What does it sound like?:

Who’d be a Blues Rock guitarist in the Twenty-First Century? Blues Rock, a genre that came into being over fifty years ago and reached its peak in the seventies. The electric guitar, an instrument that hasn’t exactly fallen into disrepute but is no longer the centrepiece of the modern world of music.

The answer is plenty of people and here are two of them. Danny Bryant is English and has been a professional guitar player for over twenty years. His skills impressed the likes of Buddy Guy and Carlos Santana enough for them to want to work with him. He’s made numerous albums and tours regularly, going down particularly well in America. He makes a decent living doing something he loves. Means Of Escape is ten tracks of classic seventies Blues Rock with loud, stomping riffs and some reflective acoustic songs. The key instrument is actually the Hammond organ. A sustained organ chord behind some stylish guitar ‘solo’ing is very effective at getting the pulse racing. The trouble is that Bryant is too much of a purist. Means Of Escape could be preserved in aspic from four decades ago as it sounds exactly like » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

The live releases from Crimson keep coming and are the gifts that just keep on giving. This 5 cd set, covering the years 2014 to 2018, was on sale at the band’s gigs on their recent tour, but has now been given a deserved wider release.

The material covers performances from the first show by this incarnation in New York in 2014 up to one of their most recent gigs in Tokyo in December of last year, devoting one cd to each year. The current line up is now the most enduring in the band’s half century of operations, and they have lost none of their spark – indeed, as the years have passed the creative fire has seemed to burn ever brighter. As purchasers of their previous live offerings will expect, this set has been superbly curated, and is accompanied by a very nice 24 page booklet.

Musically, the playing and improvisations are off the scale, and even when pieces are repeated on different cds no two performances are the same – there are always differences, some subtle, some more obvious. There are some great Crim classics here such as Moonchild, Starless and » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Frank Zappa was a serious composer who found working in the rock n’ roll idiom and making complicated popular music with knob jokes enabled him to subsidise his artistic work that had less commercial potential. He once observed that “some artists put their money up their nose, I put my money in my ears”, and the concerts on this set of discs were paid for from the profits made from the single “Don’t eat the yellow snow”: there is something Platonic in that equation. I’ve been listening to the is album for almost 40 years, and in that time it has gone from “What is THAT?” to “Could be a film soundtrack” (admittedly an odd film).

For the uninitiated, this music is tunefully and busily abstract, self-consciously difficult and sometimes effortlessly cheesy (I love the big band “Duke of Prunes”), mostly made with an orchestra but occasional guitar, synthesiser, and bass art comedy music. Does that help? It would have led to energetic frugging at a Bauhaus ball (as in German art movement, not Northampton goths) and would surely appeal to hipsters and avant-rock types if it wasn’t for the terminally unwoke cachet » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Running On Empty may not be Jackson Browne’s best album – well, it does have some pretty stiff competition after all – but perhaps surprisingly it is his biggest seller. This is a straight remaster of the original 1977 album, and thus excludes the two extra songs that appeared on the 2005 reissue. It’s not a live album as such – instead it’s a mixture of songs that were recorded in live environments rather than in a studio, be that in a concert setting, backstage, on the tour bus or in a hotel room. JB is accompanied throughout by a crack band that included David Lindley, Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel and Leland Sklar among others. You simply don’t get a better supporting cast than that!

Although the two most well known pieces are the title track and the version of Stay (segued with The Load Out) that closes the album, it includes a number of very fine songs, as beautifully crafted and performed as you might expect. Having said that, only two songs are actually new Browne solo works, with four others being co-writes and the remaining four tracks being cover versions. None of » Continue Reading.