“Boston is adrift in the brave new competition among big American cities vying for tourist dollars.” Maureen Dezell, WBUR

Maureen made that charge back in July 2006 in an article that turned out to be one of the last posts on the late WBUR Arts Online. Now that the quote, along with a link to the piece, is part of an invitation to an Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston workshop on April 23 where, for $50, attendees can listen to experts talk about ways that we can “create for Boston and Massachusetts what Philadelphia and Pennsylvania have successfully done” to encourage cultural tourism. The latest news out of Philadelphia is that Boston has its work cut out for it — Philly is surging ahead. (more…)

A recent study in Editor & Publisher delivers the lowdown; with its circulation down about 20% in four years, The Boston Globe is in free fall. Two major investors in The New York Times, which owns the Globe, are “challenging the company’s investment decisions, including its commitment to the struggling newspaper industry beyond the flagship New York Times. Like many analysts, they see The Boston Globe and a group of 15 local papers as a drain on the company, which should, they argue, be focused on extracting the greatest possible advantage from the Times brand.” Bloomberg reports the taxman may be the paper’s savior: “The Times’ low tax basis on the Globe makes a sale unattractive because a large portion of proceeds would go to the government, she [NYT Chief Executive Janet Robinson] said.” (more…)

This review/commentary will focus on Coltrane’s recordings with the Miles Davis Quintet for Columbia (in October 1955 and June and September 1956) and Prestige (in November 1955 and May and October 1956), as well as a variety of sideman dates and nominally leaderless sessions, many of which have recently been reissued by the Concord Music Group in the compilation entitled Interplay (with insightful notes by Coltrane scholar Lewis Porter). Part 2 will deal with the subsequent period of Trane’s emergence as a leader and as a key member of Monk’s quartet and then Miles’s sextet, a period in which his musical development became much easier to follow–and his discography much less.

The evolution of John Coltrane’s music from 1959 through 1967 can be neatly mapped to the output of just two labels, Atlantic and Impulse, augmented by a handful of recordings with Miles Davis — most notably, Kind of Blue — and one anomalous intervening date for Roulette. (Posthumous Impulse releases–supplemented by Atlantic outtakes, a fascinating series of early sixties live dates issued by Pablo, and a motley assortment of bootlegs–have enriched our understanding of Trane’s evolution, but not fundamentally altered it.)

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Reviewed by J. R. Carroll

During an interview in Japan in 1966, John Coltrane was asked what he would like to be in ten years. Coltrane replied, “I would like to be a saint.” Lewis Porter, author of the definitive study John Coltrane: His Life and Music, interpreted this as meaning that “he wanted to be saintly, that is, a virtuous person. Clearly he did not mean that he wanted to die and be canonized!” Yet, that is precisely what occurred. (more…)