Bass CDs
Bassist Danielle Nicole to Release Cry No More
Danielle Nicole’s Cry No More Takes The Singer-Bassist-Songwriter Into Creative New Territory…
“I’m definitely taking more chances now,” Danielle Nicole says of Cry No More, her second solo album and the follow-up to her widely acclaimed 2015 solo debut Wolf Den. “I grew up playing the blues, and the blues is still a big part of what I do. But now I’m reaching out more and trying different things. It still sounds like me, but I’m stretching out a lot more than I have previously.”
Indeed, while Wolf Den served as a powerful intro to the young singer-bassist-songwriter’s funky, blues-steeped songcraft, Cry No More, set for release on February 23rd, 2018 via Concord Records, takes the artist into fresh new creative territory, delivering 14 emotion-charged new songs whose rootsy musical edge is matched by their air of hard-won personal experience. Guitar World has the track premiere for “Save Me” here.
Danielle Nicole’s expansive approach yields deeply compelling musical results throughout Cry No More. With seasoned veteran Tony Braunagel (Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Burdon) producing, such heartfelt, groove-intensive new tunes as “Crawl,” “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore,” the Bill Withers-penned “Hot Spell” and the heart-tugging title track find Danielle cutting loose and focusing on the storytelling and character-development aspects of her songwriting.
“I wanted to open up more about myself, and I think it shows in the songs,” Danielle asserts. “I thought really hard about the stories I wanted to tell in these songs. I really dug into my personal experience, and worked to be more open and expose more of myself than I have in the past.
“There’s a song there about my father, ‘Bobby,’ who passed away a long time ago,” she continues. “That was a big one for me, because I’d never gone there before. And I’ve had lots of changes going on in my life, so the title track, ‘Cry No More,’ is about moving on and letting go, and about getting over things and moving past them. There are a lot of songs on this album about moving on, although that wasn’t a conscious direction. Every song is a different story, and every song has a purpose and a perspective.”
While Danielle wrote or co-wrote nine of Cry No More‘s 14 songs, the seductive “Hot Spell” was given to Danielle by its author, long-retired R&B legend Bill Withers.
Withers was a surprise visitor to the album’s recording sessions at L.A.’s Ultratone Studios, and was so impressed with Danielle’s singing that he dug into his archives and offered her the song, which he wrote back in the ’70s, but which had gone unrecorded since then.
“Bill is one of my all-time musical heroes,” Danielle notes. “We played him a couple of the songs we’d been working on, and he said ‘Come on, let’s go out to my car for a minute.’ So we were hanging out in his SUV, and he’s shuffling through his glovebox and he pulls out this disc and says ‘I’ve got this song; it’s a bit risqué, but if you don’t mind, I’ll play it for you.’ It was this demo that he’d done, with his daughter doing the vocals. It was real moody and had a great groove, and it was Bill all the way. He told me that if I liked it, I was welcome to record it.”
She didn’t have to be told twice. “There was a section on the demo where Bill’s scatting where the guitar solo would be. We asked him to do that on my version, but he’s retired, so he respectfully declined to sing on it. So I sang the scat line and harmonized to it, in his honor. He dug it!”
Danielle enlisted an old friend, Braunagel, who also produced the last two albums by her old family band, Trampled Under Foot, to record the album. The pair’s longstanding creative rapport is apparent throughout Cry No More, on which Braunagel co-wrote five songs with Danielle.
“I really wanted to work with Tony on this record, because I knew that he would get the best out of me,” Danielle explains. “We’ve really developed a great working relationship and we write together really well, and I knew that Tony could help me develop these stories into songs.
“This whole record was like a dream come true,” she adds.
“I got to do the songs I wanted to do, work with the producer I wanted to work with, and record in the studio I wanted to record in. It was really cool how everything fell into place. All of the songs were what I wanted them to be, and all of the players were perfect for the songs. Every aspect of this album, from the birth of the songs to the mastering, was really free and organic.”
