I don’t know why I had rediscovered Gary Moore in the last few months. But having recently added a few of his more recent CDs to my collection and enjoyed them tremendously, it was especially surprising and sad to hear … [read more]
It’s been a different sort of music listening year for me. Starting last January, I largely took a break from listening to popular music and reconnected with my first love, classical music. The last few years of increasingly commercial ‘indie’ … [read more]
A review of Myriam Alter’s ‘Where Is There’ (2007) Myriam Alter is one of those musicians about whom the Internet seems to know very little. What Google manages to dig up more or less tells the same story: Alter hails … [read more]
Sometimes, you just connect with a CD — immediately, powerfully, viscerally. That’s how I reacted when I first heard Sinéad Lohan’s No Mermaid, a 1998 disc that few people heard and fewer bought (her Wikipedia entry claims that No Mermaid … [read more]
A review of Food’s Quiet Inlet (2010). In its web review, the BBC calls this “a magical hybrid of technology and improvisation, Europe and America, ambience and dance.” It’s definitely all those things. I find myself especially excited about this … [read more]
For the past 6 months, I’ve been listening to classical music almost exclusively. (There’s a much longer post – or maybe a series – about that in the works.) Toronto, like most major cities, is definitely under-supplied with bricks & … [read more]
In 2005, the Emerson String Quartet released an album of Mendelssohn’s string quartets which also included a version of the octet. Instead of partnering with another string quartet, though, they recorded it by themselves, taking great care to make it … [read more]
A review of Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back (2010) It’s a tricky business, doing covers of well-known and well-loved songs. Perhaps not when you’re Keith Jarrett or Brad Mehldau and you can fall back on a long-established tradition of converting … [read more]