by Nick DeRiso Snooks Eaglin, who had been battling prostate cancer, shot to prominence on the strength of 1959’s “New Orleans Street Singer,” a record that even today is a revelation. Mostly, because it sounds nothing like Eaglin, who was as modern and as inventive and as non-traditional as theyRead More

This is a whodathunkit moment that nearly went un-thunk. Sarah Vaughan, a singer of dizzying range; and clarinetist Woody Herman (then leader of “The Swingin’est Big Band Ever,” as another 1963 recording trumpeted) were jazz legends, both. But they never released a studio recording together, until these broadcast programs —Read More

Sam “Lightnin'” Hopkins, as always, did it in just one take – with the money upfront.

“It’s funny how perceptive parents can be,” ace drummer Lonnie Wilson tells me. “When I was little, my mother was listening to me practice. I was running into the house, listening to a record, then practicing some more.” Musicians call that kind of near-evangelical practice “wood-shedding.” From these lonely, repetitiveRead 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

David “Fathead” Newman, one of our favorite tenor men, has passed after a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 75. A Dallas native, Newman left college to tour with Charlie Parker’s mentor, Buster Smith. He then found fame as a sideman with Ray Charles, spending 12 seminal years inRead More

NICK DERISO: The blue-eyed soul template has been copied so many times that it can feel like a faded and calculating conceit, something singers do simply to attact a demo. Unless you’re Eric Lindell, a native of San Mateo, Calif., who not only aspires to a Van Morrison/Delbert McClinton-level ofRead More

by Pico In 1939, German immigrant Alfred Lion founded Blue Note Records along with Max Margulis as a label dedicated to signing and recording jazz and blues artists. Over the years, this label became a central part of jazz history itself, as it became the home for seminal recordings byRead More

by Nick DeRiso With a shout — and a persona — to match this barrel-house presence, Big Joe Turner lived up to his outsized name every night. Turner’s emergence was tied to those brawny blasts, since Joe came of age in a time when singers had to project past bigRead More

by Nick DeRiso Masterpieces seem to come at us all at once, like epiphanies and summer storms. But the making of such things is more a journey than a lightning bolt, with ideas and elements to mix and match along the way. That’s the case with Dave Brubeck’s superlative 1959Read More