Composer and arranger Ines Velasco showcases her deeply thoughtful and harmonically sophisticated big-band jazz on 2025’s A Flash of Cobalt Blue. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Velasco honed her skills at Berklee in Boston before branching out on projects with National Jazz Orchestra of México, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropole Orkest, Snarky Puppy, and others.
She brings all of this experience to bear on A Flash of Cobalt Blue, collaborating with award-winning Mexican writer Jorge Esquinca, whose poetry book of the same name is Velasco’s inspiration. An elegy for Esquinca’s late father, the book is a narrative biographical poem detailing a trip his family took to the Pacific Coast of Mexico in their titular “cobalt blue” Vauxhall car. It’s a deeply felt…
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Smoke Shifter leans toward tradition, which is perhaps a bit surprising given the exploratory, cutting-edge music previously produced by everyone in this quintet. Led by master percussionist Chad Taylor, the album is a diverse program of well-crafted, contemporary songs performed by an egalitarian collective.
Taylor co-founded the Chicago Underground bands with Rob Mazurek, celebrated Albert Ayler with Marc Ribot and performs with the Exploding Star Orchestra. Prominent amongst his numerous collaborations is his essential work in James Brandon Lewis’ quartet. In another vein, he joined Kevin Diehl and his mentor Joe Chambers on the all-percussion album Onilu (2025). A Philadelphian since 2017, he performs…
It takes a lot of time, money, and dedication, to restore anything of historical importance. And the Plaza Theatre in Palm Springs, California was just the type of venue that required these three key ingredients. Opened to the public for the first time in 1936, this classic Art Deco building was the site of many grand events over the past 100 years.
And so it was on November 11, 2022, spearheaded by Brian Ray (Sir Paul McCartney’s guitar gunslinger for the past 20+ years), a gala fundraiser was held to restore one of Palm Springs’ most treasured landmarks, the historic Plaza Theatre.
Ray and his co-musical director Spike Edney (Queen, Clapton, Elton, Aretha) put together an all-star band to back the four headliners for the evening’s show. And what headliners…
Nashville bluegrass banjo stalwart Wes Corbett’s new album, Drift, is surprisingly spectacular. A member of the Sam Bush Band, Corbett realised that recording an all-instrumental album of original bluegrass tunes in Nashville meant he had access to some of the best players in the world.
Naturally Sam Bush joins, but the album is also graced by mega names like Sierra Hull, Bryan Sutton, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, members of the Punch Brothers, Darol Anger, and more.
Of course, this virtuosity is for nought without great tunes, and Corbett delivers here. The arrangements are shaped for each mini ensemble, so ‘Crane Island’, with Darol Anger, spins into experimental fiddling, while ‘Riptide’ with Hull, Sutton and Keith-Hynes powers through…
Steve Hammond stayed plenty busy in 2025. First, he released an album with his thrash metal band Ice Queen. Last, he put out an album of charming lo-fi recordings under his own name. And in between, he and his country band The AM’s rolled out Here Comes That Broken Heart, a set of 12 tunes that would sound great coming out of an old wobbly phonograph or perhaps off the corner stage in some not-that-cool dive bar. Hammond and “Pony Dan” Prockup split the writing duties, and both steer their songs into interesting places by incorporating pop, psych, punk spirit, and especially snappy ‘60s soul into their malleable honky-tonk.
…The music of The AM’s sounds like something you’d hear creaking out of an old console…
Some combinations are so natural that, in retrospect, you have to ask, “What took them so long to get together?” C Joynes of Cambridgeshire, England and Mike Gangloff of Ironto, Va., have labored separately in substantially similar musical fields. Joynes is a guitarist whose work has drawn inspiration from African and American folk traditions, filtered through early-electric-blues amplification preferences. Gangloff has played fiddle and an armful of other stringed instruments in Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Eight Point Star and Universal Light, traversing an arc that stretches from old-time mountain music to transcendental electric noise.
