- Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam
- Closing the books: Powell’s layoffs, Looking Glass R.I.P.
- Patrick Page plucks praise from “Spider-Man” carnage
- In the room with Egypt’s fierce cultural protector
- Alexis Rockman and good news at the Smithsonian
By Bob Hicks
Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam: My old friend and neighbor Jaime Leopold dropped me a note about his friend, Andy Stein, a fiddler who can often be heard on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. “Andy has been compared to jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and he’ll be performing in a duo with Conal Fowkes, a Wynton Marsalis alum and wonderful pianist from New York,” Jaime said.
Jaime wanted me to know this because Stein will be performing Feb. 19 at Tabor Space. And as it happens, Jaime’s own band, Padam Padam, will be opening. If that sounds self-serving, I suppose it is a little bit, but mostly it’s not, because Jaime simply loves music, and when he knows good music’s coming ’round the bend, he likes to spread the word. If he says Andy Stein is worth going to see, I’m taking him at his word.
Her life, like so many others, ended in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, where she died in 1943, at age 26. But in a few fevered final months of 1941 and ’42, before she was shipped off from her refuge in southern France to the concentration camp, she left her mark on the world — a mark that, remarkably, survived, even though Charlotte did not. In those months the young artist created a portfolio of more than 700 paintings, many also covered with words or musical notations, that together amounted to an autobiography.
The review stands pretty much on its own, as an overview of what is an overview exhibition. Each of the exhibit’s six areas of concentration makes up its own statement, and each could have been reviewed rigorously on its own, but for most viewers — and for the museum itself — the larger picture is more important.