The rock landscape is littered with immensely talented bands who, for some reason or another, never got off the ground. And I’ll bet virtually no one has heard of about 98% of them. The remaining 2% are those whose talent wasn’t recognized until it was too late, or the bandRead More

by Pico East West Quintet, based out of the decidedly eastern locality of Brooklyn, NY, is coming out with only their second full-length album today, Vast. Starting out in 2003 as an outfit celebrating the soulful hard bop popularized by Cannonball Adderley and his famous quintet, East West quickly absorbedRead More

December 17, 2008. That’s the last time a non-jazz record has appeared on a Quickies column. In the intervening half-year there’s been so many fresh non-jazz records that merits at least a few paragraphs, and sometimes the full fledged reviews can’t adequately cover ’em all. So guess what…it’s a QuickiesRead More

by Pico The last time I covered a band out of Providence RI, I was thunderstruck by the wonderfully weird folks who make up the musical buffet table Barnacled. On the other end of the spectrum but in the same seaside New England town hails an folk-rock outfit called TheRead More

by Pico There has long been this deep divide in jazz. One one side are the traditionalists, who believe in the purity of jazz as an art form that shouldn’t be diluted by combining it with other forms of music, nor should stray far from the tenets of jazz establishedRead More

Crosby, Stills & Nash hadn’t produced a new studio record in fifteen years (or ten, if you add Neil Young), but there hadn’t been a more active period of release activity of new/previously unheard material by these three than there have in the last few years. David Crosby and GrahamRead More

The term “Milwaukee’s Best” probably doesn’t have the positive connotation that it should, thanks to that being the name of Miller Beer’s economy brand. But when it comes to musicians, there’s plenty from this fine Wisconsin city to be proud of, from Woody Herman and Al Jarreau to Daryl StuermerRead More

Daniel Kelly is a keyboardist and composer with three albums since 2000 already under his belt before this one, and given his predilection for delving into so many different styles, every release has been a surprise. For Emerge, Kelly’s theme is the piano trio format, but to him, that’s hardlyRead More

This live set is only Kell’s third album, but the bassist/composer offers a fully-conceived collection of songs that’s both modern and melodic. Providing the support are alto saxophonist Loren Stillman (Jackalope, Ecumenics), drummer Joe Smith (John McNeil, Ryan Blotnick) and guitarist Brad Shepik (Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, DaveRead More

by Pico So far here we’ve covered a fairly wide variety of music styles, but still repped for only a handful of countries. Today, though, we’re going to add a few more countries to our slowly-burgeoning list of nations from which the talented musicians we cover come from. Most ofRead More