Late last night, I saw the email light blinking on my phone. A single new message had come in from one of my writer cohorts. The subject line read “Blood Brothers” … and I knew.

< >> *** STEELY DAN SUNDAY INDEX *** Cathy Berberian was this phenomenal opera/modern classical/anything vocally challenging singer. Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1925, Berberian was into music at an early age

by S. Victor Aaron If there’s one song I am drawn to by the message alone, it’s this one. The cheesy late-eighties production and the plain melody does not bother me one bit.

A stylistic tour de force, this self-titled trio effort manages to take in many of jazz music’s most notable influences, even tosses in a dash of Pacific island flavor, but it never falls into the rote imitative traps of so many of today’s more traditionalist recordings.

by Mark Saleski I do believe that there just might be a major error in the Guinness Book of World Records. They’re claiming that the loudest animal sound is made by the blue whale. Hmmmm … not that I want to be a know-it-all or anything but I’m fairly certain that the loudest animal noise ever made was by tenor [...]

This song, issued in the wake of the devastating attacks on New York City in 2001, nearly overwhelmed me with grief the first time I heard it. I thought of my father.