Twenty-two year-old Alex Brown presented his debut album Pianist a couple of months ago with a big boost from his mentor of the last four years, Cuban-American sax giant Paquito D’Rivera. Sure enough, this record has the unmistakable flavor of Cuba You May Also Like: The Crazy World of ArthurRead More

Christian McBride’s new duet with Sting, a smart and groove-filled take on 1985’s “Consider Me Gone,” shows again why the former Police frontman’s original synthesis of new wave and jazz seemed so interesting in the first place. You May Also Like: Sting – 57th and 9th (2016) The Police –Read More

In 2004, XTC mastermind Andy Partridge opened his heart and new label Ape Records to house not only his Fuzzy Warbles series — and initial releases by Peter Blegvad, Orpheus, the Lowdown, as well You May Also Like: Why Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘In an Aeroplane Over the Sea’ Still VeryRead More

Performing live, Lindsey Buckingham has developed this knack for stripping away his familiar in-studio sorcery — an exacting, very revealing process. You May Also Like: How Lindsey Buckingham Balanced It All on the Underrated ‘Gift of Screws’

When Jon Anderson told us earlier in the year that he was writing more “Yes-style music” these days, this — even more than his well-received subsequent solo release — was what most people had in mind: A conceptually epic piece, filled with wonderment, musical twists and a theme as broadRead More

It’s one thing to cover somebody, quite another to expose something fundamentally true about the original song through your interpretation — and that happens with Johnny Cash’s take on this Bob Dylan classic. You May Also Like: How Johnny Cash Challenged Convention Once Again on ‘American Recordings’ How Johnny Cash’sRead More

by Fred Phillips In the early days of my metal fandom, one of the best ways to sample new music was the compilation albums from K-Tel and the like. They were a lot cheaper than a standard cassette, usually running $4-$5 as opposed to $7-$8 for regular albums You MayRead More

Ben Folds, for all his blind-alley turns into jokes that go nowhere, retains a particular eye for the turn of phrase, for the precise word the opens your heart like a flower You May Also Like: Ben Folds Returned to Older Work on ‘Stems and Seeds,’ and Vastly Improved It

Half a decade later, Hurricane Katrina still has this devastating power to inspire, as heard on Peter Novelli’s new self-titled release You May Also Like: No related posts.

There’s a world-weary melancholy, a hard-won realism, to Styx’s new song that didn’t exist in Tommy Shaw’s fun-rocking “Renegade” days, and that points the way out of the band’s more recent habit of backtracking You May Also Like: No related posts.