Bentley’s Bandstand: October 2025 Queen Esther, BLACKBIRDING. There hasn’t ever been an album quite like Queen Esther’s BLACKBIRDING. It’s an emotional study of events at Gettysburg during the Civil War, and how it turned historial times into an era that never really allowed Blacks to get past the ramifications which occurred then. Queen Esther’s absolute […]
Music Reviews: Doc Pomus Demos, plus Lindsey Buckingham & Stevie Nicks, the Third Mind, and the Brothers Comatose Back in the so-called Brill Building era, before acts like Bob Dylan and the Beatles rewrote the rules and started penning their own material, a large percentage of the hits on Billboard’s charts were composed not by […]
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Music Reviews: The Third Mind’s Psychedelia-infused ‘Live Mind’ and an Alt-country Anthology from Souled American The Third Mind, a wonderfully anachronistic band whose music recalls the best of 1960s psychedelia, got off to a terrific start with its eponymous 2020 debut. The album features singer, songwriter, and Grammy-winning guitarist Dave Alvin; singer and songwriter Jesse […]
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Bentley’s Bandstand: January 2025 JD Allen, THE DARK, THE LIGHT, THE GREY AND THE COLORFUL. One of the very finest jazz saxophone kings, it’s interesting that JD Allen also works under the pseudonyms Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon. To each his own, and any musician who can play with such soulful depth and evolving originality […]
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God knows, no shortage exists of books devoted to Bob Dylan and his music. There are album-by-album critiques, songbooks, scholarly works, biographies, a memoir, and other writings from the bard himself. There are also Q&A collections, including yours truly’s Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters. Believe it or not, there’s even a book that describes […]
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