Greetings from The Music Bowl! I'm The Wonderfish. In this final post of the year, we look at the albums that most captivated me, The Wonderfish, in 2017. Honorable Mentions: As Heard mentioned, we saw a year of excellent music. There is just no way I could listen to all of the album releases. However, I will say I listened to a fair share of 2017's new music. First up are my honorable mentions. These are the albums I both thoroughly enjoyed and listened to repeatedly this year. Fleet Foxes -  Crack Up Ryan Adams -  Prisoner Rhiannon Giddens -  Freedom Highway Foo Fighters -  Concrete and Gold The War on Drugs -  A Deeper Understanding U2 -   Songs of Experience Ani DiFranco -  Binary Chris Thile and Brad Mehldau-  Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau Runner Up: Kendrick Lamar -  DAMN. Words that come to mind when I think about this album:  poetic, compelling, magnetic, storytelling, innovative, rhetorical ...

Ahoy! We’ve reached the end of 2017! I hope your year was as good as mine. With the last post of the year the Wonderfish and I are revealing our picks for Album of the Year (AOTY). Let’s get right to it. Honorable Mentions A lot of amazing music came out this year. Far too much for me to try and rank so here’s a list of albums that were near the top of my listening but not quite AOTY material. They all deserve many listens and I’d like to hear why anyone of them should have been named AOTY. In no particular order… Julien Baker- Turn Out the Lights Steven Wilson- To The Bone Oded Tzur- Translator’s Note Caligula’s Horse- In Contact Chris Thile- Thanks For Listening Three Fall- Four (With Melane) Brother Ali- All the Beauty in This Whole Life Rhiannon Giddens- Freedom Highway Runner Up The Stranger- The Stranger This debut album from Australian prog band The Stranger is simply amazing. I had a very hard time not giving this AOTY. It features sub...

Greetings from The Music Bowl! I'm The Wonderfish. Even though Heard and I have vastly different tastes in music, we do find common ground from time to time. As a matter of fact, you'll notice that we actually agree on one album from the last five years. Compiling this list took a little work, but in the end what you will see below are the five albums that influenced me the most from 2012 through 2016. I strongly suggest you take a listen to the highlights and see what you think. 5) LEMONADE - BEYONCE What I hear: This is the musicality I've been waiting to hear from Beyonce. Raw emotion, astounding collaborations, and blunt, powerful, refreshing honesty about what so many women go through. Lemonade is a timely snapshot of our culture in 2016, and I'm not even talking about the "visual album" aspect. I mean the spoken word segments, the lyrics, and the style of the songs. Keep in mind, this is prior to the recent surge of the #METOO movement. Beyonce s...

Ahoy! When the Wonderfish and I first began the conversation of starting a blog we quickly settled on the idea of doing an Album of the Year post. We would consider only new studio albums that were released in 2017. We have spent a lot of time this year listening to some amazing new music and next week we will both reveal our picks for Album of the Year. However, as this is the first year we decided to track albums in this fashion I thought it’d be fun if we took a look at my top five albums that have come out in the past five years. I considered as much music as I could that came out between 2012-2016. Five years is A LOT of music so in the end I went with the albums that have shaped me as a musician. I have transcribed something off all five of these albums and despite the constant wave of new music, I return to these albums time and time again. I find something new on them every time I listen and I think you’ll dig them just as much as I do. Number 5: Anderson .Paak- ...

Greetings from The Music Bowl! I'm the Wonderfish. Well, we're nearing the end of 2017 and it's time we here at The Music Bowl asked that all important question: How do you listen to music? First of all, let's get this out of the way. Are you or are you not a streamer? This is, according to most, the wave of the future for listening to music. Heard discussed the pros and cons of streaming in the early days of our blog, and you can definitely refer back to those if you want more details about those arguments. I will be the first to admit that I was very late to the streaming game. I did not want to hop on this digital bandwagon. However, I am thoroughly enjoying Apple Music. Now, we have multiple avenues for streaming in this day and age. You can use Amazon, Google Play, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, MySpace, etc... Well, maybe not MySpace. Wait, wait, wait, TIME OUT! Remember MySpace?? C'mon, I know you do! You just don't want to talk abou...

Ahoy! Over the past two weeks I’ve discussed big bands old and new. You can listen to, and admire, these groups, but what is it like actually playing in this type of ensemble? While I haven’t had the chance to work in a band with the prestige like those I’ve discussed, I played in a big band during my time as an undergraduate, I currently play in one as a graduate student, and I was regularly called for reading sessions in my gap years. These experiences were vital to my musical foundation and the lessons learned working in these groups continue to shape how I approach working with every group I’m in, jazz or not. The biggest lesson I learned as an undergraduate was learning how to learn music. Prior to collegiate playing all I really focused on was being able to play my parts. However, just because I can play my part doesn’t mean I’m making music, or even that I’m fitting in with what everyone else is doing. Now I think of ensemble playing as having three layers: 1) my ...