Delfeayo Marsalis, recipient of the 2011 NEA Jazz Masters Award, stepped out with a rare recording as a leader this year — just his second since the 1990s.

by Tom Johnson If you want to look back and see when metal changed directions, Demanufacture is the album that could easily be the one that did it. With their previous album Soul of a New Machine, Fear Factory did something unusual: They released a remix album helmed by Front Line Assembly’s Rhys Fulber. It didn’t set the world on [...]

Hungarian-born pianist Laszlo Gardony is an accomplished musician and composer, having graduated from Berklee and serving as a professor there for a number of years. He’s mingled with many of the best jazz has to offer: Dave Holland, Miroslav Vitous, David “Fathead” Newman, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman and John Blake are all name artists he’s worked with, some of them [...]

If you ever get a chance to see the movie “Dazed And Confused,” you’ll be treated to a pretty accurate depiction of a typical weekend in late 1970′s America. The bad hair, the hiphuggers, the muscle cars, the 8-tracks.

by Tom Johnson I found myself entranced by the horn-laden theme that repeatedly roared through the ads for Inception. Less song-like and more a series of massive, rumbling horn crashes, the music seemed as important as it was mysterious. Hans Zimmer’s score was no mere backing music. Like the biggest scores we’ve come to know, it was a thematic monster, [...]