The new Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis is set in Greenwich Village’s 1960s folk-rock scene, a scenario that just begs for a star-studded musical bash. And wouldn’t you know it, last night a coterie of prominent folk-rockers including Conor Oberst, Colin Meloy, the Avett Brothers, Marcus Mumford, Patti Smith, Joan Baez...

Given their shared propensity for outward-looking creative excursions and a general excitement about the possibilities inherent in pushing the boundaries of musical genres,  the current collaboration between Greatest Living Songwriter candidate Elvis Costello and crackerjack all-star band the Roots might feel something like an inevitability....

One nice thing about being the house band on a TV show: When you’ve got some new shit out, you get to do a nice amount of promotion for it. The Roots, who have a plum day job at Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, just released Wise Up Ghost, their unlikely collaborative album with Elvis [...]

The first thing to understand about Wise Up Ghost is that it isn’t a vanity project. Yes, the new LP, released yesterday on Blue Note, is a full-length collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Roots. And yes, full-length collaborations between well-known artists sometimes end up as mere historical curiosities (Jay-Z and R. Kelly&am...

Elvis Costello and the Roots first worked together on the Late Night With Jimmy Fallon stage, and now they’ve teamed up to make the surprisingly seamless collaborative album Wise Up Ghost, on which Costello’s burr meshes with the Roots’ hard-swinging old-school funk in a not-remotely-forced sort of way. Last night, ...