NICK DERISO: You have Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, playing a concert amidst some of the darkest moments of 1960s’ strife, making his own statement for racial pride. Then, as this former Miles Davis sideman repeats the song’s edgy admonition — Walk tall! Walk tall! – his band rumbles up with a friendly, familiar soul context. That’s anchored by Joe Zawinul, recalling [...]

Missing in the eternal argument embodied in their 1970s lyric — Which one’s Pink? — was my idea that it was neither Roger Waters nor David Gilmour. Maybe there would have been no Pink Floyd, not really, without Richard Wright. That’s what I hear in “Live at Gdansk” with Gilmour and Wright, recorded in 2006, but issued just days after [...]

by Nick Deriso Reissued through a joint agreement with Oxford, Miss.-based Fat Possum and Epitaph, “First Recordings” is the result of a neighbor’s recommendation. “If you want a man who can flat lay down the blues,” Othar Turner said, pointing producer George Mitchell down the road outside Coldwater, Miss., in 1967, “I know who that be.” It was R.L. Burnside, [...]

by Nick DeRiso We know Charlie Haden as the bass-playing ground wire on scores of jazz’s more important works — not least of which was his late 1950s turn with the shape-shifting improvisational genius Ornette Coleman. Later, Haden was memorably featured alongside John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, with his own Liberation Music Orchestra and then the hipster noir band [...]

NICK DERISO: While Rubalcaba was making troubling (if not downright boneheaded) political decisions, he was also proving to be an inspiring (and sometimes downright thrilling) young pianist. Not long after Rubalcaba said the crippling Communist regime in his native Cuba wasn’t all that bad, after all — much to the consternation of expats like saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera — he issued [...]

by Nick DeRiso John Campbell was a bundle of contradictions. He wore cowboy boots and snap-button shirts, but played the blues. Campbell could darken the brightest day with this remarkable scowl, something deepened by criss-crossing scars across his face, yet would laugh uproariously through a friendly game of cards. He listened intently to Lightnin’ Hopkins, but befriended Hell’s Angels. Still, [...]

Lodged toward the end of a nostalgic song cycle that attempts (with varying degrees of success) to recreate the soaring pop music of his California youth, Brian Wilson offers a moment of naked, welcome honesty. On “Midnight’s Another Day,” away from the florid orchestrations and dense backing vocals associated with his lost superstar creation the Beach Boys, Wilson admits: “All [...]

NICK DERISO: He didn’t have to do this. Didn’t have to experiment with hipster roots producer T. Bone Burnett, New Orleans pianist Dr. John and others on the superlative “One Kind Favor.” Didn’t have to get off a never-ending love-in tour that seems to draw continuous sellouts of enraptured fans — all perfectly satisfied to be the how-many-ever-millionth customer to [...]

“Wildflowers,” Tom Petty’s second-ever recording without the Heartbreakers, at least in name, was his most personal yet. No where is that clearer than during the record’s heartfelt centerpiece “It’s Good to Be King,” with a memorable orchestral arrangement by Michael Kamen of Pink Floyd fame. There are moments, surely, when the disc is more fun (“You Don’t Know How It [...]