Like so many jazz clubs and music venues across the city, it’s been shuttered on West 44th Street since the pandemic began last March, except for a brief reopening last month.
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Tue 19 Jan 2021 01.00 EST
As an investigator turned author, James Comey has developed a forensic eye for detail. The colour of the curtains in the Oval Office. The length of Donald Trumpâs tie. Something about the US president that the camera often misses.
âDonald Trump conveys a menace, a meanness in private that is not evident in most public views of him,â says Comey, a former director of the FBI, from his home in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC.
That menace came flooding out to engulf the US on 6 January when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in Washington. Five people, including a police officer, were killed in the mayhem. Comey, whose unorthodox interventions in the 2016 election are blamed by many liberals for putting Trump in the White House, watched in horror.
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It is hard to imagine New York City without jazz, which has been a central element of the city s cultural profile for a century. But the shutdown has hit NYC s performance venues hard. The East Side’s Jazz Standard closed for good in December, and music lovers fear that the essential midtown venue Birdland might be forced to follow this year unless a new campaign to rescue the club raises enough money to keep it going through the lean times ahead.
A GoFundMe campaign to save the nightclub was set up last week, and the response has been highly encouraging: The drive has already raised $200,000 toward its goal. Now a virtual concert will follow on Sunday, January 24, with a major lineup of stars eager to lend a hand. Birdland was the world s greatest jazz club in the 1950s, and it is the world s greatest jazz club today,” says the jazz and cabaret historian James Gavin. “The air vibrates with history, both bygone and in the making. Birdland defines the exciteme