German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus was making his own rather idiosyncratic version of world music years before it became fashionable to do so. Micus specializes in taking ethnic instruments from all over the planet and using them, in ways that transcend their traditional contexts, to play his own moody and somewhat austere compositions. On Darkness and Light Micus makes extensive use of the dilruba, a four-stringed bowed Indian instrument that sounds somewhat like a nasal cello which has 24 sympathetic strings that set up a hypnotic drone effect behind the haunting melodies. Also featured are the classical Spanish guitar, the Balinese suling flute, an Irish tin whistle, the sho (a Japanese bamboo mouth-organ), the kortholt (a German renaissance reed instrument), various gongs, and the remarkable ki un ki, a six-foot-long Siberian cane trumpet (pictured on the cover)…

On this recording, from 1985, multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus takes his listeners on a journey guided mainly by his incredible playing on a guitar that he disgned, custom-built by master luthier Manuel Diaz of Granada, Spain. It is a unique instrument that allows the player to customize the string array to suit his mood and the piece to be performed.
On this outing, Micus fits it with 10 single-course strings for the first half of the album, the title track 'East of the night'. He accompanies his guitar on this piece with two groups of shakuhaci (the Japanese bamboo flute used by Zen monks in meditation), a pair and a group of four. The effect is simply beautiful - the guitar is used as a base for the gentle, soaring melodies carried by the shakuhachi, making the piece a transporting tribute to the dawn (as another reviewer astutely related the title)…

Greatest Hits is a reasonably comprehensive collection of Joan Baez's best-known songs, concentrating mainly on her crossover hits. Although it misses several fine items, the compilation remains an effective introduction for the curious listener.

Featuring his popular composition "Frevo," Egberto Gismonti's Solo disc finds the great Brazilian guitarist ranging wide on a handful of stunning originals. Having already established himself as a composer in his native country and in Europe, Gismonti began to gain even wider notice with a series of topnotch ECM releases starting in 1977. His resumé includes work with such Brazilian heavyweights as Nana Vasconcelos (his longtime musical partner), Airto Moreira, and Flora Purim, as well as collaborations with jazz greats like Cal Tjader, Herbie Hancock, and Jan Gabarek. Here, Gismonti is just fine as he takes flight without any companions, treating listeners to a provocative and often meditative solo program.

The Essential Mary Chapin Carpenter takes hits from six albums she recorded for Columbia, omitting material from her first album, Hometown Girl. Since the majority of these songs appealed to both pop and country audiences, they achieved wide crossover popularity. The 16 cuts include the original versions of Carpenter's Top Ten hits "I Feel Lucky," "Passionate Kisses," "Down at the Twist and Shout," "Quittin' Time," and her first number one hit, "He Thinks He'll Keep Her."

Lucinda Williams is a daughter of the American South, born in Louisiana, who is proud of her heritage while also understanding the contradictions and the baggage that come with that. Tom Petty was a native Floridian who also loved the South without harboring illusions about it, and so it makes sense that Williams would be a Petty fan, and not simply as one gifted songwriter respecting another. As part of her Lu’s Jukebox series, designed to help independent music venues shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams has cut a set of her favorite Tom Petty tunes, and Runnin’ Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty is long on songs about Southern life, including “Gainesville,” “Down South,” “Rebels,” “Southern Accents,” and “Louisiana Rain.”

Speechless, Bruce Cockburn's first foray into completely instrumental territory, is proof in the pudding that you can teach an old dog new tricks. There are 15 tracks here, the vast majority of which are redos of tracks from Cockburn's catalog. But given their treatment – many of them done as solo guitar pieces – the dearth of new material doesn't even matter. In fact, one could venture to say that these feel like altogether new pieces. Cockburn is a master guitarist; he often interweaves jazz, blues, country, and folk styles into his cross-genre songs. Here he shines, pure and simple. "Train in the Rain" (anyone notice how many of his songs are about trains and travel?) touches on Leo Kottke and Peter Lang; "Water into Wine" utilizes flamenco stylings while crossing into Gypsy jazz chords à la Charlie Byrd. A new work, "Elegy," kisses the modalities of "Greensleeves" while creating itself as a piece that evokes both absence and memory. "Rouler Sa Bosse" from Salt, Sun and Time juxtaposes Cockburn's six-string against Jack Zaza's clarinet, and becomes a straight-up gently swinging jazz tune.

