Peter Aaron

One early evening in the fall of 1981, I put on the leather jacket I had worked all summer bagging groceries to buy, met up with the two other punks in my suburban New Jersey high school, and got on a bus headed into New York City. I was excited and nervous. It was my [...]

Called “the minimalist shot heard ’round the world,” Steve Reich’s 1971 masterpiece Drumming is, like several of the revered composer’s works, pretty much exactly what its title promises. The four-part piece, which Reich will perform on July 31 at Maverick Hall with percussion groups NEXUS and So Percussion, utilizes eight small tuned bongo drums, three [...]

Jamestown, New York, situated along the southern edge of Chautauqua Lake in the southwestern corner of the state, was once called the furniture capital of the world, thanks to its being a leading producer of mattresses and wooden furnishings. Today the city of 32,000 is, arguably, better known as the birthplace of two of America’s [...]

John Doe Records and Books, in the 300-block of Warren Street in Hudson, is pretty hard to miss. A former service station, its parking lot is now an obstacle course of rust-covered file cabinets and paint-peeling bookcases, tables, chests of drawers, and other antique furniture for sale. Inside the 1950s brick building’s front room are [...]

The electric guitar would’ve been a much tamer instrument had Jeff Beck never taken it up. Although his maverick attitude toward the music industry and emphasis on non-vocal material have kept him from crossing over into the pop realm, the UK-born player redefined rock guitar in the mid-1960s and in the 1970s helped create jazz-rock [...]