In addition to Danielle on bass, producer Braunagel on drums and longtime Bonnie Raitt guitarist Johnnie Lee Schell (who also engineered the sessions), Cry No More features appearances by such notable guitarists as Kenny Wayne Shepherd (on “Save Me”), Luther Dickinson (on “Just Can’t Keep From Crying”), Walter Trout (on “Burnin’ for You”), Sonny Landreth (on “I’m Going Home”), Danielle’s touring guitarist Brandon Miller (on “Baby Eyes”), and her brother and former bandmate Nick Schnebelen (on “Crawl”).
The musical expertise and emotional depth of Cry No More reflect of a lifetime’s worth of music-making.
Born Danielle Nicole Schnebelen, Danielle comes from a long line of singers and musicians, and showed an affinity for singing almost from birth. Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, she performed in public for the first time at the age of 12, singing Koko Taylor’s “Never Trust a Man” as part of a Blues for Schools program at her elementary school. In her early teens, she began singing in local coffeehouses and at open mic events, often jamming with her parents at clubs that would allow minors. At 16, she became lead singer in her father’s band, Little Eva and the Works. In 1999, she started her own band, Fresh Brew, with some older local musicians. Fresh Brew performed for four years and represented Kansas City in the prestigious International Blues Challenge.
It was during this time that Danielle and her brothers Nick and Kris launched a family band, Trampled Under Foot, relocating to Philadelphia in the process.
To maintain the family concept, Danielle learned to play bass, eventually mastering the instrument. Trampled Under Foot traveled the world and recorded several self-released albums, building a sizable national fan base through years of nonstop roadwork. For their 2013 album Badlands, produced by Braunagel, Trampled Under Foot moved to the Telarc label, a division of Concord Music Group. Badlands debuted at #1 on Billboard‘s Blues Chart.
As Trampled Under Foot wound down after an eventful 13-year run, Danielle formed her own band and signed with Concord Records, releasing a self-titled EP and the Anders Osborne-produced album Wolf Den in 2015. Those releases established Danielle as a formidable solo artist and bandleader.
“I learned a lot from the last album,” Danielle states. “It was the first time I was writing and recording and choosing all of the material on my own, which was a big thing for me. I had been in a band with my brothers for 13 years, but it’s a whole different thing when it’s your name that’s on the line. That aspect feels a lot more comfortable now, and I can make decisions without worrying about what everybody else will think.”
Nicole’s distinctive, inventive bass work—which resulted in her becoming the first woman to win the Blues Foundation’s 2014 Blues Music Award for Best Instrumentalist, Bass—is the product of years of intensive roadwork.
Although she had no experience with the instrument when she became Trampled Under Foot’s bassist, now she can’t imagine life without it.
“Playing the bass definitely influences the way I sing, the way I write and the way I approach music,” she says. “As I’ve progressed more, the bass lines have been getting a lot more intricate. It’s still a challenge to sing while playing bass, because it’s very rare that the bass line and the vocal go together. I still get tripped up sometimes, but at this point I’d never give up the bass.
“When I started doing my solo thing,” she continues, “someone asked me if I was gonna hire a bass player.
No, of course not! I originally picked up the bass to keep Trampled Under Foot a family band, but I really fell in love with it. It was a huge challenge, and it still is. But I really love being part of the groove and getting to sing on top of that. I had learned some stuff on acoustic guitar before I started playing bass, but I never really felt connected to it the way I do with the bass. It’s empowering, walking onto a stage full of grown men who can play their asses off, and it’s ‘OK, I’m gonna play this bass, we’re gonna do this, and it’s gonna rock.'”
With Cry No More marking a substantial creative step forward, Danielle Nicole is ready to reap her musical destiny.
“I think that it’s a good time for the kind of thing I’m doing,” she states. “From my years of playing blues festivals, I’ve seen that younger and younger audiences are getting into the blues. I think that people want to hear authentic music again.”
