Tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander delivers a soulful modern tribute to Stanley Turrentine with his album Like Sugar. Recorded at the renowned Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, with longtime collaborators David Hazeltine on piano, Dennis Carroll on bass, and George Fludas on drums, the album reinterprets Turrentine’s spirit rather than simply copying it, resulting in a deeply swinging and cohesive set that blends tradition with contemporary artistry.
Alexander begins this session with one of his originals, “Jave,” and incorporates the shout chorus from Turrentine’s signature tune “Sugar,” using it as a melodic springboard. The outcome is an energetic romp where Hazeltine’s solo bridges classic hard bop with modern harmonic…
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Heat On is Lily Finnegan’s debut as a bandleader and composer. In fact, while this CD is credited to a band called Heat On, the quartet played several gigs under the name Lilly Finnegan Quartet before it took on its current moniker.
Finnegan is an emerging presence on the Chicago scene. Since moving back here after school in 2022, she has drummed with every iteration of Ken Vandermark’s Edition band, and has participated in other combos with locals Katie Ernst and Sarah Clausen, among others. She’s also curated concerts for the Option Series, a schedule of salon-style concerts hosted by Experimental Sound Studio, is a member of the musician’s collective, Catalytic Sound.
If that combination of playing and organizing…
This month’s covermount CD is the amazing ‘Power to the People’ – an exclusive sampler of John Lennon tracks from the new box set. Features killer versions of ‘Come Together’, ‘Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)’, ‘Cold Turkey’, ‘Well Well Well’, previously unreleased Lennon and more!
1. Come Together
2. Well Well Well
3. Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)
4. Cold Turkey
5. Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking…
6. New York City (Ultimate Mix)
7. Sunday Bloody Sunday (Ultimate Mix)
8. Attica State (Evolution Documentary)
9. Send Me Some Lovin’ (Home Jam)
…Remastered by Helge Sten.
Back in 2008, Motorpsycho MK3 was beginning to gel and settle. Kenneth Kapstad’s entry into the band a year earlier had not only started to inspire a new and different writing, as shown in their first album, Little Lucid Moments, but also given the musicianship a solid kick up the behind. By summer 2008 the engine room was back to firing on all cylinders, ushering in a new era of intense and ambitious work for the band.
In hindsight it’s hard to quite remember the sequence of events, but some time early in 2008, an invitation to play the Terrastock Festival in Louisville dovetailed with an opportunity to fulfill the long held ambition to record at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini.
Fallen Angel, The Unfaithful Servants’ second full-length release, serves up a splendid sampling of the Vancouver Island-based quartet’s distinctive take on contemporary Americana.
Call it newgrass, if you will, which necessarily entails a predominant bluegrass component augmented by lots of swing, tricky time changes, nicely woven melodic lines and the occasional hint of rock/pop in the mix.
The Canadian band’s line-up of uber-talented whippersnappers consists of mandolinist Jesse Cobb (founding member of The Infamous Stringdusters), singer-songwriter-guitarist Dylan Stone, fiddle virtuoso Quin Etheridge-Pedden and bassist Mark Johnson.
‘Endless Highway’ sets the stage for…
Le Vent du Nord have been at the forefront of the Quebecois progressive folk movement for more than two decades, and yet are still as joyful and dynamic as ever.
Voisinages, their 13th album, whose title translates to ‘neighbourhoods’ in English, features 12 tracks “telling the stories of the neighbourhoods that connect us and especially those that have enriched Quebec’s repertoire: Irish and Scottish Celts, American folk, songs from Acadia, and French-speaking Americans.”
Whether traditional, like the rambunctious call-and-response of opener ‘Par-dessus le pont’ or newly-minted from the five members of Le Vent du Nord themselves (Nicolas Boulerice, André Brunet, Réjean Brunet, Olivier Demers and…
Traditional South Asian music blurs the lines between composition and improvisation. The Persian dastgah is a looser structure than ragas in the Hindustani or Carnatic lineage.
Where the Rain Is Stored, a new album from a quartet of Toronto-based musicians, is a natural step from those styles to an even freer, more contemporary form of improvisation.
The foursome consists of three members with ties to Iran and a fourth to India.
