Herbie Hancock performing Monday night at Wolf Trap. Photo by Andrew Propp, courtesy of Wolf Trap Superlatives run free when describing Herbie Hancock's nearly 50 years on the music scene. A consummate artist, he has been a pioneer throughout his career, breaking ground in genres ranging from straight-ahead jazz to electronic music. Despite his status as a jazz legend, it was still somewhat of a shock to all when his latest album, River: The......

Ziggy Marley and band performing on stage at Wolf Trap. Photo by Andrew Propp, courtesy of Wolf Trap The afternoon got off to an ominous start with the skies opening and rain pouring down, eerily reminiscent of an earlier concert going debacle. Thankfully, the rain stopped, as if coaxed by the uplifting music of the Bob Marley Roots, Rock, Reggae Festival, held this past Sunday at Wolf Trap. But let's face it, even if......

Stanley Jordan. Photo by chascar, used under a creative commons license. Guitarist Stanley Jordan has achieved a goal that all musicians strive for yet only a select few attain, and that is total command over his instrument. But unlike many players with strong chops, Jordan does not use technique for technique's sake. Rather, his prodigious talent allows him to produce a gamut of sounds which represent every range emotion from the sensitive and delicate,......

Music that attempts to fuse traditional and contemporary forms always draws some trepidation. Sometimes it works. After all, one of this year's best shows combined Indian classical music with electronic grooves. Many times, however, the results are just schmaltzy dreck, devoid of any emotion or integrity. Last night's performance by the Mystic Warriors fell somewhere in between these two extremes. While the musicianship was first rate and the melodies and rhythms were haunting, there were......

An unnamed couple takes a romantic stroll among the frozen horse-heads. It'll all make perfect sense -- maybe -- after you've seen Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. It's not really a documentary. It's not exactly a memoir. It is ingenious and poetic. Frequently it's apeshit hilarious. But, like, what the hell is this thing? Guy Maddin’s dreamy, beguiling My Winnipeg opens with the iconoclastic filmmaker employing the most loathsome directorial tactic there is: The camera fixes......

He's a lover and a fighter: Kassim Ouma reflects on his violent past in Kassim the Dream It sounds like — if you’ll pardon the expression — something out of a movie: Junior Middleweight Champion fighter Kassim “The Dream” Ouma escapes the darkest of pasts to find his way from Africa to America, arrives penniless and unable to speak English, and within a year he’s a professional fighter with a surrogate family, money in......

Joanna Rudnick ponders whether to keep her breasts and ovaries in In the Family at SILVERDOCS. If the measure of a good film is that you're still thinking about it days later, then In the Family is the best movie I've seen all year. But in no small way was this documentary, directed by filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, more or less tailor made to hit someone like me square in the jaw. Rudnick, all of......

At the outset of Lost Holiday, a charming, funny, and almost unintentionally political documentary out of the Czech Republic, director Lucie Králová rather cheekily declares the film, via the opening credits, to be a "detective documentary." It's a touch that borders on precious, and a tone that continues in the often wry intertitles that mark time throughout the "investigation" that is the film's subject. What they're trying to detect are the identities of six men......

Fidelis Cloer takes aim at competition seen and unseen in Bulletproof Salesman. “I want war. I don’t want peace,” says German armored-car merchant Fidelis Cloer at the beginning of Bulletproof Salesman. An hour later, in the doc’s final moments, he offers a slightly more nuanced view, pointing out that he did nothing at all to instigate or sustain the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan than have proved such a windfall for his company.......

Director Alex Gibney (who we interviewed earlier this year) is making a mounting case for a future legacy as the first great documentarian of the 21st century. Hot on the heels of his incisive investigations into the collapse of a major corporation and the collapse of America's wartime moral compass, Gibney has switched gears. Rather than going after an entity whose misdeeds he feels are in dire need of being exposed, he has made what......

With the recent cinematic dramatizations of the life of Che Guevara, from his early days as a road tripping med student in the excellent The Motorcycle Diaries to Steven Soderbergh's lengthy version of his revolutionary years in the four and a half hour biopic that just premiered at Cannes, an unusual perspective was obviously necessary to any documentary version of his story to keep it from seeming stale or overly academic in comparison. And......

Yoko Ono, George Martin, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at the Las Vegas premiere of Love, the subject of the documentary All Together Now. Combining the music of the most beloved band in the world with the most visually arresting live performance troupe working today seems like a surefire recipe for a hit. That's probably what the late George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté thought when they first dreamed up the......

CityDance Ensemble performs Sophie Maslow’s 1942 piece "Folksay" on Friday. With long horizontal strides, wide smiles that reached the upper tier of Strathmore’s grand 2,000-seat concert hall, and arms fully outstretched at an angle to either side, the CityDance Ensemble began The Songwriters, the final performance of their 2007-2008 season. Farmer boys were clad in jeans and flannel shirts; farmers’ daughters sported flowing frocks. Moving briskly in rows from stage right to stage left,......

The issue of self-identity is one that pervades the art of every immigrant community, especially second generation members of those communities. The question one asks is, "Am I American, or am I [insert ethnicity here]?" While the answer usually ends up occupying some space between the two, the revelation lies in the path the artist takes to find a resolution. The route Kathleen Gonzales follows to answer this question is central to The Bridge......

Bobby McFerrinThe show opened with a couple dozen or so sprightly young women taking the stage, dressed in traditional eastern European folk garb. Their conductor, also in costume, raised his hands, signaled the opening downbeat, and out came the sound of serenity. Their voices blended into a rich harmony that recalled the music of cloisters and other forms of early European classical music. The ensemble was Jitro, a celebrated girls choir hailing from the Czech......