Visit online:
- Website: daniellenicolekc.com
- Facebook: facebook.com/DanielleNicoleBand
- Twitter: twitter.com/danielle_nicole
- Instagram: instagram.com/daniellenicoleband
Bass CDs
New Album: Zev Feldman’s Time Traveler Recordings’ Buster Williams ‘Pinnacle’ Muse Catalog Reissue
A precious, but previously elusive gem by the brilliant bass player Buster Williams will re-enter the jazz firmament with Time Traveler Recordings’ April 18 reissue of Pinnacle, the NEA Jazz Master’s celebrated 1975 debut album as a leader.
The package, an exclusive RSD release on LP, is being reissued for the very first time since its original release. It is the latest installment in TTR’s Muse Master Edition Series, unearthing the long-lost masterworks from the catalog of the historic Muse Records. The series is a collaboration with Virgin Music Group and Craft Recordings, spearheaded by TTR co-founder, producer and “Jazz Detective” Zev Feldman.
Remastered AAA directly from the original analog tapes by Matthew Lutthans at the Mastering Lab in Salina, Kansas, Pinnacle is pressed on 180-gram vinyl by Optimal. It will be issued in a hand-numbered, high-gloss tip-on sleeve, featuring a new liner essay by journalist Mike Flynn and a rare period photograph of Williams by Raymond Ross. The package also includes the original 1975 notes by Elliot Meadow who produced the original session which was recorded at Blue Rock Studios in NYC.
Thirty-three years old at the time of these August 1975 sessions, Camden, New Jersey native Charles Anthony “Buster” Williams was already an acclaimed and in-demand jazz bassist. He’d spent most of the 1960s touring and recording with Nancy Wilson, also freelancing for the likes of the Jazz Crusaders, Harold Land, and the Miles Davis Quintet—substituting for Ron Carter for several months in 1967—where he met and worked with Herbie Hancock. Williams joined Hancock’s Mwandishi band in 1971, placing him on the cutting edge of the new jazz fusion movement.
Pinnacle, recorded after Mwandishi’s breakup, finds Williams still very much informed by that idiom of funky, experimental jazz. The band includes fellow Mwandishi alum Billy Hart on drums and fellow Miles veteran Sonny Fortune on soprano saxophone and flute, along with legendary trumpeter Woody Shaw and a venturesome crew including saxophonist Earl Turbinton, keyboardist Onaje Allan Gumbs and percussionist Guilherme Franco. (Vocalists Suzanne Klewan and Marcus also join on two tracks.)
Williams blazed new trails in the use of electric bass in jazz: “A pioneer among jazz doublers—musicians equally adept on upright and electric bass,” notes Flynn in his new essay. But, while he features his Fender electric bass on the thumping opener “The Hump,” on most of the album Williams plays the acoustic upright bass that had always been his first love. It anchors the darker, funkier journeys the band takes on “Pinnacle” and “Batuki” and sets the swinging tone for the acoustic numbers, the deep spiritual jazz “Noble Eagle” and the breezy, playful “Tayamisha.”
“What I love about the acoustic bass is what I have to do to get music out of it,” Williams muses. “The sound I get depends all on me, not the help of an amp. The instrument relates to my heart; it’s alive, it has emotion, it’s not just a piece of wood.”
“Bass players are often described—perhaps unfairly—as the anchor of the band,” writes Flynn. “But in the hands of a master like Buster Williams, the bass becomes something much more: the engine, the heartbeat, the mellifluous core driving the music forward.”
Williams composed four of the album’s five tracks, making Pinnacle a brilliant first showcase for his writing as well as his playing and bandleading. “Buster’s writing abilities have not gone unnoticed in the past,” observes Meadows in his original liner notes for the album. “The writing for this date is fresh and varied. ‘The Hump,’ which should make you get up and do something, contrasts with the haunting serenity of the title song. Then ‘Tayamisha’ (named for Buster’s daughter) is light and airy as opposed to the intensity of ‘Noble Ego.’”
A prophetic release, Pinnacle forecasts the subsequent 50 years that Williams has spent balancing forward-looking musical adventures with the bounty and rigor of the tradition. “The title says it all,” writes Flynn. “Pinnacle wasn’t just a debut. It was a statement of arrival—an artist stepping forward from a prolific past into a fearless, unbounded future.” And, under the curation of Time Traveler’s Muse Master Edition Series, it now sounds better than ever.
