Taste the Music: Conversations about creating.

This week, on Taste the Music, John Christensen draws a straight line from hair metal to acid jazz, and leaves nothing in between. The lanking upright bass player’s 2024 album, Soft Rock, absolutely rips. There are riffs, like the first lines of the opening track, The Loudest Whisper, that sound like an arena rock band could have played them. With rock gods Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai as major i...

Today, on Taste the Music, show co-creator Whitney Mann comes to talk about her new single, called Electric Heart, that is available everywhere on Friday . She also reveals some ways the scene has changed and some ways it hasn’t, and how a person in her esteemed position stops worrying so much about the past. Whitney Mann, singer, songwriter, and storyteller, has played with the likes of Willie Ne...

Feestet's jazz jams are steaming hot affairs, even when the air is crisp in the atmosphere. Bandleader and singer Helen Feest belts out tunes on vocals, and the band warms up the already misty crowd while jammers await their turn on the stage. Today, on Taste the Music, Helen Feest joins us to talk about the vibe, how she got into this crazy thing called jazz singing, and what kind of outfit she’s...

Paul Otteson’s music is like a message in a bottle that was tossed in a loch west of Glasgow, that drifted along the jet stream to the New World. It stopped in Brooklyn’s folk revival scene in the early aughts to pick up a pleasant spacey jangly sound that eschews the stomp clap hey of the early teens and it made its way via the fur trade up to the waters of the Gitche Gumme and down to the land o...

Today, on Taste the Music, on 89.9 WORT FM Madison and TasteTheMusic.org , Madison band Automatic Lover’s front man Uriel Lopéz Rodriguez takes us on a ride through his musical history, from a kid who couldn’t stop dancing to a short political career in Mexico, to Arizona, Colorado and finally back to Wisconsin, when a week visiting friends led him back to the music scene he couldn’t avoid. It see...

Today, Louka Patenaude joins us on Taste the Music. Patenaude is a chameleon of sorts. There’s the singer songwriter, sometimes with a country sound. There’s the bluegrass picker, then there’s the sultry 70s Grant Green sounding Jazz man. There’s the jangly indie pop that emanates from some of Patenaude’s tunes like From In My Tea, and there’s this off-kilter interpretation of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Th...

In today’s episode of Taste the Music, our host, Mark Griffin, tells his own story of becoming a writer. Why would anyone do such a thing in the first place? And why keep doing it? For Mark, it started with a dreaded blue exam notebook, refashioned into a weekly journal by his fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Brauer. Her assignment: write what’s going on with you. It was a fun activity that was better th...

Musician Whitney Mann was on her way to stardom in the music business. She had opened for some of her heroes, like Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, and Guy Clark. One day, she misplayed a song on stage, and that turned into a case of stage fright, unraveling her performance before her very eyes. After a few years of trying to settle her nerves, Whitney Mann hung up her guitar and put all her memorabil...

Today we launch Taste the Music and give you a little taste of our first episode with Wisconsin singer and songwriter, Whitney Mann. Whitney weaves the story of her rise in the music industry and the sudden stops she took along the way. Listen to the full episode 1:00 PM Central on wortfm.org or subscribe to hear it anytime on TasteTheMusic.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode wa...