Sit Tight

Music and Lyrics by Jamie Bernstein
September 10, 2020

I recently listened to a song I wrote that I made a home demo of, back in the late 90's -- and it was so oddly resonant with our current times that the tune got stuck, badly stuck, in my head. I woke up in the middle of the night imagining images for the song... the next day I invited my niece Anna to help me over this weekend to make a music video. And we did it!

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Jamie Bernstein
Three Concerts, Two Coasts, One Super Weekend

By Jamie Bernstein - Classical.org
February 12, 2018

Getting from New York City to Philadelphia is a breeze. In a little over an hour, the train pulled into beautiful, be-vaulted 30th St. Station.

I settled into my hotel room, directly opposite the clock tower atop Philadelphia’s famously beautiful City Hall. From my window perch on the 10th floor, I could have contemplated the ornamentation and sculpture for hours! But, I had a date with my young friend Juliana to grab an early tapas dinner (they have great food in Philly) and then bustle the few blocks in the freezing wind to Verizon Hall to catch the Philly Pops concert, which was devoted entirely to a celebration of Bernstein at 100.

The conductor was our longtime pal David Abell, who worked with our dad back in the day and has been a lifelong Leonard Bernstein (LB) booster. (He was fresh off the plane from having conducted “Songfest” in London the week before.)

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Me, Too — And I Let It Happen

By Jamie Bernstein - The Huffington Post
October 23, 2017

This is what women my age used to do back then...

How uncannily connected they were, those two recent headlines: the death of Hugh Hefner, closely followed by the spectacular undoing of Harvey Weinstein. It was a kind of double obituary (one hopes) for the image of that 20th century American man of success, and the delicious perquisites that adorned his achievement.

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The Time My Parents ‘Took A Knee’ For The Black Panthers

By Jamie Bernstein - Huffington Post
October 18, 2017

The word “shitstorm” had not yet been coined, but that is what the situation became.

When we fret over the intense polarization in our culture today; when we shrink from the shrill tones of TV news and social media; when we despair over the callousness of the White House toward issues of race, police brutality and peaceful protest ― we might gain insight from looking back a handful of decades to see how similarly divided we were in another era.

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Coda: The Performance I Can't Forget

By Jamie Bernstein - Opera News
May 2015

What made it all so difficult for my brother, sister and me was that blurry, blurry line between work of art and life.

A Quiet Place came as a sequel of sorts to my father Leonard Bernstein’s 1951 opera, Trouble in TahitiT in T, as we call it, was my father’s processing of his own parents’ unhappy marriage. By the time I was old enough to notice, my grandparents seemed to me like a pretty mellow elderly couple. But my father had recounted growing up in an atmosphere of dinner-table acrimony, squabbles over money, icy silences. The names of the T in T couple were originally Sam and Jennie — his parents’ names. Later, he changed Jennie to Dinah — his grandmother’s name. I wonder what his parents thought of T in T; no record exists of their reaction.

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