We really love these guys, and you should love them too! The Del Sol Quartet performs works by 20th and 21st century women composers in Berkeley tonight (and one male composer too) in their "Umbilical Chords: Women Composers and the Creative Process" program. And in interesting modern music trivia, one of the women composers (Ruth Crawford) is folk singer Pete Seeger's mother. Del Sol plays at the Ashby Stage (1901 Ashby, x MLK, right across......

In 1950, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the contemporaneous critical response to his stories and those of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, et. al. that: It takes a very open mind indeed to look behind the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time......