Nick Drake

Jazz artists love to take chances, and Chicago singer Grazyna Auguscik has taken a big one with her plunge into the music of Nick Drake. The eclectic British singer-songwriter died in 1974, at age 26, his slim discography never embraced by the wide...

The songs of Nick Drake get under your skin, insinuating their way into your consciousness through the gentle contours of their melody lines and the expressive urgency of their lyrics. And though Drake died in 1974, at age 26, with a slender...

Jazz took root in Poland long ago – even before World War II – and the country has prized it ever since. If the music lived underground in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union considered it "decadent," Polish listeners – and their...

 The best music of 2011 — or, more accurately, my favorite music of the year – is a genre-blind mix of the eloquent and the aggressive. The below 10 full-length albums, organized in order or preference, are further evidence......

Good Wednesday Morning, Fellow Seekers. We're running a little behind this morning, so we're going to dispense with the formalities and instead will dive right into a quick countdown of the Top 5 stories making news this 18th day of......

It's no secret I love movies. The ones I relish most are the indies: anything I can find playing here in good old Lakeview, at Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport) or Landmark Century Centre Cinema (2828 N. Clark). Low budgets and subtitles automatically...

Ravinia season is in full swing, which means folks across Chicagoland are flocking to Highland Park to enjoy the sounds of summer at the famous …...

Author Rob Young talks about icons and antecedents of the British Folk Movement....

John Cale is the Forrest Gump of rock, linking a disparate group of tastemakers and cultural figures throughout the four-plus decades of his career. Cale will perform his 1973 album "Paris 1919" tonight at UCLA's Royce Hall, followed by a......

Your California-bred blogger braved the foggy streets of London last week on vacation and had so much fun we couldn't help but (you guessed it!) blog about it. Here are five things the city does well enough to hold an, ahem, tea party over. Topshop and...

With a tough economy sending artists and food entrepreneurs toward grass-roots "crowd-funding" sites such as Kickstarter, it's no surprise that jazz musicians have started looking its way as well. Facing a cratering music industry, some of the worthy...

Brad Mehldau's 'Live in Marciac' On the heels of stretching his sound into the wide-screen sweep of 2010's "Highway Rider," pianist Brad Mehldau is distilled to his barest essence with "Live in Marciac," a two-CD live recording of a solo......