Category Archives: Articles

The world wants Zaz

February 21, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , ,

MTV Iggy, February 21, 2012

“Je veux.” I want. In this song, which became a huge summer hit in France in 2010, Zaz shares a wishlist that’s anything but materialistic. All she wants is “some love, some joy, some good cheer/It’s not your money that will make me happy,” she sings in French, after turning down jewels, mansions and limousines. “What would I do with all that stuff?” she asks, sauntering in the video through a flea market. That image only underscores the cute-retro Parisian feel that can’t help but attach to the 31-year-old singer. It’s inevitable: Zaz covers Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg along with singing originals, and she even used to busk in the Metro and Montmartre, plus she’s kind of bubbly, so the whole gamine thing comes pretty much built in.

But there’s plenty more to Zaz, born Isabelle Geffroy, than that cliché’d image. She’s a thoughtful and energetic woman from a Paris scene where traditional chanson is just one in a brew of influences that includes African, Gypsy, electronica and jazz elements, among others, swirling around in the clubs and taverns of the Latin Quarter or the Halles district. In her own pathway to an entirely unexpected stardom she picked up a lot of those strands, layered them atop a provincial upbringing and came out with this sassy but lucid artistic persona, a little wide-eyed maybe, but far from naïve.

Recently Zaz came through New York City for a few shows, including one at the Globalfest international music showcase, attended by an industry crowd of concert promoters, managers, media and the like. The next day, in her hotel’s lobby lounge, Zaz chatted in French with MTV Iggy’s Siddhartha Mitter about her sudden burst to fame, her troubled early years, and making classic-sounding French songs in 2012.

READ THE INTERVIEW AT MTVIGGY.COM

George Clinton gets to the bottom of funk with Berklee students

February 10, 2012 By in Articles Tags: ,

Boston Globe, February 10, 2012

He started in doo-wop, then went psychedelic. Throughout the 1970s, his bands Parliament and Funkadelic carved out bold, crazy new spaces in rock and funk, deploying a cast of loopy, absurdist characters fresh off the Mothership – the UFO that for many years throned above their concerts.

Samples of their music saturate hip-hop, and you don’t have to master the whole catalog to have danced a few times to classics like “Aqua Boogie,’’ “One Nation Under A Groove,’’ or the perennial “Flashlight.’’

What’s more, George Clinton is still at it, delivering at age 70 on a busy tour schedule with his P-Funk All-Stars, funking it up for audiences that invariably blend all generations and backgrounds.

So you would think that with this 50-plus-year track record of innovation and influence, someone would have thought to award Clinton an honorary doctorate by now.

Nimbaya! beats the odds — and the drums

February 10, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , , , ,

Boston Globe, February 10, 2012

The tremendous swirl of color and rhythm; the rich layering of djembe drums with the kora lute and marimba-like balafon; storytelling theater that starts as gentle conversation and escalates into a dance party that pulls the audience out of their seats: Nimbaya!, the dance and drumming troupe from Guinea, delivers all you expect from a top-notch African dance event.

Plus something more.

In an unusual departure from tradition, Nimbaya! consists of only women – not just the dancers, but also the musicians. The troupe’s very existence stands as a rebuke to the ancient custom that reserves drumming for men, and regards a woman on djembe as nearly taboo.

Founded in 1998, the troupe takes its name from the Nimba mask of Guinea’s Baga people – a symbol of fertility, beauty, and female power. The troupe’s own power is manifest in the school it runs in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, where around 50 young women at a time are training as professional dancers and musicians.

Pianist Jason Moran goes beyond Monk’s mood with “In My Mind”

January 29, 2012 By in Articles Tags: ,

Boston Globe, January 29, 2012

In 1959, Thelonious Monk played a concert at Town Hall, a prestigious New York venue. This was a special occasion. It was the first time that the great pianist performed with an orchestra, a 10-person group led by arranger Hall Overton. Monk was already famous, of course, in the jazz world. But this concert brought him out from the underground and put his music, until then played solo or in small groups, in a whole new context.

Fifty years later, in 2009, Jason Moran, one of today’s most innovative jazz pianists, addressed the Town Hall concert with his own eight-piece band at the same venue. It was not a reenactment (which a different band did the night before) but a multimedia experiment involving narration, graphic art, video, and still photography. Moran titled it “In My Mind.’’

The show took the 1959 program but modified and interwove it with new elements. Moran improvised while listening to Monk through headphones; later, the whole band donned headphones, playing Monk while hearing him. Moran took song snippets and sounds from an archival cache of Monk rehearsal tapes and looped them into the music.

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Sunny Jain and Red Baraat make bangers from bhangra

January 29, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , , , , ,

Boston Globe, January 29, 2012

NEW YORK – The drummer Sunny Jain tells the story of a time when he auditioned before Wynton Marsalis, the great trumpeter and consummate arbiter of all things jazz in general, and particularly New Orleans.

In lieu of a bass drum, Jain had substituted a dhol – the two-sided drum from India’s Punjab region that typically hangs from a strap slung over the drummer’s shoulder, and is played with bamboo sticks.

Using the dhol, Jain beat out a series of Punjabi rhythms, the kind that are played in the region’s energetic (and increasingly exported) folk music called bhangra. Hearing this, Jain says, Marsalis felt something quite familiar.

“And Wynton said, ‘Man, this sounds like New Orleans!’ And there is that cross-relation of those rhythms, that feel, that buoyancy, that swing that Punjabi music has, that the dhol has.’’