Vocalist Neda Mohamadpour is trained in the Persian classical style, and her improv stays largely inside those lines. The chordal instrument here is a setar (four-stringed lute), played by Mehdi Rostami. Isa Farah, on cello, alternates between melodic counterpoint and bass figures.
New Risen Throne (Gabriele Panci) does not release albums often, but when he does, it is an event. His work represents a quintessential sound in dark ambient music over the last two decades – the synths, the drones, and the atmosphere – that others have taken in new directions, such as leaning toward industrial or techno variations. But Panci continues to perfect his art, of which the double album Journey to Reach the Fathers is the latest instantiation.
Here, he combines sustained tonal layers, sweeping yet breathy effects, odd vocalizations (throat singing and chant), electroacoustic elements, and distant booming percussion to create echoing subterranean soundscapes. This produces a full, rich listening environment that…
Ukrainian composer Katarina Gryvul stunned us in 2022 with the indelible Tysha. This year, on the heels of an astonishing collaboration with The National Museum in Warsaw, she returns with a set that is even wilder and more intense.
SPOMYN means recollection, and the album delves into the manner in which memories are fragmented, disjointed and reassembled, a process Gryvul imitates with fragile electronics, eruptions of sonic power and layers of voice.
The artist calls each track “a flicker of something lost, distorted, or forgotten.” It’s impossible not to think of the ways in which entire cultures are under attack, their artifacts and collective memory threatened by invading forces; or the rewriting of narratives by the opposition.
Is Kōenjihyakkei’s Angherr Shisspa the greatest Zeuhl album ever made? It could be. …although it’s debatable how much that actually counts for. So, any noise created that helps celebrate this excellent 20th anniversary reissue is not just good for the stature of the album but also for Zeuhl in general, as it is itself a largely overlooked genre. ‘What is Zeuhl?’ you might feel justified in asking. Zeuhl is a moody and bass-driven hybrid of jazz fusion, prog rock and chamber music, typically featuring complex compositions which slough off conventional song structures and apply operatic vocals. This form requires a lot, even from virtuoso musicians. In reality though any definition of Zeuhl is a closed loop because this is music that sounds like Magma; and the term…
We were first drawn to frank dean and andrew by the fantastic art of Ez Goomi; as it turns out, all of Ebi Soda‘s covers are colorful and fun, a perfect reflection of the Brighton sextet. Then there was the title of early single “when pluto was a planet and everything was cool,” which joins track titles by Max Cooper and GoGo Penguin as our favorites of the year. And then of course the most important part, the music.
Listening to that single ~ the synth beginning, the howling Halloween sound, the keening calls, the deep bass, IDM drums and trip-hop horns, we started to think of Ebi Soda as one kind of band, when actually they are many. This particular piece, drawing on everything from early film scores to post-rock, is one of our…
Drummer and composer Tomas Fujiwara leads a powerful experimental quartet of kindred spirits, capable of propulsive rhythms and stunning textures. His Percussion Quartet features other three virtuosos: the widely praised vibraphonist Patricia Brennan and percussionists Tim Keiper and Kaoru Watanabe. Keiper also plays the African string instrument ngoni, while Watanabe brings the shinobue, a Japanese transversal bamboo flute. Fujiwara — who spent five years with the percussion collective Stomp — composed all the contagiously forward-reaching pieces, bridging drummer Max Roach’s percussion ensemble M’Boom with vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s exquisite Blue Note gems of the ’60s and ’70s. Still, the music here extends far beyond…
2025 mix by Jon Altschiller.
As we enter 2026, who could have imagined the Bruce Springsteen Live Archive series would be entering its twelfth year? The first show in the series, Apollo Theater, March 9, 2012, was released in November 2014; remarkably, 100 more have followed, expanding Springsteen’s live recording canon into territory once exclusive to the Grateful Dead.
Tours from 1975 on are represented in that 100, with many covered in depth. Frustratingly to all, a few gaps remain, limited by technical challenges (#freetherisingtour) and tape availability. But the Archive series is open-ended: new sources and playback breakthroughs remain ever possible.
For this year’s holiday release, we revisit…
Kansas City, Missouri native, Matt Pryor, is a household name for anyone who was attuned to the second and third waves of emo. His genre-defining band, The Get Up Kids, were among a small and legendary group that has shaped the musical landscape for years.
