by Pico Tuesday was pretty busy day for Manfred Eicher’s fabled label ECM Records, as this was a day when they are released no less than five CD’s. For this all-ECM version of Quickies, we’re going to take some fairly brief looks at three of these, the more jazz-oriented ones.Read More
Refined, yet deliciously groovy, 72-year-old Johnnie Bassett’s music — and his bearing — belies his family’s rascally bootlegger roots. It’s perhaps no surprise, though, that many of the more well-known Florida-area bluesmen of the Prohibition era — Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red — would stop by toRead More
by Pico East West Quintet, based out of the decidedly eastern locality of Brooklyn, NY, is coming out with only their second full-length album today, Vast. Starting out in 2003 as an outfit celebrating the soulful hard bop popularized by Cannonball Adderley and his famous quintet, East West quickly absorbedRead More
December 17, 2008. That’s the last time a non-jazz record has appeared on a Quickies column. In the intervening half-year there’s been so many fresh non-jazz records that merits at least a few paragraphs, and sometimes the full fledged reviews can’t adequately cover ’em all. So guess what…it’s a QuickiesRead More
by Pico The last time I covered a band out of Providence RI, I was thunderstruck by the wonderfully weird folks who make up the musical buffet table Barnacled. On the other end of the spectrum but in the same seaside New England town hails an folk-rock outfit called TheRead More
The term “Milwaukee’s Best” probably doesn’t have the positive connotation that it should, thanks to that being the name of Miller Beer’s economy brand. But when it comes to musicians, there’s plenty from this fine Wisconsin city to be proud of, from Woody Herman and Al Jarreau to Daryl StuermerRead More
Bill Champlin has a face to match his voice — rugged and sharp-edged, a great gravelly visage.
Photo: Kevin Westenberg By Pico A year ago I broke with my unusual protocol and included a “non-new” album in a Quickies piece. These Streets by Paolo Nutini had already been out for a couple of years by that time, but the debut album by this exceptionally talented teenaged singer-songwriterRead More
by Pico Duck Baker has made his name over several decades as a virtuosic acoustic guitarist, one who prefers to play it solo. That might make him sound like another Leo Kottke, but there’s much more to Baker that makes him a compelling and interesting musician. Baker obviously craves applyingRead More
by Nick DeRiso From the South, but not really, Diana Jones sings with an unforgettable, old-time lonesomeness — like a late-arriving featured act at an old Carter Family jubilee. She then expands on the familiar bluegrass vocabulary with a character-driven, literary touch, nowhere to better effect than on the newRead More
