The Envelope (Away-Team Music) is a short compact burst of energy with snatches of melody by Miami band Message To Venus. Word has it they’re working on a debut full-length, called Victims & Villains. If this EP is any indication, the album will definitely be worth checking out.

San…

BETHLEHEM, PA—He came out of Cuba in 1990, defecting to the United States while touring with Dizzy Gillespie’s band. Back in Havana, he had to play in state-sponsored bands where the Castro regime dictated his musical direction. Arturo Sandoval’s life reads like a Hollywood movie, and in 2000 it…

What seemed inconsequential 41 years ago sounds positively charming today. When Beatle Paul released his first solo album in 1970, he was going through horribly hard times. A one-man show, with Paul playing every instrument including drums, these 13 tracks include some of his most memorable melodies, songs that…

I don’t know how I convinced the publisher of this paper to let me cover the Yankees and Mets in 1980 but I did. The Phillies won the World Series that year for the first time since their 1883 inception and when they came to Shea Stadium, I was…

Billie Holiday was raped when she was 10 and again when she was 12. It was enough to turn her off to men for a long, long time. Practically raised in a Baltimore whorehouse, she’d do favors for the working girls in exchange for the honor of sitting in…

By the dawn of the 1980s, the Aquarian Weekly was affording me the opportunity to meet my heroes, and I was loving every minute of it. Kris Kristofferson talked for hours. Wilson Pickett told me he meant to murder one of The Isley Brothers when he shot at them…

The fiddles are flying again for Steve Earle, and it sounds so good to have the author/actor back acoustic and singin’ oldtime, backporch country/folk again after flings with alternative psychedelia. The last hit Hank Williams ever had before he died at 29 was “I’ll Never Get Out Of This…

This alien left-field collaboration between American producer Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi is a delicious slice of exotica, a compact 35:05, mostly instrumental, inspired by Ennio Morricone’s music to Sergio Leone’s 1960s westerns: haunting, evocative, strikingly dramatic, yet using two lead voices: Norah Jones and Jack White.

So the question remains after all these years: Did Bruce Springsteen really kidnap an Aquarian photographer in 1978 to teach him a lesson in privacy? Did he really have him driven to a desolate spot on the highway, take the film from his camera, and leave him stunned and…

There is weirdness emanating out of Hightstown, New Jersey, and its name is Bruce Hanson. Armed with oddball, semi-brilliant compositions containing humor, verve, alacrity, mysteriousness and a deep abiding reverence for such influencing fellow oddballs as Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Alfred Hitchcock, Hanson has…