Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington: The Great Summit: The Master Takes (Roulette Jazz) The Penguin Guide reports Ellington was “more or less slumming” du…

In 1997, I got to review art critic Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy for The Los Angeles Times and thus write what may have been the…

Hi, Robert. First, hope you’re doing well after your knee surgery. Second, I just reread the late great Nick Tosches’s Jerry Lee bio and it still kicks…

Gauche: A People's History of Gauche (Merge) Political anxiety intensified into barely contained losing-it hysteria (“Pay Day,” “Rectangle”) * Kim Gord…

Storm Lake is a northwest Iowa town of 10,000 whence Art Cullen won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for deeply reported editorials on water pollution that took o…

There is no question here. This is just an e-mail with Greil Marcus spelled correctly. You’re welcome. — Barry L., Mexico, NY I thought I’d begin with …

black midi: Schlagenheim (Rough Trade) This young g-g-b-d is such a sensation in Britain its reviews there read like competing thesis abstracts, and wh…

I only read Nicholas Lemann’s 2006 Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War after I was asked to review his new Transaction Man, and thus I caught …

“It’s always Christmas in this bar/And it’s always Saint Pat’s and also Halloween,” begins the slam-bang opener of NowThen, singing neonatologist Rich …

Charlotte Adigéry: Zandozi (Deewee) Playful turns concept on Belgium-based, English-language, French-Caribbean electrodancepop EP, so airy and beaty as…

Since July I've known where I was going to be at 4 p.m. Saturday, September 14, which for those not keeping score is today: a mile south of my Manhatta…

Here starts And It Don't Stop, your last chance to enjoy and put to use the graded capsule album reviews I've been writing for half a century—almost 15…