Zakir Hussain’s conversation of forgotten rhythms

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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Raga concert explores ties between Indian and Afghan music

Boston Globe, March 9, 2012

NEW YORK – Music is rarely the subject of news from Afghanistan. War, terrorism, corruption, and other such topics have dominated the headlines. And if the Taliban – who outlawed all music save religious chants during their rule from 1996 to 2001 – had had their way, there wouldn’t be any Afghan music to speak of at all.

That background provides some context for the concert that joins Homayun Sakhi, a master of the rubab, an Afghan lute with over a thousand years of history, with Ken Zuckerman, a virtuoso of the Indian string instrument sarod, and Salar Nader, an Afghan-American tabla player, at Brandeis University Saturday night.

Sakhi fled Kabul with his family in 1992, when he was 14, and developed his craft living as a refugee in Peshawar, Pakistan, before settling in California. His journey reflects the experience of Afghan musicians who scattered around the world to escape war and repression.

Nader, a brilliant young percussionist who studied from an early age with the tabla master Zakir Hussain, was born in Germany, grew up in the United States, and only made his first visit to Kabul – meeting scores of relatives for the first time – in 2010.

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Soul is heavy, wisdom is sweet: Unraveling the mysteries of Nneka

MTV Iggy, March 1, 2012

It’s been three years since Nneka Egbuna moved back home.

At 19, she had moved away from Nigeria to Germany, her mother’s country, where she studied anthropology and began her music career. But after releasing two albums and getting a little shine on the European circuit, she knew it was time to return.

Now 31, Nneka makes her permanent home in Lagos, Nigeria’s turbulent metropolis.

Lagos is where she gets her energy, where she engages in politics, where she composes songs that weave in and out of the rich Pidgin patois. It’s a place where the power goes out and the police are corrupt and vast amounts of money are made, legally and otherwise, while migrants pour in from the hinterland to scoop up the crumbs.

It’s a raw place, and it’s very Nneka—blunt, vibrant, uncompromising.

The city lends itself to metaphor, and so, given all this, it’s no surprise that Nneka finds a life lesson for humanity in the epic traffic jams that infamously snarl circulation in Lagos, turning the simplest errand into a multi-hour ordeal, breeding frustration and aggressive behaviors of all sorts. As she sees it, the futility of those maneuvers in gridlock tells us something about our souls.

“It could move,” Nneka says. “But we are all rushing, rushing—and then we get to the bottleneck. And then we are all standing still and asking ourselves questions. And that’s our biggest problem. We don’t listen to one another, we don’t complement one another. Because we are stubborn, we are egocentric.”

Is she speaking of Lagosians? Nigerians? All human beings? Or about herself? The best answer is “Yes.”

Because Nneka’s songs toggle back and forth between the personal and the political, the local and the universal, in a way that only the rawest, most self-searingly lyrical artists can pull off. Everything is in play—God, government, love, sexuality, aspiration, self-doubt. It’s all in the title of her new album: Soul is Heavy.

Read the full story at MTVIggy.com

The world wants Zaz

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

Dafnis Prieto plays more than meets the ear

Boston Globe, February 24, 2012

NEW YORK – In a prominent spot on the shelf in the peaceful living room of drummer Dafnis Prieto’s apartment in Washington Heights sits a row of books on one of Prieto’s favorite subjects: optical illusions. Close by is a stack of volumes on an artist famous for his use of illusion, Salvador Dalí.

A drummer and bandleader who has become one of the most prolific and well-regarded in his craft since emigrating from Cuba to New York in 1999, Prieto, 37, pays proper respect to his predecessors on the skins, from Art Blakey to Jack DeJohnette. But when the topic of influences comes up, Prieto is just as likely to point to the Spanish surrealist painter.

“Dalí is very organic, very natural, and has that scientific knowledge as well,’’ says Prieto. “He was very science-oriented but without forgetting natural instincts and beliefs. He declared himself a mystic. It’s kind of contradictory, but that made him who he was, and he’s a great influence on me.’’

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George Clinton gets to the bottom of funk with Berklee students

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.
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Nimbaya! beats the odds — and the drums

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

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

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.’’
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Gregorio Uribe brings intoxicating variety to “Pluma y Vino”

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

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

 

Best of 2011: Siddhartha Mitter

Soundcheck, WNYC Radio, December 22, 2011

This week’s year-in-review special continues with Siddhartha Mitter, a music journalist who contributes to the Boston Globe, MTV Iggy, MTV Desi and other outlets.

