This trumpet player has sold 72 million albums worldwide, including five number ones, and also founded A&M records. Ordinarily we’d talk about his person, place, and thing, but instead we devote our conversation to his person, songwriter Burt Bacharach — 73 top-forty hits. One enormously successful musician talks about another, with respect and affection. Continue reading »
Author Archives: Randy Cohen
341: Terence Blanchard
This trumpeter and composer is celebrated for his film scores, especially for Spike Lee. His opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones is slated to open the new season at the Met. In this episode, we break format; instead of person, place, and thing, we talk song, song, and song. A conversation about three pieces of music. Continue reading »
340: Natasha Trethewey
Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of the celebrated memoir Memorial Drive. As a child, she received three books from her father, meant to cultivate her literary sensibility and deepen her understanding of the world, particularly about race and class: Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Light in August. If you were to pick three, what would they be? Continue reading »
339: Robert Reich
After serving as Secretary of Labor, he resumed teaching at UC Berkeley, gracefully relinquishing power, like Cincinnatus returning to the plow. Or not. “Actually,“ he says, “I have much more power as a professor than I did as a cabinet secretary.” Training a student cadre in the Oakland hills? Encouraging rigorous thought? One of those. Continue reading »
Movies / Television / Theater
338: Kamilah Forbes
I expected this writer-director, executive producer of the Apollo Theater, to be insightful about theater and film, and she is. I did not expect her to mount a staunch defense of comic books. If she’s not entirely persuasive on this topic (to geezerly me), she’s thoroughly intriguing. Continue reading »
337: Tommy Oliver
He double-majored in economics and digital media, and, unlike those in show business who enjoy the show but decry the business, “I love the business as much as I love the creative, as much as I love the technical.” The result? Black Love, the TV series he and his wife, Codie Elaine Oliver, created, is in its … Continue reading »
336: Annie-B Parson
She’s choreographed for everyone from Mikhail Baryshnikov to David Byrne. So where does she get her ideas? “I always loved this quote by Rousseau; he said, ‘My mind only works with my legs.’ Me too! When I am stuck, I just take a walk, and something unlatches.” Movement creates thought; thought creates movement. Photo by … Continue reading »
335: Baratunde Thurston
The author of How to Be Black and host of How to Citizen With Baratunde, he’s worked at The Onion, The Daily Show, and the Obama White House. More impressive, he’s met the whittler’s challenge: carve a chain or a ball in a cage from a single piece of wood. “What I really wanted to do was to make … Continue reading »
334: Mark Morris
He calls himself “a full-on, born-again atheist,” and yet this dancer and choreographer approaches his work reverently, in part as a quest for transcendence, honoring this ecumenical doctrine: “Most religions agree with don’t kill anybody, and I agree with that.” A conversation about classical Indian dance, modern American music, and the greatest cooking utensil of … Continue reading »
333: Sarah Megan Thomas
She says, “Virginia Hall was the first female field agent―spy―for Churchill’s secret army, the British SOE, and the spy the Nazis dubbed the most dangerous of all Allied spies in World War II.” She should know; she wrote and stars in A Call To Spy, a feature film about Hall’s exploits. Continue reading »
332: Bill Irwin
“I identify as a clown,” he says, understating his range as a performer, having portrayed George on Broadway in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Mr. Noodle on Sesame Street in Elmo’s World. And yet even a career as luminous as his has its disappointments: “I once asked John Cleese to play Pozzo in Waiting for Godot. Wouldn’t it have … Continue reading »
331: Rick Cook
He is a founding partner of COOKFOX Architects, known for green buildings, including the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, and the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. During our conversation he said, “Hope doesn’t disappoint.” He also said, “stinking, rotting, flaming, sliding, hell on earth.” Something for everyone, via the Center for Architecture. Continue reading »