Gregorio Uribe brings intoxicating variety to “Pluma y Vino”

January 20, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

Boston Globe, January 20, 2012

NEW YORK – It happened one evening last March during an acoustic set at a Spanish tavern in Greenwich Village, one of those restaurant gigs that are the bread-and-butter for many striving Latin musicians in this town. It was one of those small moments of audience connection that make all the effort feel worthwhile.

Looking up from his guitar, Gregorio Uribe noticed a gentleman intently scribbling some kind of sketch at the bar. At the set break, the man approached Uribe and offered him the picture. He had taken a cloth napkin and produced a charming portrait of the musician, drawn in pen with carefully applied splotches of red wine.

The picture would become the cover art, and “Pluma y Vino’’ – pen and wine – the title, of Uribe’s debut album, which the Colombian singer and multi-instrumentalist was recording at the time.

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Cut it up & eat it: the bloody soul of Le Butcherettes

January 10, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

MTV Iggy, January 10, 2012

If you came for the severed pig’s head, you’re too late.

Ditto, possibly, for the blood-stained butcher’s apron — though Teri Gender Bender, the leader and frontwoman of the punk-inspired band Le Butcherettes, has not yet removed that trademark prop from her performance wardrobe. She may still, when she feels so moved, urinate onstage. Certainly, her rants and random pronouncements in Spanish and English and her daredevil dives into the crowd seem destined to carry on.

But by her own reckoning, a transformation is afoot for Teri Gender Bender, née Teresa Suarez. At 22, her music has (dare we say) matured and her creative personality fleshed out, having absorbed more than a little upheaval in the five hectic years since 2007, when she launched Le Butcherettes as a pissed-off teenager who was reading Simone de Beauvoir and feeling trapped by the stereotypical expectations placed on a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Along the way she’s overseen four total overhauls of the band’s line-up; released a brash, angry 2009 EP, Kiss & Kill; made the big move from Guadalajara to Los Angeles; and put out a stunning 2011 album, the still-raw but more melodic Sin Sin Sin, produced by the protean Omar Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta, At The Drive In, and countless other ventures.

EXCERPTED. READ THE WHOLE STORY AT MTVIGGY.COM

 

World music top albums of 2011

December 18, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

Boston Globe, December 18, 2011

1. SUSANA BACA

“Afrodiaspora’’ Soulful pedagogy from the sublime-voiced Baca, who this year was named Peru’s culture minister, and here leads a grand tour of Africa-rooted music from Latin America and the Caribbean, including New Orleans, with her customary grace and serene mastery.

2. MAMANI KEITA

“Gagner l’argent français’’ A shimmering, just-right set from a Malian woman singer who deserves broader recognition. Also very much a producer’s album, as French arranger Nicolas Repac develops intricate layers of rock and electronic elements, but it’s Keita’s voice that does the transporting.

3. BEZ

“Super Sun’’ A superb alternative-soul singer who happens to come from Nigeria – and a male counterpart to that country’s new songstresses such as Asa, Nneka and Ayo. Watch for Bez to emerge in the United States in 2012, starting with a visit to SXSW in March.

4. BALLAKÉ SISSOKO + VINCENT SEGAL

“Chamber Music’’ Recorded deep in the night in Bamako, this exceptional Franco-Malian meeting of cello and kora, mostly duets with a few occasional guests, is austere yet never forbidding; rather, quietly joyous and entirely unexpected.

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Jazz comes first for all-female Mosaic Project

December 9, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

Boston Globe, December 9, 2011

It shouldn’t be this way, but it’s still the case that when a jazz group forms in which all the players are women, that fact attracts at least as much notice as the music they perform. It’s unavoidable: all-women groups remain rare in a jazz world where most performers, listeners, and critics are male. It’s also annoying, not least for female artists who have worked their way to the music’s heights only to find their work with one another treated as a novelty.

That is why it is tempting to see the trio of drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, pianist Geri Allen, and bassist Esperanza Spalding, who appear at Scullers tonight through Sunday, as simply a dynamite combination of virtuosos with amazing combined breadth and experience, gathered together in a piano trio, one of the music’s classic formats.

But that would be leaving out part of the story. That’s because Carrington, who initiated this trio (although it’s the buzzed-about Spalding, Grammy winner and featured performer at the White House, who gets the attention in the club’s listing), recently set aside her deep reluctance to highlight gender in her music. And to spectacular effect: “The Mosaic Project,” her new record featuring 21 top women in jazz (with a dash of soul and funk) is a grand celebration, as well as one of this year’s most appealing releases.

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Anders Trentemøller, Danish Electro Ringmaster

December 7, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

MTV Iggy, December 7, 2011

His American breakout moment came earlier this year when he tore up the 2011 Coachella festival, in a high-intensity electronic set backed by a full live rock band and a visual show that had breathless bloggers and reviewers proclaiming it the festival’s high point. But in Europe Anders Trentemøller has been a figure to contend with on the club scene for quite some time.

Some know him for deep, hard house remixes of the likes of Royksopp’s What Else Is There or his takes on Franz Ferdinand, Moby, Modeselektor and more—sometimes spare and fidgety, sometimes opulent and intense—that have made him one of the continent’s prime remixers. Some know him for his own moody, sparse 2006 album The Last Resort.

Many had their minds blown—whether the 50,000 people in the crowd or many more who’ve watched the video online—by the ultra-high energy and lavish staging, complete with ghostly choreographed armies, wild curtains and glowing parasols, of his “Silver Surfer Ghost Rider Go!” at the 2009 Roskilde festival in his native Denmark.

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