Tom Vitale

On a hot, humid afternoon, Bob Stewart has called a rehearsal at his Harlem apartment. Six musicians are in a circle in the living room — on one side, trumpet and trombone; on the other, cello, viola and violin; and in the middle, the elephant in the room — Stewart's ...

"Maybe black male singers are not supposed to sing about love," Eckstine said. "You're supposed to sing about hurt." Born 100 years ago this week, he ushered in a new era of modern jazz.

Actor Eli Wallach has died at the age of 98. In a career that spanned seven decades, Wallach appeared in more than 200 films, plays and television dramas. His roles ranged from Mr. Fr...

In a career spanning seven decades, Wallach appeared in over 200 films, plays and TV shows. His roles ranged from Mr. Freeze on TV's Batman to Kilroy in Tennessee William's Camino Real on Broadway.

Ellison's exploration of race and identity won the National Book Award in 1953 and has been called one of the best novels of the 20th century.

Author Peter Matthiessen has died in New York at the age of 86 from acute myeloid leukemia. Matthiessen, a novelist and naturalist, wrote 33 books; among his best-known works are The Snow Leopard and the novels Far Tortuga and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was made ...

Editor's note: Peter Matthiessen died Saturday, shortly after this story published and just days before this latest novel, In Paradise, is due to be released.

At age 86, Peter Matthiessen has written what he says "may be his last word" — a novel due out Tuesday about a ...

In the room he uses as a practice space and office in his apartment in Corona, Queens, Jimmy Heath recalls a hit record from long ago.

"It's a song Bill Farrell, a popular singer, had years ago," he says, and then sings: "You've changed, you're not the angel ...

For Robert Pinsky, the pleasure in poetry comes from the music of the language, and not from the meaning of the words. So he put together an anthology of 80 poems that are models by master poets -- from Sappho to Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson.

"For a lot ...

Wallace Shawn is famous for his career as an actor, but over the past four decades he has written a handful of plays that are intellectually demanding and rarely produced. His characters tell stories in monologues, rather than acting them out onstage, and they use cascades of words to make ...

One hundred years ago this week, a ballet premiered that changed the art world. Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps — The Rite of Spring — was first seen by the public on May 29, 1913, in Paris. As the orchestra played The Rite's swirling introduction, ...

In the 1940s and '50s, Tadd Dameron worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz, from Miles Davis to Artie Shaw, Count Basie to John Coltrane. Everything Dameron touched had one thing in common, says Paul Combs, author of Dameronia: The Life and Work of Tadd Dameron.

"A penchant for ...

Cage's most lasting influence may be in his ideas — about the boundaries between noise and music and the artistic freedom that comes from breaking the rules.

Vidal wrote more than two-dozen novels and an equal number of nonfiction books in a career that spanned six decades. He was also a screenwriter, playwright and political activist, and...