The Great American

Excelling at the art of blues balladry demands that a musician possess great feeling but also great control. No surprise then, that one of its greatest practitioners, Nancy Wilson, has both traits in abundance. Save Your Love for Me: Nancy Wilson Sings the Great Blues Ballads is one in a loose series of three Capitol compilations to compile her late-'50s and early-'60s prime, the others focusing on the Great American Songbook and the torch song.

Robbie Basho was one of the big three American acoustic guitar innovators, John Fahey and Leo Kottke being the other two. Basho was the least commercially successful of the three, but his influence and reputation has steadily grown since his untimely death in 1986 at the age of 45. And with good reason; for Basho's deeply spiritual approach, intellectual rigor, and formal explorations (among his goals was the creation of a raga system for American music), present a deeply compelling, multi-faceted artist. Basho was actually a college friend of John Fahey, and his early recordings (like Kottke's) were for Fahey's Takoma label. Following Fahey 's move to Vanguard, Basho followed suit, and released Voice of the Eagle and Zarthus for the label in 1972 and 1974, respectively (his most commercially successful records were made for the Windham Hill label later in the decade)./quote]

Early on in his career Rod Stewart established himself as one of rock's great interpretive vocalists, which made the flatness of his Great American Songbook series a bit puzzling. If any classic rock veteran of the '60s should have been able to offer new spins on old standards, it should have been Rod the Mod, who was turning Elvis' "All Shook Up" inside out on Jeff Beck's Truth and turned the Rolling Stones' defiant "Street Fighting Man" into a folk-rock lament, all before "Maggie May" turned Rod into a star…

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat – Great American Taxi is not a jam band. It's not too hard to understand how their particular brand of open-hearted Americana has found an audience in that milieu, and maybe they stretch out while swapping solos on-stage, but there's no loosey-goosey jamming whatsoever on Reckless Habits, nor is there the amorphous, there's-a-song-in-there-somewhere approach to composition too frequently taken by jam bands.

When Mickey Hart's name is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the drummer's years with the Grateful Dead. But in fact, Hart has done a lot of worthwhile things outside of the Dead, including some world music projects. Produced by Hart in 1990, Honor the Earth Powwow: Songs of the Great Lakes Indians is one of his crowning achievements. This CD, which Hart produced, documents a Native American powwow in a rural area of northern Wisconsin. For the uninitiated, a powwow is a traditional musical/spiritual ceremony by Native Americans; the powwow heard on this disc celebrates nature, God, and Native American culture.