Photo by John Morris When you first hear 28-year-old Sean Costello with his soulful, emotive voice and his tasty guitar licks, it’s tempting to compare him to Jonny Lang. Born less than two years apart and both making their proper debut albums at the age of sixteen, the comparisons betweenRead More

A late period gem from a couple of old hippies you probably thought had self-destructed in a drug-induced haze years ago. Not hardly. It seems like every time you turn around, Graham Nash and David Crosby are touring in one configuration or another. Oftentimes, it’s with their erstwhile partner StephenRead More

photo by Jack Vartoogian The first thing that is usually said about Jane Ira Bloom is that she is the rare jazz saxophonist who plays the soprano sax…exclusively. With so many prominent forebears who made made memorable music on the straight horn ranging from John Coltrane to Dave Liebman, itRead More

by Pico In the wild world of underground instrumental music, Marco Benevento is a newcomer as a leader, but he’s no stranger to the scene. The thirty-year old Berklee School of Music grad studied jazz piano under Joanne Brackeen, Kenny Werner and Brad Mehldau and set up shop in NewRead More

George Harrison remains the Beatles’ great unresolved mystery — the guy who might have actually done more had he been in any another band after 1965. Or not. His solo records are a frustrating mix of the sublime, the blatant and the unremarkable. Sometimes within a three-song sweep. Sometimes withinRead More

NICK DERISO: The list of Louisiana Music Hall of Fame inductees is predictably recognizable. You’ve got your Dr. Johns and Clarence “Frogman” Henrys, your John Freds and your Blackie Forestiers, your Frankie Fords and your Doug Duffeys. Hold up, Doug Duffey? The northern Louisiana-based globe-trotter may be one of theRead More

Most of this go around of Quickies is about catching up on some of the more recent big name releases. Spending so much time off the main highway of current music, I sometimes need to get back on it to regain a sense of where the mainstream is to beginRead More

The twenty-something jazz guitarist from Maine named Ryan Blotnick is rapidly emerging as a force to be reckoned with. He first got mentioned in this space a few years ago as a member of a really good global party band called Akoya Afrobeat. Right about the same time that P.D.PRead More

This go around of Quickies includes some records promoted by my illustrious Blogcritics colleagues Josh Hathaway, Mark Saleski and Michael J. West. Since they were causing a major (well, in Saleski’s case, minor) ruckus over these recent releases, I of course had to go find out what the big dangedRead More