Organ trios aren’t as common as they once were. With the keyboardist handling the bass duties from the Hammond’s bass pedals and a guitarist or tenor saxophonist providing melodic help on top of a grooving drummer, these bands once turned bars into real music halls. Today, bars are alive with the sound of ESPN, alas, perhaps.
This organ trio of guitarist Peter Bernstein, organist Larry Goldings, and drummer Bill Stewart, however, don’t generally play funky blues workouts. Rhombus is a beautifully balanced survey of modern jazz compositions by masters, along with two originals. In fact, these tunes seem somewhat surprising in this instrumentation. Keith Jarrett rarely recorded with a guitarist; Abdullah Ibrahim, Thelonious Monk, and…
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In 2024, the year of their 20th anniversary, Stefon Harris & Blackout experienced grief and loss with the sudden death of founding saxophonist, vocoder-assisted singer, and aerophonist (an electronic wind instrument) Casey Benjamin. He was, in addition to a bandmate and creative partner, a close friend whose artistic life was deeply intertwined with Harris’. The space he left was enormous.
Legacy Dances is the band’s unconventional memorial and tribute to his memory and includes Benjamin’s playing on all but one track. Harris’s idea for Blackout has always been centered on the idea of jazz as empathy in action, as a blueprint for empathy’s transformative power.
The finger-popping title-track set opener…
Sam Shepherd studied classical piano before he started making brainy dance music as Floating Points. He still occasionally dips his toe back into the classical world, as when he collaborated with the London Symphony Orchestra and the late jazz legend Pharoah Sanders on the great 2021 album Promises. Now, Floating Points is getting into the ballet business.
…Mere Mortals is Floating Points’s first full-length ballet score. Shepherd, who is known for mesmeric live sets that often combine acoustic and electronic instruments, wrote the work in response to a commission from Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet.
Inspired by the myth of Pandora and laced with metatextual poetry, Mere Mortals was…
PRAED is an amalgamation of Raed Yassin (electronics, vocals) and Paed Conca (clarinets, bass, samples), from Lebanon and Switzerland respectively, who have worked together as a duo since 2006. Recorded between Beirut and Berlin, they’ve invited a large group of string and percussion players, well suited to the pair’s devotion to incremental layering and massive pulse-states.
The tracks range from 19 minutes down to four – ample time for expansion! Conca stacks up his clarinet parts to make a veritable horn section, while the hard-attack frame and goblet drums attain an abandoned ecstasy. The strings are strong, but sit just below the synths on the equality meter, with underlaid drones…
Really Good Time’s debut album Affirmations is a tale of squashed expectations and failed dreams. Sizzling with punk influences and genre-bending songwriting, Affirmations is the agenda of an angry generation, and an exquisite contribution to the exciting landscape that is the Irish music scene. The Dublin trio, made up of Wastefellow (vocals, guitar), Ado Tornado (drums), and Jacque le Coque (bass), have established themselves as one of the sharpest acts to come out of Ireland, offering a unique combination of powerful riffs, black humor, and explosive live performances that have landed the band on the same stage as Franz Ferdinand, The Murder Capital, and Gurriers.
With this first album, Really Good Time reflect on the communal nihilism and disillusion…
The Rolling Stones have a new album, Foreign Tongues, out, much to their fans’ delight. Audiences have long craved the raw blues-rock sound of Mick Jagger’s vocals, Keith Richards’ slashing riffs, and the band’s pugnacious attitude. Critical reception to the new record has been mixed, but there is ample desire for such unvarnished manly sounds. As evidenced by the reviews, fans of the new Stones record weren’t looking for a return to the courtly baroque pop of “Lady Jane” or “As Tears Go By”. They wanted the loud, aggressive energy of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Tumbling Dice”.
This style is historically categorized as “cock rock” because of its emphasis on masculinity and performative sexuality. Fans of that kind…
With the release of his first-ever live album, Daniel Donato is experiencing a genuine full-circle moment. What began as a fledgling music career busking around his hometown of Nashville, TN, Donato quickly found his footing as a regular performer among the litany of legendary Music City venues. Most notably, Donato became a fixture at Robert’s Western World, an intimate space that abuts Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium, where the prodigious guitarist honed his generational musical talent over the course of nearly 500 performances and spent countless hours after those shows dreamily staring up at the Mother Church of Country Music.