The best album of Loudon Wainwright III's career, History features a mix of the humorous and the serious, the autobiographical and the observational, the rockin' and the balladic, all wrapped up in some classy arrangements. There is a mood of personal reflection hanging over the entire proceeding, inspired by the death of Wainwright's father, a noted American writer and editor. "People in Love" kicks the whole thing off with one of Wainwright's trademark observations on the perils of love. On "Men," the singer quietly discusses the whys and wherefores of male behavior, while "The Picture" is a musical reflection on a picture of Loudon and his sister taken 40 years earlier (and reproduced inside the CD booklet).

For Peter Mulvey’s 17th album, and Righteous Babe Records debut, Are You Listening?, he traveled to New Orleans to record with producer and friend Ani DiFranco and her band. Are You Listening? marks the 25th anniversary of a rich career of approximately 4,000 concerts and over a million miles traveled. Mulvey has shared stages with Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson, DiFranco, Greg Brown, the Indigo Girls, and many others. NPR’s Robert Siegel wasn’t kidding when he said, “Peter Mulvey is a 21st century troubadour.” Lyrically, the songs from Are You Listening? range from the emotive, stream-of-consciousness flood of “The Other Morning Over Coffee” to the spare, haunting title track, which uses only seventeen words.

This music, the album EB=MC2 and Chapman and Banai’s concerts together before that can ultimately be traced back to two valleys. One near Hawnby, North Yorkshire, lush green and full of trees, the other, more austere, in northern Galilee. Michael Chapman, paying his way through Art College in the early ’60s worked as a woodsman on the North Yorkshire Mexborough estate in the summer breaks and found inspiration for classics like “In the Valley” and “Among the Trees,” leaning against the trees with his guitar. Slightly later, Ehud Banai spent an extended reflective period in the ’70s, alone near Rosh Pina in Galilee, with his guitar, a ghetto blaster and one cassette. On that inspirational cassette was Michel Chapman’s 1969 Fully Qualified Survivor album. Travel forward over 30 years to 2012, and Ehud, now a successful musician with a string of his own albums, is playing The 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street in London.

Peter Mulvey submerges his bluesy art-folk in a big vat of modern rock on this, his second album with Eastern Front records. Its producer, Nicholas Sansano, has previously worked with a lot of acts who are much more funky than folky (Public Enemy, Janet Jackson, Sonic Youth, Soul Coughing), and it shows. Of those artists, Mulvey's new sound most recalls Soul Coughing, thanks to the impressively versatile heavy rhythms of drummer Mike Piehl and the electric ambience of David Goodrich's guitars (both are members of Groovasaurus). Their darkly driven rock blends surprisingly well with Mulvey's celebrated plucking and sliding: his frenetic acoustic style recalls both Ani Difranco and B.B. King, and his strings are tuned so low that the bass notes dominate the album, even though only one track uses an electric bass guitar.

"I want a deep, resonant, effortless voice," Peter Mulvey confesses in one of the tracks on this ambitious folk album. "A big voice – bigger than me." Throughout his semi-major-label debut, Mulvey affects a deep, gruff, bluesy vocal style which is, indeed, bigger than him, calling to mind the Rockwellian image of a small child wearing a suit three times his size. For all of its appealing melodies and accomplished acoustic guitar work, the album is full of that sort of overambition. But overambition is always preferable to underambition, and at times it make this record more interesting. Rapture is speckled with drippingly earnest spoken word pieces (including the previously quoted "The Voice," which concludes with the lines "with this voice I would cry freedom and then I would speak peace").