One of the bigger regrets I’ve had with this site was missing the opportunity to review Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Kinsmen when it was released two years ago, because this saxman of Indian descent did such a brilliant job in combining traditional Indian music with traditional jazz. Last week, the debut albumRead More

by Mark Saleski, at Binghamton University, Vestal, N.Y. Oh dear, I was this close to feeling disappointed. I loved the Orchestrion concept and music so much that tickets were procured and a trip was planned (across southern New Hampshire, Vermont, and all the way out past Albany to Binghamton, NY)Read More

by S. Victor Aaron Love ’em or hate ’em, Styx was part of many an American boy’s soundtrack of the late 70s and early 80s. When I think of arena rock, the first two bands I think of are Journey and Styx; both bands encapsulated everything that was good andRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Howard Wiley’s The Angola Project (2007) created a lot of buzz and put his name firmly on the jazz map. It wasn’t so much for the tenor saxophonist’s playing or inventing a whole new style of jazz. Rather, the acclaim came from the attention he broughtRead More

Band of Joy resurrects a name that was the moniker for a band that Plant and John Bonham were in before being recruited by Jimmy Page to join a new incarnation of the Yardbirds. That “new incarnation,” of course, soon adopted the name Led Zeppelin and the rest is rockRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Washington, D.C.’s Matta Gawa’s self-described “cinematic chunks of post-hardcore improvised sound” is, however else you might describe it, standing apart from the main body of whack jazz. Sounds created from more than forty guitar pedals generating loops, sample, octave altering, various synthesized noise effects created andRead More

That drummer Scott Amendola must like a lot of the same kind of music that I do, because his name comes up in the credits list of plenty of records that I enjoy. A lot of that has to do with his close association with Nels Cline and being theRead More

by Mark Saleski The sun is setting earlier, the nights are already much longer, and it’s sorta dark when we get up in the morning. This is probably the last weekend for decent foliage-viewing, marking what we all know is coming: winter. The snow will fly, the storm windows willRead More

Photo by Jimmy Katz by Mark Saleski You might wonder, if you’re the curious/skeptical sort, why the late 1800’s concept of the orchestrion needs a modern update. Aren’t we headed toward the inevitable, all-digital future? What’s with all of these “new” instruments with their pesky & outdated moving parts? ToRead More

by Mark Saleski Jazz fans tend to have a love/hate relationship with pop music covers. On the one hand, there are examples like Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” that are sort of hard to argue with. Face it, reinterpretations like that not only put a new spin on an old favorite,Read More