Thelonious Monk lost (and found) in Paris.

From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.

Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation. Black artists are taking similar strides today.

Through online fan communities and digital platforms like TikTok, popular music is finding powerful new ways to shape everyday activism, protest, and resistance.

30 years after the Wall, the story of Berlin's anarchist utopia.

‘Amazing Grace,’ the long-lost film of Franklin’s gospel album, offers a lesson in the deep connections between gospel and soul music.

Kanye represents what happens when the liberties of artistic genius are confused for political insight.

A personal essay on family, death, and the healing power of music.

Mentorship is how the humanities justify themselves.

On the feminist essayist, journalist, and music critic.

Overestimating the counterculture of the 1960s

A new collection of Lead Belly's recordings.

After years of obscurity, the “5” Royales are finally getting their due.

Drake was an artist so out of step with his own time that he came to be in lockstep with things not bound by time.

The Making of an American Folk Song

Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis.

The novel House of Earth shows Woody Guthrie in a different light, exiled from the Dust Bowl but dreaming of it still.

Michael Zapruder discusses converting poetry into music.

In the 1930s and ’40s, American dance was about working men and women, not dying swans.

Robin D.G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original restores the pianist and composer to the history he lived through.

Milton Babbitt and John Cage. 

What the composer and Kant had in common.

A review of two books on Coltrane.

Rap poetry is full of cutting-edge linguistic innovations.

From the Winter 1975 issue of Boston Review: Glenn Gould argues that despite being a prolific composer, Ernst Krenek is one of the least understood musical figures of the twentieth century.