CD Reviews

Scratch Acoustic Soul Trio has been playing locally for years, doing covers of popular songs; the members include Simeon Flick, Eric Oberschmidt, and Michael Strawbridge. All sing and play guitar, and they play an eclectic song list featuring tunes by just about everybody in multiple styles. No surprise, then, that their EP Operation Demo is […]

With their new CD, One Day It Will, the Danny Green Trio give us a musical tour de force with ten compositions that combine Green’s stellar jazz trio with a quartet of some of the top local string performers. The music is, at times, engaging, thrilling, and sublime. The genesis of this project goes back […]

It was 1978, and I was in my dorm studying for my class on mediæval feminist literature. It was past midnight, a time when the local radio station took liberties with the top 40 format, when they eschewed the screaming guitars of Peter Frampton and Boston and the Bob Seegerness of Bob Seeger. Already feeling […]

Playing instrumental music that straddles multiple genres by design, the John Stickley Trio from North Carolina has toured heavily and released five CDs and an EP since 2007. Acoustic guitarist Stickley teams up with violinist Lyndsay Pruett and drummer Patrick Armitage on material that is mostly original, but mixed with occasional covers; they play songs […]

What is essential in an artist’s work, whose legacy reaches back a half century? Unless the artist in question has an unusually consistent body of work, the question can be daunting. Fortunately, in seminal singer-songwriter Eric Andersen’s case there has been consistency as well as the kind of inspiration that follows the joy and toil […]

Eddie Lenhart’s first album was back in 2008; Levittown found the local Americana singer/songwriter singing country-pop influenced songs, many of them introspective. He followed up with 2011’s Darkness, similar with more stripped-down arrangements. Both times, Lenhart wrote the music and surrounded himself with top-notch San Diego musicians. Lenhart is back with the place to be, […]

Indian Joe is familiar to many Troubadour readers for contributing guitar and songs to the Ramona band Dusty and the LoveNotes. Joe is a committed electric guitar specialist whose forte is straight ahead blues-rock guitar, and his influences are easily identified in his music: Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Johnny Winter, and Billy Gibbons. In 2014, […]

Berkley Hart are celebrating 20 years together, and by now many if not most good roots lovers in town can instantly recognize the sublime organic blend of their harmonies, the lyrical insights of Calman Hart in his many musical character studies, and the humor and soul in Jeff Berkley’s liberating country rock. Their new album, […]

The roots of acoustic blues guitar come from the river valleys of America’s heartland, where even earlier forms from Africa found their voice with the field workers a hundred years ago, in their churches and music shows. It was blue collar music, most often played on beat up instruments handed down or rescued from pawn […]