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Most Popular Featured Releases

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 July 2015

Capitol Records/ATO Records B002282802
Format: CD

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My Morning Jacket is the kind of band I tend to like. They are beyond category, encompassing everything from prog to Americana, and the band’s guitarist, Jim James, writes tunes that are both challenging and hummable. For me, the group showed its depth and versatility when it played “Ophelia” and “It Makes No Difference” for an appearance on Love for Levon, a tribute concert to Levon Helm that is available on DVD. While retaining their own identity, they showed an understanding and deep appreciation of the Band that many of the acts on the bill with them lacked.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 June 2015

Cleopatra CLP 2103
Format: CD

Musical Performance
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Canned Heat began when two blues lovers and avid record collectors, Bob Hite and Alan Wilson, decided to start a band. Wilson, who sang and played guitar and harmonica, was an avid scholar of the blues who had appeared on a 1965 recording with Son House shortly before meeting Hite. Canned Heat played at the two key late-1960s festivals, Monterey and Woodstock, and had two big hits, “Going Up the Country,” and “On the Road Again,” both reworked from earlier blues tunes.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 June 2015

Consolidated Artists Productions CAP 1040
Format: CD

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When Dizzy Gillespie appeared at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, in London, in August 1973, he hadn’t recorded for a few years, but was about to enter a period of regular studio work courtesy Norman Granz’s Pablo Records. As Doug Ramsey explains in his liner notes to Dizzy Gillespie’s Live at Ronnie Scott’s, Volume 1, the great trumpet player was coming off a month of one-nighters when he arrived at Scott’s for a two-week stand. This disc is one of four, separately available, documenting that extended stay.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 May 2015

Verve Records B0022726-02
Format: CD

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Amazon’s editorial review of Mark Knopfler’s new disc, Tracker, calls him the “former lead singer of Dire Straits.” I think of him as a remarkable guitarist. Both descriptions are too narrow. Knopfler is as good a songwriter as the ’80s produced, and he is an unusually acute and observant lyricist. His attention to the right details in the small space of a song lyric enables him to create narratives as vivid as those of the best short-story writers.

Read more: Mark Knopfler: "Tracker"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 April 2015

RCA 88875-06844-2
Format: CD

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When I saw that Van Morrison was releasing a CD of duets, my heart sank a little. It’s the kind of project that signals a career’s end -- think of Frank Sinatra’s and Ray Charles’s duet recordings. Morrison has subtitled his set Re-working the Catalogue, and again I wondered if it was a holding pattern. Morrison has released something new almost yearly since the early 1990s, all of it workmanlike, some of it inspired, but it’s not as if he’s broken any new ground, as he did with his earlier records. He’s followed the career path of many of the blues singers who inspired him, such as Bobby Bland, by turning out solid records that reaffirm his position as a music icon.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 April 2015

Jazz Village JV579003
Format: CD

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Jazz pianist Justin Kauflin was the subject of a documentary film, Keep On Keepin’ On, which chronicled his tutelage under the great trumpeter Clark Terry. Terry, who died in February, mentored Kauflin for five years and helped him overcome stage fright. Kauflin, blind since age 11, had studied music at William Paterson University and went on to further education with pianist Mulgrew Miller before coming under Terry’s wing.