The Show is back!After a hiatus starting in August 2011, with old band members leaving and new ones joining, this album was much anticipated by fans. Never fear. It’s every bit worth the wait. In fact, Carry Me Back is like two albums in one. There are “old” songs and “new” songs here, the old [...]
To expect a record by the Outlaws to sound this good in 2012 would be folly. The band hasn’t released a studio album in more than two decades and two of the main guitarists from the original band – Hughie Thomasson and Billy Jones – are dead. The remaining original guitarist, Henry Paul, has resurrected [...]
Like earlier country outlaws, Jamey Johnson forges his own paths while never forgetting his forebears. One is singer-composer Hank Cochran, who died in 2010. A giant among Nashville writers, Cochran wrote many tunes over nearly half a century, some now country standards. Having worked with a prerocking Eddie Cochran (no relation) in the early ’50s, [...]
It’s not glam rock, although “(I’m A) Slut” sparkles with a certain Bowie/ Roxy Music sexual ambiguity. It’s not Captain Beefheart’s industrial-strength experimental rock, though “Karaoke,” with a West Coast cool sax solo from Don Govoni furthers the Beefheart connection. Whatever elements make up Berlin’s musical amalgam, he often sounds like he’s working off pure [...]
Dokken is still going strong with their 11th studio album Broken Bones. With vocalist Don Dokken as producer, it’s an album that is shameless in its mission to reproduce the sound that made the band one of the top recording and touring acts of the 1980s. Though half the classic lineup is long gone, the [...]
Call this music “Americana,” if you have to put a label on it. The opener, “Red Dirt,” establishes straight away the muscular Midwestern quality that reflects Guy Forsythe’s musical coming of age in Kansas City, a locus for many musical styles. Blues, jazz, R&B, and rock and roll – Forsythe puts them all to good [...]
Picture yourself in a smoky cowboy-jazz joint around 1952, and you’ll get the picture on where Cow Bop is coming from. The combo’s music is tantalizing postwar bop, but with ample heaps of Western swing and country hokum ladled on for fun. The mastermind behind this venture is Bruce Forman, the virtuoso swing and bop [...]
When it comes to inspired songwriting and guitar playing, Mark Knopfler’s not in dire straights. On his new solo album, he had so much material, he chose not to leave good songs on the shelf and released Privateering as a two-CD collection, his first double-disc studio recording in 35 years. The result is the most [...]
Waylon was one of the first country music “outlaws” to rebel against the Nashville machine, and one of the ways it showed was that he never abandoned his guitar onstage – unlike many other country artists of the 1970s and ’80s. Even though most of the heavy lifting went to guitarist Reggie Young and steel [...]
Wonderful is right! This organ trio, featuring guitarist Larry Coryell, is pure joy with its bright and lively charge through a songlist of jazz classics and originals. The ensemble is led by Joey DeFrancesco, a Miles Davis alum who almost singlehandedly led today’s resurgence of love for the Hammond B3 in jazz with his 1989 [...]
