Music Stories [UNBRIDLED ECLECTICISM] “We call it our ‘Wet Album,’” Courtney von Drehle says of 3 Leg Torso’s richest, most colorful record since its 1996 inception. The phrase is both ...   More

Performance Only in the musty museum world of classical music would white dinner jackets and ties qualify as “informal.” But that’s standard attire for the male musicians at summer festivals, in ...   More

Music Koji Okuna brought sushi to Portland in 1982. Now he’s giving the gift of jazz.

[JAZZ] During his college days in Osaka, Japan, Koji Okuno was a pretty good jazz drummer. He performed regularly at clubs and coffeehouses until a bout with tuberculosis sidelined him; late nights in smoky jazz clubs didn’t help his condition. A later comeback attempt fell victim to an unfor...   More

Music Stories [JAZZ] During his college days in Osaka, Japan, Koji Okuno was a pretty good jazz drummer. He performed regularly at clubs and coffeehouses until a bout with tuberculosis sidelined him; late nights in ...   More

Music Revirado (Furbco Records)

[NUEVO TANGO] The great Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla earned the ire of tango traditionalists for doing for that once-disreputable dance what composers from Dvorak to Gershwin, Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan did with other grassroots musical forms: used it as the basis for a more sophisticated art music that never sounded like it was slumming. Si...   More

Music Stories [NUEVO TANGO] The great Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla earned the ire of tango traditionalists for doing for that once-disreputable dance what composers from Dvorak to Gershwin, Louis Armstrong to ...   More

Featured Stories VAGABONDAGE: Stern, center, and the rest of the Vagabond Opera. IMAGE: Alicia J. Rose“There’s nothing like telling a story,” says Eric Stern, the founder of Vagabond Opera, Portland& ...   More

News

"New music is old music now." That was the winning definition of “new music”—the inadequate and deliberately vague shorthand often used to describe contemporary music in the classical tradition—in    More

Performance Opera companies tend to be conservative, regularly rotating the same-old same-old, big moneymakers (your Carmens, your Bohèmes, your Traviatas). Portland Opera’s Studio Artists series is ...   More

Music Hank Williams covers? Experimental dance music? Tom Waits collabos? Douglas does it!

[SPLENDOR IN THE BRASS] To call Dave Douglas the most important figure in jazz today might be an understatement. Still under 50, the New Jersey-born, New York-based trumpeter/composer is one of the most ambitious creators in all of contemporary music. Emerging from Horace Silver’s band in the...   More