Joshua Hitching

Joshua is not one of Handel’s great oratorios. Although it is patterned on the previous year’s Judas Maccabaeus with a perfunctory love story tacked on, Morrell’s mediocre libretto did not inspire Handel to the heights of their earlier collaboration. But there are some very good things in Joshua , and second-rate Handel is better than music from some composers’ top drawer, so Joshua is worthy of the occasional performance and recording.

Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age fame has scored and soundtracked a new film called ‘In The Fade’ that premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival.
As Variety reports, the film is directed by German filmmaker Fatih Akin. ‘In The Fade’ is a drama that follows a woman who takes revenge after her son and husband are murdered by the neo-Nazis of the National Socialist Underground group.
Akin revealed why Homme ended up scoring the picture. He said, “That was a big surprise. When I was writing this, I was listening to a lot of music by Queens of the Stone Age. I had the feeling that this could be the music that the character was listening to, it has a self-destructive attitude and somehow the film is about self-destruction.”…

The members of the legendary original 1990s Joshua Redman Quartet—Joshua Redman (saxophone), Brad Mehldau (piano), Christian McBride (bass), and Brian Blade (drums)—reunited after twenty-six years after their 1994 debut album, MoodSwing, for 2020’s RoundAgain; they return now with LongGone, out now. The new album features original Redman compositions from the RoundAgain recording sessions, plus a live performance of the MoodSwing track “Rejoice,” captured by SFJAZZ at the San Francisco Jazz Festival.