Person Place Thing: Richard Russo on Somebody’s Fool with Randy Cohen, Ben Copperhead, and Brent Arnold

Featuring

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  Richard Russo

  Richard Russo

  Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are . . . , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017, he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.

  Photo Credit: Elena Seibert

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  Randy Cohen

  Randy Cohen

  Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for Late Night with David Letterman for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore’s TV Nation. He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. For twelve years he wrote “The Ethicist,” a weekly column for the New York Times magazine. In 2010, his first play, The Punishing Blow, ran at New York’s Clurman Theater. He is the creator and host of Person Place Thing, a public-radio program.

  Photo Credit: Marlene Meyerson, JCC Manhattan

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  Ben Copperhead

  Ben Copperhead

  Ben Copperhead is a New York City-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist whose compositions, performances, and arrangements offer a unique, contemporary vision informed by an unlikely range of influences, traditions, and collaborations.

  Copperhead expresses his folk roots through his “otherworldly” banjo style and ethos of political protest. The influence of free jazz and figures like Coltrane, Coleman, and Monk can be heard in his contrapuntal improvisational excursions and alternate tunings. Polyphonies inspired by European classical and North African artists inform his modal and tonal explorations, while the use of samplers, processed drum machines, tape loops, and handmade electronic instruments were inspired in part by the experimentalism of Musique Concrète.

  Copperhead has also collaborated and performed with the legendary Mavis Staples, Darryl McDaniels(DMC), Michael Bearden, Ed Askew, Nona Hendryx, Mary Lattimore, Eugene Chadbourne, Arnold de Boer (Zea/Th Ex).

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  Brent Arnold

  Brent Arnold

  Brent Arnold is a cellist, composer, producer, music director, and arranger. He studied with violinist Michael White (Pharoah Sanders, John Handy) and cellist Walter Grey (Kronos Quartet). He creates music for cello & electronics and composes for concert, theater, film, dance. Founding member of Ghost Quartet with Dave Malloy, Gelsey Bell, and Brittain Ashford.

  Photo Credit: Julieta Feroz