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Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

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A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

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Is It From the Birds? Stephen Sondheim Asked the Right Question About Music and Then Preferred Not to Hear the Answer

In November of 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat in his Manhattan townhouse with Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist from the Library of Congress, and said something extraordinary. Not extraordinary in the way that most Sondheim quotes are extraordinary, which is to say technically precise and laced with a craftsman’s impatience for imprecision. Extraordinary because it was none of those things. It was, instead, the sound of a man who had spent his entire adult life inside music admitting that the existence of music itself was something he could not explain.

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How AI Art Extends Our Originality of Imagination

In the world of AI (Artificial Intelligence) Art, and NFT Art, there are some who believe that sort of machine-made Art is fakery, and it, therefore, does not quantify as an aesthetic effort, while others, like me, see the rise of AI in Art, and Writing, and Science, as only a good thing — at least for now, before AI inevitably becomes our Overlord — as our ability as a Human Race continues to find new ways extend our originality of imagination. Take, for example, the following set of images where I asked the Midjourney Bot V4, to create a “treehouse neighborhood in a big city.”

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More Excellence from Evidence Audio!

Tony Farinella — of Evidence Audio fame — has been my friend since 2009. Yes, we’ve been friends for over 1,000 musician years, or in people-years, that would figure to be somewhere around 13 earth years. Tony and I were brought together by a great, shared, love of grand sound and excellent music — and if you’re in the audio biz, pro or amateur, you know that sound matters, noise matters, and purity matters. Tony makes it his day job, and probably his evening nightmare, to create really great, high-quality audio cables for music, production, and performance; and today I am delighted to share with you two new fantabulous creations of his: The Forte Microphone Cable and the Source AC Power Cable! Hey, take a look at these beauty shots!

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2018 Historic Collection 1959 Les Paul Standard

I love a Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul guitar. The heavy guitar feels right in my hands. The strings vibration is nothing like any other guitar I’ve played. For the past decade, or so, I’ve collected four Les Pauls, and I reviewed two of them for you here: My valued ’57 Les Paul VOS and my beloved 56′ Goldtop.

In the image below, you can see all four of my Les Pauls, and the newest one, on the front left, is my 2018 Historic Collection 1959 Les Paul Standard “Dark Bourbon Fade” just purchased from Wildwood Guitars in Louisville, Colorado — and on the front right, is the first Les Paul Standard “Iced Tea Burst” I purchased back in 2008.

I find it wildly fascinating that the two guitars, built a decade apart from each other, so closely resemble each other, while also being alarmingly different in distinctive, yet charming, ways. 2008 was the first wacky year for “The New” Les Paul Standard that included “weight relief” holes carved out of the body, an asymmetrical neck and locking tuners. My new Les Paul is part of the Gibson Custom Shop Historic Collection, and it arrived yesterday, fresh from Wildwood.

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Best Bedroom Amp Review: Orange Rocker 15 and Henriksen Bud

It’s been awhile since I posted a “Boles Blues” review of guitars, guitar amps and other musical gear. Two things were conspiring against me over that time. One, I injured my left wrist. That’s my “fretting” hand, so playing was difficult. The second conspiracy came in two parts, a couple of years apart: Floods! The first flood that hit my apartment came from three flights above and ruined half of my guitar collection. The second flood, two years later, arrived from the same burst pipe in the same apartment on the third floor, and ruined every single guitar amp I owned. The water damage ruined my musical collection and — because I pay for my own gear — I knew it was going to take awhile to get musically re-established.


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