Buddy Guy is a great, living blues legend who can still play guitar and sing as well as he’s always has. But his albums of late have been inconsistent. In the case of his last album, Skin Deep (2008), all the guest appearances diluted that hard-driving Chicago electric blues sound,Read More

by Mark Saleski “…The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar: now that’s my idea of a good time.” Ah yeah, tell it Mr. Zappa! One of my all-time favorite quotes concerning the instrument, Frank wasn’t proclaiming the guitar the king of instruments so much as noting that it’s theRead More

This Costello disc followed up the simple, organic country-folk of 2009’s Secret, Profane And Sugarcane. The personnel (the Sugarcanes), including red-hot producer T Bone Burnett, carries over but only a little of the music does. National Ransom, which also includes the Imposters as well as Vince Gill, Marc Ribot, BuddyRead More

by Mark Saleski “Subtlety” is not a word to be used lightly in a music review, mostly because it’s likely to scare off the listener before even a single particle of the music has entered their ear parts. The sad fact is that “subtle” and “entertaining” are often thought ofRead More

By Nick DeRiso Otis Rush is the star-crossed guitar god, always in the right place at the wrong time. Close but no rock star. That despite his role as a principal architect of the modern Chicago blues-guitar vernacular, and a memorably emotional style of singing that echoes some of theRead More

by Pico Ever since the music business as we know it first came into existence, there have always been musicians for whose need for artistic purity and/or just out of financial necessity has made them into “do it yourself” musicians, producing homemade music for a limited audience. More accurately, aRead More

photo: Jimmy Katz by Pico Bob Dylan is a towering figure in folk, and as we were reminded a few days ago, his legacy extends deep into rock music, too, via the all the strong and memorable covers done by rock bands, especially The Byrds. What’s more interesting is thatRead More

Here’s a free mp3 download of Cassandra Wilson’s “Silver Moon,” a tune featuring saxophonist Ravi Coltrane from the forthcoming Blue Note recording Silver Pony. A hybrid live/studio album set for release on Nov. 9, Silver Pony features live songs from a European tour and studio work done at New Orleans’Read More

by Mark Saleski For many years, I was very comfortable with the statement: “I hate country music.” It was easy to say because there was so much evidence all around: Garth Brooks, Toby Keith, Faith Hill and all of that — it was really just pop music with belt buckles,Read More

By Nick DeRiso For all of her wandering, Allen Toussaint remains this touchstone for New Orleans-born vocalist Christina Gaudet. But Gaudet doesn’t let her lasting affinity for a hometown soul legend pigeonhole her wider ambitions on Solid, though it’s subtitled “Featuring new songs by Allen Toussaint.” She’s particularly adept atRead More