The rock landscape is littered with immensely talented bands who, for some reason or another, never got off the ground. And I’ll bet virtually no one has heard of about 98% of them. The remaining 2% are those whose talent wasn’t recognized until it was too late, or the bandRead More

by Nick DeRiso  This is an updated excerpt from a multi-artist piece I had published as part of the statewide Louisiana Folklife Festival’s program book in 1995. Born in 1904, Thomas Edison “Brownie” Ford would travel all over the Deep South — working as a ballad singer, bronc buster, storytellerRead More

This is an updated excerpt from a multi-artist piece I had published as part of the statewide Louisiana Folklife Festival’s program book in 1995. Thomas suffered a fatal heart attack later that same year, in his hometown of Shreveport, La., ending a career that spanned seven decades: On his oldRead More

NICK DERISO: “The Spirits of Our Ancestors,” pianist Randy Weston’s vibrant exploration of the African roots within jazz, remains a rapturous delight in any language. Legends Dizzy Gillespie, Idris Muhammad, longtime Basie sideman Benny Powell and Pharoah Sanders appear, while groundbreaking trombonist Melba Liston — then working for the firstRead More

NICK DERISO: Best to fasten your seltbelts, and put your trays in the upright position. “Git It” is a frenetic, fun-filled journey, this breathless moment of in-concert glory that comes and goes so fast that it remains sadly emblematic of the meteoric rise of Beau Jocque himself. During the lastRead More

A rakish character, to be sure, Sonny Boy Williamson II wore a bowler hat and custom-made two-tone three-piece suit, often regaled the crowds with a hands-free harp solo, even took the name of a once-more famous predecessor in order to jump start his career. Williamson, then, was the perfect AmericaRead More

NICK DERISO: Frank Sinatra, 10 years gone, would have been 93 this month. His mystery still lingers with me, as does the memory of a concert — one of Sinatra’s last — when he recaptured all of that complexity. Sinatra was both a pawn to his past and the kingRead More

All music borrows from something else (even though I wonder if that’s really true when I listen to some of the whack jazz I encounter). The difference between a visionary artist and a hack is how creatively the borrowing occurs. No-Man is a band that borrows more creatively than most.Read More

by Nick DeRiso Coming as this debut rock release did, amidst the mid-1990s’ copy-cat grungery, it’s still a wonder “Weave” is any good at all. Chalk that up to Queen Sarah’s ceaseless woodshedding, said then to take place from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day in the basement ofRead More

by Nick Deriso There was no reason to believe that the Rolling Stones, 30 years into their dangerously debauched rock career, would make anything worth a damn out of the 1990s. In fact, the preceding decade — one in which, by far, the Stones’ best new thing was actually aRead More