The great and even ordinary soul singers of the '60s and '70s trained before live audiences—often in church. Ironically, the recordings they were known for were polished to a bright gleam in studio settings, making it hard to top the emotional heft when...

Musicians with famous musical parents are usually in for a hard time. Just ask Sean and Julian Lennon, who never emerged from the deep shadows of their father. Kami Thompson, daughter of the estranged king and queen of British folk rock, Richard...

If you have been waiting for a '90s revival, check out Milwaukee's Jake Paul Band. That decade never left their hearts, if The Jailbreak is any indication. The group's trick is that they don't take any one style from that time in wholesale form, but instead...

The Netherlands' reputation for supporting a flourishing and venturesome jazz scene is supported by the bracing new album by Amsterdam's Clazz Ensemble of music by Finnish-American pianist-composer Frank Carlberg. Structured improvisation occurs...

Another year brings another Launchpad, Wisconsin's statewide battle-of-the-bands competition for high-school students. When Launchpad is good, it's a thrill to hear fledgling teen combos work out their muses. Last year's finalists come from an...

Milwaukee folkie and bluegrass bandleader Mud River Lee takes a break from his usual style for this CD single, a pissed-off tune lamenting Gov. Scott Walker's nixing of tax funds for the high-speed passenger railroad between the Badger State's two most...

With Obliquity of the Ecliptic, multi-media artist Christiane D pulls together a remarkable musical tour de force, a dark swirl of sound embracing snaky hip-hop rhythms, singing and rapping, deep funk bass lines, almost elegant echoes of gospel and...

One of Joshua Bell's mentors, his violin instructor at the Indiana University, was once the pupil of the musician for whom French Impressionist composer Cesar Franck wrote his Violin Concerto in A Major (1886). Perhaps the sense of lineage as much as the...

Although reggae fanned out from Jamaica decades ago, many performers from elsewhere have remained true to the Rastafarian faith that grounded the music as well as its easy, steady-on rhythm. Case in point: one of the most prolific reggae groups...

Entertaining children has long been part of Dave Fox and Will Branch's act. For Things are Coming My Way! the Milwaukee folkies chose the songs from their live sets proven most likely to make kids laugh. Accompanied on their extended romp through...

Uruguay, the small nation wedged between the giants of Brazil and Argentina, was shaped like many places in the New World by an influx of immigration. Los Gauchos de Roldan is determined to preserve the music that filtered into Uruguay's rural...

If the samba and bossa nova are any guide, Brazil is a nation of lulling breezes and gracious cool in the subtropical heat. Brazilian Beat won't disappoint fans of the '60s era sounds that helped define the country's image. The rhythms are lively yet easy...

At their best moments, the New York Gypsy All Stars bring the past into the present in a dialogue between tradition and change. Band leader Ismail Lumanovski is really a Gypsy (and a Julliard graduate); he joins heart and head in his clarinet playing...

As a teenage novice in Milwaukee, even before he lost the first i in his name, Kevn Kinney already had a gift for fashioning stories to simple but moving rock melodies. After leaving for Atlanta, he absorbed the Southern setting through his skin, moving back in...

When the vinyl LP was introduced in the late 1940s and '50s, it wasn't primarily intended as a forum for entertainers but for artists. Jazz musicians saw the advantage of long-playing records and used them to document the advances jazz was making...

“I tried to avoid it for a long time,” Llysa Spencer says, “but you can't really help being an artist.” Spencer's second CD might be the result of nature as much as nurture. Her Kentucky ancestors...

Producer Mike Rivard is the prime mover behind this expansive double CD and its round robin of players, billed as Club d'Elf. The music reaches the spacier heights of jazz and electronica from a sonic home base in Morocco, a place where the Near East...

This much is certain: Katie Mack, the powerhouse vocalist for Milwaukee rockers Rectifier, can (and no doubt will) kick your ass. The first line out of her mouth on Something Warm's opening track “Get What You Get”—“Woke up this morning with...

The boundaries of TriBeCaStan continue to expand. On New Deli, the musical republic's third album, TriBeCaStan unfurls its flag against a lilting Caribbean breeze (“Song for Kroncha”) before sailing onto the stranger seas of free jazz and returning to placid...

On her eighth album, songwriter and singer Emily Hurd covers the psychological terrain of love—the hope as well as the loss, the exuberance of experience and the melancholy of regret. The striking images of her lyrics, delivered in a voice at once powerful...

Elvis Thao is a socially conscious rocker from Milwaukee with a voice capable of rage and vulnerability, an ear for melody and a gift for the occasionally memorable line of lyric. He's fortunate to keep good company for The Water Street Experiment with...

Heavy metal—with its countless sub-genres and broad musical definitions—rarely escapes being maligned in some musical circles. But then along comes a group like Anubis Gate. Although considered a “prog/power-metal” band by its four...

The second record from the Milwaukee four-piece The Fatty Acids has the ambitious scope of a concept album, though it could just be an especially inspired stream of consciousness. Somewhere between The Flaming Lips' epic neo-psychedelia...

Milwaukee hard rockers The Heroes Lie follow up last year's debut album with six songs on a trajectory toward rock radio's mainstream. Funny as it may be to say about a band that could easily enough play Ozzfest, The Heroes Lie's most endearing...

In 1970, Chicago letter carrier John Prine, still a year from his classic debut album, recorded his early songs for copyright purposes. The great Studs Terkel, who had just interviewed him on his radio show, allowed Prine to keep the reel-to-reel running...