Geoff Achison Sovereign Town Landslide Geoff Achison hails from Down Under and his album from last year, Another Mile, Another Minute was nominated for Album of the Year in the 2017 Australian Blues Awards. It was brilliantly eclectic and wide ranging, clearly one of the best albums in 2017. His electric guitar tone was so […]
Jonathon Long Jonathon Long Wild Heart We should know better than try to predict what Samantha Fish will do next. This is her first foray in the producer chair and as label owner. That’s right. She’s started her own label, Wild Heart Records. And, conventional wisdom (let’s say from two or three years ago) would […]
Roseanna Vitro Tell Me the Truth Skyline Grammy nominated jazz vocalist Roseanna Vitro is releasing her 14th album and this one is quite different than her last few tribute efforts. The constant is her pianist and arranger, Mark Soskin, who was aboard for The Music of Randy Newman (Best Vocal Jazz Grammy Nomination 2011) and […]
The Imperial Sound The New AM Pravda This is AM radio pop for the 21st century. For their debut, Chicago-based The Imperial Sound deliver brassy, shiny, vocally bright arrangements with hooks that linger in your head for days. In fact, some of the riffs and chords seem to reappear in several songs, as a means […]
Tobias the Owl Safe Harbor for Wayward Echoes Megaforce The band name connotes mystery and intrigue and Elijah Dhavvan’s collective sound, as Tobias The Owl, doesn’t let the listener down. It can be deceptively straightforward, built around an acoustic underpinning, but can also move into engulfing, ethereal realms. A Safe Harbor for Wayward Echoes, while offering some […]
Ernest McCarty Jr. and Theresa Davis I Remember Love BluJazz This is the second album for BluJazz pairing superb vocalist Theresa Davis with composer, guitarist, and keyboardist Ernest McCarty Jr. The first, “A Reunion Tribute to Erroll Garner” was done for McCarty’s mentor, with whom he played as a bassist for five years. Davis sings […]
Joey Morant Forever Sanctified BluJazz Trumpeter, composer, producer, entertainer Joey Morant is a veteran presence in the current NYC jazz scene. Morant works as a soloist, in duet and trio settings, and in larger bands and orchestras. It’s not only his trumpet playing, but scat singing, and his on stage banter that sets him apart. […]
Vinyl Hampdin Red Armored Steve Wiest, the founding member of the jazz-rock collective Vinyl Hampdin, sums it up this way, “What would Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears and Tower of Power sound like if they started out today?” That’s a tantalizing question that probably describes the band’s approach better than this writer can. In any […]
Jimmy LaFave Peace Town Music Road Posthumous albums that come barely a year after the artist’s passing can be difficult to listen to. My tears are welling up while writing, knowing how much we’ll miss Jimmy LaFave. He, in the words of Gretchen Peters, possessed not only a “singular voice” but was arguably the best […]
Vince Bell Ojo Mulatta When a Texas singer-songwriter is produced by Bob Neuwirth, one does not likely guess it would be a spoken word jazz album. Bell is a poet and his version of the spoken word resembles the early Beat era in San Francisco with artists like Kenneth Rexroth. Yet, the musical concept of […]