Since 2023, they’ve worked together as circumstances allow, touring England,…
Changsha, China post-rockers Summer Fades Awayreleased their first album in 2011 and their second in 2012, with an expansive sound that was often compared to that of MONO. But just as the quintet seemed ready to explode to the next level, they disappeared. Thirteen years later they have returned, having gained wisdom and experience while not missing a musical beat. Fittingly, their comeback album is titled Endless.
Much has happened in China in the last thirteen years. The nation has risen in power on the world’s stage, with an acceleration in trade, technology and growth, and the hosting of both the Summer and Winter Olympics. “Ne Jha 2” is the biggest film on earth this year, demonstrating the power of the arts. The phrase “the storms of…
The language we use always has weight to it, but especially when discussing places of contention. Take, for example, the stretch of land on the northern end of the isle of Ireland. While officially it’s known as Northern Ireland, simply using that term is a political statement in and of itself, tacitly accepting British rule over the six counties ceded by the Republic of Ireland just over a century ago in exchange for its independence. Some people call it the North, implying that the region is still a part of the nation of Ireland, only temporarily under the control of colonizers.
In press materials for their new album Days of Heaven, Belfast band Junk Drawer refer to their home as Ulster — a province that not only includes the six counties of Northern Ireland,…
Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California 1980-1992 assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different — dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic — but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.
Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling” — where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to…
Philadelphia producer Eev Frances has covered a lot of ground in four years. A given Frances track might be built out of rave stabs, Memphis-style beats, or Merzbow-grade noise blasts, any one of them looped and compressed into a blunt-force instrument; her more elaborate productions have taken the form of brooding post-dubstep, yearning shoegaze gabber, and misty-eyed jungle. No matter the style, the common denominator has been an omnipresent patina of damage: blown out, bitcrushed, and bristling with distortion, as though her DAW were buckling beneath the surfeit of ideas.
Frances’ new release, Sometimes I Forget to Breathe, marks a shift. The outlines of her music are more vivid — the beats have sharper teeth; the melodies glint like the backs of dolphins.
Witch house — the spooky, internet-y electronic music microgenre that was conceived as a joke and had little to do with actual house music — seems to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance right now.
When artists like SALEM, White Ring, and Ritualz were gathering buzz in the early 2010s, witch house was a loosely applied term referring to just about anything that was dark, mysterious, and made on a synthesizer.
By the time a cohesive aesthetic started to emerge, derived from the graininess of the early digital era and the collective taste of extremely online horror subcultures, the would-be genre had already jumped the shark. When Deftones’s Chino Moreno got in on the action with his ††† (Crosses) project, the whole thing felt vaguely embarrassing.
…La-La Land Records give the expanded treatment to Hans Zimmer’s score to the 1991 hit Thelma & Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by writer-director Callie Khouri (her first credit!), Thelma & Louise starred Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as two midwestern friends whose road trip escape from their humdrum lives takes unexpected turns. The film, screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, earned Oscar nods for its two leads and Scott’s direction, even winning one for the script; it also featured an early supporting role for Brad Pitt, whose smoldering turn led to his rise to the top of the Hollywood A-list.
Zimmer’s score reflected the southwestern Americana locations seen onscreen, with…
Egypt’s “official” popular music throughout much of the 20th Century was a complex form of art song steeped in tradition, well-loved by the middle and upper classes, and even accommodating to certain non-Arabic influences. It was highly structured by professional musicians working an established industry centered in the capitol, Cairo.
However, far from the bustling cosmopolitan center of Cairo, north and northwest, in towns like Tanta and Alexandria and extending across the Saharan Desert to the Libyan border, dozens of fully marginalized artists were developing a raw, hybrid shaabi/al-musiqa al-shabiya style of music, supported by smaller upstart, independent labels, including the short-lived but deeply resonant Bourini Records.
Hailing from an altogether different type of Newcastle (down under) are an exciting new Australian outfit called dust. Their visceral brand of cathartic, confrontational guitar music not only picks up on the coattails of post-punk’s resurgence in recent years, but the four-piece also offer an acute lens of self-inquiry through their lyrics, honed by co-vocalists and guitarists Justin Teale and Gabriel Stove. Their live show pedigree speaks volumes having toured with Interpol globally as well as Slowdive and Bloc Party back home. Now after a string of releases, the band have put to record their most full-bodied material yet in the form of their debut album Sky Is Falling.
