by Pico The first time I heard “Barbary Coast” was when I got halfway through the second side of a vinyl copy Weather Report’s Black Market I had just purchased, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with it then. In this rendering, it was a three minute one-chord bass riff decoratedRead More

by Pico Ever since Miles Davis passed away in 1991, there’s been endless Miles tribute albums by artists influenced by him whether by listening to him or even by playing with him. More recently, tribute albums have focused more on the enigmatic electric period and we even covered a fewRead More

Cowboy Mouth — announced this week as one of the many featured bands at the 2007 Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans — emerged in the early 1990s as a rugged, but distinctly popular rock alternative to the typical fiddle-and-rubboard fare associated with Louisiana music. Not that its NewRead More

Let’s circle back to a key moment from Larry Young, the John Coltrane of the jazz organ.

“Jazz is the sound of surprise”–jazz critic Whitney Balliett, 1926-2007 Sometimes you think you know a musician and his tendencies, or that he’s always played the kind of music you’ve known him to play. Over the course of pursuing my curiosity about certain artists, I’ve stumbled upon some rather peculiarRead More

NICK DERISO: Young Freddy Cole had dreams of performing in the NFL. You might understand why the younger brother of Nat “King” Cole would shy away from playing piano and singing. But a severe injury to one hand led him to listen more closely to the emotions that jazz musicRead More

NICK DERISO: On this, their second release, the Bluerunners were not so much tinkering with their tough southern-Louisiana sound, as they were utterly revamping it. “Chateau” (on the terrific old Monkey Hill label) was to traditional Cajun what punk music was to rock — a whole new version, but bornRead More