A dog on a paddleboard, a rainbow glimpsed during a walk, the quiet of a Michigan winter, birds announcing the arrival of spring—James Filkins finds music in the seemingly everyday things that become extraordinary simply because he was there to experience them. On Dog Eared Days, the evocative, multi-dimensional fifth release from the Michigan fingerstyle guitarist, composer and sonic meanderer, he creates not only an album that intricately documents a life, but one with the

Sometimes the most revealing portrait of an artist comes from music created before he even knew the picture was taking shape. That’s certainly the case with Pat Melfi, whose remarkable musical life has unfolded across decades and multiple roles, from record-company executive, promoter and tour manager to personal manager for major recording artists. Before he ever imagined himself wearing those influential industry hats, he was a wise-beyond-his-years budding young songwriter

Brett Hellings - Photo by Robert Downs Sixty-five minutes can change the way you see a rock singer. Brett Hellings had already made his case at the Whisky a Go Go three months earlier, blasting through a roughly 30-minute set with enough force to suggest what he could unleash if he ever had the room to really stretch out. In early August at the equally legendary Troubadour, he finally had the time and space to do it. With the same restless hunger, a formidable seven-piece b

There’s something almost radical about beginning a song by simply declaring that the day is going to be good—and then believing it so completely that the music itself starts to feel like evidence. With “It’s Gonna Be a Good Day,” Miami singer, songwriter, pianist and music therapist A-Stone transforms personal loss into an exuberant expression of faith, gratitude and self-determination. Sung with empowering conviction, the six words gradually stop sounding like a prediction a

Somewhere between the smoky cabaret, the downtown street corner and the ghosts of Tin Pan Alley lives the wonderfully enigmatic musical world of Rachelle Garniez. The emphatically genre-defiant New York singer, songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist brings a remarkable range of influences to Born in Time, rescuing tunes from the musical past and giving them fresh life in the present. The album’s ten eclectic tracks reach backward through nearly a century of

There are moments in an artist’s life when looking backward becomes a way of discovering how vividly the past still lives within us, its memories, emotions and dreams continuing to shape the present. On Carousel, David Lanz turns toward childhood, family, nature, the changing seasons and the passage of time, but he approaches all of them not from a distance but as familiar, living presences. From the childlike exhilaration of the opening title track to the deeply reflective “

For an artist whose public persona has been built on making millions of people laugh, Jaime French reveals a strikingly different kind of fearlessness through music. The deluxe edition of The Ripple Effect brings together the four songs from her original EP (released earlier in 2026) with a high-spirited Nashville recording of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” and another original track “Just Like This,” creating a raw and soulful, deeply impassioned six-song portrait of an a

While jazz history celebrates countless vocalists who have transformed familiar standards into deeply personal works of art, Carmen Lundy has spent the better part of five decades taking a different path—expanding the American Songbook one original composition at a time. One of the rare jazz singers whose artistic identity rests as much on her gifts as a composer, lyricist and arranger as on her extraordinary voice, she has quietly created one of contemporary jazz’s richest b

“Peace of the Senses” captures the otherworldly creative magic that can emerge when two deeply accomplished visionary artists bring their individual musical aesthetics together. From its slowly emerging tribal heartbeat and spacious electronic atmosphere, the first collaboration between shamanic practitioner/legendary percussionist Byron Metcalf and multi-instrumentalist, producer and “sound painter” David Vito Gregoli develops into a richly cinematic journey. What begins wit

A double bass can rumble like an earthquake, whisper like a memory, scrape against the edges of consciousness, or suddenly erupt with the force of a jazz orchestra. On forever eve, Kyle Grimm seems determined to discover just how far he can push those possibilities before the instrument becomes something almost unrecognizable. Across five works for double bass and electronics, Grimm turns wood, strings, bow, fingers, sampled sound, looping, delay and electronic processing int

Japanese composer Asuka Kakitani’s The Garden begins with a question that gradually becomes stranger the longer one listens: what might plant life sound like if its hidden processes—rooting, germination, pollination, growth, decay and regeneration—could be translated into the deep resonance of a single double bass? Rather than turning nature into picturesque musical wallpaper, Kakitani and bassist Mark Urness create a decidedly unconventional sonic ecosystem, one populated by

Alireza Mashayekhi has spent more than six decades challenging the boundaries between Iranian musical traditions, Western modernism and experimental sound, but on Meditation–Tomorrow, his ideas are distilled to their most intimate form: a single flute, played with astonishing versatility by Iranian-American virtuoso Kelariz Keshavarz. Across three works, Keshavarz reveals just how expansive the unaccompanied flute can become, moving from breathy, fragile passages and resona