In the News

Blues is the base of everything,” begins Fatoumata Diawara. “Blues is the heartbeat. It comes from your soul. And from this soul and from this one heartbeat, you can do anything – any type of music.”

A prolific collaborator, the Grammy Award nominee has indeed cast her creative net far and wide while featuring on numerous studio recordings alongside the likes of Flea, Herbie Hancock and Bobby Womack, and sharing the stage with such luminaries as Paul McCartney, John Paul Jones and Damon Albarn.

Fatoumata Diawara is a true multi-hyphenate – an esteemed Malian singer, songwriter and actress who left her home country at 19 to pursue her artistry in France. By way of Como, Italy, she delivers a riveting performance alongside her bandmates, many of whom have toured with her since 2018. The guitarist and keyboardist here – Yacouba Kone and Arecio Smith – both contributed to her Grammy-nominated album, Fenfo.

When the Pulitzer-winning composer Caroline Shaw wants a snack, she soft-boils an egg. She knows that six minutes and 15 seconds leads to the ideal texture — a jammy yolk, with a chalky outer edge and a flowing center. But her ritual for the past few years has been to surrender the process to music, letting whatever she's listening to that day dictate the precise cook time.

Caroline Shaw’s itemized accomplishments are many: she’s composed celebrated works for vocal and string ensembles, helped to shape Kanye West’s 

What should a portrait of Caroline Shaw look like?

The thunderous sound you’ll hear erupting from the Sony Centre stage on Thursday was born in the quiet, rural, almost monastic life the artists lead in Japan.

Living communally on Sado Island, the Kodo Drummers dedicate themselves to their craft in a way that is all consuming.

Canadian Kiyoshi Nagata apprenticed with the troupe 20 years ago in his quest to improve his drumming skills. It was a life unlike any he’d known before.

THERE is a felicitous double meaning to Kodo, the name of the celebrated Japanese drumming ensemble. Its written characters mean “drum child”. But an infinitesimally different stressing of the second syllable will give you the character which means “heartbeat”. The company regards this accidental ambiguity as a symbolic blessing, and drumming does indeed go way back. It is one of humanity’s most elemental forms of musical communication, at once both mystical and—because it can span great distances—highly practical.

Music historians have never quite known what to make of the late Renaissance composer Orlando di Lasso, or, for that matter, even what to call him. (Sometimes he’s Orlande or Roland, and sometimes De Lassus.) Musicologist Richard Taruskin calls him, simply, a loose end. Di Lasso’s style never fully conformed to the luxurious perfection of his age. His bizarre harmonic explorations, along with his attraction to lurid or mystical subject matter, could get him into trouble.

I cannot fathom the number of bruises the 21 bodies comprising the Los Angeles Master Chorale will have as they continue to trudge through their world tour performance of “Lagrime di San Pietro.”

Choosing 10 of the world’s best string quartets is no easy task – particularly when considering groups past and present. A definitive list could easily encompass tens if not hundreds of first-rate quartets active today, let alone the leading ensembles from previous generations.