Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: In blending soul, R&B, gospel, and rock, Solomon Burke had the ability to reach from the stage and shake listeners to their very core. The might and majesty of Burke is honored in this updated version of a review of his [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: David William Kearney is a guitar slinger who will happily do axe-battle with you using blues, R&B, or rock. He’ll take on all comers with sweet toned ballads or psychedelic frenzy. And as this long-lost nineteen-ninety-eight article shows, the man has [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: When did the Doors’ records start going downhill? The answer to this question is shortly after their third record, however, the band’s incipient tendency to write bad songs is evident as early as their first, as I will explain. The problem [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Joke book or important guide to the music industry? Author and compiler Jeffrey Weber believes it is both. One thing is certain: you will laugh, wince, howl, grimace, and laugh some more. Two musicians walk into a bar. One doesn’t order [...]

Music Industry Newswire Column: Playing in rock bands, creating soundtracks for motion pictures and television, and writing modern classical music would be an impossible combination for most people but composer/performer Jocelyn Pook is succeeding in all of these arenas. Jocelyn Pook does not hear sound [...]

Music Industry Newswire REVIEW: Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington’s music is not often discussed alongside the work of Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, and Arnold Schoenberg, but Reed College professor David Schiff convincingly makes a case for comparing and contrasting the creativity of each of these composers. [...]

Music Industry Newswire REVIEW: Yes, OK, it took him a long time to get them done, and some people still haven’t gotten theirs from the initial production run. I am pleased to advise, though, that it is well worth the wait. Ours arrived from Europe [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: When you hear the word ‘image’ you may think of a pretty picture or the manufactured persona of someone who is famous for being famous. But if you say ‘Baron Wolman image,’ suddenly you’re talking about beauty, truth, and iconographic permanence.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Smoothly written and dynamic, Sean Wilentz’ book is full of insight, commentary, and historical perspective about songwriting’s greatest poet. Like his subject, the work is reflection and refraction of fact, fancy, and fable.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Storytellers are to be cherished and Clark Terry should be on a pedestal for his thoroughly entertaining autobiography. Brimming with life, love, music, and great characters, this book is as much a history of the twentieth century as it is a history of his ninety years (and counting!) .

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Not a musician, yet a giant of jazz. Undiplomatic, but an ambassador of American culture. Often impolite, but always truthful. Unequaled, yet a champion of equality. And that just touches the surface of Norman Granz, producer of more music than one [...]

Music Industry Newswire REVIEW: With so many XLR to USB adapters now available on the market, it’s tough to decide upon which interface will be the best bang for the buck. The Shure x2u XLR to USB Adapter has shot out in front of the [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: You may think of spoken word recordings as esoteric or antiquated, but in Jacob Smith’s new book they have a different purpose: to illuminate the roots of today’s society. When NASA launched the Voyager missions during 1977, the two spacecraft contained [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Rock and roll allows for a wide range of styles, including music that shocks listeners, attacks social conventions, intimidates casual onlookers, and angers the vast majority of people. A band called Foul Play accomplishes all of those things. Fortunately, they are [...]

Music Industry Newswire REVIEW: Mysterious goth band The Catholic Comb created a disturbing smoky concoction in 2005 and then apparently remained underground. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of them, either, but now that I know, I’m a convert. Sometimes a good album goes unnoticed. For a [...]

REVIEW: From his smooth writing style to his commitment to interviewing nearly every possible source involved with the material, there’s a lot to like about Joseph Vogel’s new book on the King of Pop. In fact, considering the poor quality of much that has previously [...]

REVIEW: Singer and professional vocal coach Teri Danz decided to put her own private lesson plan into a book with accompanying CD. The results cover less than fifty pages but singers will find something valuable on every page. You can sing, right? You hit all [...]

REVIEW: Playing together since 1986, Dennis Davison and Jonathan Lea have now done the impossible: they have created an original Christmas album that still rocks (well, folk-rocks, anyway). Plus, it covers all the emotions that surround the season, not just the traditional upbeat ones. That [...]

REVIEW: Music of the avant-garde is for those who are open to outrage, shock, conceptualized art, and boundary-pushing ideas. If you fit in that category, you will enjoy these tales of pioneers wrestling with the 1960s triumphs of their tragedies. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Until a few days ago, Nektar was nothing more than a puzzling footnote to me. According to everything I had read, this band was a standout progressive rock outfit in Europe during the nineteen seventies. Not making it big in the [...]

