Roots Music Report

01/01/2026

Checkout Roots Music Report's Best of 2025 charts to see where your favorite artists ranked overall for the year. https://www.rootsmusicreport.com

01/01/2026

12/31/2025

Roots is currently undergoing a planned sitewide update and will not be available this evening.

12/25/2025

Merry Christmas!

12/04/2025

NEW SINGLES TO HELP CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS 2025

https://www.rootsmusicreport.com/articles/view/862/new-singles-to-help-celebrate-christmas-2025

11/27/2025

RMR wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

01/02/2025

The Best of 2024 charts are out: https://www.rootsmusicreport.com

12/25/2024

We hope everyone has an amazing day today filled with family, love, and most of all good music!

11/28/2024

We hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving filled with family, friends, and of course food. 🙂

05/29/2024

Album Review of - Treasures of the Heart
Artist - Jacqui Naylor
Written by Robert Silverstein - Review Rating 5 star

There are plenty of pleasurable R&B and pop-jazz vibes running thoughout Treasures Of The Heart, the 2024 album by California-based singer-songwriter Jacqui Naylor. For her 14-track, 60 minute album, Ms. Naylor teams with a number of fine musicians including Art Khu (keyboards, guitars, co-production), Richie Goods (bass), Ele Howell (drums) and Erik Jekabson (trumpet, flugelhorn). The end result is a pleasant hour of breezy, easy on the ear music that represents Ms. Naylor as a gifted singer-songwriter and a song interpreter.

A good example of Ms. Naylor’s fine covering skills is the lead off track, the jazz standard “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”, written in 1939 by Rogers & Hart. Other standards here that mix well among album originals written by Ms. Naylor and her pianist Art Khu, include a take on “True Colors”, the 1986 song made famous by Cyndy Lauper, with other tracks here written by Bill Withers and Burt Bacharach. With 12 albums already released to her credit, Treasures Of The Heart goes the distance and will surely please long-time fans as well as newcomers alike to the soulful pop-jazz elegance of Jacqui Naylor.
https://www.rootsmusicreport.com/reviews/view/1852
Jacqui Naylor

05/28/2024

Album Review of - True Blues Brother: The Legacy of Matt "Guitar" Murphy
Artist - Bobby Christina's Caravan
Written by Duane Verh - Review Rating 4 star

With a pack of guest artists bursting at the seams, producer/drummer Bob Christina supplemented what became departed blues legend Matt “Guitar” Murphy’s final studio sessions with a collection of good-vibes lineups populated with colleagues and admirers of the master axeman. Solid instrumental play is to be found everywhere starting with Mr. Murphy’s own features, a pair that serve as leadoff tracks for the double-disc package. Others delivering as one might expect include Bob Margolin, Duke Robillard, Ronnie Earl and Blues Brothers partner Steve Cropper. Speaking of the movie, vocalist Toni Lynn Washington serves up a nice reading of Aretha Franklin’s “Think”. Unsurprisingly, Tracy Nelson provides a moving vocal on Don Nix’s “Same Old Blues”. Other tracks of note include Doyle Bramhall II’s feature- Magic Sam’s “Give Me Time”- and Willie Dixon’s “Evil”, highlighted by Bob Margolin’s inspired sounding slide work.
https://www.rootsmusicreport.com/reviews/view/1851
True Blues Brother

05/27/2024

Album Review of - A LA SALA
Artist - Khruangbin
Written by Robert Silverstein - Review Rating 5 star

Texas-based guitar-centric instrumental band Khruangbin are making waves with their fourth album called A La Sala. It’s very hard to pigeonhole their sound but overall, this album is quite derivative and neo-exotic in scope. Almost completely devoid of intensity, melody or musical direction, the Khruangbin sound borrows from reggae, neo-soul and soundtrack music to a limited degree. Clocking in at 40-minutes, A La Sala is very easy on the ears so it does make for an hour or so of breezy listening.

Musically, Khruangbin is fronted by a trio of fine instrumentalists including Mark “Marko” Speer (guitars), Laura Lee Ochoa (bass) and Donald “DJ” Johnson, Jr. (drums). There was an interesting guitar instrumental band from Georgia in the early 1980s called Love Tractor and the dreamy, neo-psychedelic soul and groove sound of this Khruangbin album has kind of a similar sound. Of course, a lack of musical direction and an ostensible willingness to substitute style for content might limit the band’s wider audience appeal.

It might be easy to target Khruangbin for its seemingly inherent lack of musical focus, yet being adrift on the band’s wave of airy, globalist-tinged, “psychedelic-funk” instrumental guitar sounds does have its plus side, and spending a good 40 minutes or so with the 12 tracks on A La Sala does have a manifestly seductive side to it.
https://www.rootsmusicreport.com/reviews/view/1850
Khruangbin