Call the blues passé if you like, but there’s no denying that it is a fitting soundtrack for today’s scary economy. America is singing the blues about foreclosure and job loss, a broken health care system and dwindling retirement funds.  Blues superstar Shemekia Copeland rolls all that anxiety into her latest disc, Never Going Back…

R&B albums rarely combine the multiple musical legacies of one given city and catch the zeitgeist of its time as masterfully as PPP’s sophomore disc, Abundance (Ubiquity). As the title suggests, producer Waajeed and multi-instrumentalist Saadiq—the group’s two brainiacs—pack so much historical reference, so much modern perspective, so much deft musicality, so much lyrical ingenuity,…

For funk fans, there was no greater spectacle than the landing of the Mothership during Parliament-Funkadelic’s legendary 1976 P-Funk Earth Tour. Its outlandish amalgamation of sci-fi fantasy, Blaxploitation grit, glam rock, gospel furor and sweat-inducing funk helped propel Parliament-Funkadelic to the furthest reaches of creativity. The P-Funk Earth Tour became a new artistic bench mark…

Nov. 17, 2008—A grimy, crime-ridden, early 1970s-era Philadelphia, governed by the bullish Frank Rizzo, a former police commissioner turned mayor was the gritty backdrop for what later became a genre of music known as “Philadelphia soul.” When Philadelphia International Records (PIR) emerged in 1971, it was a pivotal moment in America, as the aftermath of…

Fifty years after recording her first hit, a rendering of George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” and five years after her death from complications of breast cancer, Nina Simone continues to fascinate. She left a benchmark that was, as sung in the opening verse of Funkadelic’s 1978 anthem, “One Nation Under a Groove”:…

The 42-year-old, modern classical composer Joseph C. Phillips Jr. is a self-described “late-bloomer.” Now one of the brightest new lights on the modern classical scene, he studied music at the University of Maryland and began his career as an award-winning high school director near Seattle. He honed his gifts as a composer while he was…