‘The Köln Concert’ still sounds as fresh and honest as it did when Keith Jarrett composed these songs in front of a live audience.

by Nick DeRiso All apologies to Roger Waters, who’s dragging it back on the road for a series of 30th anniversary concert performances, but I was never all that into Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Too much talking, not enough — you know — music. While working out issues in dealingRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Not the bass player for Aerosmith, but a musician named “Tom Hamilton” with a more ambitious calling. For more than forty years, the nonpop New Music composer and performer Hamilton has treated music as a laboratory for experimentation, and a pioneer of using electronics for anarchistic,Read More

by S. Victor Aaron You know the story: a band goes in the studio to records tracks for an album and finds they recorded more than what they needed for that record, so they leave one or two tracks off of it. You’ve also seen this play out: a majorRead More

Rock stars whose dad jammed with Django Reinhardt when said rock star was an infant, and dated Nico not long after after high school deserve my eternal respect and admiration, but as far as I know, only Jackson Browne falls into that category. It was only years later when heRead More

Bursting forth as rock teetered between too-big prog pyrotechnics and mawkishly symphonic concept records, it comes as little surprise that Big Star seemed to disappear with barely a ripple. That, and the fact that Alex Chilton, who died yesterday at 59 after a heart attack, always seemed to be disappearing,Read More

photo: Urve Kuusik by Pico The other day I revisited that beautiful mess by Sly Stone called There’s A Riot Goin’ On (1971), where in the midst of some herion-induced haze were some of the most forward-looking funk and r&b music ever. Even the one radio hit from it “FamilyRead More

So today we open up a new series “Deep Cuts,” where your friendly music guides here at Something Else pull out and call attention to a more obscure track taken from familiar, sometimes classic, records. If you’re like us, you’re more of an “album” guy than a “singles” guy andRead More

By Nick DeRiso “Two Of Us,” the old Beatles album cut, is reborn — as is a long-ago relationship — in the hands of this pair of early 1970s-era country-rock stars. Part of a new Disney children’s album “All Join In,” the tune is actually one of two by theRead More

You made out to Al Green. It’s what worked. Only later, did you realize all that had gone on in those records, starting with this — Green’s first charting hit, “Tired of Being Alone.” His is a voice that whips around, like a sparrow, from flat-footed baritone — all silky-smoothRead More