Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Maybe it hasn’t been talked about that much, but in spite of all the advances in the mastery the instrument led by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, the development and evolution of the jazz saxophone didn’t end with those guys. Many of the saxRead More

Densely layered, with an elegant construction, Black Dub doesn’t start out all that much differently from your average recording by uber-hip producer Daniel Lanois. Then something welcomely dangerous, almost feral, happens. Lanois — famous for his work with U2, Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel, among others — is the firstRead More

by Nick DeRiso News this week that Buddy Guy had been Grammy nominated for best contemporary blues album had me revisiting the scalding blisses of Living Proof. I loved it from the first solo, this sharp outburst of gnarled sexuality on “74 Years Young”: “There ain’t nothing I haven’t done,”Read More

by Mark Saleski Lots of review sites have already posted their best-of lists for 2010. We here at SomethingElse! are still in heavy consideration mode. Every single evening for the past couple of weeks we have been locking ourselves into the SomethingElse!Study™ with our slippers, smoking jackets, top-shelf brandy, andRead More

by S. Victor Aaron I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing West Coast jazz from East Coast jazz by ear. I mean. I know it’s supposed to be a more smoothed-out “cooler” variant of the vigorous, sometimes jarring jazz that comes out of NYC and I know that guys likeRead More

by Nick DeRiso The worry, with any rock-guitar virtuoso’s recording, is that it will quickly devolve into onanistic noodling. But Tony Savarino’s Guitaring adroitly sidesteps the problem with a keen eye for variety, and a welcome sense of unselfishness in the studio. The Boston-bred musician is a dabbler, with aRead More

by Mark Saleski Sometimes, the history of music is full of surprises. Another way of looking at it: I’m surprised by my own ignorance. When I think of the South and old-time music, the blues, whites, and blacks, I tend to think of the musics as being mostly separated, withRead More

by Mark Saleski There are so many things we depend upon in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire that it’s sometimes easy to forget that not all of them have been around forever…or will continue to be so. Just as the mountain itself solidly anchors our mental picture of theRead More

By Nick DeRiso At once neo-renaissance, new age and something akin to blissed-out bluegrass, Erwilian’s holiday-themed concert recording Midwinter’s Night neatly sidesteps the pre-conceived notion of sickly sweet Yuletide fare. Midwinter’s Night, instead, is a concert souvenir from warm night of remembrance, affection and camaraderie – sparked by these friendly-as-familyRead More

by Mark Saleski Walk down the street and stop twenty random people, asking them their opinion of Esquivel? If you get less than 19 “Huhwuh?”‘s, I’d be impressed. That’s sort of too bad because Juan Garcia Esquivel had far too many musical ideas in his head. Add some pedal steelRead More