Folk singer Dar Williams has an entry on my “Had To Sit In The Car After Arriving At Work To Get The Scoop On That Song!” list. Back in 1993, about 30 seconds before pulling into the parking lot, “When I Was A Boy” came on WERS, Emerson College radio.Read More

I made it through the first song and a half before getting bored. Mars Volta’s last album was very strong, I thought, though it also abandoned the craziness that pretty much defined them in the past. That’s about all I can listen to now — maybe the first album andRead More

Back when I was taking guitar lessons, my teacher turned me on to a whole pile of players like Jim Hall (my teacher was so into Hall that he actually attended a taping of the Merv Griffin just because Hall was in Griffin’s band), Gene Bertoncini and Howard Roberts. I’veRead More

Coming off the magnificent All Wrapped Up, Jared Gold is back just under a year later with Golden Child. A program that alternates standards with his originals, Golden Child is another parade of Gold’s advanced B3 articulations. Whereas on Wrapped he delved more into knotty arrangements and modalisms atypical ofRead More

I’ve always loved it when Patti Smith busts out the poetry notebook. Long before I ever knew what the hell she was talking about, I loved the passion. Aside from a few of the more mainstream poets (Robert Frost, etc.), poetry has always been considered a fringe sort of art.Read More

I am not a fan of rap, per se, but these newly crowned Rock and Roll Hall of Famers have managed to keep their music so varied that it’s hard to identify them purely as rap. The Beastie Boys also kept a good deal of humor in their music, makingRead More

You might think that the saxophone trio lineup (sax, bass, drums) would have nothing left to say. Sure, Sonny Rollins throws a long shadow, but that doesn’t mean the entire case has been closed. So Fly comes along, bringing a sort of Ornette Coleman vibe. I say “sort of” becauseRead More

For Killing Joke fans, 2007 was a pretty cool time. First, there was Inside Extremities, which offered a previously unreleased 1991 concert, and then there are these releases: two three-disc sets (at a very low price-point) of live material from the band’s career throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. OfRead More

I remember one of the fundamental disappointments when getting into Led Zeppelin was, sadly, this live album. It was just a mess. Sprawling, rambling, incoherent, it just didn’t jell, and there was good reason: it had been chopped up to fit on two pieces of vinyl and was never readjustedRead More

Steve Horowitz can be considered a jazz musician, but you’re not likely to have heard some of his music through the same channels as other jazz musicians. One of his main gigs is writing scores for movies, TV and even interactive media, and his accomplishments include scoring the award winningRead More