Popular Music
This year’s Chicago Blues Festival provided plenty of hope for the blues.
There were unscripted song selections whose daring and heart made this concert so much more than a night of old beloved tunes.
The magic in Eliane Elias’s performances is in how easily she slips from one musical dialect into another.
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.
Exposure is a septet assembled to perform Robert Fripp’s quirkily diverse, overlooked 1979 solo album “Exposure” for the first time ever, in sequence.
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?”
Anybody at Tuesday’s show who thought the members of Kraftwerk were just punching buttons at their static posts while audiovisuals surged automatically would be mistaken.
Though John Pizzarelli has written and recorded his own material, his specialty has always been embracing and interpreting the tunes of the giants and legends and making them his own.
Our popular music critics pick some of the standout albums and performances of 2024.
“Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 4” is rich in what too many box sets skimp on: a wide-ranging spread of live recordings. In this case, they demonstrate how Mitchell’s songs evolved on stage as well as in the studio, documenting a genius at work.
Arts Commentary: These Goosesteps Don’t Lie — Shakira in El Salvador and the “New Security” Aesthetic