T Bone Burnett wants you to know who he is. He wants you to know that he isn’t just an esteemed producer and collaborator for artists like Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Ry Cooder, and Ralph Stanley; and he certainly isn’t the beard-stroking archivist type a lot of us probably began to envision him as in the fourteen years since his last record, during which he became better known than ever for his production and soundtrack work (think O Brother, Where Art Thou? …

Whenever the average music listener thinks of a man named King associated with the blues, it’s always B.B. gracefully brandishing his Lucille. And there’s not really a problem with that, B.B. King is the living king of modern blues, after all, but if ever there was a blues King who deserved to be noticed, it’s another man named Albert.
Albert King’s unique guitar style makes him perhaps the most distinctive guitarist of the blues pantheon; he was a left-handed guitar player who never restrung his …

Little Milton’s pseudonym hardly does him justice. The blues, R&B and soul performer’s voice is by no means little. That rasp, that deep voice of a man done wrong, is all too available to nestle up to on the Stax Records release of his songs. Not only does the Mississippi native’s voice melt in your ears, but the former James Milton Campbell has been strumming away on the guitar since the age of 12. Three years later, he was picking up paid gigs at …

Johnnie Taylor may be largely unknown now, but his influence is far-reaching, helping to form the sound of artists such as Otis Redding, Al Green, and Sam & Dave. For Taylor’s Stax Profiles collection, former News frontman Huey Lewis has compiled some of the best selections from the singer’s nearly six-decade career, covering a wide range of the genres in which Taylor experimented: R&B, blues, soul, and disco, among others.
Taylor was discovered by Sam Cooke in the early 1950s, and would later replace …

As our Stax tribute week plows on, it becomes even more conspicuous that Stax was a label full of legends, soul masters and trend setters. The most cursory trip through the Stax catalogue yields the usual characters: Otis Redding, Albert King, Wilson Pickett… you can probably fill in the rest. And the thing that bound these artists together, bundled them up into an identity and place in history under the banner of Stax, was the sound of the recordings themselves. Yeah, …

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but here it is: I, like many music listeners, spent far too many years believing Eddie Floyd’s classic, “Knock on Wood,” was recorded by Wilson Pickett. Now hold on for a second; before you accuse me of a lack of R&B credibility and storm away, the fact is, my embarrassingly long-lived mistake wasn’t too far off the mark.
Anchored by a hard-driving horn refrain and that chunky, funky Steve Cropper guitar, “Knock on Wood” is a dead ringer for …

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but here it is: I, like many music listeners, spent far too many years believing Eddie Floyd’s classic, “Knock on Wood,” was recorded by Wilson Pickett. Now hold on for a second; before you accuse me of a lack of R&B credibility and storm away, the fact is, my embarrassingly long-lived mistake wasn’t too far off the mark.
Anchored by a hard-driving horn refrain and that chunky, funky Steve Cropper guitar, “Knock on Wood” is a dead ringer for …

We, the collective audience, love pop culture dynasties. Perhaps the appeal is in the idea that the level of talent that allows one to rise to the heights of stardom is not something that can be learned or even a matter of universal randomness. Rather, it is a genetic trait – something that can only be passed from the blessed few on to their blessed children. So sayeth the gospel of LA. Whatever the case, our entertainment history books are littered with the names …

Sondre Lerche does not fit into my stereotypes of a Norwegian musician. He does not play death or black metal. He does not kill his fellow bandmates. Nor has he ever (at least to this reviewer’s knowledge) burned down a church in the names of Satan and rock and roll. And until now, it’s never mattered: Lerche’s prior releases, Faces Down and Two Way Monologue, were artful pop records which cemented the then-teenager as a musical phenom. Those albums found the right mixture …

A few weeks ago, the Sex Pistols answered their inevitable nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with what many fans trumpeted as an especially “punk” gesture: an open letter, hand-scrawled and atrociously spelled, declaring their contempt for the corporate institution and vehemently declining to appear at the ceremony. And it was pretty punk of them, insomuch as our concept of “punk” in the 21st century has been informed by mass-produced bondage pants, vague notions of “sticking it to the man” …