New Albums - Page 156

Dream Theater experienced a homecoming when it played the Boston Opera House earlier this year and The Berklee College of Music Orchestra and Choir made a guest appearance. The band has a deep association with Berklee. Guitarist John Petrucci and bassist John Myung are Berklee alumni. Drummer Mike Mangini was a professor at the school before joining Dream Theater. The...

Jazz instrumentalists have the luxury of playing music all over the emotional scale, says superstar jazz bassist Stanley Clarke. That might mean pieces that are way up, way down, or esoteric. You would be right if you guessed that his latest album with The Stanley Clarke Band, , is on the cheerier end of that scale. Why did he go...

Feel the need to hear some new music from Billy Sheehan and Mr. Big? Consider that need sated. Sheehan and the rest of the original lineup of Mr. Big (including vocalist Eric Martin, guitarist Paul Gilbert and drummer Pat Torpey) reformed in 2009, and is the second release (2011’s What If… was the first) from the revitalized rockers. The opening...

Question: What would rockabilly be without the bass? Answer: Nothing. Al Gare, who holds down the low end in Imelda May’s band perfectly proves the point with a swinging sound that underpins the Irish rockabilly singer’s latest album, . Gare’s playing is an absolutely essential part of May’s sound, as you can easily hear in “It’s Good to Be Alive,”...

Top jazz bassist Steve Swallow and Austrian composer/trombonist and pianist Christian Muthspiel have teamed up for an album of duets. While the pair have played together in the Christian Muthspiel 4, is their first as a duo. The pair eschew electronic effects on the record and let the songs develop in their own simple, yet refined way. Muthispiel composed all...

A performance from the last tour featuring the classic Yes lineup of bassist Chris Squire, singer Jon Anderson, guitarist Steve Howe, keyboardist Rick Wakeman, and drummer Alan White, has been released in a special edition on CD, DVD and Blu-ray. The Songs From Tsongas special edition DVD and Blu-ray packages not only capture a previously released show at the Tsongas...

For one night, powerful-yet-underrated ’80s rockers The Call reformed in an astonishingly special way. On April 19, 2013, the band members stepped onstage at The Troubadour in West Hollywood to pay tribute to lead vocalist and bassist Michael Been, who had died in 2010 of a heart attack. Been’s bassist/vocalist son, Robert Levon Been, of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club stood...

Fans of Glenn Hughes and Deep Purple (Mark III) can hear the band’s full April 3, 1975 concert at the Liebenauer ice rink in Graz, Austria on , another installment in the The Official Deep Purple (Overseas) Live Series. It’s the first time the show has been released in its entirety. The show was one of the last for the...

Death from Above 1979 has returned after a decade-long absence. arrives 10 years after the dance/punk duo released its debut LP, 2004’s You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. The music is the first to appear from the Canadian pair (bassist/synth player/backup vocalist Jesse F. Keeler and drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger) since it reunited in 2011, following a 2006 breakup. There’s not...

If not for bassist Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s March 29, 1990 show at the Nassau Coliseum wouldn’t have been quite as noteworthy as it was. On that night, Lesh invited jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis to sit in for one tune — “Birdsong.” He played it, and then, with the band’s encouragement, stayed for the entire second set. In the...

Matt Brewer, one of the younger faces of progressive jazz bass, has released , his first album as a band leader. Brewer may be better known, thus far, for his work on albums like Mike Moreno’s First in Mind and David Binney’s Anacapa. But Mythology may change that. On the record, Brewer, who has played with a variety of artists,...

Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood are together again, and hitting the road behind the four-man-lineup’s fourth album, . Guitarist Scofield, in a track-by-track assessment of the record for Relix Magazine, reveals not only the album’s origins in an effort to reflect the music of the African diaspora, but also talks about all the band members’ contributions, including pieces by bassist...