Qobuz new release review (October 2021) With City of Mirrors, Chicago group Dos Santos have hit upon a sound that is intimate and expansive, organic and electric, and, most notably, pan-cultural and uniquely American. With members originally hailing from Texas, Panama, and the American midwest, the group is a consummate…

Qobuz new release review (2021) For the most part, the folks who have made the greatest strides in composing jazz music in recent decades have been accomplished players who have translated their performance skills into crafting stunning new pieces of music. The idea of a jazz composer whose primary role…

Qobuz new release review (Sept. 2021) The idea of a live album as a documentary is a naïvely outdated one. For decades, fans have understood that, if one wanted to hear a tip-to-tail, warts-and-all live performance by one of their favorite musicians, a bootleg would be just about the only…

Qobuz new release review (Sept. 2021) Egyptian guitarist Maurice Louca has, with Saet El-Hazz, produced a dizzying, consequential, and ultimately unclassifiable piece of work. With roots thrust deep into multiple soils — free jazz, contemporary electro-acoustic composition, traditional Middle Eastern musical forms — this is a dense and complex piece…

Qobuz new release review (September 2021) It is positively spooky how consistently interesting Lindsey Buckingham’s 30-year solo career has been. For a musician whose core creative philosophy seems rooted in the way art emerges from dramatic chaos, his own output — both within and without Fleetwood Mac — always manages…

Qobuz new release review (September 2021) Twenty years and ten albums into a career as one of the most consistently rewarding English pop acts around, Saint Etienne have delivered a work that is brimming with a sense of finality. It’s not so much that I’ve Been Trying to Tell You…

Qobuz new release review (Sept. 2021) Ten years after Gerry Rafferty’s death from alcoholism-induced liver failure, Rest in Blue is being released as a sort of “what-if?” vision of his final album. Culled from demo tapes Rafferty had pulled from his archives for consideration on the follow-up to 2009’s Life…

Qobuz new release review (August 2021) Wayne Shorter’s saxophone was so omnipresent throughout jazz’s waves of upheaval in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s that it would have been easy to mistake the man for the type of standard bearer that kept the genre anchored to its roots while iconoclasts were…

Qobuz new release review (August 2021) Since launching his solo career in the mid-’80s, Detroit saxophonist Kenny Garrett has been one of mainstream jazz’s brightest lights. With a discography that both richly honors notions of traditional jazz while pushing it to incorporate a wide range of disparate, global influences, Garrett’s…