Steve Morse Band : Triangulation Review

By Steven Miller

With Triangulation, the Steve Morse Band delivers an album that prioritizes structural compositional intent and agile playing. While Steve Morse’s virtuosity is never in question, what stands out across these nine tracks is how carefully the material is built. Each selection has a groove-first foundation, interesting flow of articulated sections, and solo spaces that feel like an extension of the composition. This is an album that rewards attentive listening, particularly for musicians interested in how form, texture, and interaction shape high-level instrumental rock music.

From [...]

John Scofield Dave Holland : Memories of Home Review by Steven Miller Memories of Home is a duet record that arrives with assertion and the shared recognition of two iconic jazz legends. From the first notes, John Scofield and Dave Holland are presenting ideas from a space they have created over years of performing together and in ensembles, exploring a common jazz language. The duo format allows the architecture of each player to shine. What results is a recording that reflects their collective time, sound, and shared understanding. Scofield’s guitar voice is conversational, subtly bent at the edges, and seeks a fluid rhythmic language distributed in layers. His style listens [...]

Sydney Irving : Unfashioned Creatures Review

by Steven Miller

Sydney Irving’s Unfashioned Creatures is a songwriter’s album through and through. This collection blends Americana rock, pop-rock punch, and folk-rooted storytelling into a set of tracks that are musically purposeful and catchy. Irving’s greatest strength is her ability to shape each song from the inside out by letting singing, arrangement, and lyrical direction work together to create a clear, satisfying emotional flow. The result is a record that feels tied together by a writer who knows how to build a song that moves.

As an opening statement, “You Can’t Forget About Me” wastes no [...]

Brad Mehldau : Ride Into the Sun Review

by Steven Miller

Brad Mehldau has always walked the borders between musical worlds. On Ride Into the Sun, he threads genres into a single, glowing tapestry. This 16-track cycle arrives as a summation of so many influences that have shaped Mehldau’s pianistic universe.  The lyricism of jazz piano, the harmonic intensity of 20th-century classical music, the earthy pulse of 60s folk-rock, the open-hearted warmth of Americana, and his enduring fascination with counterpoint. What makes this album feel different is its sense of architecture. These stylistic excursions are movements in a unified work, each track feeding the next with [...]

Dasha : Anna Review

by Shannon Smith

In Anna, Dasha steps into a pop-country space, reintroducing herself not just as a pop-country hitmaker but as a songwriter reclaiming her given name and emotional voice. This eight-track EP unfolds as a portrait of growth that captures Dasha’s confidence as a vocalist and fragility in songwriting in equal measure. For country fans, it’s a revealing document of an artist finding equilibrium between commercial appeal and country storytelling.

Opening with the flirtatious “Work On Me,” Dasha immediately asserts her trademark blend of country twang and pop flair. Her phrasing is playful, her delivery effortlessly confident, and her [...]

Wayne Alpern : Modern Music Review

by Steven Miller

Wayne Alpern’s Modern Music presents itself as twenty miniatures for solo piano (Steven Beck, the interpreter), and on its surface, one hears a blend of Baroque, Romantic lyricism, jazz-inflected harmonies, and classical dance forms. Upon listening more closely, one can hear how Alpern’s modernism lives in the structuring of rhythm, in the choice of intervallic motion, and in the way he scaffolds tradition to support stylistic inclusion without dissolving coherence.

In other words: Alpern is a polystylist at work; he is a craftsperson of interval and pulse, placing himself in a lineage of classical form but [...]