Tom Moon
Tom Moon has been writing about pop, rock, jazz, blues, hip-hop and the music of the world since 1983.
He is the author of the New York Times bestseller 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die (Workman Publishing), and a contributor to other books including The Final Four of Everything.
A saxophonist whose professional credits include stints on cruise ships and several tours with the Maynard Ferguson orchestra, Moon served as music critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1988 until 2004. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, Blender, Spin, Vibe, Harp and other publications, and has won several awards, including two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Music Journalism awards. He has contributed to NPR's All Things Considered since 1996.
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Diana Krall's latest album is dominating the market for sultry Brazilian tunes. But reviewer Tom Moon recommends an alternative: the U.S. debut album of Magos Herrera, a Mexican-born jazz vocalist with a gift for understatement.
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Winter, more than any other season, has its own soundtrack: There's a nonstop loop of holiday tunes in every store you visit, and carolers in the town square. By the time late December rolls around, many people have had it. Author Tom Moon offers an alternative list of winter music.
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The new album from the Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots contains verses from the perspective of a child soldier in Sierra Leone, a campus shooter in America, and those in the grip of addictions. Rising Down may be the group's best album. -
Last night, the Album of the Year Grammy went to an underdog — Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters. Though the Joni Mitchell tribute doesn't rank among Hancock's best work, Tom Moon says that for those who know the pianist, the unlikely honor isn't really so unlikely.
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Two years ago, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Matt Chamberlain spent a few days free-associating in the recording studio. Their extemporaneous jams were then sampled, cut up and mixed together to create an unusual album project called Floratone. -
Veteran Cuban singer and member of the Buena Vista Social Club, Ibrahim Ferrer, finished recording a solo album just before he died.
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Israeli-born pianist and composer Anat Fort spent the last seven years in New York, much of it working on her first album for ECM Records. She says that though some of the music was written quickly, it took time to discover how to perform it.
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Mitchell's work took an unexpected turn with Mingus, her streaky and often brilliant 1979 collaboration with jazz bassist Charles Mingus. After it, she sounded wiser and hipper, a jazz sophisticate whose melodies came bunched in waves and bursts of scat-singing capriciousness. -
It took a renegade of modern film, Dennis Hopper, to engineer one of the great had-to-happen musical summits of modern times. To provide the music for The Hot Spot, the director hired greats from different musical worlds: bluesman John Lee Hooker and jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. -
Even a ubiquitous figure like Chuck Berry has neglected gems gathering spiderwebs in remote corners of his catalog. Blues helps fill in a bit of his legend, showing how he transferred devices used by generations of blues guitarists into the then-new rebellion of rock.
