Showing 1 - 15 of 15
Artist: Essential Firmament
Artist: Jenna Torres
A singer with deep roots in the alt-country firmament her penetrating vocals and disarming delivery express a formidable strength while remaining touchingly vulnerable. Jenna Torres, featuring Matt Keating on guitars and bass, Erik Della Penna on Dobro, Mark Brotter on drums, Nick Damato on bass andBob Hoffnar on pedal steel, is a personal and... [+] Read More
Artist: Main
Upon the 1991 dissolution of the British trance-rock quartet Loop, bassist Neil McKay and John Wills formed the Hair and Skin Trading Company, leaving guitarists Robert Hampson and Scott Dawson to found the highly-experimental Main, a project combining the aesthetics of ambient music with layered tapestries of droning electric guitar textures... [+] Read More
Artist: Barry Goldberg
Barry Goldberg was a regular fixture in the White blues firmament of the middle '60s that seemed to stretch from Chicago to New York. A keyboardist (organ seemed to be his specialty), Barry was an in-demand session man -- he appears with Michael Bloomfield on a Mitch Ryder album, for instance -- along with Al Kooper and his blues playing... [+] Read More
Artist: Dean Martin
Enjoying great success in music, film, television and the stage, Dean Martin was less an entertainer than an icon, the eternal essence of cool. A member of the legendary Rat Pack, he lived and died the high life of booze, broads and bright lights, always projecting a sense of utter detachment and serenity; along with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis,... [+] Read More
Artist: Shivkumar Sharma
Shivkumar Sharma is one of the truly great visionaries in the Hindustani classical music firmament. His popularity has created a knotty problem for his admirers. Popularity has led to a demand for recordings by him, to a degree that having a Shivkumar Sharma album acts like a kind of validation for a label. Consequently the market is flooded... [+] Read More
Artist: Alain Bashung
Though he was present at the birth of '60s rock & roll in France, it took another 15 years for Alain Bashung's star to rise. Born in Paris in 1947, he was raised in Alsace but left home at the age of 16 to begin playing in a cover band with several friends. The group lasted several years, until Bashung began recording on his own, for Philips, in... [+] Read More
Artist: The Art Bears
A warm and wonderful avant-garde band consisting of Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, and vocalist extraordinaire Dagmar Krause. Frith and Cutler were longtime members of the seminal English radical political avant-garde art rock band Henry Cow, while Krause sang primarily with the fine German band Slapp Happy and in Henry Cow's latter years. The Art... [+] Read More
Artist: Cripple Clarence Lofton
Cripple Clarence Lofton is one of those colorful names that adorned many an album collection of early boogie-woogie piano 78s in the early days of the '60s folk-blues revival. An early practitioner of the form, along with his fellow contemporaries Cow Cow Davenport, Meade Lux Lewis, Pine Top Smith, and Jimmy Yancey, Lofton was one of the... [+] Read More
Artist: Sainkho Namtchylak
With her shaved head and seven-octave range, Sainkho Namtchylak would stand out on any stage. Add her particular mix of Tuvan throat-singing and avant-garde improvisation, and she becomes an unforgettable figure. The daughter of a pair of schoolteachers, she grew up in an isolated village on the Tuvan/Mongolian border, exposed to the local... [+] Read More
Artist: Twisted Sister
A product of New Yorker City's early-'70s glam rock scene, Twisted Sister were eager students of the New York Dolls, with the theatrics of Kiss and the shock rock of Alice Cooper thrown in for good measure. While providing an excellent role model from an artistic standpoint, the Dolls' disappointing record sales and subsequent implosion would... [+] Read More
Artist: Mississippi Fred McDowell
When Mississippi Fred McDowell proclaimed on one of his last albums, "I do not play no rock'n'roll," it was less a boast by an aging musician swept aside by the big beat than a mere statement of fact. As a stylist and purveyor of the original Delta blues, he was superb; equal parts Charley Patton and Son House coming to the fore through his... [+] Read More
Artist: The Overlanders
The Overlanders were a highly underrated group whose history took them from the prime years of the British Invasion into the Summer of Love -- their one U.K. hit -- a chart-topping British single of the Lennon-McCartney song "Michelle" -- usually gets them pegged as a cover band, while their origins as a folk group specializing in harmony vocals... [+] Read More
Artist: Bill Haley
Bill Haley is the neglected hero of early rock & roll. Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly are ensconced in the heavens, transformed into veritable constellations in the rock music firmament, their music respected by writers and scholars as well as the record-buying public, virtually every note of music they ever recorded theoretically eligible for... [+] Read More
Artist: The Drifters
The history of rhythm and blues is filled with vocal groups whose names -- the Orioles, the Cadillacs, the Crows, the Flamingos, the Moonglows, the Coasters, the Penguins -- are held in reverence by fanatics and devotees. The Drifters are part of an even more exclusive fraternity, as a group that managed to carve out a place for themselves in... [+] Read More
