NICK DERISO: Funny thing about that modern-day romantic Harry Connick Jr.: Before this decade-old release, he hadn’t ever explored a song cycle about, and only about, love. Oh, Connick would take his shots, now and then. But always with a dash of popcraft crooning, light New Orleans funk or swash-bucklingRead More

There was, for a pairing of musicians so closely associated with other forms, an irrepressible blues feel to 1961’s “Bags Meets Wes,” reissued this year as part of the Keepnews Collection. That makes a chance meeting between Milt Jackson (longtime member of the complex, often formal Modern Jazz Quartet) andRead More

Urged on by a buoyant audience, Cannonball Adderley’s “Walk Tall” becomes both a call to action and a celebration of spirit.

Missing in the eternal argument embodied in their 1970s lyric — Which one’s Pink? — was my idea that it was neither Roger Waters nor David Gilmour. Maybe there would have been no Pink Floyd, not really, without Richard Wright. That’s what I hear in “Live at Gdansk” with GilmourRead More

R.L. Burnside’s ‘First Recordings’ was the result of a neighbor’s recommendation: “I know who that be.”

We think of him as a famous jazz guy. But those who knew Charlie Haden as a child remember him as a bluegrass prodigy in a traveling musical group of relatives.

NICK DERISO: While Rubalcaba was making troubling (if not downright boneheaded) political decisions, he was also proving to be an inspiring (and sometimes downright thrilling) young pianist. Not long after Rubalcaba said the crippling Communist regime in his native Cuba wasn’t all that bad, after all — much to theRead More

Remembering Pink Floyd’s often-overlooked co-founding keyboardist Richard Wright.

In the end, too-soon-gone Louisiana bluesman John Campbell boasted a short, stormy, and now storied career.

Lodged toward the end of a nostalgic song cycle that attempts (with varying degrees of success) to recreate the soaring pop music of his California youth, Brian Wilson offers a moment of naked, welcome honesty. On “Midnight’s Another Day,” away from the florid orchestrations and dense backing vocals associated withRead More