What is the Beautiful?
(Hint: The best things in life are acquired tastes.)

Yom Kippur is when we Jews face up to the way we lead our lives. The cantor uses the liturgy to break open our hearts and try to pry open God’s. But if there were going to be a secular soundtrack, it would have to be Bach’s Cello Suites.

In 1964, Hamilton Camp described in a spookily prophetic song how civilization’s greatest tower is laid to waste, turned to dust by terror in a flash of fire, brought about by the ‘Pride of Man’. In this week’s SoTW, Jeff looks at the Twin Towers and Rosh HaShana and the Tower of Babel story and his own personal religious philosophy and tries to make some sense out of a very confusing world.

An immaculate union of the pristine and the passionate – The Real Group in a breathtaking take on ‘Nature Boy’. It’s just a little perfect.

An allegory, in which Demon Alcohol gets the last word.

Michael McGlynn’s Anúna invents traditional Irish Holy Music, Folk Music,neo-Gregorian Chants, New Age and Riverdance–all a cappella, in costume, in candlelight.

Bob Dylan at his best. It don’t get no better than that.

James Blake is the boy from the haunted house next door – Bela Lugosi’s visiting nephew. Haunting ain’t the word. He possesses you. Beacon don’t fly too high.