Siddhartha Mitter’s list:

Three Great Songs:

  • Frank Ocean, “Novacane”
  • Musiq Soulchild, “Yes”
  • SBTRKT featuring Sampha, “Hold On”

World Music that Isn’t “World Music”:

  • Chamber Music (album) – Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal
  • Tirtha (album) – Vijay Iyer, Prasanna, Nitin Mitta
  • Zuciya Daya (song) – Bez
  • Karibu Ya Bintou (song) – Baloji

Music for Upheaval:

  • Rayes Le Bled (song) – El Général
  • Into the Fire (song) – The Bant Singh Project
  • Obama Nation Pt 2 (song) – Lowkey ft. Lupe Fiasco, M-1, Black the Ripper

Rest in Peace:

  • Pandit Bhimsen Joshi
  • Cesaria Evora
  • Gil Scott-Heron

World music top albums of 2011

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

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

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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Amália Hoje brings new life to fado’s strongest voice

Boston Globe, December 2, 2011

From the start, it doesn’t feel like fado. Nor does the players’ entrance fit the norm for Lisbon’s hallowed style of melancholy song. It is not the genteel Portuguese guitar but a sharp synthesizer beat that ushers the artists on stage. There are not one but three singers – a woman and two men, sporting tattoos in lieu of the customary black shawl. Behind them, a full rock band, and behind that, a string orchestra.

But the song that launches this show, held in 2009 at the Coliseu in Lisbon and captured on a live DVD, is one the crowd recognizes. It is “Com Que Voz,” the title piece from a great 1969 album by fado’s empress, Amalia Rodrigues. And this band, Amalia Hoje (meaning “Amalia Today”) is a special project commissioned to honor Rodrigues, who died in 1999.

Now, behind the runaway success in Portugal of their studio album, live recording, and concerts, the Hoje team (minus strings, but plus a video art component) are bringing their pop approach to the Rodrigues songbook for two concerts in the United States. They visit the Berklee Performance Center on Sunday.

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She puts the world into her music

Boston Globe, November 19, 2011

NEW YORK – In the course of five albums, the singer Kiran Ahluwalia has blended the Indian classical and folk forms that are her specialty into collaborations with Portuguese fado musicians, the Celtic fiddle of Natalie MacMaster, the Inuit throat singing of Tanya Tagaq, and more. For Ahluwalia, such partnerships across genre and culture aren’t an experiment, or a social commentary on our times, or a producer’s cute idea, or a pitch to gain new listeners.

They are a personal necessity.

“The needing of collaboration comes because we ourselves are collaborations of culture,” says Ahluwalia. “We’re not pure. I collaborate in the kitchen: I make Japanese soy bean curry, Indian style. I think in English, or in Hindi – or French. Our lives are collaboration, because we don’t belong to one culture.”

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Just A Kenyan Band of Superheroes

MTV Iggy, November 15, 2011

It took a superhero to bring Just A Band back from the future.

His name: Makmende. His look: Blaxploitation chic—sharp tan jacket, flared trousers, broad-rimmed shades, Afro pick. His modus operandi: Appears in the streets of Nairobi to beat down miscreants, send robbers fleeing, fight off masked kidnappers, rescue a lady in distress and leave her swooning as he coolly walks away.

These heroics—complete with fabulous comedic touches, like when Makmende swipes his opponent’s necktie and refashions it into a bandanna—unfold to the beat of “Ha He,” a catchy electro-pop delight off 82, the second album by Just A Band. The Nairobi trio are filmmakers, animators and comic-book buffs as well as musicians, and when they gathered some friends to perform in a video for the song, they looked for a fun storyline and came up with Makmende. The name was inspired by an old street-slang term, of obscure origin, to describe foolhardy or adventurous behavior.

What they didn’t expect was that Makmende the superhero would become a cult figure days after the video’s March 2010 YouTube posting. And in so doing, turn Just A Band from an ironically-named, arty purveyor of avant-garde sounds to Nairobi hipsters into something like a national pop sensation.

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Palestinian hip-hop inspires a different kind of political party

Boston Globe, November 13, 2011

So a woman and a man enter an elevator. She is Israeli, he is Palestinian; she is going up, he is going down. But as it turns out, no one is going anywhere. The elevator is stuck. While they wait for something to happen, they talk.

That’s the premise of a new song in English that the pioneering Palestinian hip-hop trio DAM, who usually rap in Arabic and occasionally in Hebrew, are trying out on their current US visit. The tour brings them, together with British-Palestinian MC Shadia Mansour and American guests including M-1 of the activist duo Dead Prez, to the Middle East in Cambridge tonight.

“It’s a funny song, a sarcastic song about the struggle in Palestine,” says Tamer Nafar, who makes up DAM with his brother Suhell and Mahmoud Jreri. “It’s me and this beautiful woman, and we get to talk. It’s a love story; the delivery is not political at all.”

