Results for "John Lennon"

John Lennon

John Lennon was the Beatles' most committed rock & roller, their social conscience, and their slyest verbal wit. After the group's breakup, he and his second wife, Yoko Ono, carried on intertwined solo careers. Ono's early albums presaged the elastic, screechy vocal style of late- '70s new wavers like the B-52's and Lene Lovich. L7 and Babes in Toyland have also been influenced by and benefited from Ono's attitudinal, emotionally trailblazing work. Lennon strove to break taboos and to be ruthlessly, publicly honest. When he was murdered on December 8, 1980, he and Ono seemed on the verge of a new, more optimistic phase

Andrea Balestra: A Rich Sicilian Odyssey

By JIM WORSLEY

Guitarist Andrea Balestra makes a cerebral investment with every note he plays and with all of his compositions. A lot of guitarists like to jam. Balestra isn't one of them. Substance is preferred over droning speed. His highly intensified music is born of traditional Italian music...being from Sicily perhaps a factor...a deep integration of blues, a ...

Fall 2020

By DOUG COLLETTE

Blues Deluxe is a regular column comprised of pithy takes on recent blues and roots-music releases of note. It spotlights titles in those genres that might otherwise go unnoticed under the cultural radar. Heathcote Hill “the stories we are told" 311 Music 2020 Roots-music artists too often sacrifice ...

Karl Ackermann’s Best Releases of 2020

By KARL ACKERMANN

2020 abridged: A staggering loss of lives and livelihoods. We had worldwide social unrest, wildfires, locust swarms of Biblical proportions, killer hornets, killer drones, kids in cages; an impeachment, an election, an attempted insurrection. Oh, and Poland accidentally invaded the Czech Republic. It was not exactly the Gilded Age. Yet, amid doom-scrolling, the creative music community ...

“Ho ucciso i Beatles” con Sarah Jane Morris a Jesi

By LIBERO FARNè

Pergolesi Spontini Festival Teatro Pergolesi Jesi 12.9.2020 Singolare e notevole lo spettacolo proposto a Jesi all'interno della ventesima edizione del Pergolesi Spontini Festival: un atto unico di Stefano Valanzuolo, con la regia e progetto scenico di Pierluigi Iorio, che prevede un'interazione fra un quartetto d'archi, una cantante e una voce recitante. ...

Artemis: Artemis

By MIKE JURKOVIC

It's truly exhilarating yet sadly mundane and reductive that a recording as vital and victorious as Artemis will be universally hailed as a first from an all-female supergroup. That it cuts across all generational, cultural, international, and ethnic planes. That Blue Note Records has expanded its ever legendary ranks to include, well, you know, a female ...

B.B. King: Through the Years

By ALAN BRYSON

Sixty-six years passed from the time in 1948 when Riley King auditioned for a spot on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio program, until his final performance at the House of Blues on October 3, 2014 in Chicago. His life was a remarkable odyssey from a sharecropper's cabin to the pinnacle of success. We'll never know how many ...

Al Di Meola: Across the Universe

By DOUG COLLETTE

Al Di Meola's Across The Universe reaffirms how ideally the music of the Beatles translates into the eclectic style he forged early in his career. It's not as if the multi-instrumentalist/composer hadn't already made the point with All Your Life (inakustik, 2013), but this second, similarly conceived album is not only worth savoring repeatedly on its ...

Roberto Magris: Suite!

By KARL ACKERMANN

Italian pianist/composer Roberto Magris could not have anticipated the urgent need for a positive message when he recorded Suite! in 2018. The newly released double album reflects Magris' belief that a better world is coming and his certainty is conveyed in a sprawling program of poetry, original compositions, and some surprising covers. He has recorded as ...

The Archive of Contemporary Music

By KARL ACKERMANN

In Lower Manhattan, sits a musical gold mine. It's the motherlode of recorded music though the small, brightly colored sign above a grey steel door provides only a cryptic clue. The dusty window display of rare 78 RPM records, broken into erratic pie charts serves as a vestige of the past and a cautionary tale about ...