The late-career success of legendary Ethiopian musicians Mulatu Astatke and Hailu Mergia have brought new audiences to classic Ethio-jazz. The surge of attention has been aided by reissue labels that have made it their business to preserve decades-old recordings of snaking horn play, elegant vibraphones, and mesmeric grooves. But right in the Bay Area, you’ll find a contemporary artist in the same lineage, recording music with a rhythm and style that honors these righteous predecessors.
Singer and educator Meklit Hadero was born in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to an ethnic Kambaata father and Amhara mother. Journeying to America as a refugee, she settled in San Francisco during childhood, and since the late…
You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In.
In 2023, while the singer/songwriter/composer was touring in support of the previous year’s Better in the Shade, Patrick Watson woke up after a show in Atlanta and couldn’t speak. It turned out that he had hemorrhaged a vocal cord while singing. Uncertain, per his doctors, if he’d ever be able to speak or sing again, he continued to work on music in the months to follow and eventually had the idea to invite some of his favorite singers to perform the songs he was writing. With Watson slowly regaining limited use of his voice after several months of silence, the resulting set of hushed chamber pop, 
On November 23, 2024, Avishai Cohen and his Quintet gathered at the world-renowned 
On the heels of their 2024 full-length Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes try several different applications of their emotionally driven songwriting on the eight-song EP 
Sun Triptych is the eagerly-awaited second ECM New Series album by British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova. The first, 2014’s String Paths, made an immediate impact, picking up a Grammy Nomination and superlative reviews, The Strad praising its “glowing tonal harmonies and grand, sweeping gestures,” while the Washington Times hailed it as an “exciting, deeply moving, original and triumphant” recording. The new album embraces a still broader expressive range, as is immediately evident from the opening Whispered Lullaby and Suite in Jazz Style, both for viola and piano, the first a yearning song, the second an imaginative chamber meditation on jazz gestures, atmospheres and textures. Spinning a Yarn, for violin and hurdy-gurdy, has a touching…
Growing up in Inverkip, Scotland, sisters Eva and Grace Tedeschi learned to play multiple musical instruments, and in their mid-teens, they decided to start their own band when none of their peers were as into the ’80s and ’90s indie pop of C-86 and Sarah Records as they were. With younger sibling Eva singing lead and playing guitar, and Grace preferring drums, they dubbed themselves 
Even in a late ’60s rich with groundbreaking psychedelic chamber pop, few albums achieved the same magic as the Zombies’ 1968 masterwork 
In Genesis’ incredible body of work, 
When attempting to provide an overview of a big story – one that encompasses both the myriad achievements of its subjects over a span of several decades and the impacts of those achievements – you can take two routes. There’s the “just the facts” approach, where you list off the people, places, and things that populate the tale, and then there’s another road that winds through the hows and whys behind the names and numbers. Looking at the story of Canadian indie rock institution Sloan, the temptation to look through both lenses is strong.
Have you ever become so immersed in a piece of art that you never want to leave its world? On their fourth full-length, Canadian electronic duo 
It’s been over 25 years since 
Dave Hause’s musical style is best described by an old Frank Turner lyric: “The path I chose isn’t straight and narrow/It wanders around like a drunken fellow.” From his hardcore past (The Curse, Paint It Black) to his punk band (The Loved Ones) to acoustic folk (his solo work), Hause has moved fluidly across genres. So, it’s hardly surprising that he’s once again tweaked his sound. His latest record, …and The Mermaid, is a full band effort, playing straight ahead rock music – raw, guitar-driven, energetic without too much sub-genre complication – reminiscent of everyone from Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and The Replacements to The Kinks.
“One, two, one-one-one-one…” are the first words you hear as frontman/singer/songwriter Cody Cannon and his longtime band kick off Whiskey Myers’ seventh studio album, released Sept. 26, with an exuberant bang.
What happens when two musicians get divorced? If 
The list of “bitchin’” things in music is select: Camaros, summers, pretty lives. Meditative, drone-filled music built on synths, drum machines, and woodwinds usually does not fit the bill. Yet the Chicago trio