NICK DERISO: Man, this is something else. Adamantly not Nashville, for one. (Which is still saying a lot.) Adamantly retro. (Not as unique, but still just fine.) And completely Gary P. Nunn — one of a series of former Jerry Jeff Walker sidemen to step out into their own spotlight.Read More

by Nick DeRiso Freddie “Steady” Krc’s work as leader of the Shakin’ Apostles is as crunchy and cool as his old boss Jerry Jeff Walker’s contemporary stuff is serene and settled. The group had gone through several lineup changes since its inception in 1993, but by 2000 settled into aRead More

NICK DERISO: The Crawl, led by the memorable eyepatch-wearing lead picker Mike Morgan, improved on an already pleasant mix of precise playing and white-boy bark with this one. Singer-harmonica player Lee McBee, who wrote or co-wrote three songs, had by then found a simpler way of getting a song over:Read More

James McMurtry, we know now, had only just begun making steel-toe tapping records that take a while to sink in.

NICK DERISO: The Rockets were an undeniably crisp, hard-working blues band in the early 1980s, respectable if a little nondescript. Darrell Nulish handled vocals and harmonica, fronting a group led by the unusually named, and just as unusually talented, guitarist Anson Funderburgh. The basis for “Blast Off,” a 1992 retrospectiveRead More

NICK DERISO: The story goes: Someone asked Fats Waller what jazz is. His reply? “If you don’t know, don’t mess with it.” Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown messed with it on “Just Got Lucky,” and with fine results. In fact, it seemed his string-bending solos found themselves most at home in theRead More

by Pico When I first read about an album by Mariani called Perpetuum Mobile from 1970 and featuring Eric Johnson, two thoughts immediately came to mind. Either the “1970” part was a typo and “1980” was intended, or this was a different Eric Johnson than the Austin, Texas-based axe virtuosoRead More

by Pico In My Hallowed Opinion, it doesn’t matter much what kind of music it is, if it’s created and executed well, it’s worth listening to. That’s why you don’t have to like crooners to appreciate Sinatra. Or get into reggae to respect Bob Marley. That’s why even though IRead More

by Pico It was a tough call to make: do I pimp Papa Mali’s entire 1999 release Thunder Chicken or just quickly gush over just one of the tracks? There’s certainly enough tasty bits in Chicken to justify the full unpaid advertisement (and come to think of it, I alreadyRead More

by Nick DeRiso Throat cancer got Sam Myers today, all the sadder since he was nothing if not this throaty, memorable blues singer and harpist. A towering, nearly blind seer, Myers (almost always with Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets as his accompaniment) used to practically burn down the stage atRead More