Mark Keresman

There are people who despise country music who will admit to liking him. Notorious honky hater Miles Davis named a composition for him. He's a country star who releases what he wants — even a reggae album and a single about (closeted) male homosexuality. He's sold more than 50 million...

Among the singer/songwriter breed, few are genuine trailblazers. Leonard Cohen is a poet pioneer rooted in that Dylan pantheon in terms of artistic influence and resilience. But while Cohen's '60s songwriting brethren aimed for catharsis, his songs have always been knitted with deep concerns. Over the years, the author and...

Kieran Hebden is an electronica performer better known as Four Tet; drummer Steve Reid is a veteran of 1960s and '70s R&B and free jazz scenes. They initially seem like an unlikely pairing, but not when one considers the cross-pollination between jazz, electronica, and indie rock scenes over the past...

Alternative rock killed the guitar hero, that axe man who lived on fretboard histrionics. For Louisiana's Tab Benoit, hot-stuff six-string slinging is all he knows. At 41, Benoit combines two regional styles near and dear to his heart — the incendiary sting of Texas blues with the more laid-back, sultry,...

While the MD of the title of Kenny Garrett's Mack Avenue debut disc likely refers to former boss Miles Davis, Sketches sounds more like a tribute to McCoy Tyner and early 1960s John Coltrane... not that there's anything wrong with that. The opener, "The Ring," evokes those moody, slow-building compositions...