Dreams That Still Come True

Ben Ratliff has a great review (and photo) in today’s New York Times of our amigo Darcy James Argue’s Thursday gig with his big band at the Bowery Poetry Club.  Having your name mentioned in the same sentence as Charles Mingus and Bob Brookmeyer is a pretty damned inspiring head rush and we’re thrilled for Darcy and the gang.  Read his postmortem and listen to samples here.

The big news out of Second City this week is that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will return to weekly radio broadcasts on WFMT-FM, 98.7 (probably in March 2007) and the CSO has founded its own record label.  Our informant, Marc Geelhoed, informs us that the label, known as CSO Resound, will issue compact discs and digital downloads of live CSO concerts available from iTunes and the CSO website. The first release will be Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 with principal conductor Bernard Haitink and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung from last October. The recording will be available in early 2007, but the exact date and price of the release was not specified. BP’s gift of $3.4 million will fund the radio broadcasts, and the Boeing Company donated funds for CSO Resound.

This is the future of big time classical music.