Music

With the exception of announcing the arrival of royalty, trumpets aren't typically considered the most impressive of instruments on their own. They aren't particularly delicate or dainty and it takes quite a set of lungs – not to mention an abundance of saliva – to even produce a note.
So when someone is described as a trumpet master, it's bound to provoke some speculation as to what exactly this means. Does it mean having won four Grammys, six Billboard Awards and an Emmy? Perhaps it means having traveled the world performing across a wide scope of genres to create a musical career that hasn't slowed down in over 40 years? Could it be when HBO decides to make a movie out of said life and casts Andy Garcia as the star?

It wasn't until recently – Dinosaur Jr's 2009 album Farm, specifically – that I could even begin to understand J Mascis. Before that, he was just a gray-haired guitar god: a guru of geekery on the covers of Guitar World and other magazines I don't care about reading.

It's a Friday afternoon in New Orleans and Jeff Raines is taking it easy. Well, kind of. He's playing with some musicians that night somewhere downtown, but compared to earlier that week, things are pretty tame. You see, Raines is only two days removed from Ash Wednesday – three days from Mardi Gras – and given that he plays guitar in Galactic, one of the city's most hard-charging bands, it's OK that he's taking a little down time.
But there is no vacation on the horizon for Raines and his band. Within a week, Raines and the four other members of Galactic will be back on the bus for a month-long tour, doing what they've been doing for nearly 20 years – playing some of the funkiest instrumental jams in the business while also accompanying an eclectic array of performers, from rappers to soul legends. Then this summer, like most summers before in the band's history, the group hits the festival circuit, where Galactic's distinctively New Orleans roots mix well with the party atmosphere found at such mass gatherings.

When Dylan Carlson released Earth's first full-length, Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version in 1993, he and Dave Harwell took Sabbath riffs and deconstructed them into an unforgiving dragging force. This album would go on to spawn a legion of metal subgenres, most notably, drone metal.
After two decades, Earth 2 still inspires sludge metal minions and is beaming with a newfound hipster approval rating. If you're an original fan of Earth, I apologize. Even as a music obsessive, I struggle to make it through all three songs and 70 plus minutes of Earth 2. I can appreciate the originality, but the sub-tonal quality is too much for my head. I find myself gravitating toward Earth's most recent, non-metal affairs where Carlson's affinity for jazz, minimalist sound sculptures and slow Ennio Morricone compositions shine out.