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With his idiosyncratic style and spare Tele-driven setup, the inventive guitarist twists roots music on his new groove-centric album, Get It!

Rick Holmstrom says he spends “a lot of time not listening to guitar. I like trying to imagine the guitar taking the place of saxophone, Ahmad Jamal’s piano, or Mose Allison’s piano. Like Billie Holiday, who does those weird little micro bends that the great singers do—how can you get a feeling like that on the guitar?”

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Leonard “Hub” Hubbard was the founding bassist of the Roots, playing in the group from 1992 to 2007. He lost a long battle with cancer in December 2021.

Photo by Ginny Suss

As a member of the Roots, Leonard “Hub” Hubbard created a vocabulary for live hip-hop.

What’s in a name? How do names define us and the lives we live? Within my culture, everybody has both a given and “chosen name.” A hub is literally the central part of a wheel, but symbolically it’s that thing around which all motion happens. Hub, aka Leonard Hubbard, was the original bassist in the Roots, and one could argue that if hip-hop had a hub, it would be bass. Sadly, Hub lost his long battle with cancer in December 2021.

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Photo by Kara Sheridan

Bill Dess was working as a cashier in a Harlem bodega in 2016, making songs in his apartment. Then he uploaded one to SoundCloud, and well … sometimes dreams do come true.

Bill Dess, who makes music under the name Two Feet, became a sensation virtually overnight. The 28-year-old's musical career blasted off in 2016 with his breakout song, "Go Fuck Yourself," when he unassumingly uploaded it to SoundCloud in the middle of the night from his rodent-infested apartment in New York City. The next day, he awoke to millions of streams and several major labels courting him. His next hit, "I Feel Like Drowning," reached No. 1 on the Billboard Alternative charts in 2018. In the span of a few years, he went from working as a cashier to traveling the world while opening arena gigs with Panic! at the Disco.

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