May 2025 media
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BEATrio: A new jazz album—superficially Latin, perhaps, but wide-ranging in practice—featuring Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, and Antonio Sánchez. Fleck was my entry point here, and while I’m used to unusual instrumentation from his projects, the sheer audacity of banjo plus harp still took me by surprise. But as usual he’s gathered virtuosic, world-class musicians that somehow make it all hold together. I think it’s my favorite collaborative work of Fleck’s since The Enchantment with Chick Corea.
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Vesper Flights: An essay collection from 2021 by Helen Macdonald, their followup to the excellent H Is for Hawk. I’ve noted before that “nature essays from writers who are also poets” is a subgenre I seem to especially enjoy; see also Mary Oliver’s Upstream, say, or Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing, or Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders. As expected Macdonald’s particular interest here is birds and she writes beautifully about them, with the title essay a particular highlight.