Monk con Clave is the new album from the Carlos Henriquez Big Band, out now! Therein, bassist and bandleader Carlos Henriquez roots the large-ensemble recording in his long relationship with the work of Thelonious Monk and the cultural history of San Juan Hill.
He brings together a multigenerational band drawn from members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its extended community, including percussionist Pedrito Martínez, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, pianists Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Osmany Paredes, and Robert Rodriguez, vocalist Anthony Almonte, flutist and vocalist Jeremy Bosch. The project places Monk’s compositions beside original works shaped by Bronx memory and Nuyorican identity.
Few figures in modern art carry the singular presence of Thelonious Monk. His unmistakable melodic contours, harmonic tensions, and rhythmic logic continue to define the jazz repertoire, with musicians reinterpreting his work across generations. Monk lived in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood before its disappearance during the construction of Lincoln Center, and his sound still carries the imprint of that vanished New York community.
Henriquez’s work as a bassist, composer, and bandleader has drawn sustained critical recognition across the jazz world. JazzTimes has praised his playing as “clean, crisp and to-the-point…jet fuel for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra,” while noting that “anyone surprised by the depth and breadth of Henriquez’s talents simply hasn’t been paying attention.” DownBeat has described him as “an emerging master in the Latin jazz idiom,” and WRTI has called his Grammy-nominated album The South Bronx Story “a terrific album,” highlighting his rare ability to unite Afro-Latin clave and jazz swing with few peers.
Henriquez built his artistic life through decades at Jazz at Lincoln Center. He joined the organization in the late 1990s as a teenager performing with Wynton Marsalis, became a full-time orchestra member, and spent years touring, recording, arranging, curating, and directing performances. “It’s almost like a mini Wynton Marsalis throughout those 30 years,” he says. “My participation there has been basically my whole life. It’s my home and a place where I’m gonna continue to develop and to lead.”
Monk’s voice has remained central to that life. “Something stood out,” Henriquez says. “It made me feel comfortable. It made me feel like I also had a voice in this music.” He hears Monk’s rhythmic language through his own identity as “a Nuyorican — somebody born in New York City whose parents are from Puerto Rico.” The music on Monk con Clave grew from that connection because he “was already listening to his music and very attracted to his uniqueness and him being himself.”
Henriquez assembled the band for what he calls “a great moment for me, especially for this project.” The session carried humor and familiarity. “Everybody’s on point. If you mess up a note, everybody starts jumping on you. That’s the fun part… all the talking amongst friends to keep our spirits and our attention span as high as possible.” During one solo, Rubalcaba stunned the room so completely that the musicians looked around “like they saw a ghost, like they saw an alien.”
The album opens with “Round Midnight,” where, Henriquez says, Rubalcaba’s playing “becomes water and takes the shape of whatever he wants to do.” “I Mean You” captures what Henriquez calls “the vibe of Afro-Cuban music at its best.”
“El Son De Teo” unfolds through a slow Son atmosphere connecting the homage to Teo Macero, creating “a real Son vibe.” His original composition “San Juan Hill” reflects “the ups and downs of being Black American and Puerto Rican Latino during the transition period, with Robert Moses having to move people out of their locations.” On “Ugly Beauty,” Henriquez shifts Monk’s triple meter into four and draws on the ballad language of Beny Moré, while a vocal performance by Anthony Almonte delivers what he describes as “luscious sounds.”
“Evidence of Four and One” references Monk’s classic compositions “Evidence,” first recorded in 1948, and “Four in One,” a formally unusual work from 1951. Here Henriquez manages to combine both tunes as if it were one. Built on rapid sixteenth-note with both melodic lines overlapping. “Raise Four” follows the lineage of Machito and Chico O’Farrill through a six-eight pulse and the explosion of Pedro Martinez & Jesus Ricardo.
“Green Chimneys” carries a Mozambique feel that features piccolo flute and bass on the melody. “Who Knows” stands as “a reflection of people I look up to — Tito Puente, Machito, Chico O’Farrill — Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican.” The closing “Plena Azul Blue Monk” draws on Puerto Rican plena tradition, where “the trombone just playing the melody” evokes figures such as Papa Vázquez, William Cepeda, and Rafael Hernández.
