Earlier today, NPR Music published one of my pieces for Take Five, our weekly jazz feature, called Blast Beat Improv: Metallic Free Jazz. I've come to subtitle it "Or How I Stopped Worrying And ...

Equally respected in any musical community he is a part of, Alex Skolnick has built up an impressive résumé over the decades. Heavy metal and jazz never seem to have much of a Venn diagram kind of ...

“The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

Well, of course it isn’t, really. They don’t sound alike on their outer layers. And their audiences don’t overlap. From the evidence of hundreds of jazz shows I’ve seen all over the country this past ...

THE most famous riff in rock is the 3 1/2 -chord skull buster that stalks Deep Purple’s 1972 “Smoke on the Water” -- a branding moment in the infancy of heavy metal. And as Deep Purple’s set at last ...

Q: When did you decide to enter the music field? A: Hmm, would you like the short or long answer? Not long after I played my first band, I guess I realized how happy and free it made me feel. I'd ...

No score yet, be the first to add. Their post-reunion LP, 2008’s Traced in Air, thrived on a similarly ambitious mix of power and prowess, though the aging members Cynic had tempered the ambitious ...

People have their own path to becoming a jazz musician. Sometimes a parent or other family member who plays. Sometimes a musician starts off in one direction and then goes in another. Alex Skolnick ...

Back in the early 1980s, Alex Skolnick was pretty much like any other teenager. He loved electric guitar players like Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads and George Lynch. “I was caught up in the whole ...

Something other than music and food will greet New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival attendees this weekend: metal detectors. In a concession to modern-day reality, all fest-goers will have to pass ...

Bill Laswell, the legendary bassist and producer, is in rough shape these days. He's had a lot of health issues since before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and since he's been effectively unable to ...

I’ve spent plenty of time in this space discussing the myriad connections between classical music and heavy metal, a topic I always love falling back on when skeptics peg metal as a low-class art form ...