Joey McIntyre Stay the Same (C2 Records) If you needed any more proof that musical cycles are swirling faster than ever before, look no further than Joey (formerly Joe) McIntyre. This scrumpdillyicious hunkaroo was part of New Kids on the Block, which captivated the nearly pubescent crowd between 1988 and…

The scene is a self-serve copy shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, the time is several years ago, and the protagonist is Wesley Willis, beloved local icon. Willis is built like Sasquatch (he’s 6-4 and weighs over 300 pounds), but his spirit is friendly and gentle–which is why his sudden…

Virginia Rodrigues Sol Negro (Hannibal) As the global village shrinks, strife seems to grow, and terrorism, trade tiffs and border skirmishes tempt us to forget about the accompanying merits of intellectual and artistic continental drift. Sure, airport lines are longer, and the economics of NAFTA are debatable. But at least…

Most musicians tend to avoid arguments about centuries-old nomenclature such as “chamber music,” but not David Balakrishnan, violinist and composer for Oakland’s Turtle Island String Quartet (TISQ). The Hamburg Concert, the group’s latest CD, supplements classical variations with jazz standards, a globe-trotting hybrid and a funk cover associated with Tower…

Marc Sabatella is camped on a slippery musical slope. He refers to this location as the “outside shore” of today’s jazz mainstream, and it’s an apt metaphor. The 33-year-old Fort Collins-based pianist and bandleader isn’t immersed in these waters, but he drinks deeply from them on a regular basis. Second…

While collaborating with Lois LaFond and the Rockadiles, Denver blues matriarch Hazel Miller asked, “How come I have so much fun with your band?” In attempting to answer this question, LaFond, a Boulder resident who’s celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of her group with the release of its sixth album, Lois…

Jewel Spirit (Atlantic) In the current edition of Rolling Stone, journalist Neil Strauss tries to portray Jewel Kilcher, who appears on the issue’s cover, as a far more complex personality than the one who seems to be behind her music–not a thimble-deep hippie chick who’s peddling the hoariest of cliches,…

“Jazz is dead,” says Fred Hess, founder and leader of the Boulder Creative Music Ensemble (BCME). “It died in the Sixties. We had fusion for a while, and there have been some other things. There have been a lot of individuals doing this and that, but there’s no jazz. These…

Sheryl Crow The Globe Sessions (A&M) A friend of mine hears the Rolling Stones in Sheryl Crow’s new disc. But at the end of the twentieth century, any rock-and-roll album featuring bluesy, four-quarter-time, guitar-driven social commentaries in which a singer yells lines like “All the white folks shake their asses”…

What’s in a name? In the case of Michael Colin, plenty. Colin, who also answers to Big Mike, is best known for his work with Phantasmorgasm, a group that made some of the most aggressive music heard in Denver during the late Eighties and early Nineties. But he’s also performed…

Barry Adamson As Above, So Below (Mute) With this disc, the criminally underrated Adamson takes a risky plunge off his ivory tower of instrumental ambience. This composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist has compiled a decade-long discography as emotive as anything produced by the planet’s foremost musical anti-heroes, yet the verbal explorations…

“Actually, I always like not to go into anything about government or politics,” explains the planet’s foremost practitioner of juju music, King Sunny Ade. “But what is happening in Nigeria at the moment is more or less like going forward, going backward, going forward, going backward.” True enough, the political…

Beastie Boys Hello Nasty (Grand Royal/Capitol) The key development in the life of this great American band came in 1989, when Mike Diamond, Adam Horovitz and Adam Yauch followed up their crunchy goof of a breakthrough platter, 1986’s Licensed to Ill, with Paul’s Boutique, an infinitely more forward-looking melange of…

Anyone who’s ever appreciated the disturbances beneath the surface in the writings of Southern authors such as Peter Taylor and Flannery O’Connor will understand Freakwater. The band’s pretty country music harbors the same kind of compelling, complex imagery. Appropriately, principal songwriter and singer Catherine Ann Irwin–a Louisville, Kentucky, resident who…

Rancid Life Won’t Wait (Epitaph) Back in 1978, when this band was called the Clash and this album was named Give ’em Enough Rope, reviewers noted that the musicians (Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon, today known as Tim Armstrong, Lars Frederiksen, Matt Freeman and Brett Reed)…

DJ Cam The Beat Assassinated (Globetrotter/Sony Music International) Throughout last year’s Mad Blunted Jazz, DJ Cam conjured up hip-hop revelations on the DJ Shadow tip–meaning that he dispensed with lyrical excursions in order to explore the instrumental and orchestral possibilities of mixing and sampling. But although this approach was artistically…

Denver’s Little Fyodor doesn’t care if audiences are laughing with him or at him. “That’s what your parents tell you to keep you from doing anything foolish,” he claims. “And what I’m doing is rather foolish.” Perhaps–but Little Fyodor’s musical excursions are foolish in ways that are often fascinating. For…

Though the guitar is exceedingly common, Denverite Neil Haverstick’s approach to it is anything but. Rather than using the 12-tones-per-octave scale that links Western music from Beethoven to the Beatles, Haverstick regularly lays his skillful hands upon a custom-built 19-tones-per-octave guitar. The result of efforts like those found on his…

Roni Size Reprazent: New Forms (Talkin’ Loud/Mercury) Plenty of electronica artists are taking the Prodigy route: i.e., they’re attempting to split the difference between dance music and pop in the hope of coming up with hit singles that will still work in Clubland. Size, for his part, is moving in…

Timbaland and Magoo Welcome to Our World (Blackground/Atlantic) Tim Mosley, aka Timbaland, is a producer who has stepped into the spotlight a la Sean “Puffy” Combs–but unlike the Puffster, Mosley seems to understand his limitations. Rather than positioning himself as an egomaniacal rap word-slinger, he keeps the focus on the…

In a working-class town north of Columbus, Ohio, a few years back, the rowdy patrons were drinking beer out of buckets–using straws–when the bartender clanged a ship’s bell and announced, “I want all of you to hear this sax player!” Such an introduction would have left most instrumentalists fearful that…

“What we’re doing might as well be an ancient language,” explains Tom Sublett, electric bassist for Denver’s Sanskrit. “Nobody says, ‘It might as well be Sanskrit’ anymore, but at one time that was practically interchangeable with ‘It’s Greek to me.'” Sublett, age thirty, and his Sanskrit collaborators (saxophonist Bret Sexton,…