Brianland

The Day I Heard The Tambourine Man          I, like others, was whisked away by the Gallatin genie just as I was about to drown in the requirements of my previous school.  If NYU hadn’t had a school-without-walls, I wouldn’t have graduated, if you want a soundbite about it.  The trade-off they offered was that […]

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“On The Road” Comes Home — The New York Premiere The day of the “On The Road” premiere in New York (Dec. 13th, 2012) I was up at the NYPL trying to get through the doors of the hermetically sealed vault of the Berg Collection, home to a gazillion literary papers from Emerson to Shelley […]

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[This piece originally appeared in different forms in numerous publications following these events of May 22nd, 2001.] . Part I, The Author’s Song   The passing of the scroll … It’s gone to a good place … . . . with an iconoclastic, white-tie wearin’ John Lennon lovin’ “huge Bob Dylan fan,” spirit of the […]

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Making better time On The Road So, I get to the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto at 7PM for a 9:00 show (on Sept. 6th) and there’s already a whole scene.  It’s the World Premiere of the new and forever “On The Road” — the first-ever screening of the director’s revised and final cut. There’s a […]

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On The Road to On The Road Sex, Drugs & Jazz A very abnormal thing happens — it’s post-movies Wednesday night (August 15th) when Carolyn & I normally part ways for our own offices and computers, but by fortune we met up in the kitchen and started talkin about the movie premiere tomorrow night, and […]

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Paul Simon certainly exceeded my expectations last night! He and his two bands only had a couple warm-up gigs in Dublin before bringing back “Graceland” in front of 50,000 people in the most famous park in the English capital of Europe. A 2 hour show became 3 hours, and he started at 7:20 to avoid […]

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A Shakespearean Cassady   . A month of rain in 12 hours can’t dampen the Spirit of a lifetime of experience or the experience of a lifetime. Two compatible souls a generation apart, Somehow related, somehow unjaded, somehow not faded, Still giggling unburdened, still freely unherded, Two jazz cats still flowing, still riffing, still reading […]

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. Whatever the particulars of any all-encompassing multi-day music festival you’ve been to — this one takes place in New Orleans.  When the festival music is over each night, instead of driving into a traffic jam or walking to a campground or checking into some generic hotel, you’re living in history and set loose in […]

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Here’s the artists / bands / ensembles I caught at New Orleans Jazz Fest over the last week . . . Thursday, April 26th, 2012 (1) — the Honey Island Swamp trio – at the Ogden Museum of Art Friday at Jazz Fest (11) — The Classic New Orleans Revue – with “Carnival Time” Johnson […]

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  It’s 4AM on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans — on a dosey-doe night of subterranean hideaways and pirate characters right outta “Treasure Island” and hanging in the Blue Nile next to Will Blades the young Hammond B3 master as he works the keys and valves and peddles to Karl Denson on sax and Stanton […]

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