We couldn’t start our new year without a look back at last year. So “Up Close” this month will do exactly that: our Top 10 2025 Videos, all the artists we introduced in our “Meet…” section, and the long-ago and far-away New Jersey legends in our “History” section. Here’s to a rockin’, boppin’, folksy, jazzy, soulful, funky, headbanging, hip-hop amalgam of 2026 Jersey Sound.

This month’s “Jersey Bookshelf” dips all the way back to the 1800s when Newark author Stephen Crain, upset at the reaction to his Maggie debut and subsequent scandal over his involvement with hookers (while doing Maggie research), moved to Paterson to write its follow-up. That second book was his masterpiece. It’s been taught in high schools throughout the country every generation since.

Coincidently, we also go back to the 1800s in “Jersey History” this month, spotlighting 1894 New Brunswick-born James P. Johnson, the Harlem Stride piano player who pioneered ragtime into jazz. My grandmother used to tell me stories about the time in the 1920s when she was a rebel “flapper,” brazenly smoked cigarettes in public, dressed in flapper fashion and did a dance called the Charleston which Johnson wrote. Elsewhere this issue, you’ll “Meet…” and hear Homebase, who formed in the same town where James P. Johnson was born 129 years later.

This issue’s “Visual Sound” is particularly fascinating (in my humble opinion). We happened to chance upon a clip from 1956 wherein the band that ultimately became Joey Dee & The Starliters out of Garfield to take their “Peppermint Twist” to the top of the charts in 1961, performed on the original Ted Mack's Amateur Hour (a show that my mother dragged me to audition for to sing “Jailhouse Rock”). Then there’s Paramus metal band Patriarchs In Black with its first 12-bar blues and a little girl from Hudson County who moved to Texas and christen herself Annabelle Chairlegs. Essex County alt-folk favorite Jason Didner gets heavy with “Let Them.” And the long-defunct Morris County band TV Toy—who turned punk into prog—rages one more time again.