Of Note

Of Note

Sugaray Rayford’s Electric blues: a heavyweight jam with Al Kooper, Slash, Def Leppard’s Vivian Campbell and others

The ex-Marine has soul gravel in his pipes and the ghost of Teddy Pendergrass running through his veins

Sugaray Rayford is a heavyweight of the electric blues. Born in Texas, the 6’5” Rayford has said that by the age of four, he was in church seven days a week, singing in choirs. His ...

Of Note

Lettuce the band: “let us” play with celebrities like Dave Matthews and Lady Gaga

A modern kind of funk: old enough to sound familiar but fresh enough to be relevant

“Brings forth a new vitality to classic funk.” That say-nothing dash of corporate-speak was lifted from the Lettuce band’s own bio. Try this instead: Lettuce the band sets classic funk on fire, and from the ...

Of Note

“Feral” blues rocker Tinsley Ellis rivals early Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton

Award winning guitarist is not a stranger to such praise

It’s like the Holy Grail, the search for one’s own musical identity. Then again, if individuality is even possible in this era of over-saturation, does it matter? Blues-rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa is huge box office ...

Of Note

New and nuanced with Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan

Introspective, but in a blue-collar way

Good plain rock and roll. And that’s no small achievement, considering that by now, every possible note and chord combination has likely been played. Nothing new to be done. And yet, somehow, Pedro the Lion ...

Of Note

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: reformed English prosody with less archaic diction

He also introduced the world to the phrase “suspension of disbelief”

Lines On Observing A Blossom On The First Of February, 1796 Sweet flower! that peeping from thy russet stem Unfoldest timidly, (for in strange sort This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month Hath borrowed Zephyr’s voice, ...

Of Note

The connection between The Band’s Rick Danko, and Danko Jones

Will the Canadian power trio strike gold here?

Canada: some of our better rock and rollers from over the years have come from up north. Joni Mitchell, Barenaked Ladies, Neil Young, Rush, Tokyo Police Club, Arcade Fire, and Ronnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, to ...

Of Note

Turkish for ‘turquoise’

Turkuaz tend to write live and on the fly

“Dirty funk” is how one critic described the Turkuaz package. Some might call them blue-eyed funk, which is not meant as a pejorative statement. Unlike funk’s originators, Turkuaz inherited, rather than politicized a rarefied kind ...

Of Note

The 78's traditions resonate

"People like real, genuine music. That's not surprising."

“There’s a lot of good shit happening right now.” Whitey Morgan says this in answer to my question about the present-day state of traditional country music. “Sometimes, I see three generations of families at our ...

Of Note

Plain heavy-metal fun

Judas Priestess is “The world’s only all-girl tribute to the metal gods”

They’re not a spot-on imitation of their namesake band, but was that ever the idea? Judas Priestess is plain heavy-metal fun — five gifted women metal-heads who deliver a shot of club-sized Judas Priest. Priestess ...

Of Note

Instant hit

YouTube sensation Charlie Rae wants to “bring back feeling”

It’s all true, Charlie Rae says, the story about how a random passerby recorded her one day while she was busking, uploaded the performance to YouTube, and 500,000 hits later, she was a social media ...

Of Note

Sarcastic adenoidal madness

Les Claypool has released an album almost every year since 1988

Les Claypool: unless you were a diehard Primus geek, I doubt you can remember the names of the other two guys who were in that band. Claypool is another thing entirely. As Sting was to ...

Of Note

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