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From Seattle, with a clean slate

Boston Globe, November 4, 2011

Their new album’s title is a shout-out to 1930s Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, born of their fascination with film studies. The songs are oblique tributes and reflections inspired by film stars, activists, political prisoners, Barack Obama, and … weedhead comic Tommy Chong. Two tracks are eulogies of a kind: one for Oscar Grant, the young man killed by a police officer on an Oakland train platform; the other for the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team, which folded and moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.

Welcome to the kaleidoscopic world of Blue Scholars. For nearly a decade the duo of MC Geologic and DJ Sabzi has been spinning rhymes that are at once national, even global in their social scope, and hyper-local, an engagingly detailed and affectionate guide to their hometown, Seattle.

In the process, they’ve become leaders in that city’s fertile but long-unheralded hip-hop scene, and its ambassadors to a nation of beat and rhyme aficionados in need of some renewal and inspiration. “Cinemetropolis” is their third full-length album (they’ve also made a flurry of EPs), and their strongest. It has earned them their first national headlining tour; they visit the Paradise on Thursday.

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Jazz artist draws richly on Indian roots

Boston Globe, October 30, 2011

It’s been a subtle kind of homecoming for Rudresh Mahanthappa. Of course, southern India was never really home for the alto saxophonist, strictly speaking: Though his parents came from there, he grew up in Colorado and developed his jazz chops at the Berklee College of Music, then on the Chicago and New York scenes.

Still, Mahanthappa, who at 40 is one of his generation’s prominent and critically praised saxophonists, came up with a child-of-immigrants feel for India and a sense of the richness and complexity of its music traditions, even if his own route – high school band, rock and funk dabblings, music school – was more classically American.

So it was likely, but by no means inevitable, that Mahanthappa would eventually make work that engaged Indian music overtly. He did it with “Kinsmen” (2008) a dazzling collaboration with Chennai-based saxophone master Kadri Gopalnath and a group of players from the jazz and Carnatic (South Indian classical) scenes.

And he has done it again – and by his own reckoning, more deeply – with “Samdhi,” a new album with a distinctive lineup of sax, electric guitar and bass, drum set and South Indian percussions. He visits Regattabar on Thursday to present this music.

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Theophilus London makes his name – and his brand

Boston Globe, October 23, 2011

So it actually happens this way: One moment, you’re a kid in Brooklyn with a mixtape, riding classic samples from the likes of Prince and Michael Jackson. Next moment – OK, three years later, but still pretty darn fast – your major label debut is out and playing a different city each day, to crowds that know your lyrics by heart.

That compressed ride to stardom is now well underway for Theophilus London, 23, born in Trinidad and Tobago, raised in Flatbush and Bed-Stuy, now a globetrotter recently back from, let’s see, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.

“Meeting the kids in Johannesburg was amazing,” says London, now speaking by phone from a tour stop in Austin, Texas. “And them singing my lyrics back to me, people stopping me in the streets, in the mall, it was exciting. Kids were even looking like me – they had my look.”

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To her ears, Balkan Tales sounds like home

Boston Globe, October 21, 2011

NEW YORK – Here’s a concept: an American-based band that plays music inspired by the folk traditions of the Balkans in southeastern Europe, and that is actually led by someone from that region.

This takes nothing away from Balkan Beat Box, Zlatne Uste, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Slavic Soul Party! or the many other neo-Balkan bands that have sprung up this side of the Atlantic in the last decade. The founder of Gogol Bordello, a pioneer in this trend, comes from Ukraine. And many players in this wave of Balkan music appreciation have done deep, immersive research, traveling to villages and seeking out musicians in places like rural Macedonia.

That said, singer Vlada Tomova’s Balkan Tales, which visits Johnny D’s tonight, enjoys a little bit of an edge. It dwells in Tomova, who came to the United States 15 years ago to study jazz, but found herself reverting to – and innovating from – the folk music of her native Bulgaria and its neighbors, the sounds she had grown up hearing, almost unconsciously, in the background soundtrack of her youth.

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Better than Jay-Z, Bigger than Osama: Enter the future of Humble the Poet

MTV Iggy, October 3, 2011

It feels like one of those guaranteed party songs—the fat beat, the epic loop, the perfect wave-your-hands-in-the-air tempo. And it is a party song, no doubt. But pay attention to the lyrics and see the video, or better yet, watch the Humble the Poet perform it onstage, and you’ll know that “Baagi Music,” his 2010 anthem, is a lot more than that.

With its “Go Baagi Baagi! Go Baagi Baagi!” chants, it’s the Toronto MC’s biggest song, whether measured by YouTube clicks or the sheer energy rise in the club when he plays it. And it’s also a statement of defiance and regional pride, and a provocation—sharply crafted and aggressively delivered.

