by S. Victor Aaron Bassist Luther Hughes leads a tenor sax/alto sax quintet in its forth recording paying tribute to the spirit of Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane. Specifically, The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago album recorded with Miles Davis’ band sans Miles himself just six months before they allRead More

Photograph by Andy Goetz By Nick DeRiso Big Sam’s Funky Nation, all brass and sass, opens its latest CD with a floor-rattling invitation to shake every thing you’ve got. For all of its musical prowess, that remains the one and only goal of this fun-loving, funky-butt recording by New Orleans-basedRead More

by Nick DeRiso The truth is, she never really left me. We would ride around, listening to eight-track tapes – or else pull a stereo speaker outside and swing on the back porch – then sing. We listened to Elton John, me and Mom. “They say Spain is pretty,” IRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Gerald Cleaver, along with Nasheet Waits, seems to always be the drummer on some really outstanding jazz records of late. Michael Formanek’s The Rub And Spare Change required virtuosic musicians playing at peak level to make it work, and Cleaver did his part and then some,Read More

by Nick DeRiso New York City-based Brian Hugh O’Neill can’t get away from hard truths on Free World. “The light’s not very kind in this place,” O’Neill sings in the anthematic “Careful What You Want.” “There’s a shadow moving over your face.” That shadow is moving, really, over the wholeRead More

by Nick DeRiso Corinne Bailey Rae isn’t the same singer, maybe isn’t even the same person, that she was at the time of her celebrated 2007 debut. Three Grammy nominations, including one for best new artist, couldn’t shield her from this world’s knifing truths: Her husband, 31-year-old saxophonist Jason Rae,Read More

Photograph by Spencer Tweedy Over the course of a remarkable career, both with her family band the Staple Singers and as a solo artist, gospel-soul icon Mavis Staples has bravely explored the frustrations, sorrows and then joys of the African-American freedom fight. But, lest we forget, she can still rockRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Missoula, Montana’s own Nathaniel Smith has had a career as a jazz drummer and composer that took him from a mountain valley in the Rockies eastward to Appleton, Wisconsin’s Lawrence University (where Smith got to perform with the visiting Dave Holland and Maria Schneider), briefly westRead More

by Mark Saleski I heard a short piece on the radio yesterday about the band Cake. Apparently, their new album has hit the top of the charts. The bad news is that hitting the top of the charts doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Showroom of Compassion took theRead More

by Nick DeRiso Sasha and the Indulgents’ Love in a Box is shot through with a devastating sense of foreboding, from the crafty creep-rock of its opening title track almost all the way through to its desolate final moments of lonesome acceptance. Yet, and this is the power and magicRead More