Greg Laswell

With her piano-fueled songwriting, witty wordplay, and slight vocal vibrato, Ingrid Michaelson carried the tradition of the female singer/songwriter into the 21st century. Befitting a musician of the digital age, Michaelson first gained wide exposure not through sales but instead through tracks on soundtracks, including Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill. Born and raised on New York's Staten Island to an artist mother and classical composer father, she began exploring music with piano lessons at the age of four. After college, she toured with a national theater troupe and spent her free time writing songs, later compiling them into an online-distributed recording entitled Slow the Rain.

The only real downside of this record is its length. But everyone is ON, right on, and the energy is remarkable. For Kaiser fans this will be a revelation. He's channeling Cosey, McLaughlin, and Sharrock (each of whom shaped Miles's sound from this period), but also doing his own Kaiser-effects. And they don't sound out of place! Smith sounds much closer to Miles than I would have expected. This isn't a bad thing of course. The other players here are fantastic, too, especially the bass clarinetist Oluyemi Thomas. John Medeski, the ROVA quartet, Greg Goodman, and Nels Cline are also here. It's a fine group of musicians lovingly indulging in the many sounds of Miles's 1970–1975 performances.

Dakini asked its favorite artists to create tracks for use by the innovative open-minded bellydancers of the Neo-Tribal underground. A dark, mysterious journey into an imaginary Orient, where the saz and the sequencer, the darbukka and the drum loop, are woven into an electric-acoustic mosaic of past and future.
Inspired by the fresh stylings of the tribal fusion bellydance scene, Dakini's 'Tribal Matrix' series offers tracks equally suited to dancers or Djs, exotic electronica that organically blends mid eastern rhythms and instruments with modern production and grooves.