Earlier today, NPR Music published one of my pieces for Take Five, our weekly jazz feature, called Blast Beat Improv: Metallic Free Jazz. I've come to subtitle it "Or How I Stopped Worrying And ...

Equally respected in any musical community he is a part of, Alex Skolnick has built up an impressive résumé over the decades. Heavy metal and jazz never seem to have much of a Venn diagram kind of ...

“The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

Jazz guitar-style licks decorated a central section of the tune, sandwiched between dark-metal figures in octaves (an Opeth trademark—the octaves are played by Akerfeldt; guitarist Akesson, a lead ...

Jazz music, woodworking and the pummeling sounds of thrash metal. To the casual observer, one of these things is not like the other, but to Nick Menza, they had one thing in common: He loved them. The ...

THE most famous riff in rock is the 3 1/2 -chord skull buster that stalks Deep Purple’s 1972 “Smoke on the Water” -- a branding moment in the infancy of heavy metal. And as Deep Purple’s set at last ...

Think of sheaths of titanium splintering across a room at the speed of light, and a moveable wall of sound that poses a daunting proposition. These are components that signal the vivid imagery, ...

Dynamic jazz-metal fusion guitarist Bobby Koelble understands the highs and lows of a life defined via music.. The mid-90s found Death a band on the rise. Anointed the proverbial kings of the death ...

I’ve spent plenty of time in this space discussing the myriad connections between classical music and heavy metal, a topic I always love falling back on when skeptics peg metal as a low-class art form ...

Jazz purists probably won't enjoy The Alex Skolnick Trio. Nor will heavy-metal snobs. But those willing to listen with an adventurous ear should check out the band, scheduled to headline the third ...