Congolese guitarist Diblo Dibala

July 12, 2012 By

Boston Globe, July 12, 2012

NEW YORK — A corner apartment in Harlem: air conditioning on high against the blazing heat outside, African art objects and concert posters on the walls, incense wafting through the living room.

This is the temporary command post of Diblo Dibala, Congolese bandleader and guitarist extraordinaire, as he readies for a one-month North American tour spreading the gospel of soukous, one of the most compelling and contagiously rump-shaking styles of music ever invented, yet one rarely performed in these parts nowadays.

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Liner Essay: Debo Band, “Debo Band” (Album)

July 10, 2012 By

Sub Pop Records, July 10, 2012

The Debo Band’s debut CD on Sub Pop/Next Ambiance came out today. Here is the text of the liner essay I contributed to the album. 

There’s something dangerous about tales of a Golden Age: especially a brief one. The so-called Golden Age of Ethiopian popular music (or Ethio-jazz, or Ethio-groove) lasted less than a decade. It took hold in the late 1960s in the cosmopolitan circles of Addis Ababa, fed by exposure to American soul and jazz, and boosted by the return of the Berklee College of Music-trained bandleader and arranger Mulatu Astatke. A blossoming scene produced, refined and sprouted new branches of a hitherto unheard synthesis of jazz (and Latin music) with Ethiopian pentatonic scales, distilled by brass-heavy bands adding guitar, vibraphone, and organ. But the 1974 coup that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie plunged Ethiopia into a long and difficult period of military rule and civil war. The swank nightlife of Addis shut down; the musicians scattered and the moment passed.

So the story goes. And it’s not wrong, in its broad outline. Certainly something special transpired in those years in Addis. The era produced an ample trove of recordings that now, decades later, have started to emerge from their hiding places, thanks to projects like the Ethiopiques series, curated by French producer Francis Falceto, and, not least, to the foresight of the Addis players and impresarios of the time who held onto the tapes as they dispersed around the world. The richness—the sheer grooviness—of this work and the seemingly bottomless reserve of material has made Ethio-jazz, not unlike Fela Kuti-era Afrobeat, the target of a growing field of cover and revival projects in hip precincts from New York to Tokyo to Amsterdam.

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Brazilian’s road album draws from touring, tradition

June 25, 2012 By

Boston Globe, June 25, 2012

The Brazilian singer Céu calls “Caravana Sereia Bloom” — her third CD, which came out earlier this year — a road album. It is meant to capture, she says, “many aspects of the road,” a topic she’s had ample time to reflect on as a touring artist.

“Since my first album in 2005, I started to travel a lot,” says Céu, who plays Brighton Music Hall on Thursday. Appropriately enough, she’s speaking from a tour bus.

“I felt I had to talk about this. Not about a specific trip: Everyone has movement in their lives, and when you have to travel it’s like a parallel reality. You meet cultures, people, food, images, smells.”

And emotions, of course. As countless filmmakers have intuited, the road is about feelings — rupture, nostalgia, anticipation, realization.

For Céu, who first came to US attention when her debut turned up for sale at Starbucks outlets, “Caravana” confirms what her second album, “Vagarosa,” presaged: This is no central-casting Brazilian lounge diva, but a complex poet with raw force and an explorer’s sensibility.

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Singer Curumin is a shining star in Saõ Paulo

June 25, 2012 By

Boston Globe, June 25, 2012

“São Paulo is a huge city, but we don’t have a lot of music tradition,” says singer Curumin, speaking of Brazil’s commercial metropolis, with its area population of 20 million.

“Samba belongs to Rio, maracatu belongs to Recife — in Brazilian musical history, we don’t have a lot of people from São Paulo doing good stuff.”

Perhaps. But like his friend Céu, for whom he is opening on their current United States tour, Curumin, whose new album “Arrocha” came out this year, is doing his part to reverse any musical-desert stereotype that might still affix to their city.

They are part of a large local arts scene that, as Curumin describes it, has taken the city’s position as a hub, attracting migrants and cultural inputs, and turned it into fodder for creativity.

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Malaysian singer-songwriter Yuna finds a home away from home

June 8, 2012 By

Boston Globe, June 8, 2012

Yuna didn’t have to come to America.

Things were going just fine for the young singer-songwriter back home in Malaysia three years ago, when a Los Angeles artist management company started courting her on the strength of the songs she’d posted online.

She had parlayed MySpace popularity into a budding career, garnering TV appearances and winning local music awards. She had earned a law degree, and she was getting set to launch a fashion boutique.

So when faced with the unexpected prospect of setting all that aside to start from scratch as an unknown in the United States, Yuna understandably hesitated.

What tilted the balance, she says, wasn’t America’s inherent appeal, but the chance to use all her material.

“I wasn’t sure,” she says. “I was doing really well in Malaysia. But I felt this might be good for me, because I had written a bunch of English songs. In Malaysia you can only get by doing Malay music. I had about 40 songs in English, and I didn’t want to waste them.”

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For Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, war is over but not forgotten

May 20, 2012 By

Boston Globe, May 20, 2012

It has been 10 years since the civil war in Sierra Leone ended. For Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, however, the war and its effects are engraved not just in the memories of the band members, but in the group’s very name.

