Classic Albums

Digging through the Contemporary Classical bins at the old Tower Records on Broadway in NYC was an endless source of mystery and magic. Sometimes, I would pick a recording based on nothing more than the […]

Conlon Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas in 1912, played jazz trumpet as a youngster, studied music with with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky, joined the communist party, fought against Franco in the […]

Saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh’s release with guitarist Greg Tuohey, No Filter, has been getting some serious airtime in Barn of late. Jerome and I recently shared an email exchange wherein I asked Jerome if he would […]

[I am very pleased to be able to share dCS Classical Choices Curated by Charlotte Gardner. I first came across this wonderful selection of music accompanied by equally wonderful words on the dCS Facebook page. […]

I have a thing for Mal Waldron. A special thing. A Mal Waldron kinda thing which you may think would be about his gentle soulful searching side, The Quest, or perhaps his work as accompanist […]

Of all the personal discoveries made during my multi-year quest through the Tower Records Contemporary Classical department, two composers stand out from the rest: Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. If I saw something new from […]

If you enjoyed Schnittke’s wild ride, fasten your seat belts.

In 1587, Johann Spies published a chapbook based on a mythologized and fantastical version of a real man’s life who lived in the early 16th century titled Doctor Faustus. It spread like wildfire throughout Europe. […]

Back when I lived in NYC, I did not own a TV and the Internet, as we know it, didn’t exist. What ever did I do with all that time?

According to me, The Blues was a musical genre that encompassed many styles of roots music beginning in the late 1800s, ending in the 1950s. Anyone who started playing ‘the blues’ after the 1950s, especially […]