Apr 17 2025
Chavela Vargas did not need a mariachi orchestra to make a ranchera sound enormous. Often accompanied by little more than guitars, she could slow a familiar song until every word seemed to carry the weight of a lifetime. Her voice was rough, intimate, wounded, defiant, and unmistakably her own. Songs about abandonment, desire, loneliness, drinking, …
Apr 10 2025
Bird calls, croaking frogs, shimmering vibraphones, bongos, gongs, piano, and mysterious percussion from around the world: few musicians captured the fantasy of mid-century tropical escapism quite like Martin Denny. Born in New York City on April 10, 1911, Denny became the musician most closely associated with exotica, the curious and enormously atmospheric style of instrumental …
Apr 07 2025
Billie Holiday did not possess the biggest voice in jazz, and she never needed one. What made Holiday extraordinary was what she did with a song once it reached her. She stretched phrases, delayed words until just behind the beat, altered melodies, softened notes almost into conversation, and found emotions in familiar lyrics that other …
Apr 02 2025
Serge Gainsbourg spent much of his career changing shape. He began with smoky jazz-influenced chanson, wrote sophisticated pop songs for some of France’s most famous singers, embraced British rock and psychedelia, constructed ambitious concept albums, traveled to Jamaica to record reggae, experimented with funk in New York, composed music for films, acted, directed, painted, wrote, …
Mar 29 2025
Astrud Gilberto never intended to become one of the defining voices of bossa nova. She had no established recording career when she stepped up to a microphone in New York in 1963 and sang a few lines in English for a song called “The Girl from Ipanema.” Her delivery was quiet, direct, almost conversational. There …
Mar 02 2025
Lou Reed wanted rock and roll to carry the weight of literature without losing the excitement of three chords played loudly in a small room. Across more than five decades, he wrote about people rarely given much space in mainstream popular music, pushed electric guitars toward abstraction and noise, celebrated the possibilities of a perfectly …
Feb 19 2025
Some film music announces itself with enormous orchestras, booming percussion, and melodies designed to tell an audience exactly what to feel. Shigeru Umebayashi often takes the opposite approach. A few strings, a slow waltz, a repeated phrase, or a melody that seems to circle endlessly around an unresolved emotion can become more powerful than an …
Feb 10 2025
Before Bob Dylan became Bob Dylan, before folk music collided with rock and roll, and before Greenwich Village became permanently associated with acoustic guitars and politically charged coffeehouse songs, Dave Van Ronk was already there. With a booming, rough-edged voice, a sophisticated guitar style, an encyclopedic knowledge of traditional music, and a personality large enough …
Feb 07 2025
A burst of brass, a stalking bass line, crisp percussion, and strings that seem to move with the confidence of someone stepping out of a sports car in the middle of swinging London. Laurie Johnson understood that a television theme did not merely have to introduce a program. In less than a minute, it could …
Jan 29 2025
Long before Sacha Distel became famous for the tuxedo, the effortless smile, and the warm voice that seemed designed for late-night television, he was sitting in Paris jazz clubs with a guitar, trying to keep up with some of the best musicians of the postwar era. The polished crooner image came later. Jazz came first. …
