Reviews

Over the course of five albums and a little more than a decade, Natalya Zoe Weinstein and John Cloyd Miller have developed an inspired union of two disparate yet surprisingly compatible musical styles: bluegrass and klezmer. (Their musical journey is detailed in the May 2023 issue of BU.) Bluegrass, of course, needs no explanation here,…

It’s fitting that the 50th anniversary project for Lost & Found is literally an album that’s been lost for more than a decade.  In 2013, the seminal group was working on a project for Mountain Fever Records when health issues for Allen Mills put the project on hold. The “lost” hard drive was recently found…

Over the past 15 years or so, the guitar industry has embraced a controversial, even divisive, new trend: relicing new guitars to make them sound, appear and feel like they’ve been played for decades. Some people love this, and companies like Pre War Guitar Co. have carved a strong niche in this area. Others, however,…

For many of us with a fascination with both the tonalities and the designs of vintage instruments, a visit to a place like Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, with its collection of guitar rarities, is like to a visit to the Louvre in Paris or the Boston Institute of Fine Arts. In a virtual sense, this…

Robbie Fulks is a bluegrass guy who started his career in bluegrass, but then waited until his 16th project to do a full-blown bluegrass album. Listeners of his Bluegrass Vacation will likely say it was worth the wait after one spin through the player. Fulks has spent decades in the music business, best known as…

Leftover Salmon’s genius is how they take the old and reimagine it into something new.  Over their thirty-year career they have toyed with the fabric of bluegrass and roots music, stretching and pulling it into something uniquely their own, yet something that still maintains the integrity of where it was born.  Their latest album, the…