Why wasn’t Roland Hanna, a first-rate piano improviser and brilliant accompanist, more famous? Newly unearthed sessions for the IPO Recordings release Colors From a Giant’s Kit, again first-rate, again brilliant, don’t do anything to solve the riddle. You May Also Like: No related posts.
“Surprise” is right: Sounding more like a spiritual and sonic brother to 1990’s fantastic Wrong Way Up, by Brian Eno and John Cale, Surprise hardly sounds like a Simon album at all. And that’s what seemed to have long-time fans scratching their heads — the odd instrumentation and textures, notRead More
You’ll have little difficulty in finding jazz recordings that seek to transform popular songs into standards. That’s been part and parcel of the tradition from the very beginning. More unusual, however, is someone like saxophonist Miguel Zenon, who so personalizes the shopworn idea on Alama Adentro. Each of the tunesRead More
Productive and consistently good are two attributes that don’t usually go together in the record making business, but it’s been John Hiatt’s hallmark for a while, now. You May Also Like: No related posts.
The best pop songs are about more than their surface allures — the hook, the voice, maybe the lyric. The best pop songs are bound up both in simplicity and mystery, bringing you over a ridge to these stunning emotional vistas, even as you are still trying to get theRead More
Debut albums can often be fun to explore, since you’re not just exploring the music, but the artist, too. They’re funner still when the artist bolts out the gate with his/her own unique plan of attack You May Also Like: James Brandon Lewis Trio – No Filter (2016)
by Tom Johnson Leaving aside the goofy name, Pugwash was that weird bastard child we music writers like to talk about — you know, the “this meets that”: They sounded like latter day XTC meets Jellyfish. In one album, in addition to Pugwash’s own Thomas Walsh, we find friends fromRead More
Relationships heading toward their end can often impart a kind of repelling force between the couple involved. In “For You,” a relationship has run off the rails and there’s no small amount of soul searching. You May Also Like: Reevaluating Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Wild, the Innocent and the E StreetRead More
Some fun facts about this track: 1. “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” is the only Steely Dan track in which Becker and Fagen are not in the songwriting credits. This one was written about fifty years earlier by Duke Ellington and his trumpet player, Bubber Miley. You May Also Like: FiveRead More
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke must have had a bunch of material laying around after ‘Kid A,’ because that was exactly what this follow-up album felt like.