As listeners to their 2006 debut, “Living Like a Refugee,” or viewers of the 2005 documentary devoted to their story know, the group formed in refugee camps in Guinea in the late 1990s.

There, tens of thousands of Sierra Leoneans had fled massacres and destruction in their country. Several band members themselves had been victims of ghastly atrocities.

Even after the war’s end in January 2002 and the restoration of civil peace that has endured to this day, it took several years before the band members were able to settle back in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city.

So it’s impossible to unspool war and displacement from the fabric of this band, as much as its exquisite guitar rhythms, vocal harmonies, and accents of reggae and other Caribbean flavors have made it tempting.

Still, life goes on, and so does the music. On their third album, “Radio Salone,” which came out last month, the All Stars, who visit Brighton Music Hall on June 24, have put together their most eclectic and best-produced program of music to date, with nary a reference to the conflict.

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Atlas Soul makes worlds collide—and party

April 27, 2012 By

Boston Globe, April 27, 2012

WATERTOWN – As Anwar Souini describes it, he was browsing the North African section in a Central Square record store in Cambridge one day in 2006, when he came across a CD that intrigued him, by a group called Atlas Soul.

That the shop even had a North African section was refreshing for Souini, who left Morocco to study in the United States in 2001, arriving at the University of Wyoming, of all places, a few weeks before 9/11.

“I wasn’t lucky,” Souini says of the timing. Lonely and isolated in Wyoming, he had moved to Florida after two years, before finally landing in Boston — a place where, he found to his relief, many people had at least heard of his home country.

Better yet: After listening to Atlas Soul and enjoying its unexpected mix of North African music with funk and jazz, Souini — an accomplished singer who had recorded in Morocco as a teenager — noticed the CD listed a contact number with a Boston area code.

“So I called,” Souini says. “And half an hour later he was in my home.”

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CD review: Filastine, “Loot”

April 3, 2012 By

Boston Globe, April 3, 2012

A found-sound quality pervades “Loot,’’ the third album from Filastine, a Los Angeles-raised, Barcelona-based musician-activist who wanders the globe from warehouses to squatters colonies to ecological danger zones, forging ties with fellow dissidents along the way. Pushing a shopping cart rigged with microphones and speakers, he makes and manipulates field recordings of a sort: digital noise, blips, and loops harvested from samba to bhangra, from TV news to YouTube clips, from motorbikes to prayer calls. The bass and beats mark kinship with some strands of electronica (you can definitely dance to it) and Filastine deftly manipulates texture and mood. “Lost Records’’ featuring Japanese rapper ECD is edgy and agitated, while “GenDJer2’’ is stuttery but tempered, with ethereal vocals by Indonesian singer Nova. Not all the instrumental tracks hold the attention, despite such titles as “Informal Sector Parade’’ (an economics reference) or “Sidi Bouzid’’ (the town where a Tunisian vendor’s self-immolation set off the Arab Spring), but all reflect a creative mind that avoids fusion shortcuts and (for the most part) didacticism.

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Spoek Mathambo brings the future sound of South Africa

March 23, 2012 By

Boston Globe, March 23, 2012

“It would be nice if you call me Nthato. It’s how I introduce myself.’’

Nthato Mokgata is trying hard to manage his identities in the face of his blossoming fame. By day he’s Nthato, the low-key, well-spoken 26-year-old from Johannesburg who dropped out of medical school to make his career in music.

By night, in the studio and on stages around the world, he’s Spoek Mathambo, a fantastical futuristic figure who writes, raps, and produces some of the most vibrant and doggedly unclassifiable electronic pop music in the world today.

With his brand-new album “Father Creeper’’ just out on Sub Pop, the exalted Seattle indie label, he’s in the vanguard of a new wave of urban music from Africa that’s as technologically forward and stylistically varied as the trendiest club sounds of London or New York, yet propounds its own confident sense of place.
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Zakir Hussain’s conversation of forgotten rhythms

March 16, 2012 By

Boston Globe, March 16, 2012

It was only a few weeks ago that Zakir Hussain, the world-famous drum virtuoso and master of the Indian tabla, was making the latest of his discoveries of obscure percussion styles in his home country.

Driving through Maharashtra state, his party stopped for a roadside break by a temple in the countryside. “There was a young man standing there with two different kinds of drums hanging from his neck,’’ Hussain says. While drumming, the man was chanting shlokas – sacred verses in Sanskrit.

“I asked what he was doing,’’ Hussain says. “He said, this is the chanting of the shlokas at the hour when the sun is right above. His forefathers did this 400 years ago in this temple. Here was this kid who had no idea he was doing something so special and so full of emotion. He did not realize the world out there would be stunned by such artistry.’’

In Kerala, Hussain attended a festival where 18 young men circled a statue of the goddess Durga. “They were doing this very special dance while clapping and hitting certain parts of their body,’’ he says. “One lead guy in the middle was reciting mantras. With each mantra, the movement of the dance and the slapping of the body changed.’’

Even in the northeastern state of Manipur, which has a rich percussion tradition that Hussain thought he knew well, he encountered a variant that was new to him. “They drum and dance and sing all at the same time; it requires an incredible amount of stamina. I was like, this needs to be explored further.’’

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