When your favorite stars walk down the gold carpet Sunday night at the 54th annual Grammy Awards ceremony at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, get ready to be wowed with one of the best shows in years -- including performances by Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band, Paul...

Fellow Huffington Post blogger (and longtime music editor) David Wild hit the nail on the head when he said The Explorers Club's sophomore outing, Grand Hotel, is "the best album of the year -- but what year?"

Music nerds (like me) who are in touch with...

Dinner with family. Exchanging presents. Lighting candles. Caroling. Vacation. Parties. Fireworks!

How will you celebrate the holidays this year? We often forget that we have a choice about how we will observe the national, cultural and religious holidays that make up this "most wonderful time of the year." But what...

We music critics haven't had much to froth over for the past few years. The charts across most genres have been decidedly barren of worthy sounds, thanks to the never-ending influx of auto-tuned fluff. Sure, there are always a handful of really great songs in any calendar year, but there...

There's been a lot of talk lately about the strides being made against HIV/AIDS. During a speech at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on November 8, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even went so far as to proclaim the possibility of an "AIDS-free generation" with "a global...

Entrepreneur Al Meyers was attending a TED conference in Palm Springs in 2009 when a presentation by TED Prize winner and Venezuelan conductor and economist Jose Antonio Abreu sparked an idea. During his speech, Abreu connected to a live satellite feed of...

Have you ever wondered what happens to all those little bars of soap in hotels? You use them once or twice during a stay and then they're discarded the next day. Thanks to Global Soap Project, an Atlanta-based nonprofit founded by humanitarian worker Derreck Kayongo, more than 100...

A little baby born in India earlier this week was welcomed to the world as our planet's seven billionth citizen. Not only is it a staggering statistic to realize earth's inhabitants have increased two-fold in the past fifty years, but in light of "World...

Allee Willis stood at the mic, a white Jewish girl from Detroit fronting a ten-piece soul band dressed in sequined vegetable costumes. The venue was the Ohio State campus cafeteria, and the three people who comprised the audience were chomping hot dogs while a psychology professor conducted a...

Eighteen years ago, a little-known performer (and one of my favorite singers ever), Victoria Williams, was in the middle of an opening stint on the road with guitar god Neil Young when unexplainable, debilitating symptoms forced her to leave the tour. She was later diagnosed with...

Although New York singer Marilyn Carino says listening to her catalog of work with new-millennium indie darlings Mudville "feels like a nostalgia trip," she's proud of what she and collaborator Ben Rubin accomplished: critical praise (in 2006, critic John Pareles of The New York Times described their...

Quick! Name a music festival. Did you say Bonnaroo or Coachella? Maybe you just attended the Austin City Limits Music Festival ? I bet you didn't think of Music Midtown, did you? If not, there's a reason for that. The newly re-minted...

Similarly to the scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in which our favorite truant trio visits the Art Institute of Chicago and surveys Seurat's pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to the strains of "Please, Please,...

If there were ever a week for a midcentury music revival in L.A., this must be it.

Wednesday marks what would have been rock and roll pioneer Buddy Holly's 75th birthday, and to commemorate the occasion, the late singer's widow, Maria Elena Holly, along with Phil Everly of the Everly...

The fall social season has a new kickoff date, and this year, it's August 29 -- when designer Jason Wu joins retailer-to-the-stars Jeffrey Kalinsky (founder of the Jeffrey boutiques) in the haute south for the 19th annual Jeffrey Fashion Cares runway show and charity event in...

You've heard of TOMS Shoes, right? Every pair you buy, TOMS donates a pair to a kid in need. TOMS was built around the notion that a "one-for-one" business model could actually turn a profit and change the world -- and it has.

But we're not talking shoes...

"Sometimes you kick, and sometimes you get kicked," as the title track to INXS's biggest-selling album (1987's Kick) goes. Luckily, this band -- who'll make a stop at New York's Beacon Theatre August 4 -- is presently kicking, with a new tour and CD (Original Sin) featuring...

Unless you're an aficionado of James Bond soundtracks or the sexy Kim Basinger flick 9 1/2 Weeks, you may not know the name of composer Jonathan Elias. But you've definitely heard his music, which has appeared in dozens of film, television, and advertising projects, including the...

This photo of two tour posters on Sade's website sums up what music fans understand to be true about the 2011 summer concert season: it's better than last year's, but still unpredictable.

Even as radio staple Rihanna's 2009 release, Rated R, hit its...

This is not a blog about golf -- although the two jazz musicians/golf players here in question will tell you their attempts to master the sport require almost as much time and energy as prepping for shows at the world's top music venues.

Yet, when it comes to saxophonist...