Bassist Gary Peacock, pianist Marc Copland and drummer Joey Baron bring an airy, elastic swing to their new album, Now This. Critic Kevin Whitehead says the players pull the melodies together well.
For the last half century, pop music has evolved from blues to disco to hip-hop. By digitally analyzing more than 17,000 songs, a team at Queen Mary University of London has released a study showing how pop music has changed throughout history.
The former English teacher may never have become a singer-songwriter if her identity hadn't been taken. "I was just ready for a brand new start," she says. And soon she was on the road to Nashville.
"He had an underground kind of appeal that built on itself," says author Mark Ribowsky, whose book Dreams to Remember traces Redding's unlikely pivot into national stardom.
As men went off to combat in World War II, a group of Southern college women took to the bandstand. Meet the Darlinettes — hear their music and stories from their leader and their drummer.
The black entrepreneur who opened a record store called Dolphin's Of Hollywood — in South Central Los Angeles — is the subject of a new musical about his business success and untimely death.
The first words Bridie Monds-Watson sings on her debut album double as a tidy thesis statement: "A teenage heart is an unguided dart." The Irish singer-songwriter records under the name SOAK.
The Welsh band's name is a play on that of singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom. Ken Tucker likens the group's second album to a high-wire act accompanied by "furiously strummed punk-rock guitar chords."