Electric, ethereal, and earnest: An evening at Tommy Lefroy’s ‘Le Trashfire’ tour

On Sept. 28, Tommy Lefroy fans at Montreal’s Le Ministère sent seismic sound waves across North America as the crowd chanted along to the duo’s ethereal and addictive harmonies. With Wynter Bethel and Tessa Mouzourakis—who record as Tommy Lefroy—on electric guitar, and Blake Evans on drums, the hour-long set incorporated[Read More…]

Archives that evade

In 1974, the first Black woman Random House editor gathered photographs, sheet music, advertisements, obituaries, patent applications, materials, art, and ephemera in a collection entitled The Black Book. These archives, anthologies, collages, and scrapbooks celebrated, bore witness to, and captured the spectacular and the quotidian of Black life in all[Read More…]

Making a new world as we go

In 1960, the Queen of Jazz made a mistake. Performing the song “Mack the Knife” in West Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald forgot the lines. The weight of global expectations stood on her shoulders as one of the first Black women to sing this piece—and in front of a white, international audience,[Read More…]

To strike a chord

As far back as I can recall, music has been capable of evoking incredible emotion and overwhelming comfort unlike anything else. It has protected me from tough-to-swallow, unnamable feelings, and even made me aware of ones I didn’t know were possible to experience. My parents were my earliest introduction to[Read More…]

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