RIFF photographers’ best work in 2020 included these shots of Poppy, Seventeen, The Struts, Colony House, Little Image, KISS, Injury Reserve, Suzi Analogue, Elbow, Tones & I, Thundercat, Thrice, Tove Lo, George Clinton and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. In this abbreviated year of concerts, we asked our photographers to provide…

The best albums of 2020 include (clockwise from top left): Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift, Caribou, The Chicks, Joji, Nathaniel Rateliff, Deftones, he Psychedelic Furs, Open Mike Eagle and Thundercat. Now we’re getting into the really good stuff. If you missed the still-good-but-not-quite-as-good stuff you can find 75-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-31 and…

Few musicians today can compete with the resume of Stephen Bruner, better known as Thundercat. Bruner developed his virtuosic stringmanship alongside some of L.A.’s brightest talents. He was instrumental to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly (widely regarded as Lamar’s best) and collaborated on albums by Erykah Badu and jazz bandleader…

Thundercat performs at the Fox Theater in Oakland on March 6, 2020. Onome Uyovbievbo/STAFF. OAKLAND — Stephen Lee Bruner is a man who can really play the hell out of the bass guitar. He proved it again on Friday night, guiding his jazz trio through multiple structural breakdowns and outlandish…

Steven Ellison’s legacy far predates his role in Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 landmark album, To Pimp a Butterfly. As Flying Lotus, his glitchy, abstract production has continually pushed hip-hop’s artistic boundaries. In 2006, Los Angeles set a new standard for L.A. beat music, while 2010’s Cosmograma transcended genre boundaries as a nu-jazz space odyssey.…

Kendrick Lamar In addition to ranking music, I am a professional data journalist. I analyze numbers and do math every day for money. So you’d think I could count. But apparently we skipped Feb. 24 for some reason and ran 1974’s column on March 2, which means everything got…

Thundercat performs at 1015 Folsom in San Francisco on Dec. 20, 2018. Photos: Shawn Robbins. SAN FRANCISCO — The mighty Thundercat, the virtuoso bassist and bandleader known for collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus, led his trio in a blistering live performance at 1015 Folsom Thursday. Touring in support…

The impact of Kamasi Washington’s 2015 debut, The Epic, has been so great that his previous releases seem like they’re from an alternate reality. The three-hour magnum opus’ put the Los Angeles saxophonist and composer in a league of his own with cinematic grandiosity and social relevance. Last year’s Harmony of…

Photo: Alessio Neri Every week, there’s a plethora of new music at our fingertips. Artists on platforms such as Spotify and Bandcamp are plentiful, and the radio offers a steady deluge of new singles, but who has time to sort through all that? RIFF does! We pooled our resources to find some…