Various Artists Color and Light — Jazz Sketches on Sondheim (Sony) Jazz artists have been stamping their imprimatur on show tunes for so long that countless Broadway compositions have entered the lexicon of jazz standards. Certainly the works of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein have…
Six weeks after the fact, Les Garland is still scratching his head, wondering just what the hell happened. Nineteen ninety-five was a good year for the Box, the Miami-based music-video cable service where Garland works as executive vice president. Advertising revenue for the nine-year-old company had reached an all-time high,…
AC/DC Ballbreaker (EastWest) If, as the rock-and-roll scuttlebutt goes, this is AC/DC’s parting shot, you’d be hard pressed to tell from listening to it. Unlike fellow mid-Seventies vets the Ramones, who helpfully dubbed their reputed-to-be-final album Adi centss Amigos!, the brothers Young (Angus and Malcolm) don’t tip their hands on…
Gaunt Yeah, Me Too (Amphetamine Reptile) If you’re looking to point a finger at the most fertile patch of American punk-rock soil, aim it north to Columbus, Ohio, the home base for an abundance of noise-making underground visionaries, from old-timers such as Mike “Rep” Hummel and Ron House to Monster…
Expertly wielding a pair of crutches, Goods bassist-singer Jim Camacho hobbles off the Tobacco Road stage after an encore for a recent show. The narrow upstairs cabaret is packed with people, so Camacho has to navigate an obstacle course of tables, chairs, bottles, and bodies. No, wait. Although it’s very…
Willy Chirino Asere (Sony Tropical) Family-style salsa pop with a light dance beat best suited for conservative hips has propeled Miami’s Willy Chirino to the top of the Latin tropical-music ranks. And here we go again: His new release, Asere, is as predictable as the menu of a Cuban restaurant…
After his death, the image remains, an embodiment of cool that leaves an indelible impression whether you encounter it on TV, at the movies, or in photographs. He is a man of Italian descent, dark and handsome. Perhaps he is standing around at some swanky cocktail party, tie loosened into…
Just the other day, from out of nowhere, quite unbidden, drifted thoughts of the U.S. Army’s Christmastime siege of the Papal Nunciature in Panama City six years ago. You remember: Guys in combat fatigues bombarding the Vatican’s outpost with cranked-to-the-max classic rock songs in an effort to drive out pock-faced…
I’ve been compiling year-end best-of lists for one publication or another for close to ten years now, and I still have a hard time with them. It’s a daunting, intimidating task; attempting to accurately survey a year’s worth of music in ten short entries can drive a completist insane. What…
When musicologists of the future try to reconcile the high and low of late twentieth-century music — the time when avant-gardists dismantled classical convention while rock and rollers assembled a cross-cultural folk idiom A perhaps they’ll find the missing link in Can. Much like the Velvet Underground, this German progressive-rock…
The Cars The Cars Anthology: Just What I Needed (Elektra/Rhino) Back in the late Seventies, when record executives and rock critics alike used the term “new wave” to describe the more accessible groups that spun off from the planet of punk, the Cars were the rulers of the new-wave hemisphere…
Kristin Hersh The Holy Single (Ryko) On this four-song EP, Throwing Muses singer/songwriter/guitarist Kristin Hersh goes solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar with little additional instrumentation, much as she did on her fine — and overlooked — 1994 album Hips and Makers. Here she applies her clear, unaffected voice to…
In the mid-Seventies, Honorato “Ony” Rodriguez was just another teenager traveling a path well trodden by countless would-be musicians before him. He had been playing trumpet since he was ten years old, and he brought that skill to the marching band at North Dade’s Norland Senior High School. He also…
Rock and roll exists today only because so many have decided they’re going to be rock stars or they’re going to make a living as accessories to rock stars. They don’t realize the era of the rock star is over. We’ve seen all the clothes and poses and we’ve heard…
Blood, Sweat & Tears The Best of Blood, Sweat & Tears: What Goes Up! (Legacy/Columbia) First, the history. When New York City-based avant-rockers the Blues Project broke up in 1967, the band’s guitarist, Steve Katz, hooked up with jazz drummer Bobby Colomby, and the pair set about welding jazzy big-band…
For more than twenty years, Bruce Springsteen has been creating characters and pushing them through life: through high school bands and dimly lighted bars; through the back seats of Chevys; through factories, plants, and mills; through war-torn rice paddies and crowded city streets; through dead-end relationships and good, solid marriages…
“I’m very much opposed to Christian fascism and people listening to everything Christianity has to say,” expounds vocalist, lyricist, and bandleader Marilyn Manson. “But what if everybody listened to everything I have to say? On a couple of different levels, I think it obviously would be better, but at the…
For a guy who is looking to carve out a spot for himself in the fishbowl world of rock and roll, the vocalist-guitarist for Fort Lauderdale’s Green Eden is a surprisingly reticent individual. Although born with a perfectly acceptable surname, he prefers to go simply by Max, which places him…
New Bomb Turks Pissing Out the Poison (Crypt) Before punk rock found new digs on the Billboard album chart, it was the provincial music of outcasts and miscreants who had little interest in (let alone a chance in hell of attaining) the massive fame and success awarded to the likes…
Rocket From the Crypt Scream, Dracula, Scream! (Interscope) From Gene Pitney and the Crystals to the Gap Band and the Lyres, great singles artists have had trouble filling albums with worthwhile songs. San Diego’s Rocket From the Crypt are cut from the same patchy cloth. They’ve cranked out close to…
Great music writing should thump you on the head and in the heart with the visceral power of the music itself. It should dance in your mind with the sure-footed authority of a tightly locked rhythm section riding a bodacious groove into the Valley of the Big Beat. It should…
It’s easy to think of country music these days as a homogeneous piece of product used primarily as the soundtrack for the Tennessee Nashville Network. TNN is a blisteringly bad but wildly popular cable channel that serves as a kind of MTV for wearers of cowboy hats and Wrangler jeans…
