A Morning with Hammond Heroes leads the Safari to “Bag of Jewels” from Lou Donaldson!

So this morning started with a cold walk to my office. I left the car at the office yesterday and walked home during the snowstorm!  While that may have been a good idea yesterday, it didn’t seem that good this morning, when I faced a ten minute walk to work with single digit wind chill temperatures. But like I always say when I struggle through a run  “At least the music was good!” The music came from an album released back in November titled Hammond Heroes. The album somehow got accidentally downloaded on to the iPhone a while ago and…

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The Safari finds Blues from Tinsley Ellis’ Midnight Blue on a Snowy Day is a good thing!!

So today was a blues day. A blues day inside and a white snowy day outside, as we here in the northeast were hit with another snowstorm! s]Since it was a blues day, the latest release from Tinsley Ellis Midnight Blue was the album of the day. After listening and thinking about Tinsley I was trying to fix when I first discovered his music. I have his 1992 release Trouble Time and his 1994 release Storm Warning both on cassette, and I may have bought them at Tunes in the late 1990s. Not that it really matters, the important thing…

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The Safari’s Eclectic Music Day – A Little Folk, New Age and Prog from three great guitarists!

Crossposted from Me.Myself, Music and Mysteries So today was an eclectic music day. I had to return to Lambertville today, so I loaded music on the iPhone from two different genres. First some folk music from a longtime favorite, Brooks Williams,  his latest release, More New Everything which is an EP. Then some New Age from guitarist Alex DeGrassi. I listened to those two albums on the way to the site. Then on the  way back, I listened to music from a third genre Prog Rock from the album Ravens and Lullabies from Gordon Giltrap and Oliver Wakeman. As I was…

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The Safari explores Doug Webb’s West Coast Jazz at Another Scene!

  Saxophonist Doug Webb was born in Chicago and raised from the age of three in California. He is a well-known West Coast jazz musician. Webb has appeared on over 500 recordings for a myriad of artists including:Horace Silver, Freddie Hubbard, Sal Marquez, Stanley Clarke, Brian Bromberg, Quincy Jones, Mat Marucci, Bobby Caldwell, Kyle Eastwood, Rod Stewart, Carly Simon, Art Garfunkel, Queen Latifah, Cher and Vikki Carr.He played for fifteen years with the Doc Severinsen Tonight Show Big Band.. with whom he still tours. He also played with the house band for the Dennis Miller TV show, and the Jimmy Cleveland orchestra   Webb…

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Life’s Soundtracks – And She Said Gold from Sweden’s Enbound leads me to a good run!

Well if you told me when I was in the fist half-mile of my run tonight that I would end up running faster and farther than I did on Tuesday night I ay you are nuts!! Obviously I did not feel real spry at the beginning of the run! Part of the reason for that it was a lot colder than i thought it was and I always have trouble breathing when the air is cold. But I had put on an album by what I thought was a progressive rock band Enbound and their 2011 release And She Said…

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Lunchtime Music from Two Blues Favorites – Vincent Hayes and Tinsley Ellis

  So let’s make this a Blues Thursday, we’re almost to the weekend, even though that means that I have to work Friday and Saturday nights, I do have off on Sunday for the NFL Conference finals!!  I don’t have much time to write now so I’ll just give you a taste of what I’m going to listen to this afternoon! First up will be the new release from Vincent Hayes The Grind. Hayes is an award-winning blues man from Michigan. I really liked his earlier release the Reclamation. So I’m looking forward to The Grind. Here’s Vincent performing an…

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The Safari Explores the Chromatic Harmonica of Enrico Granafei (He lives in New Jersey!)

 So this evening I was reviewing the JazzWeek Chart for this week, and I saw a name that looked interesting at No 20, Enrico Granafei  His current release Alone (and) Together rose from No 46 last week to that No 2o spot. So I found the album at Spotify, and put it on while I was doing some other stuff on the computer. As I was listening, I was struck by how much the music sounded like the French Gypsy music of Django Reinhardt.What I couldn’t decide was whether or not the instrument Enrico was playing was a harmonica or not. It sure…

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Archives:The Music Safari explores the Tunisian Prog Rock of Myrath!

Originally posted at Me, Myself,Music and Mysteries -May 2013 In Tunisia, Myrath (means Legacy or Legend), in the progressive rock world it means great prog-rock with a Tunisian flavor! Myrath was founded in 2001, by a then 13-year-old guitarist Malek Ben Arbia. The band changed musicians over the next several years and played mostly cover songs and gravitated towards progressive rock. In 2005 MYRATH released their first self-produced album  Double Face. In 2005 Malek Ben Arbia the band’s founder and guitarist traveled to Nancy – France and enrolled in the famous Guitar school, Music Academy International (M.A.I.) After graduating, Ben…

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Progressive Metal from Philly’s Tungsten – The Reservoir

The Safari did not really travel far today folks, just across the Delaware River to the Port Richmond area of Philadelphia, the city that the new progressive metal band Tungsten calls home! Their debut album The Reservoir was released today, Jan 14th. Tungsten is a progressive metal band whose signature sound according to their biography at their website is.  ….dark, innovative, and creative, but still bursting at the seams with classic metal attitude that makes you want to pump your fist in the air. Drawing on influences both timeless (Iron Maiden, Rush, Pink Floyd) and modern (Opeth, Mastodon),  The  band…

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The Safari runs with Italian Progressive Rock from Laviantica’s – Clessidra

  Ok so I admit that I am a fair weather runner. When it’s dark and cold out Edward is not in the mood for running! But today it was nice, a decent temperature, bright and sunny and so off I went! I won’t bore you with my times. etc. If you’d like to read about them though you can go to Me, Myself, Music and Mysteries in a bit and check that stuff out. But for here I’ll write about the soundtrack for the run, which was the Italian Progressive Rock band Laviantica. I have started to listen to…

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