Alex Ross

On his New Yorker blog, the magazine’s music critic Alex Ross singles out “Ten Exceptional Recordings” of 2009. One, sharing the hit parade of the most prominent U.S. writer on classical music with recordings of Mozart, Schubert and Ravel, is Canadian. I discovered Eve Egoyan’s recording of what Ross calls Ann Southam’s “immense, mysterious piano piece” Simple Lines of Enquiry a few weeks before Ross started raving about it on his (other, former) blog. I believe it was this Star review that tipped me off. I’ve been reluctant to write about Southam’s work because it’s, well, immense and mysterious, but clearly it has a powerful hold on the attention of at least some people who hear it, and more should hear it.

A few days after the fact, won’t you please welcome the 2008 MacArthur Foundation fellows, who receive large amounts of money from a munificent benefactor, without warning, simply for being great. This corner heartily endorses the grants to the wonderful music journalist Alex Ross and to the wonderful saxophonist Miguel Zenón. To celebrate, here’s nearly an hour of Miguel’s music, recorded four months ago at a club in Paris that I miss very much even though they’re not big on leg room.