Guitarist Bill Frisell, on his third recording for Blue Note, expands the quiet, explorative music he delivered on 2020’s Valentine through a much different instrumental configuration
Blank Canvas is the fourth album from composer and vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles and her band SCOPE. This one comes via Chief Xian Atunde Adjuah’s (aka Christian Scott) Stretch Music label in partnership with Ropeadope. It’s her first release since 2017’s Free of Form, also on the same label.
Andrew Browning and The 9 Pound Hammers features members from places as varied as Oklahoma and Moscow (Russia, not Idaho) but calls Los Angeles home. The band began as a
Not only does Olli Hirvonen fuse jazz with Americana, but he adds slide guitar, and fashions an airier, lighter overall sonic due to both his own playing and that of bassist Kenney, who plays a Fender Bass VI.
Though no stranger to delicate Americana heart-tugging music, on Love Songs For Losers, The Lone Bellow’s fifth LP and second in two years, the band once again traces scars of loneliness and hurt, but also offers some reflection on love and joy throughout making for one of their most eclectic albums yet, both musically and thematically.
The first solo release from Dean Fertita as Tropical Gothclub is a mix of all the dark and somewhat exotic bands he has played in and supported over the years: Queens of the Stone Age, The Dead Weather, and The Raconteurs.
The new SmallsLIVE Living Masters Series has issued Kirk Lightsey Live at Smalls Jazz Club, their second offering, following this past August’s release of vocalist Sheila Jordan’s Live at Mezzrow. As the series name implies, these recordings honor the best of iconic jazz musicians that are still with us.
Aside from being a great improvisational drummer, Paul Motian is perhaps best known for his composing. Motian was the ideal artist for the dream-like ethereal sounds often captured by the ECM label on which this tribute Once Around the Room appears. His melodies seem to drift like shrouds of mist above a foundation, sometimes shifting but more often sturdy. It’s the kind of music that places a premium on listening and group interplay rather than a series of solos.
Bird Streets’ new album Lagoon is an emotional tour de force that covers self-pity, regret, anger, depression and ultimately peace.
On Changes, King Gizzard’s fifth and final record of 2022, the band proves that they also know when to let one of those ideas marinate.