…Most recently, on his latest album under his given name, Matt Pryor has presented the world with The Salton Sea, and it is abundantly clear that this is the continuation of a decades-long love affair with music and being outright obsessed with songwriting. Steadfast fans of Pryor’s prolific career will also find themselves treated to a style that is more reminiscent of the works of Paul Westerberg and Red House Painters, that is of course laden with Pryor’s signature style, whose…
…remastered & with 5 bonus tracks.
“Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”, maintains Paul McGann’s character near the start of Withnail and I. He plays Marwood – the ‘I’ of the title – in a drunken and druggy but decidedly unpsychedelic cinematic glimpse into the late 1960s. The film initially flopped in cinemas at the height of 1980s yuppiedom, only to find cult adoration (and over quotation) via subsequent release on video. Everything has its right time in the end. And so it is with Henry Badowski’s one and only album Life Is a Grand, which is finally getting the reissue it justly deserves after all but disappearing, along with its creator, to near complete indifference following its release in 1981. Indeed Badowski himself seems more…
Over the past 15 years Devin McKnight has been building his musical path in bands like Grass Is Green, Speedy Ortiz, Philadelphia Collins, and his own three “solo” releases as Maneka, building quite an impressive resume. McKnight’s releases as Maneka have been increasingly varied as he’s melded jazz (check the Wes Montgomery smoothness in “Throwing Ax”) hip-hop, goth tinged post-punk, searing guitar, and maelstroms of distortion into his songs, sometimes all at once. McKnight has been probing different ways of manipulating sounds to create a very unique adventure in musical expression and his fourth Maneka release Bathes and Listens keeps pushing against the made up boundaries and limitations of “genre.” McKnight and associates…
Egyptian-born oud player and composer Mustafa Said is one of the most illustrious names in Arabic music today. Born blind, he learned music through Braille. He’s led the Asil Ensemble since 2003, a fine band of traditional players on various sizes of oud, qanun zither, nai flute, tanbur, violin, viola, cello and various percussion. Said was awarded an Aga Khan Music Award in 2019.
This is his first album since then, although his fifth with the group. It opens with a short solo performance of sung Sufi poetry, written by Maymunah al-Asheqah, an 11th-century female poet who is said to have been able to walk on water. It’s followed by a substantial instrumental suite for the whole orchestra in ‘Maqam Segah’, gradually increasing in tempo and…
When Eraserhead premiered in 1977, it didn’t just mark the beginning of David Lynch’s singular career — it rewired the language of underground cinema. A nightmarish journey through industrial decay, existential dread, and fractured identity, the film remains one of the most haunting works ever committed to celluloid. Shot in stark black and white, Eraserhead unfolds like a fever dream — where sound, space, and emotion bleed into one another in an uncanny, hypnotic dance. But what truly sets Eraserhead apart, even beyond its disquieting visuals, is its sound. David Lynch, working closely with sound designer and technician Alan Splet, constructed an aural landscape as vital and disturbing as any of the film’s images. The soundtrack is not built…
Twenty-five years is a geologic age in terms of pop culture. For electronic music, it’s an eon, with whole genres, subgenres and movements living and dying faster than mayflies. For an electronic label to simply exist for a quarter century is a major accomplishment, worthy of accolades and great celebration. For an electronic label to be releasing some of their best, most exciting so far along is nothing short of miraculous.
25 Years Cocoon Recordings deserves a medal and a victory lap for that reason alone, as its 15 tracks of driving, relentless, hooky techno feels entirely of-the-moment while simultaneously serving as a weathervane, offering a hint of where electronic music may be heading in the next decade.
Even though it’s ostensibly a retrospective,…
It’s been clear since she first emerged that German pianist Johanna Summer is an extraordinary soloist and virtuoso. But none of her work to date has really resonated beyond the ”wow what an incredible classical technique” dimension until this latest. Perhaps the classical strictness of her style took time to get used to. Her jazz affinity is clearest here. Perhaps she is more of a classical player than a jazz one. Perhaps, perhaps, a lot of these perhapses are still valid.
However there are fewer maybes about this well curated selection on a very still and gathered solo piano album that revels in simplicity.
…‘Giant Steps’ is done more as an étude and you could say that about a lot of what’s here. Its extreme slowness is in a way a statement.