Cartoon by David Borchart. For more: http://nyr.kr/YbzsID

Cartoon by Jack Ziegler. For more: http://nyr.kr/Y7pk4K

Sasha Frere-Jones on San Francisco-based band “Tussle,” and a streaming of their new album, “Tempest”: http://nyr.kr/RujU0h

Opening today at Bonni Benrubi Gallery, “One Steinway Place” is an exploration of the famed piano factory in Astoria, Queens, by the photographer Christopher Payne. Under the glow of fluorescent lights, raw lumber is bent, pressed, conditioned, and polished into instruments of exacting quality. With more than twelve thousand individual parts, including Canadian maple, Bavarian spruce, and Swedish steel, each piano takes nearly a year to assemble before being subjected to a final hand inspection by Wally Boot, a fifty-year veteran of the factory. Payne was allowed unfettered access to the factory, allowing him to document every step of the process. Click-through for a selection of his work, which is on view through September 19th: http://nyr.kr/LZ8NyA

The Master from Flint Hill: Earl Scruggs

Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried. In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and played banjo the way no one had ever heard before, the audience responded with shouts, whoops, and ovations. He performed tunes he wrote as well as songs they knew, with clarity and speed like no one could imagine, except him. When the singer came to the end of a phrase, he filled the theatre with sparkling runs of notes that became a signature for all bluegrass music since. He wore a suit and Stetson hat, and when he played he smiled at the audience like what he was doing was effortless. There aren’t many earthquakes in Tennessee, but that night there was.

The Best of The Talk of the Town, 2011

The Swarmatron, in the center of the room, had a pitch ribbon and a swarm ribbon, and an array of unlabelled knobs and switches, which Brian began manipulating in a way that produced something that your own first cousin once removed might recognize as music. Hanging from the walls were four “wall gins”—synthesizers, housed in various clocklike cases, that had been programmed to make random sounds at random intervals.

—Nick Paumgarten, “Swarm,” (January 24, 2011). 

From Hugh Hefner’s brief engagement to Jon Huntsman’s trio of daughters, highlights from The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section in 2011: http://nyr.kr/vwm8Wz