Saturday, December 19, 1970 For first-time listeners to The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia, 1970), the first four discs can be like a side trip to unfamiliar neighborhoods of a well-known place. The language is the same, the architecture familiar, but the details are new and delightfully alive. Arriving at discs five and six is […]
Friday, December 18, 1970 When The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia, 2005) recordings were made, none of the members of Miles’ band had yet reached age thirty. The leader himself was only forty-four. But even at their younger ages, the intense physicality of the playing for three sets a night, Friday and Saturday, had to […]
On December 12, 2025, the world lost a truly innovative voice. When any accomplished artist passes, there is a natural inclination to list the other artists that person once called collaborators, as if to provide necessary context to the loss by reference to names perhaps better known. Certainly, one can write a piece about Marilyn […]
Thursday, December 17, 1970 –What I Say. With “What I Say,” Miles Davis and his band answered the bell for Round two at the Cellar Door like a boxer bursting off his stool to land a volley of combinations before his opponent has even reached the center of the ring. It’s not quite shock and […]
Before diving in, a note on inspiration. This project is the child of a small-scale obsession. Last fall, I moved my collection of five thousand, six hundred and sixty-four CDs across town to a new home. I like to file them alphabetically by artist and then chronologically within each artist. Seventy-one of these are by […]
Fifty-five years ago this week, Miles Davis brought a new-ish band into Washington D.C.’s Cellar Door club for a four-night engagement. Columbia Records, perhaps hoping to catch lightning in a bottle, sent a crew and two eight-track tape machines to record the ten sets. Edited versions of material from the final night’s three sets found […]
2025 was a year of great growth for our site. In addition to Brian Kiwanuka and John Chacona’s reviews, friend turned staff writer Jim Hynes, joined us in a big way. That includes his review of the Big Ears Festival, an event I have long wanted to attend, but for which the timing never seems […]
Deeming any album the “best” of a given year is inherently fraught with problems. First, there are the logistical issues. Generally, thousands of recordings are released annually. Given that a year has only 8,760 hours, it is logistically impossible to listen to everything. Often, classifications can help limit the scope. Focusing on only the “best […]
Over the last few years, tenor saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh has released recordings thst featured his dulcet tones with several jazz elders – Kenny Barron (Vintage (Sunnyside, 2023)) and the late drummer Al Foster (Heart (Analog Tone Factory, 2024)). With Stand Up! (Analog Tone Factory, 2025), Sabbagh returns with this twenty-year running quartet with guitarist Ben Monder, bassist Joe Martin, and newly added drummer Nasheet […]
Folk music is often broadly defined as being a music “of the people.” But what does that really mean? Of course, the generally understood definition implies that it is music not of the conservatory or the upper strata of society, but from the average person, one of the commoners. But the descriptor of the music […]
