by Nick DeRiso Billie Holiday’s voice, fragile and thin at the end, belied the strong-willed fighter she always was. This record, dotted with tunes she’d once owned two decades before as a bubbly bird in front of big bands, makes the argument for her. By the mid-1950s, the hard-living HolidayRead More

by Pico Last year I devoted precious little space to praise a then-new album by bassist-composer Ben Allison called Little Things Run The World. The brief praise didn’t really do the record justice, as Allison is a certain kind of composer and bandleader who can build rib-sticking compositions and findRead More

by S. Victor Aaron The Two-fer isn’t a double celebration of a single artist, but rather of a single instrument: the trombone. I’ve always liked that warm, brassy sound with its slippery pitch variations that gives it a colorful, almost-human character. An instrument that has been there in jazz’s earliestRead More

So today we open up a new series “Deep Cuts,” where your friendly music guides here at Something Else pull out and call attention to a more obscure track taken from familiar, sometimes classic, records. If you’re like us, you’re more of an “album” guy than a “singles” guy andRead More

photo: Chris Barber The history of jazz is a history of a continuum of leaders where the next generation of shining stars emerge when the leaders of the prior generation are still in their prime period. The torch of the premier trumpet player passed on from Louis Armstrong to DizzyRead More

by Nick DeRiso Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, a spirited, bluesy and always fun performer, seemed to burst out from a series of early live recordings during a period when that was rare. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were just too many logistical nightmares, from getting good takes inRead More

by S. Victor Aaron About six weeks ago we saluted some amazing young women who stand poised to make a lot of noise in the man’s world of jazz instrumentalists. One of those is releasing her debut album on this very day, a unique bass player who goes by theRead More

by Mark Saleski This review was written with a No. 2 pencil. It seemed like the right thing to do. I know this seems like an odd choice, especially for material destined for a website, but after finishing Against The Machine I felt the need to put some ‘old’ technologyRead More

by Nick DeRiso An honorable, if ultimately somewhat superficial, tribute to the thing that makes Robert “Jr.” Lockwood such an important element to modern blues. Lockwood was something of a stepson to Robert Johnson. The doomed Delta bluesman would stop in to stay with Lockwood’s mother in Helena, Ark., duringRead More