REVIEW: Hearing one of the softer tracks from this album playing in my studio, a visitor dismissed it as “NIN lite.” I hear it as something much more complicated: “NIN expanded to include the invasion and conquest of modern classical music.” A chameleon alters its [...]

REVIEW: If his name sounds familiar, you are probably already a fan of rockabilly. But even if that genre’s blend of rock and country ain’t your thing, these songs are so much fun that you might become a Burnette-ette by the time you get halfway [...]

REVIEW: Before seeing the singer perform live, this album sat around the studio for a few months. After playing it a couple of times at various volume levels, the urge to write about it became too palpable to pass up. While several tracks leave me [...]

REVIEW: Noisemakers unite! Calling all anti-composers and radical music theorists! That was the idea of a group of wildly unpredictable academics and stars of the experimental music world back in “the sixties.” Cage, Oliveros, Neuhaus, Reich, Budd, Foss and dozens more appear in this collection [...]

REVIEW: Back in the early 1990s, Randy Poe authored a book entitled “Music Publishing: A Songwriter’s Guide.” Several revisions, editions and rewrites later, Poe returned with “The New Songwriter’s Guide to Music Publishing” (Writer’s Digest Books, 157 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1582978048, $18.99) and I am here [...]

MusicIndustryNewswire COLUMN: Some songs sound special. There are recordings where there are licks that are tasty and satisfying every time you hear them. Recordings with such a powerful groove that you dance even if you’re sitting down. Recordings where the atmosphere or the feel is [...]

Music Industry Newswire REVIEW: “Dhana” is a European born blonde diva and lead singer of dance rock group “TaxiDoll.” In this, her first solo release, “Confessions of a Lily Rouge” (Fly Me To The Moon Music), Dhana delivers a potent concoction of electronic pop and [...]

REVIEW: The four piece group “B and Elephants” delivers innovative yet passionate progressive world music comprising fundamentally of Spanish folk and Classical Indian styles embedded in a dreamy and fresh psychedelic rock constant. B&E appear to be an unusual phenomenon, referring to themselves as ‘Psychedelic [...]

REVIEW: While the concept of a music keyboard with a computer inside isn’t entirely new, the folks at Austin, Texas start-up Music Computing think they might have invented the new sweet spot in bridging the gap between the notebook and controller crowd and the people [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: You cannot teach someone to write good song lyrics. That’s just how I feel. And yet, I kind of changed my mind after reading “The Art of Writing Great Lyrics” by Pamela Phillips Oland (Allworth Press, 260 pages, $18.95, ISBN 978-1-58115-093-3). [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: The title of this article is the same as the title of a book that should be owned by every songwriter and music publisher. That book is: “Music, Money and Success: The Insider’s Guide to Making Money in the Music Business,” [...]

COLUMN: The description on Amazon was interesting so I purchased “The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution” by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard (Hal Leonard/Berklee Press, $16.95, ISBN: 978-0-87639-059-7), not realizing it was written in 2004 and released the following year. Sure, [...]

REVIEW: If you’re a long-time user of Propellerhead’s REASON application, or just coming back to it with the new version 4, as I am, then you are probably impressed by Reason’s new capabilities, and its general ease of use. Reason is very cool because it’s [...]

COLUMN: You go through your musical memories and up pops that long lost classic, that awesome album from years gone by, that ideal example of “the way music used to be,” that shining beacon of sonic excellence that puts today’s posers to shame. “I’ll purchase [...]

REVIEW: I’m a big fan of Open Labs’ music workstation instruments, so I was pretty excited when they announced the rebirth of their XXL model this spring, which was not available last October 2008 when I bought the NeKo TSE (previously reviewed for this magazine). [...]

REVIEW: Two fast-paced and entertainment documentaries in the same week? Yup, and both saturated with superb music from fade-in to fade-out. “It Might Get Loud” has the pedigree (director Davis Guggenheim won an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”) but “I Need That Record!” has the [...]

REVIEW: Jazz. Wait! Don’t stop reading. Sure, the very word frightens some people. But there are all kinds of jazz. Smooth jazz is pleasant, bop is pulsating, West Coast jazz is cool, and free jazz is way out there. But all of it can be [...]

