Bender

When Toscanini encouraged Nino Rota to study at the Curtis Institute, where instructions by Fritz Reiner and a friendship with Aaron Copland awaited the precocious composer, it was already clear he would have a massive career. Only the direction wasn’t certain yet. It turned out to be classical music and film music, the former informing the latter. Notable when you listen to the delicious waltz Rota from War & Peace or the darkly humorous snippets from the very apropos Orchestra Rehearsal. And while the de-facto horn concertino Castel del Monte, inspired by King Frederick II’s famous medieval castle in southern Italy, isn’t technically film music, it very much sounds like music to a fantasy film of Rota’s imagining.

"I can't fit into my skinny black jeans anymore," laments veteran blues rocker David Gogo on the appropriately titled, hard-driving, Stones-inflected, and likely autobiographical "Getting Old." Only in his early forties at the time of its 2011 release, he's obviously not letting fears of his advancing years slow or dull his attack, as his sixth release in a decade shows. Gogo isn't a particularly distinctive guitarist, but as this disc's title implies (Soul-Bender is also the name of the Fulltone guitar pedal he uses)….