Gordon Ightfoot

Jay Gordon and Blues Venom continue and expand upon their lifelong love for the raw, real blues on a blazing new album called Slide Rules. Released in November of 2019 by Shuttle Music, Slide Rules is a masterful set of rough-edged, roadhouse-style blues/rock that leans more than a little toward a sound Gordon himself, calls “extremely dangerous.” Gordon is a ferocious slide guitarist and singer with a live, in-the-moment style that’s impossible to ignore. He effortlessly generates that delicious ragged-edge feeling of someone going so hard that you expect him to crash and burn at any moment but never does. His sound is informed by players including Johnny Winter, Buddy Guy, and Stevie Ray Vaughan but isn’t imitative in the least. Like all true legends, Gordon puts his blues down his own way.

Scarcely three decades old, the enduring appeal of novelist Stephen King's horror oeuvre has already begun to foster remakes of the films and TV productions already based on his most popular works. This cable TV redux of King's 1975 tale of a small hamlet beset by vampires features an ominous, brooding orchestral and choral score that's a winning collaboration between newcomer Christopher Gordon and former Dead Can Dance mainstay cum film scorer Lisa Gerrard. The gothic seasoning she imparted to her previous collaborations with Hans Zimmer (most notably Gladiator) comes to the forefront on this score's haunting title aria (composed by Gerrard and partner Patrick Cassidy) and tracks like "Bloody Pirates" and "Free in Spirit." But it's the music of newcomer Gordon (Master and Commander) whose sheer scale and ambition belie the small screen format it was written for at nearly every turn.