Distractions: Hugh Dillon’s new gig, Quincy Jones tells all
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From rock to role: Hey, Hugh, smile and wave at the camera. Yes, the Hugh Dillon starring on the CBS series “Flashpoint” is the very same man who once worked local concertgoers into a frenzy as the front-man of the Canadian rock act the Headstones.
Though his head is now shorn of its spiky black locks, it’s fascinating to watch this former rocker harness his stage energy for his role as a member of the elite police tactical unit for the Toronto-based series.
The Man and the music
“The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions,” by Quincy Jones (Insight Editions) is a fascinating inside account of the life and work of Jones –musician/ arranger/producer/ activist and quite likely the most revered “ideas man” in the history of recorded sound. Jones has worked with the greats in every decade of his career to date, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Barbra Streisand and Michael Jackson.
He also helmed the “We Are the World” project and has remained active in fighting poverty and racial injustice ever since. Illustrated and annotated gorgeously, the book also tells the story of American music in the second half of the 20th century.
On the surface
Buffalo painter Peter Stephens’ new series, “Areography,” on view through Feb. 24 at Nina Freudenheim Gallery, 140 North St., is an engrossing new direction in the work of one of Western New York’s most masterly artists. The new paintings, exquisitely rendered oils that look like the surfaces of planets viewed from space or cells under a microscope, beg you to get lost in them. Stephens’ work, former News Critic Richard Huntington wrote, “resoundingly demonstrates that painting is an argument between surface and illusion that never can be completely reconciled.”
Never enough Eno
Director Frank Scheffer’s meditative soft-focus shots form more than able counterpoint to this performance of Brian Eno’s ambient music masterwork “Music for Airports” (Medici Arts) as offered by “In the Ocean,” which is ostensibly the story of Bang On A Can, but, with insight from the likes of John Cage, Eno and Steve Reich, becomes much more than that. Really, it’s an examination of the transformative nature of the artistic process, as it applies to music. This is far less hoity-toity than it sounds. Beautiful, and touching.
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