To wit: “Toronto’s my heart, Punjabi n my blood.” And: “I’m not Indian—four knuckles to your eyes, if you call me that again.” And: “F*@k Bollywood—we Punjabi!”

Around this core theme, some ornamentation: The flyness of Punjabi girls. The realness of Punjabi guys. How Punjabis the “home of bhangra and Jay Sean’s mom.” All spit by Humble, a tall, rangy Sikh brother with full beard and turban, hyped and accompanied onstage by his friend—and “Baagi Music” producer—Sikh Knowledge.

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Accordionist continues on his Balkan-influenced quest

Boston Globe, September 30, 2011

Jeremy Barnes won’t mind if you call him quixotic.

In fact, he will take it as a compliment. Like Don Quixote, whose adventures in the Cervantes epic birthed the adjective, Barnes set out long ago on an oddball yet high-minded adventure as the accordionist and co-leader of the New Mexico band A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

For Quixote, it meant tilting at windmills. For Barnes, a veteran of the ’90s indie band Neutral Milk Hotel, it meant starting anew in 2000 while living in a small town in France and recording an album based on obscure folk music from the Balkan region – for the sole and simple reason that it fascinated him.

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Their notable conversations

Boston Globe, September 25, 2011

NEW YORK – One of them played at Woodstock. The second got his doctorate in physics at age 24. They found their third member in a small town in France and the fourth working as a personal trainer at an Equinox gym.

Behold: A jazz quartet.

Of course, more than serendipity connects trumpeter Lew Soloff, bassist Francois Moutin, vocalist Anne Sila, and dancer Courtney Giannone, the multigenerational group whose one-of-a-kind music, dance, and video project “Evidence: A Jazz Creation” has its premiere tomorrow night at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline.

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Das Racist is not your typical rap story

Boston Globe, September 23, 2011

NEW YORK – Back in the day – that is to say, a couple of years ago – Himanshu Suri held down a suit-and-tie job channeling executive talent to Wall Street. That was before he became Heems, full-time rapper and music entrepreneur and one of two MCs in the absurdist and now extremely hip rap trio Das Racist.

“I had a lot of loans to pay for going to this stupid expensive college,” says Suri, now dressed in typical Das Racist garb: sneakers, below-the-knee shorts and a blue tank top covered, despite the summer heat, by some kind of shapeless red fleece. His eyes and hair display the look of someone for whom getting out of bed is a salient achievement.

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Reggae legend Tiken Jah Fakoly: “The future is in Africa”

MTV Iggy, September 15, 2011

“It used to be that when people saw you with hair like this, you were considered a lunatic,” says Tiken Jah Fakoly, the reggae artist from Ivory Coast.

Fakoly’s dreads are short and orderly, the kind of look that would pass unnoticed on a Brooklyn street. But he is right: for many years in much of Africa, the figure of the Rastaman—dreadlocked, likely unkempt, possibly high—was assimilated, at least by middle-class society, to that of the sad deranged men you’d see pacing the roadside or darting in traffic in the bustling business districts of cities like Abidjan, Lagos or Accra.

But like his predecessors Alpha Blondy, also from Ivory Coast, or the late Lucky Dube, from South Africa, Fakoly, now 43 and perhaps the leading figure in African reggae today, stuck to his guns. He followed the path inspired by the Rasta revelation he had as a teenager in dusty Odienné, his home town, and made a career, now 10 albums deep, telling truths about corrupt politicians, pointless civil wars, Western economic manipulation, the false promises of immigration and the sadness of exile.

It’s in the vocation of the Rastaman, after all, to shrug off contempt or ignorance by polite society in favor of telling the truth.

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Cuban choir salutes Haiti from a distance

Boston Globe, September 11, 2011

After the awful earthquake of January 2010 that devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, an unusual form of consolation and aid arrived from nearby Cuba, alongside the medical corps that the Cuban government quickly dispatched.

This other, less orthodox relief group took the form of a 10-person vocal choir, five women and five men. They visited the camps, slept in the open air with survivors, played with the children – and everywhere sang, sang, sang.

They had no trouble connecting with their audience: They sang in Creole. Their repertoire consisted of Haitian roots and folk songs. That’s because the group’s members, although Cuban, were all descendants of Haitian sugar cane workers. They came from the eastern city of Camaguey, a center of Cuba’s Haitian community, and in performing in Haiti, they were in a simple sense coming home.

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Sweet predators: the cannibal courtship of Dengue Fever

MTV Iggy, September 9, 2011

There’s a poignant moment on Cannibal Courtship, the fifth album from the Cambodia-inspired, Los Angeles-based Dengue Fever, that encapsulates what is tragic and urgent in the message of this idiosyncratic band who just as often come off light-hearted.

