The Highlander String Band will pull into Offbeat Roadhouse Friday night, August 6, for a concert which will also be broadcast on WTJU.  The Highlander String Band is a collection of Rockingham County musicians playing traditional Appalachian Mountain music.  They play the Top Ten Tunes of the 50’s and 60’s – 1850 that is.  They […]

The Classics a Day team once again made NAFTA Classics the theme for July. Two of the three countries in North America have significant holidays in the month — Canada Day (July 1), and Independence Day (July 4). As always with this theme, I simply alternated between Canadian, American, and Mexican composers. And the process […]

The 9-CD Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap has just been released, and it brings the usual thorny issues that arise around canonization, especially when an august institution canonizes a rebellious cultural phenomenon. How do we define the parameters of the art form? What criteria do we consider for inclusion? Who gets to decide? Join […]

Allison Miller For over a decade, drummer Allison Miller has led and been the principal composer for the band Boom Tic Boom. The group was launched in 2010 as a quartet with Jenny Scheinman on violin, Myra Melford on piano, and Todd Sickafoose on bass, but was augmented to a sextet more recently with the […]

New Jazz & Blues News – 7/27/2021 Wayne Alpern – Frankenstein (Self-produced): “My musical grammar is neither radical nor experimental. Its vitality lies in the familiarity of genres, recollection of themes, and the unpretentious interpolation of the dance floor, the saloon, and the iPod. It tempers serious music with the social, inviting listeners to come […]

According to the liner notes, the purpose of this release is to “uncover the fine thread of cultural exchange between high art music and popular music tradition.” Sure, I could hear that. You can also enjoy this release as a great collection of early music hits. I use the word “hits,” because many of these […]