Amazing Aretha: A Review of Aaron Cohen’s book Amazing Grace

Aretha, ready for a little churchy action (Photo: Roger Bamber)

“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll—the way the hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty. American history wells up when Aretha sings. Because she captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and also the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation and transcendence.” – Barack Obama, Kennedy Center, 2015

Wesley Morris put it most succinctly in his elegiac praise for the greatness of Aretha in The New York Times after her passing: “[Her album] Amazing Grace is about an artist reaching another level altogether. Albums don’t ‘matter’ anymore, but they used to. Aretha was responsible for one of the very best. The excellence of Amazing Grace is no secret exactly. It’s still one of the country’s best selling gospel records, as well as Franklin’s most popular album ever.” Morris also alludes to the “fine, forensic appreciation by Aaron Cohen” in the Bloomsbury music-criticism book series, and indeed, Cohen’s masterful book about Aretha’s 1972 live gospel album is not only the chronicle of a seminal event in gospel music proper, it’s also about a major cultural landmark by a national treasure who was widely acclaimed in her lifetime as a form of living heritage. For a deep appreciation of the making and recording of the music on this timeless Aretha recording, the best go-to place is this wonderful little book by this Chicago-based music critic and historian. His Amazing Grace is an inside-out and behind-the-scenes look and listen to her recording artistry in her prime. I say little advisedly, not to diminish its importance but merely to convey its scale, as it is a part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 Series of shorter books each of which examines a single historic recording from start to finish. Cohen’s intimate study is definitely big in stature.

The Big Guns: The Irishman, Marriage Story and 1917

Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in The Irishman. (Photo: Niko Tavernise/Netflix)

This article includes reviews of The Irishman, Marriage Story and 1917. 

The Irishman is the cinematic equivalent of a thick, expensive coffee-table book prominently displayed in Rizzoli’s for the Christmas trade. Martin Scorsese’s three-hour-and-twenty-nine-minute epic has as much prestige as one awards-season release can handle. Steven Zaillian (screenwriter of Schindler’s List, Moneyball and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, creator/co-writer of the TV limited series The Night Of) wrote the adaptation of Charles Brandt’s bestseller I Heard You Paint Houses, a biography of Teamsters Union official Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a middleman for the Bufalino crime family who, shortly before his death, told Brandt that he’d murdered Jimmy Hoffa. (Sheeran’s claim has been disputed since the 2004 publication of Brandt’s book, by the journalist Bill Tonelli in Slate and by the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith in The New York Review of Books.) Rodrigo Prieto, the terrific cinematographer associated with Alejandro Iñárritu and Scorsese’s collaborator on The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence, shot it, in handsome dark tones befitting a classic. The star, Robert De Niro, shares the screen with both Al Pacino (as Hoffa) and De Niro’s Raging Bull co-star Joe Pesci (as Russell Bufalino, who pulls Sheeran’s strings). The list of the cast, which also includes Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale and Anna Paquin, is thirty-three computer screens long on imdb.com.