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Recent Posts
- What’s New for the 16th of August: Deborah Grabien’s music criticism essays; new Americana and jazz, and some music for the Dog Days of Summer
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Midsomer Strangeness
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Contradances
- What’s New for the 26th of July: Witches in fiction, both books and film; an Americana reissue and some music on a smoky theme
- A Kinrowan Estate story: chicken pot pieces
- What’s New for the 19th of July: Charles de Lint’s Ottawa novels with a quote from Drink Down the Moon, Gary’s review of Nordic fiddle music, It’s Michele Walther and Irina Behrendt playing Aaron Copland’s ‘Hoe Down’ from his Rodeo album
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Midsomer Odd Things
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Library and Its Librarian
- What’s New for the Fifth of July: Remembering Jane Yolen; some new Americana and jazz music; Fishing Blues
- A Kinrowan Estate Story: Recursive Loops
- What’s New for June 21: Jennifer Stevenson’s ‘Solstice’
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Turkish Coffee
- What’s New for the 7th of June: Foxes in literature, live Balkan music, comforting jazz, Americana jazz, and wonderfully weird fusion jazz; and John Fogerty live
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Bloodied Kings
- What’s New for the 24th of May: Gary’s Review of Elizabeth Bear’s White Space novels, iain’s review of the Lonely Signal Burns novellas by her, she reading her own story, ‘The Chains That You Refuse’, and I see Gary has some tasty music reviews fir us as well
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Our Greensward
- What’s New for the 10th of May: books reviewed by Jennifer Stevenson, music by Teddy Thompson, Americana music from all over, and some live music from John Fogerty
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Walk
- What’s New for the 26th of April: the nature of Stories; some new and newish SF, plus new world, jazz, folk and Americana music
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Spring Day
- What’s New for the 12th of April: Some new and recent SF; new Americana, Norwegian folk rock and jazz; and thoughts on War For The Oaks
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Unified Theory of Libraries (A Letter to Anna)
- What’s New for the 29th of March: Beer and spirits, in song and text, some new Scandinavian fiddle music and jazz flute music, and more
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Ghostly Librarian
- What’s New for the 15th of March: some DeLint stories for early spring; lots of polskas, Serbian folk rock, progressive jazz, and Nordic music from the archives
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Hedge Witches
- What’s New for the 1st of March: Emma Bull’s War for The Oaks, Rosanne Cash’s ‘Runaway Train’, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, plus new Americana and jazz music
- A Kinrorwan Estate story: Cranachanh
- What’s New for the 15th of February: Some Seanan McGuire fantasy, Alison Bechdel’s latest, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin; Nordic sounds, old time, Americana and Tex-Mex music
- What’s New for the 1st of February: Kage Baker retrospective; new Americana, Buddhist chants and Finnish songs, new and reissued jazz, and more
Category Archives: Music
Courtney Hartman & Taylor Ashton’s Been On Your Side
Courtney Hartman and Taylor Ashton’s debut recording is an intimate affair, born of their close friendship and harmonious ideas about how they want to make music. Ashton, a Canadian, is a visual artist as well as a singer and songwriter … Continue reading
Posted in Music
Tagged Americana music
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Very Be Careful’s Daisy’s Beauty Salon
Anyone who’s paying attention to world music in the past 20 years or so knows about cumbia. This Colombian folk music style has taken the world by storm in the 2000s. But its cousin vallenato (“vai-yeh-NAH-toh”) is less well known … Continue reading
Posted in Music
Tagged cumbia, folk-rock, world music
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The Tallis Scholars Sing Josquin
Josquin des Pres (1450?-1521) was born Josquin Lebloitte, either in Hainault (modern Belgium) or in France. (The “des Pres” was a nickname, as they understood such things in the fifteenth century.) He seems to have been a choirboy at Saint-Quentin … Continue reading
Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet
I’ve remarked before on Morton Feldman’s propensity to shape sound with silence, a tendency he shares with Toru Takemitsu. Listening to Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet, a late work, written two years before his death in 1987, I realize that … Continue reading
Posted in Music
Tagged contemporary avant-garde
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Clay Parker and Jodi James’s The Lonesomest Sound That Can Sound
Clay Parker and Jodi James are a music-making couple from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This album, which looks like it’s maybe their second or third, is a superb collection of country-leaning folk, which I guess these days is called Americana. The … Continue reading
Posted in Music
Tagged Americana music
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John Prine’s The Tree of Forgiveness
John Prine is the folk singer America deserves. And needs. Since his debut self-titled album in 1971 he has been ministering to our malaise with his unique blend of humor, pathos, comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy that perfectly reflects and refracts … Continue reading
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Tagged Americana music, folk music, folk-rock
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Cowboy Junkies’ All That Reckoning
Cowboy Junkies’ latest release marks the 30th anniversary of the Canadian folk-rockers’ breakthrough album The Trinity Session. All That Reckoning, all these years later, still is built around Margo Timmins’ hushed vocals, but this one seethes with a barely suppressed … Continue reading
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Tagged Americana music, folk-rock
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Tim Clement and Kim Deschamps’ Wolf Song Night
Classifying things seems to be, for some reason, a basic human need. And it is axiomatic that our systems for classification have built-in limits and conceptual gaps: Archaeopteryx lithographica is, therefore, a bird. And Wolfsong Night, a collaboration between Tim … Continue reading
Posted in Music
Tagged contemporary music, new age
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Jefferson Airplane’s The Essential Jefferson Airplane, Red Octopus and Blows Against the Empire
Psychedelic music was originally so named because it sought to recreate musically the mind-expanding experience of LSD. “Psychedelic, man!” The center of this music was unquestionably San Francisco, with bands like the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Jefferson … Continue reading
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Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and Vassilis Tsabropoulos’ Chants, Hymns and Dances
The name Gurdjieff calls up images of mysticism, esoteric spiritual doctrines, perhaps to some extent a certain wild-eyed fanaticism. Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was, in point of fact, one of those restless wanderers in the realm of ideas who crop up … Continue reading
Posted in Music
Tagged modern music, world music
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