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Grant Alden

Various Artists - From Spirituals To Swing: The Legendary 1938 & 1939 Carnegie Hall Concerts

The late John Hammond is credited with discovering and/or signing artists including Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Among others. For 60 years or more, this Vanderbilt heir set about making and changing musical history. Amid all that, little was as striking in

Bottle Rockets - Brand New Year

People stood in line to see Jeff Beck at South by Southwest this year. Maybe that should have been a sign. The next night, the Bottle Rockets took the stage in full Motorhead mode and tore off a 45-minute set of new songs. Not the same as the old songs.

Cynthia Gayneau - Sister in the sun

Nobody with any degree of hipness aspired to sing on Broadway in 1966, so when 16-year-old Cynthia Gano ruined her voice smoking cigarettes, she didn't much feel the loss of withdrawing from those classes. Thirty years later, she finally found time to sing what she really loved, and

Chip Taylor - Seven Days In May...A Love Story

Two years ago, when I first wrote about Chip Taylor's return to songwriting and performing, I titled the story "When A Man Grows Older," borrowing the phrase from an obscure Italo Svevo novel about an older man's unrequited love for a younger woman. It

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Blackjack

Though hardly an unknown, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown has rarely been the beneficiary of the kind of elder-statesman adulation that has attended the waning years of John Lee Hooker. True, Brown's never had a hit the size of "Boogie Chillun", but more importantly, he'

Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band - Bring the Family

Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band - Bring the Family

"The old write memoirs, the young do resumes. In midlife we keep a kind of diary that always begins with a discussion of the weather. The present is where we live, equidistant from our birth and death....We see our history and future clearly. We sleep well, dream in

Lucinda Williams - Self-Titled

One can only spend so many minutes kneeling on the floor, slipping CDs in and out of the player, before the subtle nuances fade into irrelevance. Lucinda Williams' third album has been remastered for reintroduction into the digital world, and is doubtless the better for that attention; certainly the