Boston Globe, May 8, 2011

Train your ears southward, to the nightspots of South America’s capital cities, and it won’t take long before you start grooving to some form of electro-cumbia. The mix of electronica with cumbia, a folk-music mainstay of South America, has sparked myriad groups, collectives like Buenos Aires’s ZZK, and endless variants that weave in reggae or hip-hop. Fluid, vital, accessible, electro-cumbia has made it into the arsenal of a certain global DJ crowd that stays on the hunt for new, intelligent sounds.

The newest sensation in the genre, Bomba Estereo, is in a way, one of the most authentic. Cumbia took different forms in each country, but its roots are in Colombia – particularly the Afro-Colombian communities of the Caribbean coast. A Colombian band with a charismatic costena (coastal) lead singer, Bomba Estereo – which plays the Brighton Music Hall on Monday – has made a mission of unearthing obscure cumbia and other sounds and working them into dynamic, soulful tracks that could work as well in a London or New York club as at Carnaval in Barranquilla.

[Read more...]

Boston Globe, November 27, 2010

NEW YORK – A small diaspora of new-generation Latin American singer-songwriters has recently gained critical mass: artists steeped in the folk music of their countries but also jazz, rock, and electronica, artists who seem most comfortable in places like New York, Barcelona, or Mexico City where the scene is ever-changing and full of expatriates.

Claudia Acuna from Chile, Lila Downs from Mexico, Sofia Rei Koutsovitis from Argentina, and Marta Gomez from Colombia are a few of these new-breed Latin troubadours who have made names for themselves in the past few years. But the well of talent runs deeper, and around these best-known artists are colleagues, friends, and accompanists who are also enriching this new school of Latin song.

Among them is Juancho Herrera. His guitar work has accompanied all four of the singers just mentioned as well as Jenny Scheinman and other genre-bending players in New York, where he has lived for a decade. But Herrera is a singer in his own right, with an eclectic and engaging 2006 album, “Buscando,” and an upcoming new one, “Banda,” in which he mixes a host of lesser-known South American folk rhythms with sweet and often playful stories, in Spanish and English, that carry an instant pop appeal.

[Read more...]

Boston Globe, August 18, 2009

Maria Concepcion Balboa Buika belongs to a wave of Spanish singers breathing fresh life into classic styles – flamenco, of course, but also the ballad form called copla, and regional folk songs. But Buika, 37, brings a background that sets her apart. Born to political refugees from the former Spanish colony Equatorial Guinea, she was raised with jazz and African music, and growing up on the island of Majorca, she forged her affinities with Gypsy and working-class kids. All this imbues Buika’s sound – most recently on the Latin Grammy-nominated “Nina de Fuego” – with an immigrant’s immersive commitment, but also a restless curiosity that pushes her to broaden her range. She answered questions by e-mail from Spain in advance of her appearance tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Q. With your voice, you could have gone into many different genres. What was the attraction of classical Spanish forms like copla and flamenco?

A. People just know what the record company has published from my work. But I also sing jazz, blues, I like electronic music. It is true that copla and flamenco belong to my childhood, it was the music people listened to in my neighborhood.

[Read more...]

Boston Globe, May 17, 2009

BROOKLYN – The elephant lumbered out of the forest and straight into the lobby of a luxury hotel. At the bar, an elegant woman, martini in hand, gasped, while the pachyderm, oblivious, settled down to feast on a mango. Absurd, amusing, and gently intimating some kind of ecological moral to the story, this scene – based on a photo spotted in National Geographic magazine – struck Jose Conde as perfect fodder for a song. Embellishments to the story began to write themselves in the Cuban-American singer’s mind. And so did the music.

“Elefante in Hotel,” one of several new songs Conde is developing for his next album and already performing with his group Ola Fresca, ended up taking the form of a Venezuelan joropo. On the strength of the musical variety on Ola Fresca’s 2007 album, “Revolucion,” it could just as easily have come out as a Cuban son, Puerto Rican bomba, Haitian compas, or even a New Orleans funk jam – or any combination of these and other Latin and Caribbean styles.

[Read more...]

Boston Globe, November 3, 2006

For Marta Gomez, absence makes the heart grow fonder. When she left Colombia to study at the Berklee School of Music, the distance gave her the perspective to value her home country’s traditional musical styles. And though she moved to New York, as many Berklee graduates do, in 2003, Boston remains her favorite market and one she visits frequently, as she does for two sets at the Regattabar tonight.

In the course of four albums with her longtime band – two independently produced, followed by two on the New York label Chesky – Gomez has developed a poised, sensitive musical personality with an easy, earnest charm that spills into conversation. She has also managed to confuse the mysterious gremlins who label music by category, as iTunes, for instance, lists her work variously as jazz, world, Latin, and folk.

Does that bother her? “It’s actually the opposite,” Gomez says. “It means I can work more. I can go to jazz festivals, Latin festivals. … It’s a good thing.” What she does, after all, is consistent: mainly original compositions that draw on traditional rhythms from across Latin America, performed in a warm, unornamented style with a jazzy feel.

[Read more...]