The essence of dust’s energetic roots is vibrant from the offset of their debut. Opening track…
Cover the Mirrors, the seventh album from power pop auteur Ben Kweller, is an expression of crushing grief delivered with unbelievable levels of hope and optimism. These songs are Kweller’s first creations since the tragic sudden loss of his son Dorian Zev, who died in 2023 in a car accident at age 16. This kind of world-rattling pain has often historically served as a catalyst for an artist either disappearing from the public eye, or returning to their art as a place to process overwhelming emotions. Cover the Mirrors, while by no means happy, finds Kweller facing all of the heartache and existential confusion related to the death of his son in songs that are honest, vulnerable, and often far more joyful than they are sad. “Don’t Cave” serves as a fairly direct mission…
…limited edition bonus CD featuring 4 demo versions of album songs – ‘The Mirror Still’ and ‘Stay Out of Place’ from the writing/demo sessions at Post Electric studios in Edinburgh, and ‘It’s Not the First Time’ and ‘Like I Had Before’ from the writing/demo sessions in Iona Library last summer.
Idlewild breach dreary themes, such as one’s sense of self and heartbreak, across their self-titled album. All the while the melody on each song, especially ‘Like I Had Before’, creates a juxtaposition of danceability. The diversity of feeling pushes for a cathartic release of the song’s sombre lyrics onto the dancefloor. On the same track, Idlewild’s lyricism captures how our perception of self is shaped by what we witness in the media before we’re able to…
Howard Shore may not be a household name like John Williams, but even casual filmgoers could give any number of junctures at which the Lord of the Rings films would not be what they are without his contributions. Those films are not neglected in this release by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, recorded live at its facilities over a trio of concerts in 2023. The Lord of the Rings films, including The Hobbit, take up most of the first of the album’s three CDs, and one gets the sense that the films are fairly represented even if those wanting to luxuriate in their scores have other options. The main purpose here is to show the diversity of Shore’s scores, emphasized by his own statements that only in film music, once they find a director whose goals accord…
Bandonegro is a Polish tango quartet. Over the course of their 15-year career, they have developed a style that, inspired by the legacy of Astor Piazzolla, combines elements of jazz and classical music. This formula has already won over audiences in Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Switzerland and Japan.
This album, the group’s sixth, was recorded in Buenos Aires. The birthplace of tango, with its vibrant concert and dance hall scene, provided an unbeatable setting for its recording. Of the ten pieces included, nine were composed by double bassist Marcin Antkowiak.
Tanuevo (the title a play on the tango nuevo genre) features prominent musicians from the Argentine jazz circuit: guitarist Lucio Balduini…
The creative community centered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, can be seen as the modern-day equivalent of a city once known as New Amsterdam — a 17th-century Dutch settlement that would eventually become New York City.
Just as modern jazz flourished in mid-20th-century New York, some might argue that today’s hotbed of creative music resides in old Amsterdam. Evidence for this can be found in Old Adam on Turtle Island, a stunning musical creation by a multicultural quartet.
Led by American saxophonist John Dikeman, the quartet previously released Sunday at De Ruimte (2021) with Frank Rosaly on drums. In this new venture, Rosaly has been succeeded by Korean drummer Sun-Mi Hong.
Trust a man whose ideal compositional form is the palindrome to reckon with this axiom: Everything comes back to where you started, then you start over again. 2023’s American Landscapes, the last record by Dutch lutenist/multi-instrumentalist Jozef Van Wissem and American guitarist/filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, ground their sound down to the essentials of pealing feedback and patiently cycling lute melodies, then let it sprawl, taking up all available space. After that, what can you do but build things back up?
That’s one gambit that they employ on their new LP. The quivering, e-bowed guitar tones that Jarmusch wraps around gradual progress on The Day The Angels Cried opener “Concerning Celestial Hierarchy” blossom like a chorus of…