on Days Like These

Whether navigating the backroads of Louisiana or Thuringia, exploring the snowy Quebec woods, or performing onstage at Rush concerts, Neil Peart has stories to tell. His first volume in this series, Far and Away, combined words and images to form an intimate, insightful narrative that won many readers.

For Troy Roberts, a New York Australian, it has become a good tradition to give listeners a new album every year. 2019 was no exception. Unlike previous works, Tales & Tones (2017) and Nu Jive Perspective (2018), published by Inner Circle Music, his new album, Like Like, was released under the logo of Toy Robot Music, the musician's label, whose title is very transparent in its initials. The difference is more significant: this time Troy preferred the trio format, moreover the organ trio. In three tracks, he is played by the outstanding master of the electric organ, Joey DeFranchesko, in whose ensemble Troy has been playing for four years, and in the rest - the young, talented, but so far less famous Emmett Cohen, whom Roberts met in Miami when Emmett was a university student, where Troy taught. Behind the drum kit on all the tracks is another Roberts “employer,” the highly experienced Jeff Thane Watts, with whom Roberts has been playing for five years.

When Harry Connick, Jr. was in the early days of his career, every release seemed full of hunger, like a wound-up horse out of the gate desperate to bolt into competition and win the race. Canadian singer-pianist Michael Kaeshammer's fifth CD, Days Like These, contains that same abundance of sass and passion, evident immediately on the blistering self-penned opening track "Cinnamon Sun."…

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