It comes on a track called “Sister In the Radio.” Singing in Khmer against a slow-paced backdrop that sounds a bit like a surf-rock dirge, frontwoman Chhom Nimol tells a story from her childhood—when she was about 9 years old and living, like many Cambodians scattered by the Khmer Rouge genocide and later political conflict, in refugee camps.

“This is my personal song,” Chhom says, in a conversation before the band took the stage recently at Lincoln Center in New York. “When I was a kid I lived in camps in Thailand. My family had fled. I had no idea if my older sister…”

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Getting down with dub

Boston Globe, September 3, 2011

In the beginning there was dub.

Well, in the beginning there was reggae. But from the early 1970s in Jamaica, sound engineers led by now-historic figures such as King Tubby stepped out of the shadows and became performers in their own right. Using controllers, mixers, and effects, they generated a spaced-out alter ego to reggae, usually shorn of vocals and underpinned by extra-heavy lines of pulsating bass.

Naturally, dub quickly traveled alongside reggae to the United Kingdom, where it roosted and spread out. Second-wave masters like Adrian Sherwood with his On-U Sound system and Neal Fraser, a.k.a. Mad Professor, developed new techniques and performance styles and began making dub mixes of other styles of music.

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Honoring his roots, Touré blazes his own trail

Boston Globe, August 20, 2011

Four years ago a conversation with Vieux Farka Toure was a loose affair held in a kitchen in Queens while the Malian singer-guitarist and his bandmates cooked lunch amid boxes of CDs. It was Toure’s first US tour; he had a name – he is the son of the great “desert blues” maestro Ali Farka Toure – and a debut album, but he was otherwise mostly unknown.

A lot has changed since 2007.

Vieux, as he’s known, has put out three more albums in quick succession: “Fondo” in 2009, a live CD last year, and this year’s “The Secret,” rounding up top guest talent from Mali and the US jazz and jam-band scenes. He’s been remixed by global-minded producers such as Karsh Kale and Eccodek. And he has emerged as a next-generation African star, playing the kickoff concert for the 2010 soccer World Cup in South Africa.

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The whole kit and caboodle

Boston Globe, August 5, 2011

Any decent investigation of the jazz scene is likely to yield these near-conclusive findings: First, Eric Harland is everywhere. Second, Eric Harland can do anything.

Evidence? Just look at his schedule for the next few days. At the Newport Jazz Festival this weekend, Harland, a 34-year-old drummer with an absurdly lavish body of work, appears in three groups with utterly different sensibilities.

One is Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s group, Triveni. There’s James Farm, an eclectic song-driven quartet with Joshua Redman on sax, Aaron Parks on piano, and Matt Penman on bass. And there’s Sangam, the pure improvisation trio that joins Harland with two living legends: saxophonist-flautist Charles Lloyd and Zakir Hussain, India’s tabla master.

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Hanni El Khatib’s got a hot hot thing

MTV Iggy, August 4, 2011

Somewhere on a side street in the vestigial industrial precincts of Manhattan’s Far West side, the rocker Hanni El Khatib interrupts a photo shoot—he was getting portrayed roaming these blocks and checking out the High Line elevated park—and pulls out his camera phone to take a few snaps of his own.

The sight that attracts his interest is a nondescript heap of old car tires, piled up at the edge of an auto repair shop lot. “I just like stuff,” El Khatib explains. “I like piles of s**t, old TVs or electronics. A pile of tires is really cool to me. I don’t know why.”

Clad in black jeans, a blue work shirt with a white undershirt, and a bunch of tattoos visible, El Khatib almost looks the part of a warehouse or parking lot greaser, but not quite. A bit too clean. The beard moderate and trimmed. Most of all, the fresh face with the open, curious look and wide eyes. A 30-year-old manchild checking out random urban materials while rocking a cultivated but sincerely worn style.

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Her career is having a moment – again

Boston Globe, July 31, 2011

NEW YORK – As a pre-teen, Ximena Sarinana played willful child characters in telenovelas, Mexico’s ultra-popular soap operas. As a teenager she went on to complex roles in feature films. In her late teens she fronted a jazz and funk band, and she even spent a semester at Berklee College of Music. At 22 she was playing festivals and headlining major venues behind the whimsically titled “Mediocre,” her 2008 Grammy and Latin Grammy-nominated solo album of moody, inventive rock.

Now all of 25, Sarinana is starting over. Again.

The budding pop star (who dropped out of Berklee to promote “Mediocre”) with the earnest following back home is back on the grind as an opening act, touring the US as the appetizer in a three-act bill, limited to a half-hour set before ceding the stage to Danish singer Oh Land and the headliner, Sia.

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Si*Se’s small output yields big following

Boston Globe, July 29, 2011

It feels like less is more for Si*Se.

