A couple of years back keyboardist and composer Pete Levin put forth Certified Organic, the second in a string of Hammond B-3 jazz records he’s recently taken an interest in making. It was a thoroughly enjoyable set, one that sizzled and simmered in all the right places, and we hadRead More

As a Louisiana-born singing and songwriting swamp pop legend, Tony Joe White is a guy we like a lot around here but never gotten around to singing his praises. His new album The Shine, released last September 26, gives us the perfect occasion to do so. The originator of hitsRead More

Photo by Tommy Hazeltine by Mark Saleski It was many years ago, in the early 1990’s, that I had my first encounter with Ronnie Earl. He was playing at Raoul’s Roadside Attraction in Portland, Maine. I had never heard of him before but a friend of mine was sure thatRead More

Photo: Julieta Cervantes by Mark Saleski Not long after receiving Etudes 4 Violin & Electronix, I got up one morning before the alarm went off, and settled myself down to some coffee. The idea was to catch up on the reading material that had stacked up over the past fewRead More

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