This year has been particularly tough picking my #1 favorite, as I had two very different contenders that blew me away much more than any other record on the list. In the end, I went for the heartwrenching comeback album released by singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia. ‘Riderless Horse’ was her return to music after many years of personal struggles, including divorce and mourning. Pursuing a very back-to-basics approach, she delivered 33 minutes of powerfully poignant tunes for voice and acoustic guitar only. The other contender is amazing in a completely different way: ‘Xaybu: The Unseen’, by Steve...

A few years ago, after seeing both David Gilmour and Roger Waters in concert, I wrote a post commenting about how seeing both shows would give Pink Floyd fans the best of both worlds, as a reunion seems very unlikely. Since then, a new picture entered this frame and turned out to be quite a surprise. I’m talking about Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, the band put together by Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason to bring out his take on that legendary songbook.  I recently saw them live and I was literally blown away. While Gilmour and Waters put up big shows that can generally draw a lot of casual fans, Mason’s act is more of a hardcore...

Sometimes, discovering new music leaves such a big mark you end up remembering a lot of tiny details that for other events you just don’t bother. It was a January morning in the mid ’90’s and I clearly remember the streets all wet, but the rain had already passed by and a pale sun was swaying above the clouds. For some reason, I didn’t go to school and I stopped at my usual record store with nothing but a few coins in my pockets. With such a scant budget my options were pretty limited, so I just started to flip through a clearance bin full of cd singles. As soon as Mark Lanegan’s ‘House A Home’ popped up, I knew that was it. I had never...

2021 has been another year well-stocked with high quality releases. Not as much as 2020, but still a lot. To avoid the rabbit hole of an endless list, I narrowed the choices down to 15 and I only picked from records I actually bought. The list is at the bottom of this post and, except for the first choice, it’s in alphabetical order. My #1 pick is the latest effort by Canadian (but Brooklyn-based) tenor saxophonist/flutist Anna Webber. ‘Idiom’ is a double album (actually, a double cd, as it’s not available on vinyl) walking the thin line between avant-jazz and contemporary classical music. Anna herself...

If there’s been something good in this ill-fated 2020, that’s certainly music. I can’t remember another year with so many high quality releases in recent times and that’s great news. I tried to put together a list of my albums of the year, but the draft kept growing. At some point, I just gave up and decided not to narrow it down. If you want to see all the records I considered (about 50), the whole draft list can be found at the end of this post. All of that said, if I had to pick just one, it would be Matt Elliott’s ‘Farewell To All We Know’. It was conceived way before the pandemic, but the title...