Ten years ago, the New York band broke out with a self-titled disc of downtempo grooves with lyrics in English and Spanish, foregrounding lead singer Carol C. and the production work of cofounder Cliff Cristofaro. It offered an artsy, bilingual sound at a time before the combination of Latin rhythms and loops became a recognized international trend. The record appeared on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label and earned Si*Se the chance to tour worldwide with the former Talking Heads maven.

That was 2001. Since then, Si*Se has put out exactly one album – “More Shine,” in 2005, on the obscure Fuerte Records label – and one EP, last year’s “Gold,” which the band released independently. Yet despite the slender output, Si*Se enjoys something of a cult following. Its Facebook page and online reviews brim with declarations of love from fresh fans smacking themselves on the head for only just now discovering the band.

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Malian diva stays true to her own message

Boston Globe, July 24, 2011

There came a point, says Oumou Sangare, the great singer from Mali, when she had to finally take her own advice.

A world music phenomenon since 1990, when she released her acclaimed debut album “Moussolou” at 22, Sangare had spent a decade and a half – or longer, if you include her adolescence as a street and wedding singer – making music with messages of celebration and empowerment for the women of Mali, Africa, and the world.

By 2005, she was an established star with four albums of rootsy pop based on the traditional music of her Wassoulou region. Her message was consistent: songs addressed bride price, polygamy, the stigma of childlessness, and other social issues. Audiences abroad might not understand the lyrics but related to her voice, presence, and story. At home in Mali, she received adulation.

These were great accomplishments, especially for a woman who didn’t finish school and helped support her mother and six siblings from a young age when her father took another wife and left town.

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Celebrating Africa at City Hall Plaza

Boston Globe, July 15, 2011

The first time around, it was a gamble – one woman’s labor of love to make visible the Boston area’s scattered African communities and to present African music to the widest possible audience, not in pricey concert venues or out-of-the-way immigrant social halls, but free, in City Hall Plaza, on a sun-splashed summer afternoon.

A year later, the African Festival of Boston is back for its second edition, with longer hours and a strong roster of under-the-radar performers with roots from Senegal to Mozambique. If last year’s event is an indication, expect a strong turnout of area Africans and their families, many sporting traditional dress and waving national flags, alongside vendors, sightseers, world-music heads, and Peace Corps returnees.

The musical program for tomorrow’s festival emphasizes North America-based artists – long-time residents and others from the younger generation that has grown up here – who perform everything from traditional percussion and dance to multiple strains of Afro-pop, gospel, and R&B.

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Jazz vocalist Sachal Vasandani: “Catch me, because I need you”

MTV Desi, July 13, 2011

Beautiful songs in the great American tradition that stretches back to Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter or Nat King Cole. A rich, assured voice that distills with equal poise the soothing of romance and the bittersweet anxiety of love lost or imperiled, or the yearning of a compassionate heart trying to make sense of the troubles of the world. In a time when male jazz vocalists have grown rare, it’s all the more impressive to watch the emergence of Sachal Vasandani, who in the course of three albums—the latest, Hi-Fly, came out June 21—has earned abundant praise for the way he mixes the classicism of a true scholar of the music with a singer-songwriter’s more contemporary edge. MTV Desi’s Siddhartha Mitter caught up with the Illinois-raised, Brooklyn-based Vasandani for a conversation about Desi roots, the appeal of jazz vocals, and the art of the song.

Now three albums deep, you’re building an identity as a classic vocalist in the jazz and American songbook tradition. The Sachal Vasandani sound has a very classic, throwback feel. Would you agree?

I understand that moniker. And It’s definitely easy for me to find stuff that I like in older material. What other people—and myself—find in indie music or pop music or underground music, I also find in jazz. That same freshness, that kernel of originality and optimism and darkness, I find that in songs that might have come from a generation ago. Those are the kind of feelings that I try to infuse in whatever material I sing. So I don’t think of myself as a throwback; on the contrary, I think of myself as resuscitating older songs and making them a part of the current lexicon, you know what I mean? That’s my goal.

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Meklit Hadero, keeping it real and varied

Boston Globe, July 10, 2011

“On a Day Like This,” the 2010 debut album by San Francisco singer-songwriter Meklit Hadero, traces the arc of one day, its 10 songs sequenced to convey the moods and events of the passing hours from daybreak until time to sleep.

It is a day of shifting weather, from “You and the Rain” to “Soleil Soleil,” as befits the city by the bay; a bittersweet day, as misgivings over a love that can’t last (“Leaving Soon”) give way to the affirming Nina Simone cover “Feeling Good.”

It is a day as emotionally rich as the sounds that accompany it are eloquent in their assured diversity, from the New Orleans jazz feel of “Float and Fall” to Hadero’s cover of “Abbay Mado,” by Ethiopian master Mahmoud Ahmed.

