Forget everything you know about Brad Mehldau, who rose to fame via contemplative classical-leaning reimagingings of pop songs at an acoustic piano. This isn’t that. It isn’t even jazz You May Also Like: Avishai Cohen’s Melodic, Masterful Gently Disturbed Was a Canny Update Dragon – ‘O Zambezi’ (1978): Antipodean April

Offered with a rough-hewn, acoustic grace, Damian Joyce’s paean to the Big Apple unfolds with a warm confidentiality. But the beginning? Pure Keith Emerson. You May Also Like: Did Emerson Lake and Palmer almost lose Keith Emerson to Yes? ‘Fanfare For the Uncommon Man: The Official Keith Emerson Tribute Concert’Read More

You want to know the Johnny Winter story? Listen to the blues stuff, and there’s a heaping helping of it here.

Jeremy Spencer’s ‘Coventry Blue’ dives deeper into the sense of varied experimentation that guided 2012’s ‘Bend in the Road.’

Close your eyes, and there’s no way you picture this guy singing these songs. The guy with the glasses, the suit, the flushed cheeks. You May Also Like: John Belushi originally thought Steve Cropper was a roadie: ‘The guy with the long hair?’

The songs, after a long time away, just started floating to the surface for Benmont Tench. He’d been a member of Tom Petty’s staggeringly underrated band the Heartbreakers forever, had even had a Nashville writing gig for a time. You May Also Like: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ gritty MojoRead More

Rattling out like a loose-mufflered muscle car, Dark Night of the Soul is a more raw-boned version of Jimbo Mathus’ typical roots rock — darker and harder, like a grittier, more visceral take on the mythical parables of the Band. You May Also Like: Robert Randolph & the Family BandRead More

Left to her own devices after a band breakup, Austin-based singer-songwriter Amy Edwards found herself stuck between her melancholy over what had been and her hopefulness for what might come next. Ghosts and Saints, at times hard-eyed and at others remarkably open, is stronger for that essential dichotomy. She purrsRead More

It would have been easy enough for Matt Schofield, the most heralded blues guitarist to come out of England in recent memory, to leave at slow burns and nifty shuffles. But Far As I Can See displays broader ambitions — and from the first. You May Also Like: Matt SmithRead More

Very Sad begins with a melancholy moment, as Wanja Slavin unfurls these lengthy, enveloping lines on the alto over a stark figure from pianist Rainer Bohm. You May Also Like: ElectroBluesSociety feat. Boo Boo Davis, “It’s a Sad Thing” (2021): One Track Mind Jonny Lang – Signs (2017) A glimpseRead More