Upon reflecting back on the year, I’ve concluded that Torben Waldorff’s American Rock Beauty ranks up there among 2010′s finest fusion jazz records. by S. Victor Aaron It’s been a great year for fusion records, as there has been an abundance of new ideas and well-recycled old ideas. Moreover, there’s a wide diversity of ideas, at least, if your idea [...]

by Nick DeRiso For me, the traditional year-ending Top 10 list has a more utilitarian standard: Which albums did I add to my permanent rotation? See, it’s the rarest of rare items that actually becomes a member of the collection. That’s the kind of standout recording we’ll be talking about today for my calendar-turning retrospective. I don’t know if they [...]

Nobody plays it like Buddy, as his Living Proof testifies. by Pico This part of the Year End series is typically the shortest, and not because there’s less excellent blues and roots records than other kinds of music, but because I regrettably have little time leftover to delve into these idioms as much as I’d like to after soaking in [...]

From where I sit, Roky Erickson’s True Love Cast Out All Evil qualifies for the comeback record of the year. by Pico We begin this series by covering the kind of music most music critics cover when making lists: the Great Mainstream. What defines “mainstream” depends on who you ask, naturally. I slot all rock, soul and pop here, including [...]

by Mark Saleski What kind of a year was it for music? It was so good that very often, I had a tough time figuring out what to listen to next. The proper cliché to be applied is “an embarrassment of riches.” Not only was it a great year for music, it was a great year for writing about it. [...]

by Pico Like mistletoe and egg nog, the “Best Of” lists has become a holiday tradition here. 2010 has been a very good year at Something Else, and not just because we got to listen to a lot of swell tuneskis: we added to our ranks someone whose writing we’ve admired from afar for a long while in Mark Saleski [...]

by S. Victor Aaron There’s jazz and and there’s whack jazz, that label I assign to jazz that is unrestrained, unconventional and sometimes, rude. The kind of jazz that you wouldn’t play at any party, but boy, they sure are fun to listen to when you’re really engaged to the music. The practitioners of this most misunderstood of art forms [...]

by S. Victor Aaron I’m not one of those critics who creates a “best of” list by merely dumping a bunch of names and titles. But I felt a need to explain that because this list of mainstream and modern jazz from the past year has 41 entrants on it. And yet, I left out some albums I would still [...]

by Pico I was going to start off this year’s version of the Fusion Jazz list by explaining what exactly we are calling “fusion jazz,” until I recalled that I already attempted to define it last year. And looking back, it seems so damned convoluted. So disregard that: if it’s at least somewhat jazz and it’s not traditional/modern jazz and [...]

by S. Victor Aaron 2009 has had its share of the blues but there were plenty of blues practitioners making the best of the hard times, as we saw a slew of fine releases by them last year. There were seven of those that really stood out to me, above a large batch of solid, but more run-of-the-mill blues. Most [...]