I once had a minor tiff with Brad Mehldau, an exchange of words in the pages of the L.A. Weekly that, I hope, ended up serving us both well. It started when I wrote up a plug for a rare Keith Jarrett appearance, saying that Jarrett had influenced a generation of young musicians. For proof one needed to look no further than Mehldau’s recorded rendition of “Blame It on My Youth”

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Jazz critics have made a living declaring that John Coltrane was the most influential saxophonist of the modern jazz era. But listen to the current crop of practicing sax players and very few of them sound like Coltrane. In fact, saxophonist go out of their way to avoid such comparisons.…

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Living underground to avoid arrest suggests two stories: the crimes that force one to disappear and the circumstances that pull one back into the light. Kunzru’s novel of an English political radical in the 1960s runs these tales in parallel. Young Chris Carver is drawn into protests against the war…

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