Back in the old days–those being the days when rock and roll was still the bastard child of the blues, rhythm and blues was teaching white kids how to dance like the black kids, and country was for hillbillies and rednecks–when a bunch of musicians came through your town, it…

Teisco Del Rey, the self-proclaimed “King of the El Cheapo Guitars,” has just sat down for lunch at Guero’s, a popular South Austin restaurant and taco bar. He barely begins his life story when a distinctive twang and rumble spills out of the sound system. “Hey, that’s appropriate!” he gushes…

It’s just before New Year’s Eve, and Roger Morgan is packing up his home, along with boxes of singles and CDs, moving his Unclean Records label from Austin to San Antonio. As career moves go, it’s hardly an obvious one, but Morgan has no problem leaving the town that calls…

Though T-shirts and joints of cheap Mexican pot still typify the Austin music-scene ambience, dinner jackets and expensive cigars are the style at Cedar Street, a downtown jazz bar that boasts a long line of patrons awaiting admission every weekend, all of them eager to quaff martinis and tap their…

In the eternal debate between nature and nurture, saxophonist Joshua Redman might cause adherents from both sides of the argument to scratch their heads in wonder. On the one hand, he’s the son of free-jazz saxophone legend and Fort Worth native Dewey Redman, whose tonal qualities and agility are certainly…

Santiago Jimenez Jr. reverently lowers the needle of one of the old wooden phonographs onto an old 78 RPM record made by his late father, Don Santiago Jimenez, in 1928. “Now this is the first record he ever recorded,” Jimenez explains, before sitting down in his San Antonio living room…

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and singer Toni Price has just arrived at the back door of the Continental Club in Austin to play her weekly after-work gig known to its regulars as “Hippie Hour.” Up the hill behind the roots music haven, bulldozers and backhoes are clearing away the remains…

If one were to design an ideal new rock band for the current alternative Zeitgeist, one couldn’t do much better than Austin’s Sincola. This co-ed, multi-ethnic, democratic quintet includes women both gay and straight, and at least one guy (hetero) who’s been known to wear a dress and even drop…