Tag: Vol. 26 No. 5

SABRI BROTHERS Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has popularized qawwali, the ecstatic devotional music of the Sufis, but fellow Pakistanis the Sabri Brothers were actually the first performers to take it outside their native land. The Sabris, whose lineage runs back 400 years to Punjabi court musicians, made their first recording in 1958, and in their […]

GEORGE SHEARING QUINTET Elegant and playful, light-fingered and crafty, the blind pianist George Shearing qualifies as a genuine jazz perennial. He made his first record in 1939 in his native London, but it was a series of events in mid-40s New York that established his popularity: his immigration to the U.S., his adoption of bebop, […]

DEL MCCOURY BAND With the recent passing of Bill Monroe, the undisputed father of bluegrass, it’s hard not to view Del McCoury–who played and sang in Monroe’s band in the 60s–as the music’s most vital living proponent. Most modern bluegrass artists have opted either for post-Alison Krauss airbrushed gloss or post-Bela Fleck wankery, but McCoury […]

CARL STONE The digital revolution has produced at least two distinct schools of aesthetic thought. One seizes on the sampler’s capacity to zip through and assimilate vast quantities of diverse information; the other uses the computer to examine minuscule flecks of material in meticulous detail. If the first school is epitomized by the pastichery of […]