Step One: be comfortable with who you are. Step Two: show the world how to follow suit. That’s exactly what Sylvester did with Step II,...

Before emerging as a bandleader in his own right, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane had played a key role in rising trumpeter Miles Davis’ group (from...

More than a masterpiece, Brilliant Corners was the culmination of a carefully devised plan to reintroduce Thelonious Monk as modern jazz’s preeminent composer. Immediately hailed...

1968 was a wondrous year of creativity and reinvention for Latin music in New York. Fania Records was at the epicenter of this musical revolution,...

By the time of the release of 19-year-old Joan Baez’s eponymous debut album in 1960, folk music had become firmly established as part of the...

In ways that few gospel-based groups could have imagined, the music of the Staple Singers broke barriers of genre and popularity, first with folk-leaning songs...

Sixties garage-rock history is littered with one-off albums and standalone singles whose creators burned bright before fading into obscurity. Collectively, they’re now the invigorating evidence...

Few film composers have the range and scope of Hans Zimmer. As comfortable scoring epic, atmospheric soundtracks for moody blockbusters (The Dark Knight, Inception) and...

There’s a scene in Wayne’s World in which erstwhile metalheads Wayne and Garth find themselves in front of a blue screen, pretending to travel through major...