Yesterday I woke up to the news of Chris Cornell's passing. My first instinct was to think that this couldn't be real, but my Facebook timeline was littered with several pages reporting that he has died. His importance to my musical growth cannot be understated.

Dan Briggs of Between the Buried and Me fame is one busy dude. BTBAM should really be enough to keep anyone busy considering the complexity of their music and their touring schedule. It seems like they make their way through the bay a few times every album cycle (not that I'm complaining). How he has the time for side projects like Orbs, Trioscapes and now The Nova Collective is beyond me.

I've never heard of post metal outfit Junius until they dropped their latest album. It ends their trilogy of albums, starting with The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist, continuing with Reports from the Threshold of Death, and ending with Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light.

Several members of The West Coast Get Down (WCGD), heard on Kamasi Washington’s hella bloated “The Epic,” are branching off with their own releases. Coming from the same marathon jam session that spawned The Epic, comes such fantastic releases as Thundercat’s Drunk, Miles Mosley’s Uprising, and now Cameron Graves’ Planetary Prince. The WCGD are really taking the jazz/funk/R&B world by storm, and giving a huge kick in the nards to one of the most unpopular genres as of late.  To quote Frank Zappa, “Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.”

Black metal and blues, surely such an odd pairing shouldn't work. It almost doesn't, and it's downright bizarre, but something about it just keeps me coming back.