Tag: Vol. 24 No. 49

Fontella Bass’s torrid “Rescue Me” on Chess Records’ Checker subsidiary in 1965 established her as a major R & B figure, despite her relatively brief tenure in the limelight. All in all, Bass charted seven times for Chess. After leaving the label in 1968 she toured Europe for a while with the Art Ensemble of […]

This recital, which opens the fifth season of Oak Park’s well-received Concerts Under the Dome chamber series, felicitously pairs a seasoned veteran with a quartet of emerging talents noted for their interpretive acumen and enthusiastic playing. Menahem Pressler, the distinguished pianist whose career stretches back to the late 40s and who’s achieved wide renown as […]

Tricky’s prophetic debut album, Maxinquaye (Island), is an aural ripple unlike anything you’ve heard before. Emerging from the much-hyped if feebly named Bristol, England, trip-hop scene, which has also produced Portishead and Massive Attack, with whom Tricky (aka Adrian Thaws) first recorded, he sumptuously twists hip-hop rudiments into a slippery, dense collage of sound. On […]

John Darnielle, singer and songwriter with the Extra Glenns, is a man in love with language. Flush with vividly evocative phrases and economically rendered narratives, his songs may seem a bit out of sync with the times: in an age when the self-conscious deployment of obscenity is a viable marketing tool, he makes old-fashioned phrases […]

For a long time it seemed that guitarist Roy Montgomery would be remembered, if at all, simply for playing on the first record ever released by New Zealand’s renowned Flying Nun label. Though he and his band Pin Group put out two more singles after that historic 1981 release, in 1983 Montgomery went into semiretirement […]