From the first sparkling notes of his intro to Luiz Bonfá's "Manha De Carnaval", originally recorded for the soundtrack to the classic film, Orfeu Negro ("Black Orpheus"), it was clear that Kenny Barron is a master pianist who plays with soul, grace, wit, and technique. His first set on Saturday at the Kennedy Center's Family Theater saw him play 90 minutes of polished jazz that was pleasing to the ear, but there was something missing.......

Credit: Søren Solkær StarbirdHopefully you got to the Black Cat early on Saturday and made plans for after. We knew that the Raveonettes, Denmark's louder, dirtier answer to Sweden's Roxette, have a reputation for brevity, but few people were probably expecting to get out of the 'Cat by around midnight on a Saturday night. To be fair, it wasn't that their set was particularly short, but with only two bands on the bill, the......

Three songs into Bob Mould's set at the 9:30 Club on Saturday night, he sang, "The twentieth century has not been particularly kind to me." Actually, he more screamed it than sang it, cords standing out in his neck and palpable rage spilling out over the microphone. It almost seems odd now that Mould can still deliver this line from his self-titled 1996 record with such vitriol; whatever the twentieth century's transgressions, the twenty-first......

Pianist Chick Corea and vibraphonist Gary Burton are both jazz giants in their own right, but they have forged a musical partnership that is one of the most special and enduring in music, regardless of genre. Last night's sell out crowd in the lovely Dekelboum Concert Hall at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center no doubt had high expectations, but as it cheered the two masters as they took the stage, no......

Last night may have been a cold and blustery Sunday evening, but the Music Center at Strathmore played host to a band whose smokin' hot grooves made everyone present forget the frigid temperatures outside. Master conguero Poncho Sanchez (pictured), whose recording and touring experience stretches back over 30 years, took to the stage along with his stellar band and delivered a spicey two hour mix of traditional and contemporary Afro-Cuban music. Aside from the quality......

"I can't keep doing this on my own, with these....people," laments Daniel Plainiew, midway through Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film. That final word, "people," tumbles out of Daniel Day-Lewis' mouth like a piece of sour meat, rotting and foul-tasting. It's a defining moment for his character: as far as he's concerned, people are just no damn good. The problem is, he's just as much of a bastard as the rest of them. And try as......

We've got a secret for you: Sweeney Todd is a musical. We understand there might be some confusion about that, seeing as how the television ads don't have a single note of singing in them, and if you blink during the theatrical trailer, you'll miss the five seconds of Johnny Depp singing buried in the clip. Make no mistake, though. The vast majority of this film is told in song. On the one hand, it's......

Mid-December has arrived, and with that comes the inevitable flood of best-of lists. The Washington Area Film Critics' Association has, for the previous five years of its existence, been in the habit of trying to get their own list out ahead of most of the other critics' societies. We can't really blame them. Considering the fact that none of the critics from the city's biggest newspaper are members, not to mention the fact that the......

>> "More than 50 nonunionized workers rallied against the new Nationals ballpark this morning, angry that more District residents did not receive construction jobs." [WaPo] >> "I saw firsthand the fragile relationship that exists between Mayor Fenty and the City Council Members. I heard tales of a delayed Comprehensive Annual Financial Review , rising murder rates and a Chief of Police who feels burdened by a system that won't help her, proposals to close......

Compiled by DCist Contributors Josh Kramer and Sarah Stonesifer The Eagle - American: >> AU is fine-tuning their free HIV testing program to accommodate students' schedules. They've also switched from an anonymous testing program to a confidential one. The changes aim to bring the school in line with the District government's HIV testing initiative. >> The American University bus drivers were approved by the Undergraduate Senate to have their own union, a debate that had......

Of the numerous romantic notions surrounding the writing life, perhaps none dies harder than that of the solitary, ink-stained wretch plugging away at his or her latest work in some dilapidated garret, alone and unnoticed and oblivious to what's going on around him or her. Writing may be a solitary act, but as any intellectually honest writer can tell you, writers need communities: first, because the realities of today's writing life necessitate that one be......

We kid. Kind of. According to the Washington Business Journal, the Uline Ice Arena and the surrounding area may be the next frontier in development in the District. The arena, which is just north of Union Station and hosted the first Beatles concert in the U.S. in 1964, is being looked at by developer Douglas Jemal as the anchor for a new entertainment district along the lines of the popular East End/Verizon Center area. While......

We've been following the fate of the 9th St. NW Shiloh Baptist Church properties since they were condemned in mid-May. No visible repairwork has since been performed on the buildings, despite an order from the District to fix the roof, gutters, masonry and generally clean up and make the buildings safe. Yesterday at a meeting of the D.C. Board for the Condemnation of Insanitary Buildings, the board ordered DCRA to either perform the repairs......

Opera is a serious musical genre, the summa of high dramatic art. For some serious thoughts about the season just concluded by Washington National Opera, you could read the Opera Season in Review from last week. In a less exalted but equally important way, opera is about ostentation, and in that vein, there is one more glittering event that always makes the end of the season final in Washington, and that is the annual Opera......

One of only three art schools in the nation that are affiliated with a world-class museum, the Corcoran College of Art + Design is a powerhouse in the "art schools of America" roster, ranking high in the Princeton Review (but receiving a ‘C’ average among current pupils and alumni). Founded in 1890, the school is the District’s only four-year, fully-accredited college of art and design. The Corcoran Gallery of Art has finally dedicated a gallery......