There’s a roomful of artistic capacity between just Mike Keneally and Scott Schorr. ‘MFTJ’ puts it to good use.

Here is Butcher Brown’s new, smooth-as-a-baby’s-behind rendition of Ronnie Laws’ hypnotic groover from 1975, “Tidal Wave.” Good call for bringing such a fresh jam from the mid-70’s out of obscurity, as Black Moon did a generation ago.

Bassist and producer Paul Bryan’s ‘Cri$sel Gems’ is a very consistently satisfying set of retro-fusion tracks.

Circles Around the Sun first gestated when Neal Casal was assigned to come up with intermission music for the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well dates.

‘Ordinary Heroes’ is better than your ordinary mainstream jazz because Peter Hum composes, arranges and plays with the finesse and conviction he brings to his political activism.

Just being eccentric doesn’t make one creative, but Cheer-Accident continues to find ways to be a lot of both twenty albums in. Here’s hoping for another twenty albums by this band.

Broadly speaking, ‘From This Place’ is the classic Pat Metheny plot updated with new twists; that is still miles better than what the vast majority of artists are capable of today – jazz or not.

Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘Ordinary Man’ is extremely difficult to listen to – not because of the content, but because it sounds like utter crap.

Giorgi Mikadze tells a lot about himself on his first record as a leader. He is telling us he’s proud of where he’s from and quite honestly, he’s got plenty to be proud of.

Bobby Previte, Jamie Saft and Nels Cline’s ‘Music From the Early 21st Century’ is, thankfully, not typical of music from the era in which we are living in.