The blues, according to B.B. King, is about survival, and if there’s a list of people who know about both the blues and survival, King’s got to be near the top. The blues, we learn from King, isn’t about being beaten down, it’s about getting back up again. Singer Vienna Carroll knows about blues and survival, too. And she knows […]

I’ve been admiring the Lancaster, England, duo the Lovely Eggs from afar for quite some time. They’ve been at it for well over a decade and are perfectly molded for the age of internet-induced attention deficit disorder. Their songs and videos are fast, funny, charming and can serve to work out aggression in a matter of minutes, either by giggles […]

Of course, everything’s different now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So instead of walking over to the shop, I called Farhad Soheili, owner and founder of F.S. Lutherie in Brooklyn. F.S. Lutherie is a custom guitar maker and guitar repair workshop started by Farhad. Originally from Los Angeles, he has spent the past two decades repairing, restoring, and building custom-made […]

Live streaming has certainly become a fine escape for many people who love music in these days of pandemic. It is working out OK for certain musicians and many suddenly less distracted music lovers. A positive side effect of this quarantine is that many musicians who were too busy playing in the past had not been able to see each […]

The musicians are doing their all, but the zoom-type media experience is just not working for jazz. Jazz has an in-the-moment feedback that streaming can’t support. Catch a live performance and the musicians (if it’s safe for two or more to got together) can be seen responding to each other, but there’s nothing they can get from the viewers, nor […]

February 23rd, the band and I played our second show at the Flying Lobster, the coolest new venue in Carroll Gardens/Columbia Street waterfront. Essentially the backroom of Le Petite Crevette, it’s a highly attractive place with a brick and wood interior, tin ceilings, great food and wine, and a vintage jukebox stocked with jazz 78’s. The group that night went […]

With the world – and the arts world with it – shuttering its doors amid COVID-19’s havoc, life as we know it has sputtered to a standstill. That doesn’t erase the months or years that bands and musicians had poured into preparing albums slated for a release whose timing turned out to be impeccably poor. But that also doesn’t discount […]

Few industries are immune to the financial and structural chaos that COVID-19 has wrought. The music business, though, is particularly vulnerable. Essentially made up of dozens of patchwork business models, with the majority of workers being self-employed, there is little relief for the majority of musicians. Broadway is shuttered, bars are closed, weddings are postponed, international tours are canceled, and […]

Ben Bierman lives around the corner from me, which explains how I first met him and his partner Val at the local gin palace. It was the usual Sunday afternoon gathering, and I was on the prowl for a game of cribbage, but there were no takers, no suckers, no ringers. I felt like a cross between an also-ran Paul […]

25 years ago, Ibrahima Diokhane opened Keur Djembe, an African drum shop, on Union Street. When I stopped in to talk to Ibrahima last month, he was sitting on a stool, as if waiting for me. “Ibrahima?”  “Yes, that’s me.” The store was about as big as my living room.  I told him that I wanted to write an article […]

Like most of us, Ethan Fiks has had to respond creatively to the new reality of the Coronavirus. Ethan has been teaching my nine-year-old-son, Travis, guitar for the past year and a half.  Travis went from not being able to play guitar to now playing songs like “Stray Cat Strut” and “Wonderwall.”  We go to Ethan’s house on East 16th […]

The sad state of the days means that pianist Mike Longo will, for at least a good period of time, be remembered more for being the first American jazz musician to succumb to the COVID-19 virus than for the what he did musically, and how it added to the world. Dorothy Longo, his wife for 32 years, reported his death […]