New Albums - Page 142

Sludge metal band Crowbar has released its 10th studio album, . It’s the New Orleans-based group’s first since 2011’s Sever the Wicked Hand and its first with bassist Jeff Golden, who replaced longtime bassist Pat Bruders after Bruders left to concentrate on work with Down. The album also comes during Crowbar’s 25th anniversary year. But although the guys are older,...

French bassist/composer Olivier Babaz has released his third album, . Paris-born and now Montreal-based, Babaz usually focuses on working with small, acoustic jazz ensembles, but this 11-song album straddles the line between jazz and acoustic rock. Babaz’s previous recordings include the Akoz Duo record La Lune de Kala and his own Midnight Cafeine. This latest album finds Babaz working with...

The Roots’ latest, is one of the group’s shortest efforts while still being a conceptual piece focusing on self-destructive cycles. With the low end provided by bassist Mark Kelley, the record is a deep, different offering from the group, which is now on its 14th album. The group’s drummer and bandleader Questlove even goes so far as to call it...

Bassist Martin Wind and his quartet are back with an album that pays tribute to the great jazz composer/pianist Bill Evans. The quartet includes Scott Robinson on tenor sax, Bill Cunliffe on piano and Joe LaBarbera on drums. LaBarbera also played in a trio with Evans. The album, , sees the quartet working with the Italian Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana and...

“Your life will be greatly enriched” by Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band’s sixth album, . Or at least that’s what bandleader Goodwin has to say. The 10-song collection (seven of which are originals) features the Grammy-winning band, featuring Rick Shaw on bass (he also plays with Johnny Mathis, Bill Holman, and Chick Corea,) in top form. Goodwin said the players...

Bassists Will Lee (The Late Show with David Letterman) and Roscoe Beck (Leonard Cohen, Robben Ford, The Dixie Chicks, Eric Johnson) provide the low end for singular guitarist/composer Oz Noy on his sixth album, . The album is a follow-up to the 2011 release of Volume 1, also featuring Lee and Beck. An Israeli native who has called the U.S....

Mark Egan (Pat Metheny Group, Sting, Arcadia, Roger Daltry and Joan Osborne) is showing off his stellar fretless bass chops on About Now, his seventh album. Egan, a contemporary jazz composer, recorded the instrumental album as part of a trio featuring Danny Gottlieb on drums and Mitchel Forman on keyboards, both musicians with whom he has recorded before — Gottlieb...

Linley Marthe, the bass virtuoso from Mauritius, has teamed up with vocalist Monika Njava in the new world music/jazz hybrid group, Island Jazz, which has released its . Njava sings in English and several dialects of Malagasy, the language of her home country, Madagascar, which lies west of the island of Maruitius — the birthplace of the now Paris-based Marthe,...

R.E.M. was the only band to ever headline MTV’s acoustic “Unplugged” series twice, and now both those performances — from 1991 and 2001 – are available in a . The 1991 performances features the entire original band — vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry, while the 2001 performance occurred after Berry left the...

Down has followed up the 2012 EP Down IV, Part One, fittingly enough with the 6-song set, . The group, which includes pedigrees from Pantera and Corrosion of Conformity, features a new guitarist, Bobby Landgraf. And the new EP, recorded at bandleader Philip Anselmo’s New Orleans home studio, also known as “Nodferatu’s Lair,” is full of the heavy riff the...

Legendary jazz funk band Incognito is back with its 16th studio album, , and as the records have since 2005, the lineup features phenomenal bassist Francis Hylton (Chaka Khan, Lulu, Miki Imai.) Although Incognito is 16 albums into their long career, the band’s sound remains as vibrant as ever, as the single “Hats (Make Me Wanna Holler)” – featuring Tony...

Judith Owen’s latest album, , evokes the sounds of 1970’s singer-songwriter troubadours, so it’s just fitting that bass legend Leland Sklar, who played on James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender” and countless other hits, is providing the low end on the record. Owen, a jazz-rock singer and her band, which also includes superstar sidemen Russ Kunkel...