Archive: 2022

When the best of late ’60s music is discussed, it’s hard not to name Fame Recording Studios and Muscle Shoal Sound Studio and its collective soul artists and session musicians that created a longstanding sound and revered groove that still permeates today. Gainesville, Fla., 9-piece Southern soul outfit The Savants of Soul rekindle that spirit […]

Cole Quest and The City Pickers are a group of New York City musicians connected by friendship and a love of bluegrass. Cole Quest, grandson of the folk icon Woody Guthrie, has brought together a collection of eclectic pickers who have gained recognition on the local scene. Performing both Quest’s original tunes as well as […]

“School” is Irish musician Chris Comhaill’s debut single, but for a first release, it carries impressive compositional depth. The arrangement is warm, folk-oriented, and tinged with the sepia tones – the perfect backdrop for an exploration of romanticized childhood memories. “It felt right that the first song I put out under my own name be […]

Vinyl junkies rejoice, the people over at Record Store Day have announced the list of releases coming to independent record stores on June 18th. This will act as a follow-up date to the original Record Store Day on April 23. Anyone who follows vinyl releases knows the struggle most pressing plants have been going through. […]

In the Spirit of Ntu is South African pianist, composer, and improviser Nduduzo Makhathini’s tenth studio album and his second for Blue Note. As such, it’s a distillation of the styles and concepts covered in those first nine recordings. As we learned in the previous Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds covered on these […]

Time Out Take Five is a regular column comprised of pithy takes on recent jazz releases, spotlighting titles deserving attention that might otherwise go unnoticed. Douglas Cuomo featuring Nels Cline and the Aizuri Quartet: seven limbs – On these arrangements of poignant and provocative compositions, the wide-ranging sounds of guitarist Nels Cline’s instrument, plus electronics, […]

Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band will mark their return to the road in early February, 2023 with a string of to-be-announced US arena dates, followed by European stadium shows kicking off on April 28th in Barcelona and a second North American tour leg starting in August. Said Springsteen: “After six years, I’m looking […]

San Francisco native singer/songwriter Leland Ettinger inhabits the hallucinatory LA seen by transplants like Canadians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell or Sacramento’s Joan Didion (from whom Leland & the Silver Wells derives its name). It is a world where Raymond Chandler’s murderers and victims are Didion’s dreamers of the golden dream. It is a world […]

In “This Head Ain’t Big Enough for the Two of Us”, the KY-born multi-instrumentalist Duncan Wood manages to squeeze the listener in for a brief but exciting tour of what seems to be an already crowded scene in the artist’s mind. Coming from a supportive and musical family, Duncan engineers (except for mastering which was done […]

Iron Maiden have been tearing apart stages since their debut in 1980. For over 50 years the band has been releasing intense recordings and bringing them to life on stage. They returned to the stage on May 22 at the Arena Zagreb in Zagreb, Croatia to kick off their Legacy of The Beast Tour This […]

This weekend, Daytona International Speedway put their race cars in a garage to make way for some of Rock and Roll’s biggest names for the Welcome To Rockville festival. The weekend was packed with legends but the highlight was the long-awaited return of Perry Farrell’s Porno For Pyros. Besides a few brief appearances, including a […]

With the new David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Jane) presents a genre-defying immersion into the art and sounds of David Bowie. The film will be shown in theaters this fall. Moonage Daydream is the first film to be supported by the David […]

With a howling and unholy mix of punk rock and the blues, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club exploded on the L.A. club scene in the early ’80s. By 1984, the band had gone through a few lineup changes and expanded their musical palette to deliver The Las Vegas Story, their most diverse effort […]

This Saturday (May 21), Saturday Night Live closed out its 47th season. Michelle Zauner’s Japanese Breakfast acted as the musical guest for the season finale, performing two cuts, “Paprika” and “Be Sweet”, off their 2021 album Jubilee. Actress Natasha Lyonne hosted the season closer which featured a small appearance from Eminem and more Pete Davidson […]

With John Doe’s new solo album, Fables In A Foreign Land, released on Friday, May 20, the X singer/bass player finds himself in a pre-industrial state of mind, where living wasn’t easy but people were less cluttered with hyperkinetic flashes of social media, spending their lifetimes focused on pretty much what was right in front […]

Hatched in Cleveland, Ohio, Big Hoke delivers horn infused, original Americana and Roots/Rock/Revivalism. Elements of New Orleans Jazz, early Rock n’ Roll, and a Singer/Songwriter mentality make this 12 piece band unstoppable. Justin Gorski (pictured) leads his team of professional players from the Cleveland area with his song writing, arranging, vocals and piano playing that […]

On Friday, May 20th, indie rocker Phoebe Bridgers brought her Reunion Tour to Austin, Texas for a show at the Moody Amphitheater. Sloppy Jane opened.

It’s not unusual for a musician to moonlight in another profession to fund their passion for making music. What is unusual is for a musician to also be a cardiologist. Suzie Brown is a cardiologist in advanced heart failure and heart transplants at Vanderbilt Hospital. She is also a mother of two, which makes you […]

Jacob Garchik, the Rising Star trombonist in the 2018 Downbeat Critics Poll, has already earned a reputation for shunning conventional, straight-ahead jazz albums, although in a strange way he gets closer to that here on Assembly than on previous efforts that pushed gospel, heavy metal, and rhythm section-less big bands. On Assembly Garchik expands his […]