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One man became a cultural icon, the other a cult figure. But James Brown and Harry Crews have more in common than you might think.

Some of my favorite recordings from Miles' acoustic years: Bag's Groove, My Funny Valentine, Generique, Milestones, Solea, Teo, Masqualero, etc.

Four new releases this year unearthed some of Art Pepper's final live recordings. Seems like a good excuse to re-post this piece.

Desert-island discs, featuring Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, The Rolling Stones, The Band, Lucinda Williams, Bo Diddley, Aretha Franklin, etc.

Soul jazz favorites by Brother Jack McDuff, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Hunter, Gene Ammons, Grant Green, John Patton, Kenny Burrell, Medeski Martin & Wood, Sonny Stitt, etc.

Time for this hopeless Blue Note fanatic to pay tribute to the jazz label’s 75 years in business. I was inspired by a recent article on NPR.org by a couple of top-notch music writers – Tom Moon [...]

A re-post, just in time for my own personal Sabbath (I have separate playlists for my Jewish and Wiccan friends)… Sunday morning – a time of worship. And for me, that worship involves a cup [...]

I don’t think I can shed any new light on the legacy of John Coltrane. But I can answer the question, how did a white, middle-class kid from Akron – a 12-year veteran of parochial schooling – get [...]

I’ve got a real weakness for West Coast jazz – that cool, seductive sound that didn’t exactly get a big thumbs up from Miles Davis in his autobiography Miles: “What bothered me more than anything [...]

Check it – RCR is now optimized for iPad and iPhone use. We’re also the only site I’m aware of that’s optimized for rotary phones. Just dial Garfield 1-2323 and I’ll have [...]

We’ve covered guitarist Robert Quine pretty well in this blog, especially here and here. But I had to throw this post together after my sister came across a long-lost article in the bottom of a [...]

I’m a bit of a “completist,” but only with a few select artists. For example, I don’t need all 1,000 songs that Lightnin’ Hopkins recorded throughout his career. Just give me a little bit of this [...]

Recently I took a peek at Google Analytics and noticed that RCR’s readership was up. So I thought, I’ll fix that… Time to do a post on soul jazz. What exactly is soul jazz? Well, I’ll give you my [...]

Don’t get me wrong… I like to hear John Lee Hooker do the boogie over a driving beat or Allen Toussaint comp behind a funky New Orleans horn section or Thelonious Monk make seasoned jazz [...]

Kevin and Tim tag-team on this piece about an American classic that still gets a lot of action some 50 years after it first hit the scene. It can sneak up on you: that warm, soothing yet crunchy [...]

At what point did we know that the box set was deceased? Was it when the German Bear Family label released a 12-CD collection (with hardcover book) of Pat Boone’s complete ‘50s recordings? Or [...]

Sunday morning – a time of worship. And for me, that worship involves a cup of joe, the Sunday Times, and a playlist of soul-soothing music. (Hey, I did 12 years of hard time at parochial [...]

My cousin Robert Quine was a bona fide guitar hero (number 80 on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” – right after Cliff Gallup of Be Bop a Lula fame and before [...]

I grew up listening to a lot of jazz. Not the edgy stuff. My dad mostly liked straight-ahead piano players like Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner and Earl “Fatha” Hines. He also had those “can’t [...]