by Nick DeRiso News this week that Buddy Guy had been Grammy nominated for best contemporary blues album had me revisiting the scalding blisses of Living Proof. I loved it from the first solo, this sharp outburst of gnarled sexuality on “74 Years Young”: “There ain’t nothing I haven’t done,”Read More

Buddy Guy is a great, living blues legend who can still play guitar and sing as well as he’s always has. But his albums of late have been inconsistent. In the case of his last album, Skin Deep (2008), all the guest appearances diluted that hard-driving Chicago electric blues sound,Read More

Click through the titles below for Something Else! reviews on a number of last night’s key Grammy-award winners, including Robert Plant and Alison Krauss — who must have charley horses from going up and down to the podium so often. We also review B.B. King, whose terrific “One Kind Favor”Read More

If whack jazz isn’t exactly your cup of tea, this fifth and final installment of “The Best of 2008” might suit you better. It’s all about the blues, here. I took a fairly broad view of what is called “the blues.” Some of these records may not have a singleRead More

‘The Blues Rolls On’ shows Elvin Bishop is as lively and loose as ever – and that’s enough to make it a good add to anyone’s collection.

by Pico Doyle Bramhall II has been around so much fame and combined with his songwriting and guitar talents, it’s downright shocking that he hadn’t become more than an underground hero himself. But, man, what a résumé. The son of drummer and Stevie Ray Vaughan collaborator Doyle Bramhall, Doyle TheRead More

The concert had been over for hours, forever. But B.B. King was just getting started.

Neatly mixing two of our favorite topics, Branford Marsalis pays no empty lip-service to exploring blues through the jazz idiom here. In fact, you don’t have to listen more than once to hear that’s he’s gone off the deep blue end. Any CD with appearances by B.B. King, Linda HopkinsRead More