If you live in Vermont but want to make a record that sounds like it was made in Nashville, you need a producer that knows how to achieve the famous Nashville sound. Mark LeGrand has producer Colin McCaffrey, who, with […]
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I first met Sarah Munro and Mark LeGrand in the mid-90’s. Mark had said he wrote songs and suggested that we play a few tunes together. I didn’t think much of it until I heard him sing l Know What […]
This is an updated version of an article originally published in July, 2010 in YourNews.com, Madison, Wisc., edition. FORT ATKINSON – If the carp ain’t bitin’ folk here just start writin’ — and singin’ and pickin’. Actually locals have caught […]
Devin Drobka evokes fellow composer-percussionist Paul Motian–one of his influences and heroes–like a kind of guiding light throughout this album. The CD-opening “Blues Town,” exploits the fraught relationship between an elegantly unfolding, mournful melody and a rhythmic pulse that pushes […]
The propulsive “Augurs of Spring” rhythms and the contorted “Ritual of Abduction” must’ve called out to Minneapolis’ muscular alt-jazz trio. They bravely delve into Stravinsky’s transformative epic The Rite of Spring. Yes they boil down the orchestra; yet Ethan Iverson brilliantly funnels Stravinsky’s […]
Milwaukee-born singer Jackie Allen brings to mind a bramble bush in autumn on her new album My Favorite Color. You hear a delicate balance of songs imbued with painful confession, as if her voice carries the slight tinge of spiritual […]
So, who is Jason Moran, really? Well, seems he took his MacArthur “genius” Fellowship and began messin’ with folks, in his latest musical project. For part of the show, he transforms into the Harlem Renaissance pianist-singer-songwriter Fats Waller, wearing a giant caricature head. If you […]
Michael Bloomfield From His Head to his Heart to his Hands: An (Columbia Legacy) Finally, this extraordinary Chicago-born guitarist is no longer playing the blues in history’s alleyway. Al Kooper — who met Bloomfield when both played on Bob Dylan’s epochal “Like […]
Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn (Little, Brown) $32 679 pages The steely quaver in Johnny Cash’s voice seemed to ring out of the blackest, most-bedeviled corner of the male American psyche. It conveyed the resolute self-assurance of a guy you could […]
Pioneering black music critic, playwright, essayist, and former Poet Laureate of New Jersey Amiri Baraka died at 79 on Jan. 9 in a Newark hospital. I thank jazz critic, author and educator Howard Mandel for posting a tribute to Baraka […]
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