BOOK REVIEW: Punk meets metal, punk loses metal, punk gets metal. That is one of the themes of Steve Waksman’s “This Ain’t the Summer of Love” (University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-25717-7), a sometimes down ‘n’ dirty but always scholarly examination of the flashpoint where [...]

REVIEW: Thank you, Grammy Awards, for not entirely embarrassing the music business this year. Sure, there were problems with the presentation, but this show had fewer eyeball-rolling moments than any awards program in recent memory. Usually, the Grammys have so many cringe-worthy moments that I [...]

REVIEW: Creating a song can be joy or toil, art or craft, pleasure or pain. What it cannot be is free from effort. Certain aspects of human existence must be utilized in the making of music: your brain, your heart, your soul. Otherwise, noise is [...]

REVIEW: I would probably have liked this album more if it was comprised of personal friends, or the brother of my girlfriend, or fronted by the lads working part-time at the local Auto Club, but coming in cold I found the album “The Butterfly Net” [...]

REVIEW: The concept of the so-called workstation keyboard is certainly not new; with a wide range of current such products on the market from big guns like Korg, Roland and Yamaha, stretching back in time to the Korg M-1. These products seek to fill the [...]

EVENT REVIEW: Blue Microphones this past week threw a private party (November 6, 2008), to demonstrate their latest products and it turned out to have the most security of any event in the city. The site was the Gibson/Baldwin Showroom which is right next to [...]

REVIEW: These Thousand Emotions — Have you ever thought about what is inside the sounds you like to hear? Harmonics and overtones are in there, for a start, but it can go way beyond that with some artists. A few special people are able to [...]

REVIEW: I’ve been a fan of the late (and sadly missed) Bob Moog’s various sound creation inventions since the mid 1970s. I first saw one of his theremins at a Southern California museum and while the rest of my family perused the other modern art; [...]

REVIEW: New Jersey based Phoenix Block’s new CD “Chemtrails” nicely combines ’80s flavored world alt-rock with modern rock and sits nicely in various places if you happen to like artists as varied as U2, Bon Jovi and Remy Zero. Once I got past the hand [...]

REVIEW: Blending big ballads with confessional lyrics, Sheva touches listeners at the core of their emotions. Scott G gets lost in the melodies of “The Closest Thing” even while admiring the sonic textures of her band.

REVIEW: You’ll find clever lyrics, strong melodies, and excellent musicianship on songs in several genres on the new Rob Kendt album. But as Scott G points out, this may be too much of a good thing. Rob Kendt is a tall quiet fellow who writes [...]

REVIEW: Celebrating an endorsement between G-Man Music and the fiery axe-makers known as Minarik Guitars, Scott G (The G-Man) reviews the Minarik Inferno X-treme, a design that is fueling the excitement of a new generation of musicians.

REVIEW: Scott G goes back to old habits by writing a batch of CD reviews. As in his prior reviews, the musical styles he covers are all over the place, from the hip hop of Enjae to the glorious organized noise of Nine Inch Nails, [...]

REVIEW: You can never be too rich or have enough disk space, or be too paranoid about data back-up. In recently deciding it was time to do some back-ups of audio and imaging projects, and other valuable docs, and put them in a fire-proof safe, after somebody’s house burnt down nearby, I chose to look at external hard drives.

REVIEW: Take a pianist with a classical repertoire and a guitarist who grew up playing rock; turn them loose and you might get Davison/Coleman, whose first album wraps you up in melodies that reach back to the seventies and stretch forward to music that could come from a distant peaceful planet.

REVIEW: Some music soothes you. Some seduces you. And some swaggers up to you and hits you over the head with a box of skateboard parts. Scott G (The G-Man) writes about an upstart new band called Manic Circuit that slams its way into your skull with songs of raw power combined with progressive structure.

REVIEW: I was pretty excited to hear about the new disc “Fingerprints” (A&M/New Door/UMe) from Peter Frampton, a seminal guitar god from the ’70s who became enormously famous for his “Frampton Comes Alive” album and for his formant-tube guitar “talk box” sound on that record 30 years ago. I hadn’t really thought about him much lately except when my iTunes jukebox cycled around to his tunes. So, getting the new disc was like hearing from an old friend again.