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- Written by: Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
Chicano Music has gone through a lot of transformations and highs and lows, in the last half a century, sometimes in a good way, some other time not really up to the standards that the genre's Kingpin, Lalo Guerrero, reached in the late 40's.
It is therefore refreshing that a record that sticks to the traditions and the foundations of Chicano Music, with a little contemporary twist, like Johnny & Jaalene sees the light of the day right now, in 2018.
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- Written by: Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
One of the secrets behind the success of a great album is the ability to keep the sound fresh and vibrant throughout the record, at the same time entertaining the listeners and jiggling different musical layers that magically fits inside one another, like a perfectly shaped sonic Matrioska.
This is something that the Leicester-born and London-based troubadour Jack J Hutchinson and his band of brothers Boom Boom Brotherhood fully manage to achieve in their debut album called Set Your Heart For The Sun.
Read more: Jack J Hutchinson's Boom Boom Brotherhood - Set Your Heart For The Sun
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- Written by: Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
One of the most common questions recurring often when analysing the songbook of an artist or of a band, it's the one related to the building of an album's setlist and the decision related to choose some tracks instead of others ending up left out, maybe because the latters were considered unsuited to the idea behind the making of the album in question.
A fan or the music press get to know about those aforementioned tunes only when an artist decides to release a collection of b-sides or outtakes, frequently revealing some hidden gems that, inexplicably, never found space on an official studio album release.
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- Written by: Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
If there is an artist within the Blues-Rock industry in the United States able to be completely honest and truthful to himself, his music and to all his thousands of fans worldwide, that artist is most certainly the American Blues-Rock Titan, Guitar Supremo and singer-songwriter Walter Trout.
Throughout his whole career, might that have been as a solo artist or with Canned Heat or Bluesbreakers, there has always been something completely genuine and real about Trout’s music, no matter whether that was expressed through a guitar solo or the American artist's powerful vocal range, even in what sometimes Trout Himself calls "The Wild Days", referring to a time of his career where this prodigious Guitar Titan was still very successful but not exactly living a very morigerate life.
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- Written by: Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
It's becoming increasingly more important, especially in a society that is somehow not valuing music with the right amount of appreciation that this art form deserves, to remember, celebrate and cherish influential artists that have heavily contributed to the evolution of music throughout the last century.
Thankfully, some of said music artists are still with us, like the American composer Terry Riley, who has just celebrated his 90th birthday on 24th June and what better way to celebrate such an important life landmark than releasing a boxset called The Columbia Recordings, containing the 4 albums released through Columbia Masterworks from 1968 and 1980, a time of the world when the growth of music was at its healthiest state, thanks also to the phenomenal, constantly transformative and forward-thinking contribution provided by Riley himself.
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- Written by: Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
There are not, as far as our website is aware of, art forms able to fuse cultural elements of different countries and melt them together in a very harmonic fashion as much as music does.
Furthermore, to have the capacity, the skills and the vision to unite sounds with tradition and local folklore in style without being obvious or, in any way disrespectful by altering said elements in any shape or form, it's a massive achievement and, in that respect, the Peruvian Jazz artist Gabriel Alegría completely fulfilled this challenging artistic brief by putting together a project called Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet, whose musical talent and sense of sonic authenticity has (and still is) been the real core of this extraordinary collective for the last 20 years.
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- Written by: Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
There's too many people out there that try very hard to change a genre like the Blues, by trying to repackaging and reselling it to the masses under forms that, far too often, have got nothing to do with the Blues.
For all those fans that were born in the last couple of decades, to get to know at least the basics of the Blues means scouring old records of Pioneers of the genre, like the late greats Muddy Waters, B.B.King or Howlin' Wolf, just to mention a few, because sadly, we don't have a lot of true Traditional Blues artists still with us, in 2025.
