Richard Thompson Mirror Blue (Capitol) What a bizarre fix Richard Thompson is in. This extraordinary guitarist, vocalist and songwriter has released outstanding discs since his Sixties stint with Fairport Convention; likely no other popular-music artist performing during the same period has produced so undeniably consistent a body of work. Sure,…
James Blood Ulmer Blues Preacher (DIW/Columbia) Ulmer’s music has always been an acquired taste, and he’s never seemed that interested in others acquiring it. Unlike most blues-based players, who frequently claim to be taking tremendous musical risks even as they succumb to the seductions and stereotypes of the genre, Ulmer…
To get the scoop on the Meters, you need to talk to the right people. Ask an aficionado of early New Orleans blues rock and he’ll tell you that the Meters were, with Allen Toussaint and Lee Dorsey, the originators of this timeless sound. Ask a Neville Brothers fan and…
Roy Hargrove, Wednesday, February 16, through Friday, February 18, at the St. Petersburg Jazz Club and Restaurant, 4851 East Virginia Avenue, is among the new and improved crop of even younger “young lions” aiming to fulfill the promises made by their most recent predecessors. At 23, this retro-bop trumpeter is…
Various Artists Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix (Reprise) Beautiful People If 60’s Were 90’s (Continuum) We, the members of the record-buying public, have been deluged with more than enough tribute albums lately–enough, at least, to know that they don’t work very well when the albums’ performers think their…
Alice in Chains Jar of Flies (Columbia) Wherein another conglomeration of grunge heroes tries to prevent its career from dribbling away into an increasingly irrelevant pool of stereotypes. But unlike Nirvana, which established its credibility last time around by releasing a disc (In Utero) so calculatingly grating that it separated…
Material Hallucination Engine (Axiom) Producer/bassist Bill Laswell is a major talent, but his conceptual skills are spotty: For every intriguing album he’s put together under the Material banner, there’s another one that never lived up to expectations. So it comes as a wonderful surprise that Hallucination Engine stands as Laswell’s…
Donald Kinsey is happy being a family man. And what a family. Donald, a multifaceted, complex and unfathomably deep blues guitarist/vocalist, plays with his brothers, bassist Kenneth and drummer Ralph, in the Kinsey Report, among the finest modern blues trios. In addition, the bandmembers frequently provide the sonic backing for…
Sun Ra, the eclectic extraterrestrial of the jazz world, may have died last year, but one of his cosmic siblings is alive and well and living in Boulder. Exuma, the Obeah Man, like Ra during his time on this planet, enjoys decking himself out in colorful clothes and weaving mysticism…
Pat Boone Pat Boone’s Greatest Hits (MCA) I know that the rise of the compact disc has meant the rerelease of plenty of older material, but does everything have to be rereleased? I mean, are there really thousands of Pat Boone fans out there who have been counting the days…
Denver is the home of two radio broadcasters–KUVO-FM 89.3 and KHIH-FM 95.7–that promote themselves as jazz outlets. Which is why it’s something of a surprise that the best three hours of jazz on the local airwaves can be found on a rock station. The jazz show on KBCO-FM 97.3, heard…
