Ron Miles’ last album, 2017’s I Am a Man was elite. It brought together a striking band—his triomates Bill Frisell on guitar and drummer Brian Blade, along with Frisell’s bassist Thomas Morgan and the always-interesting pianist Jason Moran. The Miles… Read More
6 April 2020, “The Quarantine Concerts”: This is the first time I remember hearing David Grubbs like this, and I was unmoored by the presentation and the humble kind of luminosity to it all. Grubbs doesn’t break his poker face… Read More
In the year 2016, battle lines were drawn. I’m not just referring to on-screen, where heroes fought other heroes in Captain America: Civil War (Russo Brothers, 2016) and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder, 2016), but also off-screen amongst… Read More
Steve Wynn has the patience of a saint. When he formed the Dream Syndicate in 1981, he was up against it, as all the hip critics were falling over themselves to tell the world how little they cared about guitar-based… Read More
At age 13, I encountered my first bootleg: a murky cassette of a Nirvana performance from 1988, seemingly recorded from a toilet stall in the building next door. Over the years, I’ve counted myself fortunate to have had this early… Read More
In the summer of 2011 the Syrian civil war broke out. After struggling for four years to hold on in the capital of Damascus where they lived, the Al Khatib family – ranging in age from teens to grandparents –… Read More
Prince’s 1991 album Diamonds and Pearls, which introduced his band the New Power Generation, is by some counts his second best-selling album period, after Purple Rain. It went double-platinum. It contained his fifth, and final (to date), #1 single. Yet… Read More
Bassist and composer Charles Mingus used to be a figure of controversy for ten different reasons, some political, some personal, and—though this all seems silly in the new century—some musical. Mingus could be difficult with audiences, tough on fellow musicians,… Read More
Not much has changed for Kurt Wagner since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Nashville native spent most of his time in the house, anyway — listening to music, tinkering with songs for his long-running band Lambchop, and carrying… Read More
At the start of the century, in the UK at least, Travis were everywhere. Their brand of earnest, plangent indie rock was a soothing balm for the pre/post-millennium morass, which threatened to make airplanes crash from the skies and terminally… Read More