Critic Alex Ross & Pianist Ethan Iverson April 24, 2010

Popular New Yorker music critic and blogger Alex Ross joins with Ethan Iverson, pianist for the jazz combo The Bad Plus, for "The Rest is Noise: In Performance" a unique exploration of 20th-century music.

Ross and Iverson first presented "The Rest is Noise: In Performance" to a sold-out audience at the Paris Bar in New York. Ross reads vivid portraits from his best-selling 2007 book "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," with Iverson providing piano interludes to illustrate. Among the composers covered will be Bela Bartok, Jelly Roll Morton, George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Parker and Dmitri Shostakovich.

"While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T.S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, 20th-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences," says Ross. Yet its influence is felt everywhere, from jazz to Hollywood film soundtracks, from rock to pop.

Ross has been music critic of The New Yorker since 1996, and from 1992-1996 wrote for the New York Times. His first book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book, a collection of essays entitled "Listen To This," will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this October. In 2008 Ross was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Iverson is best known as pianist for the post-modern jazz trio The Bad Plus. Formed in 2001, the group has released six records and performed in venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall, Bonnaroo and the Village Vanguard. He is also currently a member of the Billy Hart Quartet and the collective Buffalo Collision. For five years he was music director of the Mark Morris Dance Group and has accompanied tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert's "Winterreise."

Official Website: http://www.performances.org