Robert Baird

Sort By: Post Date | Title | Publish Date
Tasteless, puzzling and absolutely classic
Robert Baird
Robert Baird  |  May 05, 2011  |  5 comments
Talk about your bad ideas. I can’t decide whether Whole Lotta Rosie subtitled “An All Star Salute to Fat Chicks,” exists just to be obnoxious or whether Paul LaPlaca and A.J.Confessore really are the kind of hard rock dudes that actually love large women.
Continue Reading >
Teddy
Robert Baird
Robert Baird  |  Jan 14, 2010  |  2 comments
When you’re old, you begin to read obits and relate to the ages of the dead. Like this from this morning: the great Teddy Pendergrass dead at 59 of colon cancer.
Continue Reading >
Tenor Saxophonist Kamasi Washington: Giant Steps
Music and Recording Features
Robert Baird  |  Nov 04, 2015  |  2 comments
Tinseltown. La-La Land. Smell-A. First, of course, there's the climate. No way to hate sunshine and ocean breezes. And if you were somehow able to erase all the people in Southern California, the land itself—rising from the blue Pacific to high desert to timbered, sometimes even snowy mountaintops—is gorgeous. Then, of course, there's the unusually attractive human flora and fauna roaming SoCal. How did Brian Wilson put it . . . ? "Dolls by a palm tree in the sand."
Continue Reading >
Terence Blanchard: Animal Magnetism
Music and Recording FeaturesInterviews
Robert Baird  |  Aug 08, 2013  |  1 comments
Down deepest, beneath everything he does, underlying all the facets of his ever-expanding career in music, Terence Blanchard is still a New Orleans guy. Question that and you can hear his dander rise.
Continue Reading >
The 2018 Grammies: Missing the Point
Robert Baird
Robert Baird  |  Jan 29, 2018  |  11 comments
It is a given these days that the Grammy Awards telecast has devolved into a not very interesting TV variety show. And that most of the really interesting awards are given out off-camera the day before.
Continue Reading >
The Bad Plus—the Magnificent Threesome
Music and Recording FeaturesInterviews
Robert Baird  |  Jan 04, 2013  |  First Published: Jan 01, 2013  |  1 comments
In a discussion about what their music is—and is not—Dave King, drummer for the Bad Plus, remembers opening a show for free-jazz patriarch Ornette Coleman at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. After their set, the band joined the audience to watch Coleman.

"After the first couple tunes—and this was in a seated theater—I swear, half the audience had left. Fifty years into your career, and he's still making people want to check it out and then decide if they can take it. And that's every night, I bet.

Continue Reading >
The Beatles 2009
Robert Baird
Robert Baird  |  Sep 10, 2009  |  21 comments
So the big day, September 9, Beatles Day, has come and gone and after being away on a brief trip, I returned this morning to a number of voicemails that began, “Are the Beatles reissues worth the money?”
Continue Reading >
The Best Beatles Solo Work?
Robert Baird
Robert Baird  |  Oct 02, 2016  |  9 comments
To my ears, the masterpieces of the solo careers are obvious.
Continue Reading >
The Big O
Robert Baird
Robert Baird  |  Nov 13, 2015  |  5 comments
Why didn’t sets like this appear when CD as a format still had a vital future?
Continue Reading >
The Blog Starts Here
Robert Baird
Robert Baird  |  Apr 25, 2006  |  7 comments
Starting this blog has made me feel almost the same way I did when Frank Sinatra died and I wrote in the pages of Stereophile that when I became a music writer, lo those many dark-haired days ago, I knew that someday I'd have to write a Francis Albert obit. When the blog craze first began to gallop, I knew intuitively that someday, I too would be sucked into the immediacy maw and be lured into venting my opinions, valuable or not, in the blogosphere.
Continue Reading >

Pages

X