Posts by Doug Collette

In the past few years, Little Feat has experienced a dramatic elevation in its public profile. But it hasn’t just happened: the group has slowly but surely nurtured its reputation, long-term and short, through increasingly regular touring that, in 2022, took the form of celebrating the 45th anniversary of the epochal Waiting For Columbus with full performances of the live […]

As the Felice Brothers circa 2023 took the stage in almost sheepish fashion at The Monkey House on June 22nd in Winooski, it hardly seemed possible it’s been a decade since they last appeared in Vermont. Yet indeed it was almost ten years since Ian, James, and the company delivered one of the highlights of […]

Taking place over two nights, 2023’s Grateful Dead Meet Up At The Movies rendered it difficult if not impossible to note the significance of the offering. Devoted to the iconic band’s June 22, 1991 performance at Solider Field in Chicago, this first concert at that venue was also the site of the group’s very last show with the late […]

In all its unfettered glory, whether loud or soft, the jazz saxophone is the sound of liberation. And no such horn-playing embodies that spirit of freedom more than Sonny Rollins. Sufficiently inner motivated to take two extended sabbaticals from touring and recording during the course of his lengthy career, “Newk’ also made a purposeful trip […]

Seemingly as irascible as he is independent, Lloyd Cole is the ideal songwriter/musician to be using electronics as a means to write and record. As on 2019’s, Guesswork, the once and future leader of The Commotions creates, populates, and inhabits a digital nether region that corresponds to his inner world(s) and, by extension, our own. Proceeding directly […]

Add Pat Metheny’s Dream Box to its predecessors, 2003’s One Quiet Night and What It’s All About from eight years later, as distinguished entries in the increasingly lengthy discography of the guitarist/composer. By the very dint of their nature as solo efforts, these three albums would be among the most memorable of many in the history of the Missouri-born musician/bandleader’s career. That […]

Forty-five years of hindsight at least partially illuminates why Bob Dylan’s Street Legal suffered such a negative response in the short term upon its release as well as in some extended retrospect. The man’s eighteenth studio album followed the objectively brilliant Blood On The Tracks in 1974, while that album’s successor, Desire, though not nearly so sharp, benefitted from much […]

Hindsight isn’t always 20/20 when it comes to Neil Young and his extensive body of work (see ‘The Ditch Trilogy’ for the most extreme instance), but it’s crystal-clear in the case of 1993’s Unplugged. The Canadian rock icon pulls from ten different albums for a broad range of selections that comprise the fifty-some minutes, the final […]

Son Volt presents The Songs Of Doug Sahm primarily as a homage to the late Texan, a somewhat unsung but nonetheless rabidly revered figure of contemporary rock. In doing so, Jay Farrar and company’s arrangements and musicianship on the twelve songs accurately reflect the eclectic range of style for the object of their affection employed on his own […]

With the release of Gov’t Mule’s Peace…Like A River, the band’s 2021 album Heavy Load Blues makes much more sense. The latter is a statement of bedrock musical values that, sluggish as it sounded at times, was in fact the sound of a group bringing itself up to speed after not playing much together because of the pandemic lockdowns.  […]