This is where I will post my thoughts about my favorite classical or jazz CDs and sometimes survey the various recordings of a specific piece.
Sixty-five years ago this year an event occcured which changed the course of American music. A unassuming man, unknown, with no professional expertise other than his devotion to old 78s of American vernacular music, released to the public the Anthology of American Folk Music. “Had he never done anything with his life but this Anthology, […]
Eilen Jewell is an American singer-songwriter from Boise, Idaho. “I always felt like I wanted to leave,” Jewell says. “And I remember when I learned the word ‘wanderlust,’ I felt like I finally had a word to describe myself.” Jewell attended college in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she began busking on the streets of Sante […]
The Steel Wheels are a roots and Americana band, writing and playing music in the closely related but unique styles of blues, bluegrass, old-time music, and fiddle music. Virginia musician Trent Wagler is the lead vocalist and the band’s primary songwriter. Jay Lapp (mandolin, guitar, vocals) had been touring in several bands throughout the Midwest […]
“I have never felt this “other” Baroque with quite the sense of anachronistic shock which I experienced when first encountering the cover photgraph for this CD. At first glance, it almost looks as though it represents the lamenting Mediterrean culture of pleureuses (professional mourners), but it is in fact a funeral procession on the little […]
I was raised in the Catholic Church, educated at Jesuit schools and was an altar boy for several years from the age of eight, or so. I was taught enough of the Latin Mass to be able to assist the priest and recite the proper responses during the mass (we also had four years of Latin […]
Eroica Quartet Peter Hanson violin 1 Julia Hanson violin 2 Vicci Wardman viola In Britain, the Eroica Quartet, founded in 1993 by four of the country’s leading period-instrument performers, have the field virtually to themselves. Three of the members are principals in John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (which specialises in early 19th-century repertoire) and […]
The Orlando Consort has paused their traversal of the songs of Guillaume de Machaut (their intention to record them all has yielded three CDs so far) and devoted their latest release to charting the radical development of music between the late thirteenth and mid fifteenth centuries—the transition from what is at essence embellished chant to […]
