Use Transcriptions For Solo Piano The best way to improve your solo piano playing is to practice, listen and become familiar with the greats. Imitate what they do and learn from their mistakes. This will take time but is the only way to refine your own soloing skills. When you know a tune so well […]
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New York is still reeling from the pandemic. Almost 35,000 people have died from covid in the city; temporary morgues, in the form of refrigerated vans, were set up to store victims’ bodies. Many residents have left dense urban areas for leafier suburbs elsewhere in the state or in New Jersey. To some, the future […]
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The Man from the Future. By Ananyo Bhattacharya. Allen Lane; 368 pages; £20. To be published in America in February by W.W. Norton & Company; $30 IN 1945, WHILE in a state of exhaustion, the mathematician John von Neumann had a kind of stammering premonition. He was in Los Alamos, working on the atom bomb, […]
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The Magician. By Colm Toibin. Scribner; 512 pages; $28. Viking; £18.99 THOMAS MANN’S last, unfinished novel tells of a confidence trickster named Felix Krull. In “The Magician”, Colm Toibin’s fictionalised portrait of the great German writer, the ageing Mann thinks of himself as a similar “dodger” who “got away with things”. He believes that the […]
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On October 7th the Swedish Academy awarded Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer based in Britain, the Nobel prize in Literature for 2021 for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. He became the first black African writer to win […]
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IT IS AN elegant, if slightly worn, writing desk (see picture below). Carved from mahogany, it has two drawers and a wide writing slope, and is accompanied by a simple wooden chair. The bureau might be considered unremarkable, except that it is one of the desks at which Charles Dickens wrote “Great Expectations” in his […]
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Aftershocks. By Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright. St. Martin’s Press; 464 pages; $29.99 and £23.99 Geopolitics for the End Time. By Bruno Maçães. Hurst; 240 pages; £18.99 THERE ARE few monuments to the tens of millions of victims of the Spanish flu, overshadowed as it was by the death and destruction of the first world […]
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There is Nothing for You Here. By Fiona Hill. Mariner Books; 432 pages; $30 WHO WAS the woman with the strange British accent testifying to Congress during the hearings for President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, suddenly in the spotlight and trending on Twitter? For the many who wondered, Fiona Hill now explains: she is a […]
Continue ReadingPiano Transcription William James Basie (born in 1904 in Red Bank, New Jersey) was a pianist, organist, and bandleader who established himself as one of the most important figures in the jazz history. Basie’s economical piano playing was ahead of its time compared to several stride pianists of the time, but what really set him […]
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Net Positive. By Paul Polman and Andrew Winston. Harvard Business Review Press; 352 pages; $30 and £22 WHAT IS THE purpose of a company? For some, the answer is simple: to make as much money for shareholders as the law permits. But many modern companies take a much broader view. They argue that business should […]
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