Search results for

Saxophonist Sonny Rollins has outlasted many of the jazz greats he played with. At age 76, he's now jazz's elder statesman, crossing another milestone in his 65-year career with a new CD, Sonny, Please, a new record label and a Web site.

At first, The Avett Brothers' "Yardsale" unfolds as a fairly straightforward study of the mundane items at a neighborhood yard sale. But then, three-quarters of the way through, the North Carolina brothers shift gears radically, speculating about how nice it would be to burn the whole lot of it.

It's audacious to declare the end of an entire musical subculture, and downright outrageous to do so when it's your musical subculture. With "Hip Hop Is Dead," Nas attempts to steer the genre in new directions while reasserting his status as one of its foremost personalities.

Brazilian singer Ceu loves soul, jazz, hip-hop and afro-pop. And those influences are apparent on her new self-titled CD. But the foundation underlying it all is the Brazilian samba. "It's what sticks to the soles of my feet, " she says.

The songs of singer-songwriter Patty Griffin are full of heartbreak and longing — so much so that a friend recently challenged her to write a happy song. She discusses that song and her new CD, Children Running Through.

It's hard to decide what to make of The Bad Plus, whose sound has no pretense of operating at either extreme of jazz and rock, but instead plays with the colors in between.

"Boogie Blues" contains two minutes and one second of wonderful boogie-woogie, sung by a great jazz singer at a 1963 concert and never heard on record until now. Anita O'Day's Tokyo performance aired live on Japanese TV, then languished in the vaults.

Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams has released her eighth CD, West. The collaboration with producer Hal Willner is mostly a meditation on the death of Williams' mother, and the end of a turbulent love affair.

For its contribution to the Band tribute album Endless Highway, Widespread Panic offers neither a faithful cover of "Chest Fever" nor a recasting. Instead, the group takes an approach so obvious, and so unlikely to succeed, that few ever try it: They try to beat the original at its own game.

Funerals celebrate life as much as they mourn the departed, and Robert Glasper's poignant requiem "Tribute" — assembled in honor of his mother — makes no secret of that. Glasper and his bandmates initiate a plaintive piano-trio hymn that soon underscores Rev. Joe Ratliff's poetic eulogy.