Sincere

Blues-rocker Walter Trout struts his stuff on , the follow-up to his self-titled 1998 major-label debut. Overall, it's another fine outing for rabid blues guitar fans, full of gritty, gutsy playing and well-executed band support. Although songwriting isn't the album's primary focus, there are a number of tough survivor's tales here that resonate pretty well. On the other side of the coin, his balladry tries to be sincere yet leans toward sentimentality, which can dissipate the fire of the harder-rocking tracks. Still, is an entirely worthy effort by one of contemporary blues-rock's most underrated instrumentalists.

Malaby's fourth solo album. A work enriched greatly by the lively and sincere musical relationship among Malaby, Drew Gress (bass), and Paul Motian (drums), Adobe moves in assured, sinuous grooves of mind and soul. The five originals and four covers are all treated with an unhurried pace that primarily showcase Malaby's melodic dissections, but they also show the dynamic support in rhythm by bassist Gress and drummer Motian.

This is the last and also the longest of Mr. Bernstein's lectures in this cycle. He presents us with "sincerity" in music and whether the examples he plays are sincere or not and reminds us of Theodore Adorno's theory on the compositional dichotomy in the persons of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. For Adorno the latter is "a child of satan" full of heart-up-his-sleeve forms of expression, vacuous; in other words: artificial. Whereas Schoenberg represents the saintly, objective and direct expression of feelings; i.e. what is ART and what is ARTIFICIAL. How artificial can art be and still be art?