs. Gresh’s writing on Israel-Palestine and on the battles over Islam and secularism have made him one of the most important voices on the left in France. Born in Cairo in 1948, Gresh learned in his late 20s that a man he knew in Paris as a family friend, the Egyptian-Jewish revolutionary exile Henri Curiel, was his biological father. In 1978, Curiel was assassinated in his apartment building – a crime that remains unresolved to this day. In our conversation, Gresh talked to me about his trajectory as a radical commentator on the Middle East, his upbringing in Egypt on the eve of decolonization, his relationship to Curiel, and his ongoing search for the truth about Curiel’s murder.

Henri Curiel, citizen of the third world - Le Monde diplomatique

When Palestine captured a generation’s dreams - Le Monde diplomatique

French Law on Separation of Church and State - Orient XXI

PLO: The Struggle Within

Anouar Brahem - Blue Maqams

The bassist, composer and poet William Parker is the soul of the Lower East Side free jazz scene. A veteran of ensembles led by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Billy Bang and David S. Ware, Parker is also remarkable leader in his own right. In 2021 he released a ten-disc boxed set, The Music of William Parker: Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World, Volumes 1-10, featuring compositions in a dizzying range of styles. With his wife and collaborator, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, Parker has turned the annual Vision Festival into one of the defining events in New York creative music. In our conversation, William spoke to me about his early years in the Bronx, how he rose up in the “Loft scene” of the 1970s, his experiences with Cecil Taylor, and his understanding of music as a force of revolutionary social transformation.

Links and References:

recordings in this episode

Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World

I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield

Piercing The Veil

Farmers by Nature: Love and Ghosts

Cecil Taylor Unit: The Eighth

Blue Lime Light: A Tribute to Cecil Taylor

David S. Ware Quartet - Surrendered

James Brandon Lewis: Jesup Wagon

links and additional music

Universal Tonality - Cisco Bradley

Arts for Art / Vision Festival

William Parker Tone World - New York Times

The Life and Music of William Parker - Brooklyn Rail

Lisa Sokolov

David S. Ware & Apogee

David S. Ware - Passage to Music

Amiri Baraka - Black Music (re: Jazz and the White Critic)

Art Taylor - Notes and Tones

The bassist, composer and poet William Parker is the soul of the Lower East Side free jazz scene. A veteran of ensembles led by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Billy Bang and David S. Ware, Parker is also remarkable leader in his own right. In 2021 he released a ten-disc boxed set, The Music of William Parker: Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World, Volumes 1-10, featuring compositions in a dizzying range of styles. With his wife and collaborator, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, Parker has turned the annual Vision Festival into one of the defining events in New York creative music. In our conversation, William spoke to me about his early years in the Bronx, how he rose up in the “Loft scene” of the 1970s, his experiences with Cecil Taylor, and his understanding of music as a force of revolutionary social transformation.

Links and References:

recordings in this episode

Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World

I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield

Piercing The Veil

Farmers by Nature: Love and Ghosts

Cecil Taylor Unit: The Eighth

Blue Lime Light: A Tribute to Cecil Taylor

David S. Ware Quartet - Surrendered

James Brandon Lewis: Jesup Wagon

links and additional music

Universal Tonality - Cisco Bradley

Arts for Art / Vision Festival

William Parker Tone World - New York Times

The Life and Music of William Parker - Brooklyn Rail

Lisa Sokolov

David S. Ware & Apogee

David S. Ware - Passage to Music

Amiri Baraka - Black Music (re: Jazz and the White Critic)

Art Taylor - Notes and Tones

Claudia Roden is the author of cookbooks that revolutionized eating in the United Kingdom, including The Book of Jewish Food and Arabesques. Raised in a Jewish family in Cairo, Roden began to collect Middle Eastern recipes after her family and families like her own fled Egypt in 1956. By chronicling the cuisines of the Middle East, Spain, the Mediterranean, and the Jewish diaspora, Roden has produced an extraordinary Book of Memory, as rich in history as it is in flavors and aromas. In our conversation, Roden talked to me about her Cairo childhood and her youth in Paris; about how collecting recipes became her obsession; about the sexist prejudices against cookbooks; about how politics informs her understanding of food; about the secret Jewish origins of fish and chips; and about how she discovered why the Spanish roast their pork with cumin seeds.

Links and References:

The Book of Jewish Food

Med

The pianist Marilyn Crispell works in jazz and improvised music. Crispell started out in classical music, but when she heard Coltrane’s spiritual suite A Love Supreme, she experienced an epiphany that led her to jazz. A member of Anthony Braxton’s classic quartet in the 1980s, Crispell has established herself since then as one of the most lyrical and introspective voices in avant-garde jazz, especially in her work on ECM records. In our conversation, Marilyn spoke to me about her childhood in Baltimore, the revelation she had listening to A Love Supreme, her work with Braxton and the ECM producer Manfred Eicher, and the restorative effects of contemplation and silence on her art.

Links and Reference:

Storyteller

Amaryllis

For John Coltrane

A Jazz Supreme - Raphaël Imbert

Creative Music Studio - Archive Selections Vol 2

Creative Orchestra Music - Anthony Braxton

Nothing Ever Was, Anyway

Sibanye (We Are One)

MUSIC; A Chosen Calm After the Avant-Garde Storm - New York Times

Camilla Nebbia

Benedicte Maurseth

Lena Willemark

The Adornment of Time - Tyshawn Sorey

J.S. Bach: Six sonatas for Violin and Piano - Michelle Makarski & Keith Jarrett

Joe Sacco is a Portland-based cartoonist and graphic novelist who has reported from Bosnia, Palestine, India, and Iraq. His powerful chronicles of modern-day political atrocities – in such books as Safe Area Gorazde, Footnotes in Gaza, and Paying the Land – have earned him comparison with Goya. In our conversation, Joe spoke to me about his childhood as the son of immigrants from Malta, about how he became politicized at the end of the Cold War, about his travels in the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia, about how he sees his art of witness -- and why he rejects the idea that he is “giving voice to the voiceless.”

Footnotes in Gaza

Paying the Land

Safe Area Goražde

Palestine

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

How To Read Donald Duck - Ariel Dorfman

George Lewis is a composer of contemporary classical music, an avant-garde jazz trombonist, an electronic sound artist, an essayist, and the author of A Power Stronger than Itself, the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a black composers’ collective based in Chicago, where he grew up. A dazzling polymath, he moves between the worlds of new music, jazz, academia, computer science, philosophy and visual art with extraordinary ease and humility. In our conversation, George talked about his working-class Chicago roots, his experiences at Yale and in Europe, his views on “cultural appropriation,” his ambivalence about being seen as a trombonist, why he thinks about John Coltrane more than John Cage, and why he’s proud to be considered an Afro-futurist.

A Power Stronger Than Itself

The Recombinant Trilogy

Rainbow Family

The Will to Adorn

Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives

Jessica Ekomane

Seth Parker Woods

Dana Reason - The Myth of Absence

Savvy Contemporary - Anton Wilhelm Amo