Posts by Doug Collette

The new Rose Hill Drive album, Moon Is The New Earth, exhibits as much style and finesse as the same trio that composed, played and produced it.

Firmly ensconced for fifteen years now as a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, Nils Lofgren has never abandoned the solo career he was nurturing when Neil Young asked him to play on After the Gold Rush. The two rockers have built an abiding relationship over time and it continues to this day in the form of The Loner: Nils Sings Neil.

his forty-minute 'EP', a collection of tracks previously available individually as downloads, may not supplant what could otherwise be the de rigueur live release from the recent tours of Pat Metheny, Christian McBride and Antonio Sanchez. But it does extend the dynamic of the trio in ways not capturee by the studio album released earlier this year.

Of the four original surviving members of the Grateful Dead, drummer Bill Kreutzmann has kept the lowest profile since the untimely death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. But now this long-standing resident of Hawaii has elevated that profile considerably this year with his work in the trio format with bassist Oteil Burbridge (Aquarium Rescue Unit, ABB) and guitarist/vocalist Scott Murawski (Max Creek).

n their debut recording, Vermont’s Badsuit accomplish the most difficult tasks facing improvisational musicians:  bringing a genuine sense of spontaneity, comparable to their live performances into the often not-so friendly confines of the recording studio.

Same Old Man may be the most accessible album of John Hiatt’s career. But it’s worth serious note that the rewards of hearing this album (repeatedly) far outweigh its simplicity and that’s due to the strength of the songs. Tunes such as “Cherry Red” and “Hurt My Baby” are just two instances in which the author turns the usual conceits of composition inside out.

Like their left coast cousins The Greyboy Allstars, Lettuce is something of a modern urban musical myth. Formed in the 90's out of common experience and taste, members of the band went out on individual projects—Soulive, Scofield and solo—before coalescing once again into a powerful funk collective.

Time Out Take Five, is a semi-regular series by Glide contributor Doug Collette, where he briefly reviews five recent jazz recordings.

It’s been some years since Carlene Carter began her music career consorting with Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds and The Rumour back in 1979. In fact, Stronger is her first album of original material since 1995, a work of renewed creativity inspired in its own way, like that of sibling once-removed  of Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac, by personal tragedies to which the cd title refers.

Mudcrutch is not a Tom Petty album. Nor is it merely a novelty. It is rather the rebirth of a band that met an untimely end when coincidence and circumstance brought together what would later became Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.

Steve Winwood has had a most successful solo career for over a quarter century, beginning in 1981 with Arc of A Diver through 2003’s About Time. Yet no album has so accurately reflected his versatile talents or vividly echoed the pinnacles of his past as Nine Lives. 

Higher Ground certainly deserved to commemorate their anniversary April 15th. The Burlington area Vermont venue, originally housed in a former Denny’s in Winooski strip mall and now in a former movie theater a couple miles away in South Burlington, has made a name for itself over the last decade, alternately nurturing up and coming talent (Derek Trucks, Soulive), welcoming established acts (Gov’t Mule, The Black Crowes, Sonic Youth, Wilco, John Mayer, Modest Mouse) while providing a regular tourstop for musicians as wide-ranging in style as Charlie Hunter and Hot Tuna.

What’s it say about the legacy of The Clash that a truncated version of Revolution Rock was broadcast on public television prior to the release of the DVD? Somehow it makes the English quartet seem less insidious in their influence than they would want their legacy to be.

With four albums, Jackie Greene, 27, hasn’t really come out of nowhere, but he reached a whole different level of visibility when he joined Phil Lesh and Friends in the summer of 2007. Greene’s diverse skills have allowed him to become this group’s de facto front-man, a role to which he has conveyed a commanding stage presence as he sparks both his band-mates and the audiences who come to see them.

If it’s true absence that makes the heart grow fonder, it may also be true that absence makes the band grow stronger. Judging by Vorcza’s second set at Burlington Vermont’s Red Square March 28th, that would seem to be the case.

If you want to talk about tragic irony in rock and roll, you can’t ignore the story of Lynyrd Skynyrd. On the threshold, and deliberately so, of capturing the mainstream audience with which they flirted via the popularity of “Sweet Home Alabama” in 1975, a plane crash took the life of three bandmembers in 1977 merely days after the release of Street Survivors, compelling the label to pull the album and re-release it with new cover art in place of the original version which depicted the band in flames.

Each of Jackie Greene’s albums, from 2002’s Gone Wanderin' to 2006’s American Myth, has marked a definite progression for the young Californian and Giving Up The Ghost is no exception.

The second album in a triptych that includes My Aim is True and Armed Forces, This Year’s Model is now available in a deluxe two-Dd edition, compiling the various b-sides and singles Costello released around this time, as well as a full concert from 1978 with his band The Attractions,

Time Out Take Five is the second of a regular jazz column by Glide contributor Doug Collette, who will be taking snap-shot reviews of recent jazz albums.  This edition, looks at legends Dave Brubeck, McCoy Tyner, Pat Metheny and Joshua Redman, along with the Deep Blue Organ Trio.

In the most practical sense, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood’s three-night run at Madison Square Garden is quite unlike the recent Led Zeppelin on show reunion or the comeback tour of The Police. These two esteemed musicians have some unfinished business: Blind Faith, the band they created and then lost control of stands as the most significant case of arrested development in the history or rock and roll.