Musician and street poet Gil Scott-Heron, best known for “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” died today. Cause of death was not immediately known; he was 62. Scott-Heron started out at the dawn of the 1970s as a jazz-inclined R&B singer and spoken-word performer, a rapper years before the genreRead More

by Mark Saleski There are drummers who can keep time, who stay out of the way in the effort to enhance their fellow musicians’ sound. Moving a step beyond that are people like Joe Chambers, who play with so much nuance and obvious consideration for the ongoing moment that whatRead More

Vacation Part 3. OK, so I didn’t win the lottery. I didn’t buy a big house on the Maine coast. There was no affair with the real estate agent. But you could have probably guessed all of that. You May Also Like: Why You Should Give Pat Metheny’s ‘Rejoicing’ AnotherRead More

Chris Connelly, coming off key contributions to a pair of recordings by Al Jourgensen’s Ministry, neatly sidestepped the dreaded “industrial” tag here with simple musicianship (not to mention a dead-on Bowie vocal turn). Still can’t be sure how he made time for Phenobarb Bambalam, considering he was also touring andRead More

By Tom Johnson I spent most of the morning flipping between one disc and the next, restless for something that actually fit my mood. I just didn’t want to, you know, as they say, deal and nothing particularly appealed to me. On days like this, I tend to gather upRead More

When I listened to the all-time-great bassist Rufus Reid’s brand new CD Hues Of A Different Blue for the first couple of times, it kind of threw me for a loop. Last year’s release Out Front, an SER “Best of 2010: Mainstream and Modern Jazz” selection, was the perfect bass-ledRead More

Vibraphonist Gary Burton’s entire career as a musician has been about thinking outside the box and exploring new frontiers in jazz music. You May Also Like: No related posts.

by Tom Johnson Following her fantastic 2000 release Red Dirt Girl, this found the angelic-voiced Emmylou Harris continuing down the path she started with Daniel Lanois on the equally fantastic but slightly more stunning 1995 album Wrecking Ball, and that’s just fine with me. Once a country-goddess, Harris has incorporatedRead More

In many ways, the initial cuts on Journey’s Eclipse recall the wide-open heavy fusion of the the band’s original Gregg Rolie-era records, a period when guitarist Neal Schon pulled and stretched his muse. At the same time, singer Arnel Pineda possesses a second-act Steve Perry-sounding penchant for soaring expectancy. YouRead More

by Mark Saleski First off, I just have to say that this album, recorded at WGBH’s Fraser Performance Studio in Boston, sounds gorgeous. Many modern recordings, even in the quieter jazz realm, are tainted by the overuse of compression. Not so here. The inner detail of Winard Harper’s cymbal workRead More