Album Reviews

Swing States: Harmony in the Battleground, is the latest from multi-GRAMMY nominee, MacArthur Fellow, and Doris Duke Award recipient, violinist Regina Carter. For this momentous release, Carter has assembled her Freedom Band, a first-rate ensemble of consummate musicians including multi-GRAMMY award winners John Daversa (trumpet, flugelhorn) and Kabir Sehgal (bass, percussion), GRAMMY nominees Harvey Mason Jr.(drums) and Jon Batiste (piano) – renowned for leading the house band […]

People have been trying to bury rock and roll for a long time, declaring countless times that rock is dead. Well, if Mojo Nixon taught us nothing else (and there’s a lot to be learned from Mojo), he taught us that “you can’t kill rock n roll.”  If you need proof that Mojo is correct […]

The latest release from Austin singer-songwriter David Ramirez, My Love Is A Hurricane, was initially meant to be a glorified love letter of sorts to his new partner, documenting his affections via song. Unfortunately, the relationship fell part in the middle of the project, giving the album a heavy dose of unanticipated heartbreak. While there […]

How’s this for a description of a record? “Like if Werner Herzog made a chamber-prog-punk record under DMT in The Chelsea Hotel.” That is as apt and vivid a description as any for The Academy of Sun’s new opus The Quiet Earth, a sweeping epic that takes in disparate themes and styles and forges them […]

One of the first things that is striking about southern singer-songwriter Tawny Ellis’ Love Life, her fifth full-length album, is her network of high profile musicians, producers, and engineers. To begin, she worked with three co-producers – Jesse Siedenberg (Lukas Nelson, Lissie), Ted Russell Kamp (Shooter Jennings) and Gio Loria (Jack Johnson). Renowned engineer and […]

Simply said, put your music where your mouth is. Grammy-winner composer, bandleader, and recently named NEA Jazz Master Maria Schneider has been increasingly outspoken about Google and big data companies, writing articles and white papers, appearing on Copyright Office roundtables and testifying before Congress. Schneider says, “Musicians have been the canary in the coal mine. […]

Bluesman John Fusco basks in dichotomies. One is occupational as he is both an acclaimed filmmaker and a recording musical artist. For the latter, he works in two distinct locales, or worlds – deep in the Mississippi Delta and in the pastoral beauty of his home state, Vermont. Yet, the musical dichotomy has never revealed […]

Until relatively recently lifelong Massachusetts resident Lori McKenna was known mainly as a songwriter for the bigger country music stars even though she’s had a long-running solo career. She still has major momentum delivering hit songs but her reputation as a solo artist, now with her tenth release, keeps strengthening with the success of 2016’s […]

2018’s May Your Kindness Remain was singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews’ breakout album. Old Flowers, her third for Fat Possum, surpasses that effort. Few albums come more highly anticipated. Every so often, writers like this one can be somewhat embarrassed to learn that Andrews had issued five albums prior to the 2018 stunner, which proved to […]

Even the headline does not do Bill Kirchen justice. He’s forever associated with the guitar part on the Commander Cody & Lost Planet Airmen hit, “Hot Rod Lincoln,” a great tune for sure but one that pegged him immortally into the category of hot rockabilly guitarist and purveyor of trucking songs. Here on this collection […]

There have been many changes in Mike Dillon’s personal life recently and that has led to a self-described transitional album titled Rosewood via Royal Potato Family. Dillon moved from his longtime hometown of New Orleans to Kansas City and got married while recording. While those personal changes obviously had an influence on his style, it is […]

While avant-funk trio Medeski, Martin & Wood relegates itself to rare live appearances and records these days, native New Yorker Billy Martin aka  ‘illyB’  has kept a somewhat lower but hardly less prolific profile than his bandmates. Guilty is the latest product of his varied endeavors as composer, percussionist, visual artist, educator and record producer, […]

Drummer/composer Jeff Cosgrove uses his sixth album as a leader to celebrate the music of former collaborator, bassist/composer William Parker. On History Gets Ahead of the Story, the drummer offers a unique take on the bassist’s long-standing quartet repertoire by rearranging it for the classic organ trio. Saxophonist/flutist/composer Jeff Lederer (Matt Wilson Quartet and Bobby […]

The Texas Gentlemen – a flawless collective of Dallas-based musicians that have served as backing band to everyone from Kris Kristofferson to George Strait – recorded some of their latest LP Floor It!!!  in Muscle Shoals, Alabama at the legendary FAME studio. And damn those Swampers’ ghosts haunting that studio made sure their fingerprints were […]

Buried in just seven tracks on the debut album from TWO are crates and crates of musical inspiration. Everything from the obvious – alt and indie rock – to snatches of Depeche Mode-esque synth anthems and even folk. The band, comprised of Nico Vega vets Aja Volkman and Dan Epand, strips away a lot of the […]

Precious few of us get to live until age 93, even fewer can look back at that point over 76-year career, and even fewer can see a lifelong dream realized just a month before passing. The beloved saxophonist-composer Jimmy Heath certainly makes a grand exit with the final album of his career, the finishing touches […]

Akron, Ohio’s own, Chrissie Hynde, is back with the Pretender’s 11th studio album, Hate for Sale – a tasty, ten-track nugget that rocks, rolls and everything else in between. In just over forty years, Hynde has fronted the aforementioned rock and roll outfit with various members, and now she’s returned with a smashing new record – featuring the […]

Pianist Christian Sands is fascinated with the element of water – vital to life, surrounding us in so many ways, calm and beautiful and by turns turbulent and devastating. This is his inspiration for his third full-length album on Mack Avenue, Be Water, from the tranquil to the powerful, malleable and unpredictable. The album takes […]

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers were seminally vital in the development of Blue Note Records. Blakey, beginning in 1947 and continuing for over the next two decades, made more than 20 albums for the label as a leader and appeared on over 40 as a sideman. (Keep in mind Blakey has many more as […]

We last heard from Chris Stamey on his double CD vocal/orchestral mammoth project with many high profile guests, last year’s New Songs for the 20th Century Vol. 1 &2. That was a shock to many who associate Stamey with the hard-driving rock of the group he co-founded, the dB’s, as well as his work with […]