Dorothy Carter began her musical career in the avant-garde and ended up an early music revivalist/popularizer. In between these two poles, she made two records that fittingly reside somewhere in the middle. For her first solo album, Troubadour, originally released in 1976 on her own label and now reissued by Drag City, she explored more traditional zones, evoking and interpreting gnostic hymns, ancient airs and cosmic carols with fidelity and freshness.
Howe Gelb :: Coherence is Accidental (A Conversation)
Poet philosopher Howe Gelb is a natural storyteller. And it turns out the Tucson-based songwriter doesn’t even need his signature voice—husky and low, a rumbling, phantasmagoric presence fronting his genre-crossing band Giant Sand for more than 40 years—to get his tall tales across. On his latest, Weathering Some Piano, Gelb’s voice does make a few brief but welcome appearances, but the focus is on his piano playing—solitary, unadorned, self-recorded at his home in Tucson “during random moments of weathering.”