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Clip of the Week

Anyone going to see Steve Earle between 2010 and 2022 and who caught the support act will be aware of the Mastersons. Eleanor Whitmore and Chris Masterson, a husband and wife duo, were part of Steve’s touring band, the Dukes and Duchesses, for those twelve years, and frequently performed a double shift as the support act too. More fool those who preferred to go to the bar than catch the support act. They missed a real treat. I’d venture, provocatively some people may think, that Chris and Eleanor were playing music far more essential than anything Steve Earle himself released since The Revolution Starts Now … (READ ON)

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This Week’s Book Choice

Not long after John Coltrane died in July 1967, a truck pulled up in front of the family home in Dix Hills, New York. His widow, Alice, and their four children watched two men carry a large package up to the front door. Once inside and out of the box, it turned out to be a full-size harp that John had ordered as a gift for Alice earlier in the year. She had never played one but six months later she was recording A Monastic Trio in the home studio downstairs. If you know this beautiful album, you will know that it is defined by her work on the instrument. Andy Beta’s new biography, “Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane” (White Rabbit, 2026), is long overdue. Jazz writers in the late 60s and early 70s were quick to dismiss her recordings and concerts with the suggestion that she was simply cashing in on her husband’s fame. There was also an idea that she had somehow broken up his classic band of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones and taken him over to the free jazz dark side that produced his more challenging later work. The Alice as Yoko schtick lingered for a long time in the male-dominated world of jazz criticism. Cosmic Music, an entertaining and highly informative book, addresses both charges but, more significantly, draws Alice out of her husband’s shadow and reveals an important and influential jazz artist in her own right. Her story begins in Detroit where Berry Gordy was a family friend and continues with her time as a noted bebop piano player in the 1950s. Beta solves the mystery of how two of the shyest people ever in show business came to be married and provides some glimpses of the Coltrane family before and after John’s early death. The book also does a good job unravelling her time as a spiritual leader and the music that she made in the decades that followed her best-known 1970s records. Curiosity about Alice will be rewarded. Longtime fans will swoon over the detail. Highly recommended.

Tony Thompson

Read all our previous book reviews here.

Toppermost Recommends

The new album from Liz Lawrence, her fifth and the second release with Chrysalis Records, Vespers is an album about tragedy. It is the record of a life and death, an act of devotion and reflection. Liz Lawrence wrote these songs in the ashes of disaster. “It is dedicated to my beautiful sister Jessie and her too-short life.”

“I wanted someone to be able to say to a friend who is grieving that they should listen to Vespers. I want people to come to this record. I want people to use this record. I want it to have purpose, to give comfort and catharsis,” Liz says.

Vespers is unvarnished, spare and elegiac, a testament of life and death. “The album is very specifically about my sister and my family’s situation, but equally, that is universal.” In wrapping up the harsh demands of life in the plain warmth of love, it is a romantic and frank finale with ‘Thank God For You’ offering some of the comfort and catharsis that she hopes Vespers will offer to others, too.

Liz Lawrence bandcamp