Zoh Amba
I’ve been thinking about up-and-coming free jazz saxophonist Zoh Amba’s music for a while. I first heard her last year, at the same time everyone else did — she appeared on five albums in 2022 (of...
View ArticleChick Corea
I interviewed Chick Corea once, in 2009, when he was on tour with the Five Peace Band, a short-lived quintet that featured John McLaughlin on guitar, Kenny Garrett on alto sax, Christian McBride on...
View ArticleKeith LeBlanc
I’ve been a fan of drummer Keith LeBlanc for well over 30 years. I first heard his 1987 album Major Malfunction in high school, along with the 1988 album Tackhead Tape Time, which compiled and remixed...
View ArticleStop Making Sense
I wasn’t a fan of Talking Heads when Stop Making Sense came out. I was 13; I was just starting to be truly aware of the universe of pop music. I had no idea where musicians or records came from —...
View ArticleCharles Gayle
Saxophonist Charles Gayle died last week at 84. He was born February 28, 1939 in Buffalo, New York and lived and worked there until the early 1970s. He didn’t like to talk about his early life, but...
View ArticleInterview: Kyle Gann
I recently received a 21CD box set from the Deutsche Grammophon label, reissuing almost all of the two dozen albums they put out between 1968 and 1971 in their Avantgarde series. Four boxes, each...
View ArticleHedvig Mollestad
I’ve been a fan of Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad for more than a decade. A graduate of the Norwegian Academy of Music who was named Young Jazz Talent of the Year at 27, her music has more in...
View ArticleCreation Rebel
I don’t think anyone would have expected the brilliant UK reggae band Creation Rebel to put out an album in 2023, but here we are and here they are. It’s called Hostile Environment, and it features...
View ArticlePurple Trap
In case you hadn’t heard, John Zorn (who turned 70 on September 2) has at long last allowed his Tzadik label’s catalog to appear on streaming services like Spotify and Tidal. With close to 1000...
View ArticleSouth Africa ’75
I’ve been mildly obsessed with South African jazz for about the last five years. It helps that the scene seems to have been undergoing a renaissance. There’s a young (in jazz terms) school of players...
View ArticleDredd Foole & The Din
Way back in the summer of 1988, I read about an album in Spin magazine — in Byron Coley’s “Underground” column to be exact — that I’ve been obsessed with ever since. He wrote, in part, “If you’ve got...
View ArticleObscure Records
In the mid-1970s, Brian Eno — who had left the band Roxy Music in 1973 and almost immediately released two solo albums, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and a...
View ArticleTrad, Gras och Stenar
What if the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead, and Faust were all stages in the development of one group? Well, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a collective of Swedish musicians underwent an...
View ArticleBebop
Jazz at Massey Hall is a live album that was recorded in 1953 in Toronto by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. It’s the only recording to feature all five...
View ArticleFela In Colombia
Lisandro Meza died just before Christmas, on December 23, 2023. He was an accordion player, born in 1937, who gained great popularity in his native Colombia and gradually all over South America and...
View ArticleBA Podcast 79: Ethan Iverson
It’s true — the Burning Ambulance Podcast is back! To find out about upcoming episodes, as well as all things Burning Ambulance, sign up for our free weekly newsletter. It’s been a long time since...
View ArticleAntenna @ 30
ZZ Top were one of America’s greatest bands. (They’re still around, touring every year, but the chemistry between guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons, bassist/vocalist Dusty Hill, who died in July 2021,...
View ArticlePhilip Glass Solo
Philip Glass turned 87 this week; he was born January 31, 1937. He’s indisputably one of the most important composers of the 20th century. I mean, the sheer volume of his output alone, never mind the...
View ArticleFrench Art-Metal
I first wrote about the French stoner/space-rock trio Slift a year ago, calling them “a perfect storm of space-rockin’ cosmic fury” and “galloping toward the horizon…set on maximum destruction all the...
View ArticleCannibal Corpse
There’s a very good reason that this post starts with a photo of Cannibal Corpse (L-R: guitarist Jack Owen, bassist Alex Webster, vocalist George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, guitarist Pat O’Brien, drummer...
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