Blues Music
June explores the roots—and the promise—of blues, gospel, and folk music on her new album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers.
This excerpt is from BOMB’s Spring 2021 issue.
June explores the roots—and the promise—of blues, gospel, and folk music on her new album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers.
This excerpt is from BOMB’s Spring 2021 issue.
The blues, sports, lessons from Dave Van Ronk, and the legacy of “triumphal American painting” are among the stimuli for Weatherford’s large-scale abstract works.
Ghost stories, paganism, the blues, and silent cinema are just some of the fixations of two authors known for novels steeped in history.
“I think violence is inherited, it’s taught, and some of the characters are born into bad blood. …The characters are raped and so is the land.”
“I am an artist. I am a NEGROGOTHIC, devil-worshipping, free black man in the blues tradition. Those are the things I am now.”
They said I wasn’t smooth enough / to beat their sharp machine.
Rock ’n’ roll and the malleability of historical fact.
Composed of the first line of every review on the first four pages of a google search return for “Bill Orcutt, review,” accessed on Wednesday, February 4, 2014.
Bill Orcutt discusses his new solo album A History of Every One, bending genres in Harry Pussy, Bob Dylan, authenticity, and the history of blackface.
As a young musician, Mohsen Namjoo first captivated Iranians’ attention with his magnificent album Toranj from 2007.
Full House Head presents mind-numbingly blissful tracks, and uses repeated riffs to create a long, loud, monolithic album.
“After being dragged off stage I awoke with the hysterical screams and cries of a shocked, bewildered, and titillated audience jumping out of their seats. This was my first event as a so-called musical performer.”
Sharp is a top-notch avant-garde guitarist whose main musical styles are far from bebop, but this disc of tunes by bop legend Thelonious Monk is not some hipster’s ironic desecration of iconic material.
Sometimes you see a thing done so thoroughly, pristinely, and with utter care, you wonder why anyone else would attempt anything similar—ever. Such is the case with the obsessively crafted CD reissue projects of Atlanta, Georgia’s Dust-to-Digital, whose Grammy-nominated gospel music overview, Goodbye Babylon, fit five unerringly-curated discs inside a pine box packed with cotton and a hymnal-sized book.
This First Proof contains the poems “Crossroads Blues: Duet with Robert Johnson #4,” “Little Boy Blue: Duet with Robert Johnson #18,” and “Rambling on My Mind: Duet with Robert Johnson #33.”
Saxophonist John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards inherits an alter ego and a knack for vocals on his new album The Legendary Marvin Pontiac’s Greatest Hits.
According to Glenn O’Brien, David Johnson and the Harry Smiths “brings to life biorhythms all too often filtered out by digital thinking and bad posture. This is the real deal…”
Cassandra Wilson’s sophisticated jazz riffs cover everyone from Hank Williams to Miles Davis to the Monkees. Poet and music wiz Glenn O’Brien steals a téte â téte with the chanteuse not long after a night club appearance at New York’s Blue Note.
For Kerry James Marshall, 1997 was a good year: a MacArthur Fellowship, the Whitney Biennial and Documenta X. He spoke with Calvin Reid about the future of painting.