The Space Between Us

Sara Bareilles just finished recording her concept album of songs used in her Apple TV+ series, Little Voice. While she and her team mix and master that, lucky fans have some new tunes to enjoy.

"Blue Lights in the Basement" is the sixth studio album by American singer Roberta Flack released by Atlantic on December 13, 1977. The album was a commercial success, peaking at number eight on the US Billboard 200, becoming her third consecutive top-ten album on the chart and reaching number five on the R&B albums chart. The album features the single "The Closer I Get to You", a duet with best friend and fellow soul musician Donny Hathaway, which became the biggest hit from the album, peaking at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and reaching #1 on the Hot Soul Singles chart. The collaboration with Hathaway would be one of his final singles released in his lifetime before his death in 1979.

There are voices that speak, others that sing, and then there are those rare voices that listen—to the world, to its wounds, to the fragile beauty of humanity. Fabrizio De André was one of these rare voices.

Ghana has been considered a land of storytellers for many centuries. But this great tradition does not necessarily have to be continued with words or the voice. Peter Somuah spins storytelling with his instrument: as a young trumpet player, he embarks on a fascinating search for identity between the highlife of his homeland, his idol Miles Davis and the cosmopolitan musical language of his new home Holland. This journey is his "Letter To The Universe".

Scottish alt/post/progressive-rock outfit Midas Fall release their Fifth studio album, ‘Cold Waves Divide Us’ on March 8th, 2024 worldwide on Monotreme Records. Michael Hamilton joins founding members Elizabeth Heaton and Rowan Burn for the follow-up to their 2018 Prog Magazine Awards ‘Limelight Award’ winning album, ‘Evaporate’. ‘Cold Waves Divide Us’ sees Midas Fall at their most confidently visceral, each song moving beautifully between quiet and loud, gentle and crushing.

Nite Bjuti (pronounced night beauty) is a US-based, Afro-Caribbean, woman-led improvised experimental trio of vocalist Candice Hoyes, GRAMMY-nominated sound chemist Val Jeanty and bassist Mimi Jones - who weave together multiple strands of storytelling using voice, bass, electro percussion, turntables, Haitian drums, dance and visual projections. The trio was formed in 2018 after Hoyes performed an Afrofuturism concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center where she is a lecturer, inviting Jeanty to play and collaborate. This performance revealed a powerful chemistry that led to extended studio improvisations and an invitation to Mimi Jones - a fellow Berklee professor with Jeanty.

Everything begins with a vision. A virtuoso imagination hovering auspiciously in the air, composed of multi-faceted fragments and ideas that gradually become more concrete, slowly taking shape and then finally forming out of the minds of their makers as a new project. Completely unexpected, it’s just a natural, flowing process.

January 2nd, 2023. Aside from being the second of a new year, it was a pretty ordinary night at ETA in Los Angeles, where guitarist Jeff Parker - alongside his ETA IVtet with saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose - had been holding down a regular Monday gig since 2016. At the time, nobody knew it was the first gig of the last year that ETA would be open for business. Over seven years of holding down that residency, Parker’s ETA ensemble evolved from a band that played mostly standards into a group known for its transcendent, long-form (sometimes stretching out for 45 minutes or more) journeys into innovative, often uncharted territories of groove-oriented, painterly, polyrhythmic, minimalist and mantric improvised music. With that musical growth, the crowds for Parker and his band at ETA grew across the years too. What started as a sparse gathering of weeknight drinkers, friends, family, and Chicago expats (coming to get a shot of nostalgia for the atmospheres Parker used to create at Rodan across the ‘00s and early ‘10s) grew into a Los Angeles nightlife staple with a packed house and a line down the block for every show.

The Grateful Dead celebrates its diamond 60th anniversary this year with ENJOYING THE RIDE, a sweeping 60-CD collection that maps an epic cross-country road trip along the "Heady Highway" with stops at storied venues where the music, the moment, and the magic of the Grateful Dead reliably converged. Spanning 25 years of legendary live performances, this expansive collection spotlights defining shows from 1969 to 1994 at 20 venues that consistently inspired the band to new heights—Winterland, Frost Amphitheatre, Madison Square Garden, and Hampton Coliseum, among them. Whether playing the intimate confines of Fillmore West or beneath the open skies at Red Rocks, the Grateful Dead never played the same show twice. ENJOYING THE RIDE is a thrilling testament to that adventurous spirit. With the exception of a few tracks from earlier releases, virtually all of the music on ENJOYING THE RIDE is previously unreleased, spanning more than 450 tracks and over 60 hours of music. Of the 20 shows in the collection, 17 are presented in full, with some featuring additional material from the same venue. The remaining three—Fillmore West, Fillmore East, and Boston Music Hall—are curated from multiple performances at each venue, capturing key moments on those legendary stages.

There are moments in our lives when birth and death intersect and engage in dialogue for a moment. Often, this is done in silence. La Féline decided to go the musical route. Vie Future, the third album by musician and author Agnès Gayraud (she is just about to publish her recent philosophical essay Dialectic of Pop in English (Urbanomic, 2019), is a truly cosmic record. At once deep and airborne, like the musician herself, it is an opus concerned with the cycle of life – that arc in which the cosmos expresses itself in the physical world, and where worries about the present never stand in the way of joy.