Milo Miles
Milo Miles is Fresh Air's world-music and American-roots music critic. He is a former music editor of The Boston Phoenix.
Miles is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he also writes about music for The Village Voice and The New York Times.
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Widely regarded as one of the best guitarists of all time, blues legend B.B. King is still recording at age 82. Music critic Milo Miles reviews King's newest album, One Kind Favor.
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Fresh Air music critic Milo Miles reviews Classic African American Gospel, a Smithsonian Folkways "Classic" that spans over a half century of recordings. Featuring Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry and others, the compilation illustrates a truly American musical tradition.
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Fresh Air's music critic reviews three new deluxe reissues on the Universal Music label: Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, Beck's Odelay and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors.
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Fresh Air music critic Milo Miles reviews music from Russian rock group Auktyon. The band is currently on tour in the U.S. Auktyon, like some other Russian rock groups, found their footing during the censorship-free period of glasnost in the former Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev.
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Nils Lofgren, best known as guitarist with Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, also played for Neil Young and Crazy Horse early in that band's career. He's also had a notable solo career — and he founded the mid-1970s band Grin. Critic Milo Miles surveys his work.
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The cliché about a catchy song: "It's got a good beat, you can dance to it." But things get more complicated when the beat is all there is to it. Two recent albums put the percussion front and center: Batterie, from Loop 2.4.3, and Global Drum Project, with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and tabla master Zakir Hussain.
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Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru is the first album of Chicha music released outside of Peru. The unique music style grew out of the booming cities of the Peruvian Amazon in 1970 and incorporates surf guitars, synthesizers and distinctive melodies.
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Fresh Air's music critic Milo Miles considers the work of the art-punk band Sonic Youth; the group's 1988 album Daydream Nation has just been reissued in a deluxe double-CD edition.
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Celebrated salsa musician is the subject of the film El Cantante. Our music critic takes a look at his career, marked by dazzling musical highs and personal lows including heroin addiction and a suicide attempt.
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The cross-cultural crew that is the New York band Balkan Beat Box came together around two Israeli musicians, Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan. Their latest album is called Nu Med; world music critic Milo Miles has a review.