Jazz Articles

Los Lobos: Native Sons

by Doug Collette
August 2, 2021

Unusual as it may seem for a veteran band like Los Lobos to display the artistic humility of Native Sons, only a single original song appears here surrounded by a diverse round of cover material by artists based in and around their home city of Los Angeles. It's a generosity of spirit that actually recalls an earlier album, The Ride (Hollywood/Mammoth Records, 2004), wherein this tenured band shared writing and playing credit with the likes of Richard Thompson and Elvis ...

John Hiatt with The Jerry Douglas Band: Leftover Feelings

by Doug Collette
May 22, 2021

Leftover Feelings is not the first such group collaboration in John Hiatt's varied and lengthy career—-the North Mississippi Allstars were integral to Master of Disaster (New West Records, 2005). But there's an even more unusual kinship in play here between this gifted songwriter and The Jerry Douglas Band, if only because this LP is even more deeply steeped in bluegrass style(s) than the comparably acoustic-based Crossing Muddy Waters (Vanguard, 2000). Perhaps due to his early experience working as ...

John Hiatt: The Eclipse Sessions

by Doug Collette
October 28, 2018

Since John Hiatt hit his artistic and commercial stride with Bring The Family (A&M, 1987), the most listenable and durable albums of his have been those recorded with a band like the one appearing there (eventually known as Little Village: Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner). Offering comparably uniform musicianship in proportionate support of this highly-regarded songwriter's most memorable material, the Goners (featuring guitarist extraordinaire Sonny Landreth) appeared on Slow Turning (A&M, 1988) as well as The Tiki Bar ...

Rodney Crowell: Tarpaper Sky

by Doug Collette
June 7, 2014

Tarpaper Sky reaffirms Rodney Crowell's position as one of the most literate of contemporary songwriters. At the same time, it exhibits his unusual savvy as a musician and bandleader as he collects a core quintet to skillfully elicit both the intelligence and emotion of his original material. In its prolonged gestation before and after other projects- Kin (Vanguard, 2012) his collaboration with novelist Mary Karr and his reunion with Emmylou Harris Old Yellow Moon (Nonesuch, 2013)--Crowell's fourteenth album ...

Delbert McClinton and Glen Clark: Blind, Crippled & Crazy

by C. Michael Bailey
July 19, 2013

In 1972, Texans Delbert McClinton and Glen Clark had already been a part of the Texas music scene for ten years. They recorded Delbert & Glen (1972) for Koch, inaugurating two careers, McClinton's being the more fruitful. That recording produced “B-Movie Boxcar Blues," which found its way onto The Blues Brothers' Briefcase Full Of Blues (Atlantic, 1978), jettisoning McClinton's already considerable popularity. The two singers team up again, forty years later, for Blind Crippled and Crazy, demonstrating that the formula ...

Delbert McClinton: Delbert McClinton: Cost of Living

by Doug Collette
October 6, 2005

Among Delbert McClinton's many virtues are his longevity and his integrity, not to mention the humility that gives the title to Cost of Living. Staying power comes at a price, but like his late, lamented Texas blues peers, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Doug Sahm, this Texan can't sell out, because he really does not know how.

Honky tonk is holy in the hands of this man, which is why a song of his called “Midnight Communion is so ...

John Hiatt and the Goners: Beneath this Gruff Exterior

by C. Michael Bailey
April 4, 2004

John Hiatt and Sonny Landreth—nothing, and I mean nothing could be better. John Hiatt has advanced to the forefront of American rock songwriters, a group of musicians that include Warren Zevon, Rodney Crowell, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and John Prine. Sonny Landreth is the stratospheric slide guitarist who knows no near competitor sporting a bottleneck on his/her little finger.

The music—well, this is prime Hiatt. Coming into his own with the release of the perfect Bring the ...

Delbert McClinton: Nothing Personal

by C. Michael Bailey
July 1, 2001

Delbert McClinton returns to the studio for the first time in three years for a new label and serves up the same old thing—the most informed and honest bastard child of country music and blues one could hope for.

I saw Delbert McClinton at the now defunct Little Roxy in Little Rock, Arkansas in the exceptionally hot summer of 1984. He had his big band, horns and all. He played “Two More Bottles of Wine", “The B-Movie Boxcar Blues" and ...