He’s easy to take for granted, the weird-voiced singer named Willie Nelson. He’s been at it for so long it’s hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t a Willie Nelson around, writing some of country music’s most enduring classics, revolutionizing the artistic and commercial possibilities of honky-tonk, forging a…

After taking a spin through Tommy Womack’s latest album, Stubborn, it’s obvious to see the guy can do practically anything. The Nashville-based wordsmith has the heart of a rocker, the fatalism of a seasoned troubadour, a wit that rivals that of Bap Kennedy or Robbie Fulks, the weird streak of…

Bruce Springsteen’s career, onstage and on record, arguably is the most consistently brilliant of any artist of the past 30 years. But his latest tour is unlike the recent embarkments by rock’s other aging legends: the biannual Rolling Stones and Who wingdings, or the contrived revenue-raking regroupings of Fleetwood Mac,…

The career of Sammy Davis, Jr., was long and strange — laced with tragedy, blessed with success, loaded with contradictions, and defined, for better or worse, by his ceaseless determination to live up to his marquee epithet, Mr. Entertainment. He pulled it off, as is amply proven by the 91…

(Sub Pop) From Brian Wilson and Nick Drake to Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg, rock and roll has never been short on guys who’ve been kicked around by love and roughed up by romance. Northampton, Massachusetts, singer/songwriter Joe Pernice has his share of bruises and scars, and he’s used them…

Like the best mid-Sixties work by Bob Dylan, the first three albums by the Clash redefined the rock and roll landscape into which they were unleashed. Between 1977 and 1979, the British punk foursome issued The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, and London Calling, along with a brilliant string of…

(Delmark) From concept to execution, Design in Time is a visionary marvel, an album that honors jazz innovators as it steps boldly into the music’s future. The maiden release by the Sound in Action Trio, a Chicago outfit led by reedsman Ken Vandermark, Design in Time presents the young sax/clarinet…

The Byrds Live at the Fillmore — February 1969 (Sony/Legacy) Take a spin or two through the latest batch of Byrds reissues offered by Legacy, and you’ll soon figure out that the late Sixties and early Seventies were not kind to the band, which went from defining the country-rock aesthetic…

For someone who describes himself as a “social misfit,” documentary filmmaker Les Blank has a tremendous knack for crawling inside his subjects and capturing their souls on celluloid. Over the course of a career that stretches back more than 30 years, the Tampa-born Blank has penetrated the insular communities of…

The Firesign Theatre Boom Dot Bust (Rhino) Like radio terrorists simultaneously infatuated with Dada, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, and Surrealist wordplay, the Firesign Theatre spent the better part of the Sixties and Seventies skewering pop culture and redefining the concept of the comedy album. At its creative zenith, the…

In the spring of 1962, Memphis producer Sam Phillips, ever the iconoclast, did something he hadn’t attempted in nearly a decade: He recorded a set of raw blues, the kind of stuff that boomed from the juke joints and roadhouses that dotted the flat, desolate landscape of north Mississippi. Phillips,…

Frank Emilio Ancestral Reflections (Metro Blue/Blue Note) While Cuban pianist Frank Emilio hasn’t benefited so far from the wave of international adulation that has swept other Cuban musicians, particularly pianists, into the limelight over the past few years, he’s no less an integral part of the island’s musical history than…

Even before its release earlier this year, George Jones’s Cold Hard Truth already was the most hugely hyped album of the honky-tonk hero’s four-decade career, for two reasons: an alcohol-induced auto crash that damn near killed him, which would have made the set his last collection of new studio recordings;…

Various Artists Viva CuBop! Jazz the Afro-Cuban Way (CuBop) The fact that CuBop, the Latin jazz arm of the independent label Ubiquity, has released twenty-two records in three years is proof enough that something is going right with “the little Latin jazz label that could.” The label’s first compilation, Viva…

Various Artists Bob Marley: Chant Down Babylon (Island/Def Jam) They say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but it can still be fun to fiddle. In the case of the Stephen Marley-conceived-and-produced Bob Marley: Chant Down Babylon, the fiddling may not improve on the perfection of his father’s music,…

Along with Amos Milburn’s “Chicken Shack Boogie” and Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody,” Koko Taylor’s “Wang Dang Doodle” is among the greatest party records every committed to wax. A huge R&B hit for the Chicago-based singer back in 1966, “Wang Dang Doodle” is a vivid, almost surreal snapshot of a particularly…

Even in a city that is defined by its anomalies, Churchill’s Hideaway is one of Miami’s most logic-defying entities. Unless of course you’d expect to find a British pub in Little Haiti — a British pub that specializes in U.K. delicacies such as bangers and mash; boasts a satellite dish…

Although he claims it has nothing to do with his bitter divorce a few years back, Tom Petty’s Echo is the rock veteran’s masterful chronicle of the hurt, betrayal, and confusion that inevitably follow a nasty split. Battle-scarred and weary, this is a different Petty from the guy who smirked…

Faces The Best of Faces: Good Boys … When They’re Asleep … (Warner Archives/Rhino) Respect never came easy for Faces, even during their early-Seventies heyday: Written off as a stumbling, inferior version of the Rolling Stones when they weren’t regarded as merely the back-up group for its vocalist Rod Stewart,…

Cuban Roots Cuban Roots Revisited (Cubop) If Cuban Roots Revisited were simply a tip of the hat to an influential Afro-Cuban recording of 30 years ago, it still would be worth the time and effort. The original Cuban Roots album, released in 1968, was enormously influential (and currently impossible to…

My first exposure to Captain Beefheart came, aptly enough, during an intensely enjoyable acid trip to which Trout Mask Replica provided the soundtrack. It was 1983, and I was seventeen years old. Though already a seasoned music dork with obsessions that encompassed punk and zydeco, Delta blues and modern jazz,…

Los Zafiros Bossa Cubana (World Circuit/Nonesuch) The London-based World Circuit label has had phenomenal success with Buena Vista Social Club, Afro-Cuban All Stars, and septuagenarian singer Ibrahim Ferrer’s recent solo album. With more than two million records sold, the label is clearly on to something good: the preservation of twentieth-century…