For Henriquez, the music returns to the place that shaped him.
Well-respected roots rock/Americana sidemen; drummer JIMMY LESTER (Billy Joe Shaver, Webb Wilder, Los Straitjackets), bass player/songwriter/singer/bandleader MARK W. WINCHESTER (Planet Rockers, EmmyLou Harris, Brian Setzer), and keyboard player KEVIN MCKENDREE (Lee Roy Parnell, Delbert McClinton, Brian Setzer) form super-groove-group LESTER WINCHESTER MCKENDREE to go it alone, together, on their debut collaborative release, THEY GOT IT ALL (Times Three Records/MAY 29, 2026).
The drum, bass and piano (with vocal) trio recorded over two “live” days at McKendree’s Rock House studio in Franklin, TN early this year, focusing on a collection of Winchester’s original songs the three had been performing together on local club dates, brand new material (the unique origins of which we’ll get to), as well as two instrumentals collaboratively conjured in the studio.
Originally feeling the power of their locked-in, feel-based natural groove while backing E. Street Band bassist Garry Tallent on his solo album and brief tour in 2017, Winchester says he wanted to feel that again. “On that tour, Garry would let his musicians do an original song or two of their own, and I never forgot how great it felt and sounded to sing my songs with Kevin and Jimmy, or how Jimmy and I backed Kevin’s instrumental piano romps.”
In recent years, as Lester Winchester McKendree began performing live, an evolution began taking place with regard to Winchester’s instrument of choice. “I was changing strings one day and started thinking about the band Morphine, and how their frontman Mark Sandman, rest in peace, played a 2-string bass. So I took a YouTube deep dive, got inspired, and only put two strings back on my own bass”, Winchester explains. The sonically unique, melodically interesting result made the decision for the band to record an album a no-brainer.
Songwriters will often say a guitar new to them will “have songs in it”, or that writing on an instrument one is not totally familiar with can open up new creative possibilities. Winchester described it this way: “Songs just started falling out of that thing. Sandman played with a slide, but I just used my long fingers. The 2-String is tuned in fifths, and I started finding melodies and riffs, and for the first time ever, really, wrote all the music to pieces before any lyrics came.”
About a year after stringing his own bass with only two, Eastwood Guitars serendipitously (for Winchester) brought to market a replica “Sandman Model” 2-String bass. Winchester immediately ordered one. “When I got it, it was tuned in a different key than my Silvertone, but sure enough, songs started falling outta that thing too.” The songs that ‘fell out’ of that Sandman Model 2-String bass, by way of Winchester’s creative mind, make up the bulk of THEY GOT IT ALL, and the sparse fire and crisp energy that McKendree’s piano and Lester’s drumming bring to these tunes infuses them with, well, ‘cool’. The 2-String bass running separately, but simultaneously through bass and guitar amps, gives the trio a guitarish crunchiness you wouldn’t expect with no 6-stringer in the fold.
All three of these accomplished musicians’ careers started commingling in Nashville in the late 1980s.
JIMMY LESTER, a Nashville, TN native, moved from Billy Joe Shaver’s band to the original drum chair for Webb Wilder and the Beatnecks. Lester also established himself as a master of surf-rock drum style as a founding member of Los Straightjackets, which coincided with the
formation of roots rock cult hero band The Planet Rockers, of which Winchester was a founding member on upright bass.
Originally from Monroe, NC, MARK W. WINCHESTER moved to Nashville in 1988. He went on to join Emmylou Harris’ Nash Ramblers, before a stint as a Music Row staff songwriter, where he penned a hit for Randy Travis (‘Would I?’). He later joined the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and has had several of his songs recorded by Setzer, including ‘Rooster Rock’ on which Setzer had Winchester sing lead vocal.
