Moondog Music in Coventry Cathedral

By Martin Longley

APRIL 2022 | Music

Coventry Cathedral invited Down Is Up from London, an ensemble dedicated almost solely to the music of Moondog, that old inhabitant of New York City. The cathedral is famed for both being bombed into destruction (1940) and optimistic rebirth (1962), providing a suitably majestic setting for the works of composer, performer, and Viking-robed street musician Louis Hardin.

Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards’s Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music

By George Grella

JUNE 2023 | Music

It is absolutely a measure of his importance and achievement as a musician that a major publisher has brought out this book, Henry Threadgill’s autobiography (written with Brent Hayes Edwards in a fluid and engrossing style close to that of an oral history). Jazz in general is not a subject the big publishers are interested in, much less for someone like Threadgill who has been a leader in the avant-garde for decades.

Oluzayo: African Music Futures

By Martin Longley

JULY/AUG 2023 | Music

In the Zulu language, Oluzayo means “what lies ahead," and this five-day festival aimed to present new African music that circumvented familiar patterns of reception and presentation. The organization behind this festival is the Cologne-based African Futures, regularly presenting a program of panels, lectures, workshops and discussions. Innovation wasn’t always compulsory, as some of the acts involved maintained deep traditional roots. Whatever might be “new” usually possessed familiar traits and elements at the core of its style.

from The Ones Who Listen (Book One of the Cywanu Trilogy)

By Whit Griffin

APRIL 2023 | Poetry

Whit Griffin is a poet-medium and semi-professional hermit dwelling in Colorado. Author of such nonlinear metaphysical epics as We Who Saw Everything (Cultural Society) and Uncanny Resonance (Book Two, Lunar Chandelier Collective). With visual artist Timothy C. Ely he collaborated on the book Interior Voice / The Great Practice (Granary Books). Along with Eric Baus he is a resident wizard at Common Name Farm, through which he freely gives away visionary elixirs.