Indie Roundup

Don't let the cheesy cover art steer you away from this music, which is anything but. It's hard to go wrong with material this good, and Holly Norman and her fantastic backup musicians do right by it – and by Elvis – in a big way.

Coruscating Latin rhythms with a four-mallet attack, folk-jazz from a guitar-ukelele-vocal duo, and baroque-jazz crossover from the late bassoonist Daniel Smith

Folk-rock from accomplished veterans and hard rock from precocious teenagers.

One of the long-running Jim Cullum Jazz Band's great achievements is its jazz-band version of 'Porgy and Bess,' now available on a two-CD set, including narration by William Warfield, who played Porgy on stage many times.

Singer-songwriter Megan Slankard is a distinctive talent – a gifted melodist, and a literate and crafty, if hard to parse, lyricist.

Two recent albums that do new things with very old music.

Ric Todd, Drawing Lines Ric Todd’s new EP Drawing Lines crashes out of the gate with the heavy blues-rock of “Red Letter,” followed by the bouncier but still gritty “Something Real.” These smartly conceived songs combine crisp, stark modern production with traditional retro-rock attitude; in pure sound terms they’re superb. …

These three new albums all fit loosely into the Americana category but are all very, very different. Two are from artists who aren't even (originally) from America.

For fans of Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Simon, Ellen McIlwaine, Leo Kottke, John Fahey, and acoustic guitar mastery in general, discovering Hulburt's only solo album will be a treat as well as a rewarding time capsule (timeless capsule?) too.

Asian folk music and 20th century history inform this collection of modern classical works for Western strings and the Chinese lute called the pipa.