Popular Music
Two very influential and brilliant Cuban musicians, Albita Rodríguez and Chucho Valdés, join together to make a fine album; Chilean guitarist/vocalist/composer Camila Meza serves up a potent mixture of jazz and lyrics concerned with social justice.
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In his new album, Terry Kitchen moves effortlessly through lilting songs of happiness and sadness.
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Jon Batiste’s performance resonated with what musician Zachary Richard calls the “holy trinity” of Louisiana music: Cajun, zydeco, and “old-fashioned” rock and roll.
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This year’s Chicago Blues Festival provided plenty of hope for the blues.
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There were unscripted song selections whose daring and heart made this concert so much more than a night of old beloved tunes.
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The magic in Eliane Elias’s performances is in how easily she slips from one musical dialect into another.
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Suzanne Vega’s collection of 10 new original songs further solidifies and builds on her reputation as a unique talent among her generation of singer-songwriters.
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Exposure is a septet assembled to perform Robert Fripp’s quirkily diverse, overlooked 1979 solo album “Exposure” for the first time ever, in sequence.
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Stripped of trip-hop trappings, Beth Gibbons’s fragile voice commanded through a ghostly filter effect as she sang with edgy emotion, peaking in the tagline, “How can it feel this wrong?”
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Music Commentary: Analyzing the Greatness of Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows”
I hope this close look makes clear the exquisite craftsmanship that went into “God Only Knows.” But for many of us, the song has a magic that goes beyond the mere exercise of compositional skill, even skill of a very high order.
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