Fast forward to August 22, 2025, exactly ten years to the date of his final show at Robert’s,…
Cherry Red previously anthologized shoegaze and dream pop with the expansive multi-disc sets Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995 and Cherry Stars Collide: Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986-1995, neither of which included anything by My Bloody Valentine, presumably due to licensing restrictions.
In both cases, the compilations started near the beginning of when the genres were beginning to crystallize, then firmly stopped in the mid-’90s, after the music press stopped giving shoegaze attention, and most of the genre’s big names either disappeared or changed their sound. With We Are the Beautiful: Two Decades of Shoegaze 1991-2011, the compilers start right when shoegaze’s definitive releases were…
In recent years, Gerry Beckley, co-founder of the group America, known for his Top 40 hit compositions “I Need You,” “Sister Golden Hair,” and “Daisy Jane,” has stopped touring with the group in order to focus his time on family and friends on two continents, and on his solo career.
…Produced by Beckley with frequent collaborator and lyricist Jeff Larson, his new solo album Merciful finds the America co-founder looking at where he’s been and where he is now, with ‘All the Wounded Cowboys’ serving as the album’s focus track. Recorded largely in Beckley’s home studios in Sydney, Australia and Venice, California, the 13-song collection brings together new songs, material rediscovered in his archives and a few unexpected turns. Beckley plays virtually all…
Yumi Zouma are breaking up with dream pop. After a decade together, the New Zealand four-piece have honed an airy, lush, lightly melancholic sound – but now they want change. “More extreme everything, more boldness,” guitarist Charlie Ryder has said of fifth record No Love Lost to Kindness, written during the band’s “most friction-filled creative period” to date. While it’s true that their latest singles are faster, louder and more distorted, these bright, pretty tracks will rattle only their longest-serving fans.
‘Bashville on the Sugar’ locks eyes with an ex on the subway and rushes with Olivia Campion’s breathless drumming, while ‘Blister’ flips the band’s knack for whistleable melodies into pogoing, enjoyably predictable pop punk…
4CD sequel to Heaven Sent: The Rise of New Pop 1979-1983, documenting the influence of jazz and ’50s/’60s black American music (including retro soul) on modern pop in the UK between 1982 and 1987. Featuring Everything But the Girl, Robert Wyatt, Working Week, Joe Jackson, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Matt Bianco, Carmel, Fine Young Cannibals, The Blow Monkeys, The Style Council and Swing Out Sister.
…In 1982 a new jazz era was dawning and Soho, a hotbed since the ’50s, was where the renaissance began. Blue Rondo A La Turk, who had the first ‘New Jazz’ hit, were led by Chris Sullivan who opened The Wag Club in Wardour Street in April 1982, a vital catalyst for the ‘New Jazz’ scene.
Vic Godard, singer with Subway Sect,…
Many bands play early jazz these days, but few make it sound as if the ink is still wet on the page. The Oliver-Smith Incomparables accomplish exactly that on Stomp Your Stuff, a recording that salutes the musical language of Jelly Roll Morton without ever treating it as a historical artifact. Pianist Andrew Oliver and drummer Hal Smith lead an exceptional ensemble featuring Colin Hancock on cornet, Andy Schumm on clarinet-cornet, T.J. Muller on trombone-cornet-vocal, Jacob Alspach on guitar-banjo, and Dan Anderson on string bass-tuba. These musicians know this repertoire inside and out, yet perform it with such vitality that each chorus feels newly created.
The title track “Stomp Your Stuff” bursts out of the gate with buoyant brass interplay, playful…
It’s been five years since Zooid, Henry Threadgill‘s longest-running ensemble, released the excellent Poof. Cut Where You Was marks his return to alto saxophone and flutes– he conducted his last two albums. This release coincides with the 25th anniversary of their debut, Up Popped the Two Lips. Cut You Where You Was differs from other Zooid albums in that Threadgill composed it with economy as the hub on which creativity turns. Given the band’s almost instinctual comfort with the leader’s compositional approach, they move out onto a ledge in these (mostly) brief pieces. Threadgill arranged them with built-in permissiveness and flexibility within the interval-based compositional system. Its distinctive musical syntax guarantees that harmonic…
The word invictus was with us long before Prince Harry founded his Invictus Games in 2014.