It is, all in all, a very Meklit Hadero kind of day.

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Friendship, opportunity rooted in the desert

Boston Globe, July 3, 2011

Discovery is a loaded term in world music. It carries the colonial connotation that the art of another culture does not really exist until an outsider – typically, a conquering outsider – comes across it, gives it a label, and delivers it to the market.

And yet small acts of discovery – say, a pair of music mavens sitting in a hotel room in Morocco recording tapes of the local radio, and suddenly blown away by a sound, an energy, they had never heard before – have been crucial in enriching the market with expressions from places that the news otherwise either ignores altogether or reduces to political factoids or economic statistics.

That hotel room epiphany, in 2005, launched an obsessive quest that led Hisham Mayet and Alan Bishop, cofounders of Seattle-based specialty lo-fi world label Sublime Frequencies, to locate Group Doueh, a family band from Dakhla, on the Atlantic coast of Western Sahara, and release four albums of their music, some from old tapes and others freshly recorded, including the brand-new “Zayna Jumma” CD.

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South African band set to make it in America

Boston Globe, June 25, 2011

They were already big at home, in South Africa. Very big, in fact: born of a jam session on the small Cape Town scene in 2002, the seven-member Freshlyground has enjoyed, with its gently Africanized pop fusion, a string of local hit songs that convey sweetly earnest themes of uplift and harmony.

But it was in a studio in New York City in early 2010 that Freshlyground had the chance encounter that would catapult them into the global spotlight, as they happened to be mixing their latest album, “Radio Africa,” in the same building where producer John Hill was working on Shakira’s official anthem for soccer’s 2010 FIFA World Cup, the planet’s biggest sports event, which was to be held a few months later in South Africa.

“He heard there were a bunch of South Africans three floors up,” Freshlyground drummer Peter Cohen says on the phone from Cape Town, remembering the impromptu session that ensued. “We recorded through the night. Then we never heard from him for months – until three weeks before the song came out, and we were delighted.”

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Cuban singer gets a little help from a friend

Boston Globe, June 13, 2011

The story of Jackson Browne’s friendship with Carlos Varela – his Cuban singer-songwriter counterpart, locally acclaimed but little-known in the United States – begins, as do so many good Cuba stories, with a bottle of rum.

It happened when Browne and Varela, who were being introduced by mutual friends, found Varela’s plans for a big get-together with friends, family, and a full band thwarted because Fidel Castro was to give a speech that night in the same Havana neighborhood, and the area was shut down.

So instead, Browne says on the line from his home in California, they repaired to his hotel with a bottle of local spirits as libation. There was a film festival going on, and other visitors popped in, drawn by Varela’s presence.

“We were in my room and word got out in the hotel that he was there and that there was actually singing going on,” Browne says. “People began translating his songs to me, and mine to him. We had a sort of spontaneous house concert.”

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MC Ras Ceylon: One love from Sri Lanka to Jamaica

MTV Desi, June 6, 2011

“The Gideon Force was the regiment that kicked the fascists out of Ethiopia,” explains Oakland-based MC Ras Ceylon. The force, he says, resisted the Italian incursion against the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie, the emperor sacred to Rastafarians. It inspired the title of the latest mixtape from the reggae and hip hop MC, Gideon.Force Volume 1, with its array of “conscious” guests including stic.man from the militant duo dead prez.

Resistance, liberation, and Rasta are integral to the music of this overtly political MC. And so is Sri Lanka, his family homeland. From Sri Lanka to Jamaica via the Bay Area, the connections are not as far-fetched as one might imagine — at least not as Ras Ceylon, who’s been making music on the underground scene for over a decade, sees it.

MTV Desi’s Siddhartha Mitter caught up with Ras Ceylon for a session on consciousness, politics, and how the Emcee realized he was part of a Desi music movement.

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Activist/MC Delhi Sultanate: “The new rich kids are ignorant, selfish and crude”

MTV Desi, June 3, 2011

Not long ago we featured a remarkable collaboration called the Bant Singh Project. Bant Singh is the Punjabi Dalit singer and political activist who lost several limbs after a vicious beating by upper-caste neighbors after he dared confront them for raping his daughter.

After Bant Singh refused to be silenced and continued singing and raising awareness of rural injustice, he came to the attention of Delhi Sultanate. That’s the stage name of Taru Dalmia, a Delhi-based poet and hip hop/dancehall MC who also happens to be an academic historian and social activist. Before long, Dalmia and his friends were visiting Bant Singh and making music with him—in a project they’ve also documented in a short film.