KEVIN McKENDREE, from the Washington D.C. area, came to Nashville as the piano man for Lee Roy Parnell and quickly established himself as a real-deal roots and blues keyboardist, eventually playing on multiple Grammy-winning albums. McKendree (as well as Winchester) played with blues mastermind Mike Henderson, Brian Setzer’s Rock-A-Billy Riot, and The Brian Setzer Orchestra. McKendree’s 20+ year partnership with Delbert McClinton, as musician/co-writer/producer/engineer, led to the 2020 Grammy-winning McClinton album TALL, DARK, & HANDSOME -recorded by McKendree at his Rock House studio.
It was there at the Rock House, with McKendree on keys and control board, that he, Lester, and Winchester, with no bosses, no agenda, and no pressure, laid down the live, loose, properly boned, expertly fleshed, lyrically interesting, groovy aural document that is THEY GOT IT ALL.
Maybe they do.
Visit online at www.markwwinchester.com
Oteil Burbridge & Lamar Williams Jr. Champion Love Over Hate in New Single “Hush” | New Album ‘The Offering’ Out May 1.
Bassist Oteil Burbridge and vocalist Lamar Williams Jr. continue the rollout of their forthcoming collaborative album The Offering, with the release of its second single, “Hush”. A slow-burning Southern soul meditation rooted in love, peace, and emotional clarity, the track is a centerpiece on the album with a potent, thematic statement, in Williams’ words to “block out all of that nonsense” and “remember that there is more love in the world than hate.” The full-length album arrives May 1 via Flóki Studios, recorded on Iceland’s northern coast and produced by drummer, engineer, and Soulive co-founder Alan Evans.
While much of The Offering grew out of Burbridge’s banjo-based writing, “Hush” emerged from he and Williams’ shaping a deliberate sonic vision. Burbridge says they were “trying to capture a more old school Memphis, Macon, Muscle Shoals vibe,” leaning into a Southern soul feel that fits Williams’s phrasing. The end result is a song that is unhurried with a deep pocket that allows the groove and the song’s message breathe and stand at the forefront.
The album features an all-star lineup of drummer John Morgan Kimock, percussionist Weedie Braimah, organist Melvin Seals of the Jerry Garcia Band, pianist and violinist Jason Crosby, guitarists Tom Guarna and Jaden Lehman — musicians whose overlapping histories connect the Allman Brothers Band, Dead & Company, the Jerry Garcia Band, Soulive, and West African percussion traditions.
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Pops Magellan unveils her debut live EP, DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios), a three-track performance project recorded at the legendary EastWest Studios. Captured in Studio One using one-take camera performance, the session offers a raw and intentional introduction to Magellan’s artistic world as a solo artist, bandleader, and producer.
The live EP features three compositions from her DAMAGE era:
“Misunderstood,” featuring Taylor Graves and Robert Sput Searight
“Deep Thoughts,” featuring Noa Kahn
“Drive Complaining,” featuring Robert Sput Searight and Artur Menezes
Originally released as a series of live performance videos on YouTube, the session now lives as a body of work, highlighting Magellan’s ability to merge high-level musicianship with groove-driven, emotionally resonant compositions. Each track unfolds as a conversation between players, balancing technical precision with spontaneity.
Recorded in a single day at EastWest, the session reflects Magellan’s commitment to capturing music in its most honest form. With a focus on raw live interplay, DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios) sets a clear tone: this is an artist building her identity in real time.
The session features a handpicked group of collaborators. Robert Searight, founding member of Ghost-Note, brings his signature groove, alongside virtuoso Noa Kahn, acclaimed guitarist Artur Menezes, and Grammy winner Taylor Graves, who co-produced two songs on the original EP.
“It was a way to start a strong foundation for the world I’m building.” says Pops. “I wanted to make something beautiful, strong, and honest, something I’d be proud of looking back.”
Pops leads every aspect of the project, from curating collaborators to shaping the sonic and visual identity. The result is a refined yet powerful debut live statement that positions her at the intersection of musicianship, artistry, and modern performance culture.
With more music on the way and live shows to be announced soon, DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios) marks the beginning of a larger vision still unfolding.
Stream DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios) HERE
Watch the Live Session HERE