Jazz and punk have long had a fascinating relationship. Mixing both styles dates back to at least fifty years ago, with punk powerhouse The Stooges incorporating jazz-influenced saxophone solos on “L.A. Blues” and the title track on Fun House (Elektra, 1970). Actually, many of the early punk icons were fans of jazz music, particularly the grittiness and […]

Often, many place a wall between the secular and the religious, as though neither influences the other. In reality, both can find value in one another’s efforts to find or provide meaning to the world. James Brandon Lewis, the son of a science teacher and a pastor, is uniquely positioned to understand the complementary nature […]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart once noted that “melody is the essence of music.” This may be true, but such a perspective overlooks how melody can also serve as a restraint. For an artist seeking to freely express themselves, would not adherence to a central motific theme stand in their way? As a result, in the mid to late Twentieth Century, as composers of […]

Henry David Thoreau once noted, “The perception of beauty is a moral test.” Regardless of whether we wish to acknowledge it, one cannot deny that their biases and history shape how they experience everything around them, including art. Interestingly, this artistic predisposition extends to ideas of how a particular instrument “should sound.” In the case […]

As Arnold Schoenberg once noted, “Intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition.” Repetition is a shared facet of all music. And it seems an attraction to repetition is an innately human response. Repetition transcends style. Repetition transcends culture. Repetition transcends era. But things are not exactly as they seem. Merely copying a sound […]