Of all the acoustic new age artists currently calming our anxieties and uplifting our souls these days, there’s none whose fascinating background engages me as much as multi ZMR Award winner Shambhu, who released two beautiful, inspiring and uplifting singles this past spring in advance of his highly anticipated EP, also titled Life Passage. These pieces are perfect starting points to the full experience - the richly meditational “Life Passage,” a tender and soulful dedicatio

Currently closing in on 30 years as one of jazz’s most stylistically and culturally diverse jazz singers, vocal interpreters and pianists, six time Juno Award nominee Carol Welsman has occasionally tied the songs on her collection neatly together with a specific overall theme as she did on two of her best in the last decade – sharing her passion for travel and cultures on Journey (2012) and her splendid immersion into Latin Jazz on Dance With Me (2020). Yet even when she’s mo

In my enthusiastic piece on veteran pianist/composer Christopher Boscole’s exquisite, stylistically eclectic 2019 piano solo collection Dawn of Love, I was inspired to offer a detailed overview of his career that dates back to the mid-80s and a whole different era of new age music. His blend of originals, classical pieces, sacred Christmas songs (some of which he had previously recorded) and the modern pop classical standard “Time to Say Goodbye” was intriguing and daring for

When listening to instrumental new age music, sometimes it’s conducive to fully immersing in the artist’s journey when he/she explicitly explains the inspiration behind the songs or the sonic journey as a whole. Multi-award winning composer/keyboardist Holland Phillips, enjoying a creative and commercial resurgence since the mid-2010s of a career he originally launched in the 90s, gifted us with some fascinating background concepts and imagery for his two most recent releases

In my review of Grammy nominated composer and multi-instrumentalist Masa Takumi’s vibrant 2020 collection Heritage, I made a handful of nostalgic comparisons, equating the dynamic and prominent koto melodies to the epic sound of the fusion band Hiroshima and his blend of “intense, earthbound rhythms with transcendent flights of fancy and rich sonic detail” to the multi-textured music of Keiko Matsui. While descriptions like that often help new listeners find a point of refere

You don’t really have to know who the hell Klaus Schwab is and what his World Economic Forum (WEF) does when it meets every year in Davos, Switzerland to discuss so called global issues to rock out and have your mind blown by “Eat the Bugs,” the latest incisive sociopolitical single by Michael Belkin and his wildly defiant powerhouse band the Refusers. But just for shits and giggles, and so you can better appreciate the brilliant, biting satire of the tune, here are the basic

An online search of Oxford Languages offers two thought provoking definitions of the term “X Factor.” First. a “noteworthy special talent or quality; and next, “a variable in a given situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome.” While both of those capture fast emerging singer-songwriter Jason Shand’s ascending career and recent string of international hits to a T, there’s now an all-important new third way to experience the phrase – as the sophistica

In a perfect world, soprano Natalia Tsvi and tenor Gilad Paz – the unique classical crossover vocal duo collectively known as VOCE NOVA - would have taken the “America’s Got Talent” stage and performed their fascinating hybrid twist on Verdi’s “Libiamo” before all four judges and a live audience of 3000. But their audition date, March 14, 2020, was the day Hollywood began shutting down because of the pandemic, and Tsvi and Paz had to wait it out seven hours as the show’s prod