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Dave Chappelle has four previous Grammy nominations for Best Comedy Album and four previous wins: “The Age of Spin and Deep in the Heart of Texas” (2018), “Equanimity and The Bird Revelation” (2019), “Sticks and Stones” (2020) and “The Closer” (2023). Indeed, he’s undefeated in the category and is a contender again this year for “What’s in a Name?” If he prevails again he’d tie for second place on the all-time list of winners in the category.

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To date the biggest winner for Best Comedy Album is the now-disgraced Bill Cosby. He claimed six in a row from 1965 to 1970, and then won a seventh in 1987. Of the five comedians who are next in line, Chappelle is the only one still living. The late George Carlin and Richard Pryor won five apiece, and Chappelle shares fourth place with fellow quadruple...

Peter Schickele, whose comedic parodies of classical music overshadowed his own strengths as a serious composer, died Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, N.Y. at 88. His daughter confirmed the death and attributed it to a series of infections that damaged his health.

Schickele won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album four years in a row from 1990-1994. He also won in 2000 for Best Classical Crossover album.

The composer aimed at breaking down the stuffiness of classical music in the grand tradition of Victor Borge, His compositions included the No-No Nonette, the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, the Unbegun Symphony, and Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons, among other titles.

Schickele claimed to be the discoverer of 18th-century composer P.D.Q. Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach, “the last and by far the least” of his 20 children. Schickele claimed to have made several unusual discoveries of P.D.Q. Bach works,...

The Man Who Anticipated Our Present in 1967

In 2000, when I was the Classical Editor at Cdnow.com, I interviewed Morton Subotnick at length -- so much length, in fact, that my boss complained that I ran a two-part feature on a guy he'd never heard of whose name, he said, sounded like that of a dentist. Well, as much as I loved that job and that boss, I was right about the importance of Morton Subotnick. He was one of the first computer-music composers to find a broad audience. Among the earliest electronic composers to use electronic instrument designer Donald Buchla's modular voltage-controlled synthesizer rather than wave generators and tape-manipulated sounds, Subotnick broke away from the highly abstract formulas and structures of academically respected electronic music by including sections with regular rhythms, which pointed to the future of electronic music.

His work for tape Silver Apples of the Moon, released in 1967 on the Nonesuch label,...

With the release of the new Spike Jonze re-imagining of the children’s book Where The Wild Things Are this week, it’s only natural that there is a corresponding flurry of Wild Things merchandising. This DVD, Where the Wild Things Are…And 5 More Stories By Maurice Sendak, is a re-release of the animated version of the book from 1973. It is not a re-master in any sense of the word… but that’s okay. I think that for a lot of people, myself included, seeing stories from their childhood in a pure form, unchanged from how we remember them, is comforting. In addition to the eponymous story, the collection has one other reading of In The Night Kitchen and four shorter Sendak books that were made into songs. As a collection, it is transparent; there are no improvements or rare insights. The set is for people who grew up with...