But that’s only one of the projects on Dalmia’s plate — whether through Word, Sound, and  Power, the umbrella venture for this and future collaborations with traditional musicians in rural India, or through his drum & bass, dubstep, reggae and ska projects in Delhi. MTV Desi’s Siddhartha Mitter caught up with Dalmia for a wide-ranging conversation about two subjects that go well together: music and politics.

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“I killed him in a bar fight and claimed his skin” – A fish eyed poet speaks his mind

MTV Desi, May 27, 2011

Not long ago we featured the music of Adam & the Fish Eyed Poets, the one-man project of Chennai rock wunderkind Kishore Krishna, whose angsty sensibility and sharp songwriting are as much post-punk as deep blues. We caught up with Krishna to find out where he got his mojo… and what keeps him up at night.

As a bonus, we learn what a fish-eyed poet is… and whose love child Krishna killed in a bar fight in his dreams in order to take on the persona of Adam. Read on.

So how does a kid from Chennai get into the likes of Nick Cave, Patti Smith or Sonic Youth? That’s a contrast with the standard Led Zeppelin/Rolling Stones/Pink Floyd diet that many young Indians inhale…

I guess its a consequence of good parenting and the Internet. But I feel it’s an important prerequisite for an artist to understand the evolution of his tradition before he can find his place and start, erm, mining. As for the “many young Indians,” cut them some slack, man. There’s enough pressure on them already.

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Composer Previte drums up new musical ideas

Boston Globe, May 27, 2011

NEW YORK – When So Percussion – a quartet based here that plays only percussion instruments – received an invitation to collaborate from drummer and composer Bobby Previte, they quickly went online to research his work. And what they found pretty much blew their minds.

It wasn’t that Previte was obscure. It was just that So, coming from the contemporary-classical world, were more in tune with the lines of Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, or Steve Reich than with the polymathic Previte, a longtime inhabitant of the downtown jazz and experimental scene. They had heard of him, but not much more.

They discovered an impossible-to-confine musician whose work spanned jazz, scorching rock-like bands, all-improvisation collectives, large-ensemble pieces, a long-running duo with guitarist Charlie Hunter, and more. Previte even played on one So member’s favorite Tom Waits record, “Rain Dogs.”

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Soulphonics’ Ruby Velle: “Singing soul is like therapy”

MTV Desi, May 26, 2011

A few days ago we introduced you to Soulphonics and Ruby Velle, the vintage soul act in Atlanta that’s fronted by a young Desi woman. We caught up with Ruby to talk music, culture, history—and how 1960s-era soul music captured her heart.

So what’s a nice Indian girl doing fronting an old-school soul band?

I’ve been a fan of soul music for years and it has become a great way for me to express myself as well as to keep the genre itself alive and kicking. My favorite thing is bringing the sound to new listeners who don’t know they like it until they hear it. That to me is priceless.

How Indian an upbringing did you have? Did you run the gauntlet of Indian music, dance lessons and all that?

I was born in Toronto. I’ve been to visit India several times, my family is spread out between North and South India, so I got to glean the best parts of each culture. I grew up with a perfect of blend of east and west. My parents were typical in their strictness, but they allowed me to follow my creativity and passions. I was able to take part in Indian festivals, I learned dances and hymns as much as I could while attending school and singing in chorus. The blend of culture was never a shock to me. It has caused me to be authentic and honest about straddling two cultures.

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Moving sounds of the modern Sahara

Boston Globe, May 22, 2011

Communities that go through wrenching change often find strength in concepts they use to define themselves and claim their identity.

For the Tuareg of the Sahara, that word is “ashek.” It means something like honor and dignity. It guides the Tuareg’s behavior in a world where borders and economic change have hampered their nomadic ways and pitted them against governments that often see them as a threat.

In recent years, the Tuareg have seen conflict with authorities in Mali, Niger, and elsewhere. But war and peace have produced a remarkable body of music that expresses “ashek” with acoustic and electric guitars, catapulting Tuareg bands – notably Tinariwen – to the front of the world music scene.

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Giving GURU his due

Boston Globe, May 20, 2011

Edo G. remembers well the day when Guru set off from Boston for New York City in search of fame and fortune.

Back then, in the mid-’80s, Guru was known as Keithy E. – the stage name of Keith Elam, son of a judge and a librarian from a respected Roxbury family, and a recent graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta. Like so many young people of his time, he had caught the hip-hop bug hard. And he had talent – a deft pen and a patented delivery, in a kind of syncopated monotone, that would go on to make him, as the MC in the group Gang Starr, one of the most influential rappers of his time.

But first he had to leave home.

“I was there the day that he left for New York, in his old Jaguar,” says Edo G., who in those days was a teenager from Humboldt Avenue in Roxbury who beatboxed and rhymed around town. “He had bought a big radio for the ride, a boom box, from a cat I knew. We were there when he left. And he became who he became.”

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