Fintan O'Toole on the Easter Rising on the NYRB

The Rising acquired its imaginative potency not in spite of its small scale but precisely because of it.  It's power lay in its manufacture of highly individual and meaningful deaths during a period of mass, apparently meaningless, slaughter. It was handcrafted martyrdom in an age of industrial massacre. 

Adam Shatz on Miles Davis in the NYRB

Davis played on some of Parker's finest sessions but he was something of a tentative, even ambivalent, bopper, because he couldn't play as high or as fast as Gillespie. He was searching for a mellower, less frenetic approach to bop, and found it in "cool" jazz, a style he developed in the late 1940s with the Canadian-born orchestrator Gil Evans. So fervently did he believe in his own vision that, at twenty-three, he turned down an offer from Duke Ellington.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Davis assembled bands that were notable for their startling contrasts of personnel, like the pairing in his late 1950s sextet of John Coltrane, a tenor saxophonist with a furiously probing gnarled style, and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, a buoyant, sweet-toned alto player who always sounded as if he'd just gotten out of church.