A colleague recently shared that when they advocate for community engagement in their organization they get pushback about “mission creep.” Mission creep??!! If connecting the arts with communities is not an arts organization’s mission, what is it?! – Doug Borwick

Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums every weekday in the order in which I first heard them, starting in 1968 with the first record I ever bought with my own money. – Terry Teachout

One of the highlights of the 2019 Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival was a concert by Hannah Svensson. Now, Ms. Svensson’s new album, Places And Dreams, presents her along with the colleagues who backed her at Ystad. – Doug Ramsey

Clive James recently filled out the Guardian’s “Books That Made Me” questionnaire. I was so struck by his answers — as well as the questions themselves — that I decided to play along. – Terry Teachout

Part of the reason we think so is Sidney Poitier’s depiction of Porgy in the Otto Preminger movie. – Joe Horowitz

Why is artist Angel “LA2” Ortiz not included when we’re discussing Keith Haring’s work? – Jan Herman

More than its disappointing 1985 predecessor, the Met’s vigorous new staging of Gershwin’s opera manages to vindicate a controversial cultural landmark whose reputation, still unsettled, feeds on the fraught racial sensitivities of the current moment. – Joe Horowitz

A friend of mine sent me this color photograph the other day, remarking that he suspected it was the only time that Louis Armstrong and George Bernard Shaw appeared in the same painting. – Terry Teachout

With virtually no public money flowing in, U.S. arts organizations have, understandably, been most concerned with the interests of those who fund the enterprise. This narrowness of attention, this “donor myopia” has created a system in which the broader population can be very nearly unseen. – Doug Borwick

The news that Darren Walker has been named as one of the National Gallery of Art’s five general trustees gave me pause. My misgivings arose from what struck me as his astonishingly clueless views on the current state of American museums. – Lee Rosenbaum

The process and the permanence of recording never seemed to entirely sit well with her. There are some likely treasures out there somewhere that we’ve never gotten to hear. – David Patrick Stearns

At the New York City Ballet’s Fashion Gala, premieres by Lauren Lovette (costumed by Zac Posen) and Edwaard Liang (costumed by Anna Sui). – Deborah Jowitt

Does anyone still wear – gloves? A lady’s elegant, elbow-tweaking white gloves? Or a gentleman’s svelte riding gloves? Spot these on stage, my friends, and you can rest assured that you are safely encased in the genteel past. Dickens World. Downton World. Best of all, Austen World. At least, that’s how it seems when The Watsons begins. – David Jays

One of my Twitter followers asked over the weekend if I’d post a list of my favorite film scores. This is, needless to say, an impossible task, but I did spend a few minutes drawing up the following roster. – Terry Teachout

The most notable thing about Barrie Kosky’s production of Handel’s Agrippina at the Royal Opera is that every member of this ensemble can act — especially Joyce DiDonato, giving what I expect will be remembered as an historic performance of the title role. – Paul Levy

Heidi Hall, an old friend of mine from Smalltown, U.S.A., died last week. She was 49, far too young for so extravagantly vital a woman to lose her life to cancer. I, on the other hand, am 63, which isn’t nearly as old as it was a few generations ago. Why did people back then seem to age so much more quickly than they do now? – Terry Teachout

This show turned out to be more timely than the NYBG could have known when it began to organize what it billed as its “largest botanical exhibition ever.” – Lee Rosenbaum

It’s been a busy month at Tula’s, a jazz fixture in the US Pacific Northwest for more than two decades, as most of the top jazz musicians in Seattle are playing their last gigs at the club and it’s been a full house every night. – Doug Ramsey

Ever on the frontier of experimentation, the adventurous tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger is aided by the complexity of Steve Lampert’s composition Zigsaw. – Doug Ramsey

Bertoldo di Giovanni, a favorite of Lorenzo de’ Medici and now the subject of a compact but comprehensive Frick Collection survey, is a Florentine sculptor who has been overshadowed by his more illustrious teacher (Donatello) and revered pupil (Michelangelo). – Lee Rosenbaum

Kerry Politzer, Diagonal: A Tribute To Durval Ferreira
The pianist recruits several of her talented Pacific Northwest colleagues for this album of pieces by a Brazilian composer whose works were central to the rise of bossa nova. – Doug Ramsey

And why it’s a problem: “What we’re looking at right now, this extreme marginalization of classical music, is really the chickens coming home to roost.” – Joe Horowitz

Comparing a 1967 collage to a Photoshopped image in the current New York Times: Are both art? – Jan Herman

Think you (or your organization) don’t understand the people you are trying to reach? If you are talking about people other than your current attendees/donors and their peers, you are 100% correct; and they understand you even less. (And if you don’t think you don’t understand you are probably deluding yourself.) – Doug Borwick

It’s kind of calling-for-immediate-attention bell that invites a sharp smack with palm or finger, and drives Basil Fawlty to the very verge of derangement. Ping! It’s a comedy device – an indicator of short-fuse entitlement, an enhancer of retro-farce chaos. It retains its comic tinge in Amsterdam, which is unnerving, given the context. – David Jays

Q: How do you invite thieves to steal a famous, expensive, publicly exhibited artwork? A: Publicly announce that no guards are protecting it. – Lee Rosenbaum

Dave Douglas is a trumpeter whose adherence to basic jazz values fully justifies the title of the new album he shares with pianist Uri Caine and drummer Andrew Cyrille in their unusual trio. Unusual? Yes. – Doug Ramsey

Dvořák predicted that a ‘great and noble school’ of American classical music would arise from ‘Negro melodies.’ But the black musical motherlode migrated to popular genres; American classical music stayed white. The reasons are both obvious and not. – Joe Horowitz

When I attended the celebratory press conference in 2015 that announced multiple major benefactions to the Met’s Asian Art Department, little did I know that a few years later the Met would auction off a good chunk of those lauded gifts. – Lee Rosenbaum