Tag: Abby Swidler
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Tracks of the Week 04.05.24

Tracks of the Week
From Paul Robeson, Otis Redding, Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel to Tyla, TLC and Boyz II Men there is hardly a shortage of songs which evoke water, literal or figurative, from still pools and rolling rivers to gushing precipices, from contemplative docks to collapsible bridges and from vaporous mists to the muggiest sweats. The parlance of jazz with...

Tracks of the Week 09.03.24

Tracks of the Week
Great Britain likes to think of itself as the country which ended slavery, what with Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce and all that. Yet a few years ago a BBC documentary pulled back the drapes, revealing the names and circumstances of the 46,000 slave owners who received compensation when the Slavery Abolition Act was finally passed after decades of...

Tracks of the Week 29.07.23

Tracks of the Week
Still navigating the quixotic charms and cavernous obsessions of Charles Baudelaire, whose insatiable lusts, death whorls and sometimes rhapsodic depictions of the lives of rag-pickers and blind men, prostitutes and gamblers scandalized the tree-lined boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, this week the Danish chanteuse Susanna scales up her distinctive settings of the French bohemian poet's classic texts with lavish accompaniment...