At its most pure and best, jazz is a live art where musicians disassemble, explore, then reconstruct melodies and rhythms right before your ears.

There are Baxter self-quotations and talk of cut-throats and fowlhouses for literary experts to spot, but you don't have to know a line of the great men's work to enjoy the play.

Choir teacher Rhondda Garland is serious when she says everyone can sing, or at least hit the right note with her help.

At the more refined end of the Comedy Fest spectrum is an elegant memoir chronicling Paul Barrett's life-long engagement with Tourette's syndrome.

What do Maori haka, Fijian firewalking and yoga have in common? According to a book by Canadian writer Andrew Potter they are all part of an authenticity hoax.

Printmaker Rodney Fumpston has the best of both worlds with a home in Auckland and the beloved place of his birth, Fiji.

Hollywood, aromatic with the scent of gorgeous and available young women, still remains a sexualised and sexist ecosystem.

A treasure trove of Modernist art, lost in the Nazi invasion, is to be auctioned in the UK.

A "FULL HOUSE" sign outside the town hall last Friday was hardly surprising, with Hilary Hahn playing Sibelius with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

And what do you for a job? asked Chris Cox of one of the six whom he had dragged up on stage for the grand finale.

Hyperion's Romantic Piano Concerto series has made its reputation tending to such forgotten masters as Bortkiewicz, Goedicke and Melcer-Szczawinski.

A new biography about talk show host Oprah Winfrey reveals more through what it cannot say.