As noted by Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop (b. 1969), during his long prison stay Nelson Mandela regularly recited the same-titled poem, which William Ernest Henley wrote in the hospital after surgery saved his right leg, his left having been amputated years earlier due to tubercular bone disease.
While the Latin word stands for unconquered, it’s also associated with determination, perseverance, resolve, and resilience.
Why exactly Garrop chose Henley’s sixteen-line poem as the inspiration for her piano concerto Invictus isn’t entirely clear, though the choice does dovetail with other works…
In 1982, British composer and tabla player Kuljit Bhamra debuted with the album Punjabi Disco, featuring his mother Mohinder Kaur Bhamra as the singer. The album was initially a commercial failure, but later developed a cult following after its rediscovery in the early 21st century, leading to a re-release in 2025.
…On DESI: The Soul of Punjab Bhamra serves as the primary mastermind and producer, uniting iconic voices and renowned lyricists across the British-Punjabi and global diaspora.
This album is a testament to, celebration of and showcase for the current talent of the Punjabi music scene in the UK. As such, it not only reminds us of the huge impact bhangra had when it arrived in Britain during the 1980s but also…
…The album has been newly mastered for the reissue and the 2CD edition includes a selection of rarities appended to CD 1 including a newly discovered ‘Cricklewood Jam’ instrumental demo. CD 2 includes a newly mixed version of the band’s second set at the Fillmore East on 27 February 1970, which includes an 11-minute version of ‘Going Home’.
Cricklewood Green provides the best example of Ten Years After’s recorded sound. On this album, the band and engineer Andy Johns mix studio tricks and sound effects, blues-based song structures, a driving rhythm section, and Alvin Lee’s signature lightning-fast guitar licks into a unified album that flows nicely from start to finish. Cricklewood Green opens with a pair of bluesy…
…At the BBC: The Complete Recordings 1979-1981 covers The Selecter’s glory years, from the first of two John Peel sessions in October 1979 (coinciding with their first-on-the-bill slot on the legendary first 2Tone tour, supporting Madness and The Specials) to an April 1981 performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, recorded months before singer Pauline Black effectively called time on the band by leaving to pursue a solo career and acting ambitions (they’d officially split the year after). The 30-track set marks the first time that all the beloved 2Tone act’s BBC recordings have been released in one place. The eight live tracks taken from a December 1979 show in Paris supporting The Specials were released on 1992’s BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert CD…
After 10 releases that have garnered Montreal’s Rishi Dhir and his band Elephant Stone a staunch cult following and collaborations with the likes of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Beck, maybe after their latest album Asha, they will get more than they deserve.
After all, Dhir has been around for a while, covering almost a whole spectrum of psych rock known so far, not only with Elephant Stone but with The Datsons/The High Dials before, and has been one of the more forward purveyors of that branch of psych that looks to India and all things on the Eastern side of the globe.
And so far Dhir and Elephant Stone have not missed a beat in that respect, and obviously had no intention to miss it on their eleventh…
Two decades into their career, a lot has changed for Fruition, a band that initially started out busking on the streets of Portland. Across eight LPs, the group has slowly evolved from a solidly reliable Americana/roots outfit to a collective willing to expand its sound. Their latest, Something More, finds them expanding into indie territory, bringing a little more rock and pop into their familiar roots-based approach.
While the opening song, “Compass,” calls back to their folk background, “Oh Well” finds them starting to stretch a bit more with some alt-country influences. The song is affecting not only because of its message, with Jay Cobb Anderson looking back on his more reckless earlier years, but also because of his delivery, which…
Exactly 30 years after Soul Asylum’s legendary 1993 MTV Unplugged session – recorded at the height of the band’s fame – the Minneapolis alt-rockers returned to their hometown to once again strip things down and go acoustic.
The performance captured that night wasn’t a song-for-song recreation of their early-’90s set, but it was very much conceived in the same spirit: an intimate, unvarnished look at a band and a songbook now carrying three more decades of history.
Three years later, the band is giving the album, MPLS Unplugged, captured from that Minneapolis show, a proper release. Frontman and rhythm guitarist Dave Pirner is the sole remaining member from the Grave Dancers Union era of…