Our music critic discusses the ambivalence that comes with being a musician writing about music. “This is not a job for people who like to feel necessary.”

Let’s not get too brazenly accustomed to the performers that the Falcon in Marlboro calls “regulars.” Christmas Eve performer Marshall Crenshaw is one such regular; he is also one of the most highly regarded guitar-pop songwriters of the last 30 years, a cognoscenti pick and the owner of a dazzlingly good catalogue of general undervalued records.

Incorporating piano, a horn section and chanteuse “Miz Elizabeth” Bougerol, the popular “hot jazz” ensemble’s repertoire is inspired by the works of Fats Waller, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, ranging in style from Manhattan speakeasies to New Orleans juke joints to prewar Paris cabarets.

The preponderance of revivalist folk music in the new millennium has been scruffy and idiosyncratic by design, some of it

The album covers whirled into psychedelic mandalas and looped action sequences like an Eadweard Muybridge zoopraxiscope, transforming centrifugally into something rife with a post-verbal Jungian symbolism… Some records were legendary for what happened visually when they were spun animate, a living design, intent assumed. Grateful Dead: intent assumed; Led Zeppelin: intent assumed; Pink Floyd: intent assured.