Month: March 2003

For the artists appearing in this often amazing annual touring show, utility is by no means the enemy of beauty. Clothes, jewelry, lamps and furniture, all the art on display here is functional as well as aesthetic—adhering to a tradition of handmade household art that we too easily forget about in this age of mass…

Over the course of a rich, long career including journeyman dues paid on cruise ships and with Ray Charles’ international touring band, Jim Rotondi’s developed a rich style on trumpet and flugelhorn that launches off from groundwork laid by predecessors such as Freddie Hubbard. After four releases on the Criss Cross jazz label, he moved…

Making the world safe for jazz—that’s a full-time job these days, and no matter how hard a band or a program director or a club owner works to make jazz accessible, well, it’s always going to be a hard sell. Unless you’ve got grooves like Medeski Martin & Wood, who have somehow managed to carve…

It’s springtime in the Twin Cities, which means touring musicians are once again willing to add us to their schedule, including the talented New England singer/songwriters Dar Williams and Melissa Ferrick. On the light side, Dar Williams, with her quirky, melancholy songs about alternative radio, therapy, and how southern California wants to be western New…

Regular listeners to A Prairie Home Companion might find these songs familiar. A frequent guest and onetime music director on the show, multi-instrumentalist maestro Ostroushko wrote the songs on Red Lodge as a challenge to himself to fill a five-week stint last March with entirely new work. The 10 songs here reflect the range of…

Lucinda Williams is a stubborn lady, which has been both a blessing and a curse. She’s refused to compromise her genre-crossing, rough-edged songwriting, but it’s not easy to get ahead in country music when your influences also include Delta blues and electric-era Dylan. She’s too raw and electric for country radio and too twangy for…